His design was going awry and it was impossible to tell why. Until now, he’d been confident of the unbroken line. The girls had died according to his plan and he had smoothed over the traces without any difficulty. The bottles, even without the glass to encase the objects inside, held true. The meaning remained obscure and the combined forces of local law enforcement along with visits from the FBI and profilers had failed to spot the link. Even as he had scrawled the mark near his final victim, he had been sure of the potency of its power directed towards the one person who might spot its relevance. Now, the line was breaking and he wasn’t certain if it was an error on his part.
The mark had been hardest to place in the wood, which was ironic. The soft bark should have been perfect to score in the design. However, as his knife dug into the pulpy wood, a dog had run up to him. He’d dispatched it with a kick, and it had returned yelping to its owners, leaving him to close the pattern freehand.
Iris Chan. She had been trouble from the start and he should have known it was her death that might return to haunt him. There was someone asking questions, burrowing beneath the deaths, who might mess it up for him as he neared the end. It was time to speed things up and push forward his plans. To echo the slogan of a T-shirt Iris had owned, he hadn’t come this far to come this far.