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

murder with the cases in 1996. She had been missing for seven days and was whipped shortly before death. That’s also when you came up with the killer’s moniker, isn’t it?

Detective Harold Sykes:

Yes, although indirectly. It certainly wasn’t my intent.

Elle voice-over:

That’s the lead detective on the case, Detective Harold Sykes. I met up with him at his favorite diner in Minneapolis.

Elle:

But you noticed something that no one else had picked up on. Tell me about that.

Sykes:

Yes, well, we had already noticed that the killer seemed obsessed with certain numbers. He kidnapped the first two women three days apart, he kept them for seven days, and he whipped them twenty-one times. So, we figured those numbers meant something to him. The pattern was consistent. Which meant my team immediately scoured the missing persons records, looking for someone who might have been kidnapped three days after Isabelle was. But then when I was going through the cases, I noticed another pattern. Beverly Anderson was twenty years old. Jillian Thompson was nineteen. And Isabelle was eighteen.

Elle:

They were each a year younger than the last.

Sykes:

Yes. It was just a hunch at that time, but I thought there was a good chance his next victim would be seventeen. It also fit with his number obsession. If the ages weren’t a coincidence, I knew that was bad news. It meant he probably had a plan. And that’s what I told them, when the reporters interviewed me. I regretted it at the time, but I suppose it doesn’t matter now. Someone would have thought of it eventually. I just told them: I think this guy has started some kind of twisted countdown.

Elle voice-over:

It was a simple observation, but it stuck in the minds of Minnesotans across the state, filling everyone with a sense of impending doom. The killer was far from finished. Every girl knew she couldn’t let her guard down—as much as any girl ever does. A catchy name is all it takes to turn a local case into a national sensation.

Within hours, all the channels were calling him the same thing: the Countdown Killer.

2

Elle

January 9, 2020

Elle pulled her car up outside Ms. Turner’s house and paused the podcast on her stereo. It was one of her favorite true crime pods, more focused on the psychology of convicted criminals rather than investigating cold cases like hers. They were just getting to the good stuff, behavioral analysis of a legendary serial rapist in the Pacific Northwest, but it wasn’t exactly child-appropriate, and her best friend’s daughter was already making the half run between Ms. Turner’s front door and the warmth of Elle’s car.

The passenger door swung open, letting in a gust of frigid, dry air tinged with the smell of snow. Natalie jumped in and slammed the door, letting out a dramatic “Brr!”

Cranking up the heat, Elle asked, “How were piano lessons, kiddo?”

“Good.” Natalie buckled her seat belt and tugged her scarf away from her neck. Even in the dim late-afternoon light, her usually pale face was ruddy from the slap of winter air. “I mean, I’m still just doing scales all the time. I don’t think Ms. Turner knows how to teach more than that.”

Elle chuckled as she pulled back onto the road. “You’ve only been taking lessons for four months.”

“Yeah, I know, but it’s boring. I can do it in my sleep.”

“Be patient. Scales are the foundation. You have to learn to do the basic stuff well before you can tackle a whole composition.” Elle smiled at how quickly she could snap into mom mode, teaching life wisdom and doing piano lesson pickup like Natalie was her own kid.

“I guess she did teach me the happy birthday song today, too.”

“Oh, really? How come?”

Natalie laughed. “Aunt Elle, you know why.”

At a stoplight, Elle looked at her and gave an exaggerated shrug. “What do you mean?”

The girl giggled and rolled her eyes. “Because it’s my birthday, nerd.”

“Nerd!” Elle put her hand to her chest, as if mortally wounded. “You only ever call Martín that.”

“That’s ’cause he’s usually the only one being a nerd.”

“All right, all right, no more games. Happy birthday, sweetheart.” She couldn’t quite believe that Natalie was ten. So close to the age of the youngest victim in the TCK case, which had been absorbing every minute of her life since she started doing interviews for the latest season of Justice Delayed six months ago. She could barely close her eyes without seeing the faces of those girls, the ones that lined the wall in her recording studio. Natalie was the closest thing Elle had to a daughter—imagining her in the place of TCK’s youngest victim caused a surge of rage that made Elle dizzy. If it wasn’t for Natalie, Elle probably wouldn’t have started the podcast. If she hadn’t known what it was like to love a child enough to kill, she might never have started hunting the monsters who hurt them.

Elle leaned across the console and gave Natalie a loud kiss on the forehead just as the light turned green. “Did you do anything fun for your birthday?”

“I got sung to in class, and they let me bring in cookies for everyone,” Natalie said, fiddling with one of her dark blond braids. “And I came in third in freestyle.”

“You couldn’t pay me to put on a bathing suit in this weather.”

“If we stopped swimming when it got cold, we’d only swim three months out of the year,” Natalie said as they pulled up to Elle’s house. “Besides, it’s, like, eighty degrees in there.”

“I’ll stick to lakes in the summer, but I’m proud of you for doing so well,” Elle said. The wind bit into her skin as she got out of the car and checked to make sure Natalie was walking carefully on their slick driveway. She made a mental note to ask Martín to put more salt down later.

“Yum!” Natalie said as soon as they walked through the front door. Elle’s mouth watered in agreement, taking in the