Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

their first victims. Even someone as meticulous as TCK could have been triggered to kill in a rage, dispose of the body hastily. Maybe he even left DNA behind. Thousands have tried, but if you were able to figure out who that person was, I think it could be a huge turning point in the case.

Elle:

Well, sir, we’ll certainly do everything we can. Getting back to the pattern, though. He’d established in all the murders since you joined the case that he was taking three girls three days apart and holding them for seven days before murdering them. This would have required intense studying and planning on his part, which was likely why it took him a year in between each trio of killings to prepare for the next group. What did this tell you about the killer’s profile?

Sykes:

We all agreed that he was meticulous. That was evident from the state he left the bodies in: not a stray skin cell or eyelash to be found. The only way we figured he could have had a girl available to kidnap on each day in his countdown sequence was if he had dossiers about each of them, and if there were others he had ready as backups if one failed. There were likely dozens more potential victims of each age that he considered and decided not to pursue for a variety of reasons. He must have had girls of each age with different days of the week where they were open to victimization. Suzie walks home alone on Tuesday afternoon, Bess goes to church alone on Sunday, et cetera. He would have to, because all the circumstances had to line up precisely for him to take each girl, and his pattern for taking the other two after he had kidnapped one was inflexible. It had to happen three days apart. Jessica’s kidnapping was a mix of both opportunity and planning. Her mother’s gaze was probably only off her for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, and she was gone. He had to have known their habit of shopping every week, because he’d scoped out all the areas there were security cameras, and he knew exactly how to avoid them. But it was incredibly risky. He had to get her out of a busy store without a trace in a narrow window of time. Taking her in that way, it was cocky. He knew it was a challenge that he was ready for.

The only time we saw him create his own luck was with the last victim. Her routine usually left her exposed on that day, but she deviated from it, so he had to force the opening.

Elle:

How did he do that?

Sykes:

Eleanor Watson, known to everyone as Nora, was sometimes home alone for an hour in the afternoon, between school and her parents coming home from work. She was a classic latchkey kid, which was getting rarer by then but hadn’t completely gone out of fashion in 1999—especially not for kids her age. Most days, Nora stayed at a friend’s house and her mom came to pick her up around dinner. She had been going home more and more, though, in a bid to prove her independence. TCK must have been banking on her being home alone that day, but she went to her friend’s house instead. That’s when he took his biggest risk yet. He went up to their door and knocked.

Elle:

Who answered?

Sykes:

Nora’s friend. Her mom worked from home in a study at the back of the house, and she was not to be disturbed during business hours, so her daughter answered the door. TCK was apparently wearing a paisley knit scarf and a red hat. It’s a trick, wearing something intentionally distinctive if you think you might be witnessed so when you discard them, you blend into the crowd. He told Nora’s friend that he had been sent to pick her up because her mom had been taken to the hospital. Nora didn’t think twice about it. She was so worried about her mom, she got in the man’s car. It was more than an hour before her friend’s mom came out of her study and learned that Nora was gone.

Elle voice-over:

And that could have been the end of it. If everything had gone to TCK’s plan, there would have been two more murders after Jessica’s, and then three the next year, and then the next. All police knew was that he took a new girl every three days and killed her a week later, like clockwork. They had no reason to believe he’d ever stop—and they had no idea how to stop him.

It might have gone on forever, TCK changing his chosen victims after his countdown was complete, starting a new ritual entirely. A man like that doesn’t just stop killing after he gets a taste for it.

But that isn’t how this story ends. Because Nora Watson wasn’t killed by the Countdown Killer. She escaped.

9

Elle

January 13, 2020

A blizzard swept through the Twin Cities, leaving roads impassable for the whole weekend. Martín’s sister, Angelica, called on Saturday morning. She was the only family he had in the Midwest; most of the rest still lived in and around Monterrey. Her kids stole the phone and took it outside to show them the snowman they had made in their backyard in Eau Claire. The nephews clearly loved the snow and cold, but when they handed the phone back to Angelica, she and Martín managed to fill nearly an hour complaining and joking about the winter weather until Elle was in tears laughing.

After they hung up with Angelica, Elle and Martín invited Sash and Natalie over, and they spent the rest of the weekend watching movies and drinking copious amounts of Abuelita hot chocolate. Besides sneaking a few hours to put together an episode outline for the upcoming week, Elle tried her best to relax and not think about the case. There would be plenty of time for that once the