CHAPTER THREE
1780 Words
CHAPTER THREE
Ilse's eyes were heavy as she pushed through the apartment door to her building. In one hand, she held a folded, lined piece of yellow notebook paper, upon which she'd copied the article online word for word. It hadn't been a very long article. Mostly due to the lack of details.
A burning victim in the old church. No ID, no DNA match. Ruled a suicide.
On the sixteen-hour flight, Ilse had combed through the notes, allowing her imagination to wander. To think like her father, like her stepmother for a change.
But none of it was clear. Had her stepmother faked her own death? Had she murdered someone? Had she really killed herself?
If so... who was sending the taunting postcards?
Ilse couldn't take much more. She knew an impasse when she found one. For now, she folded the notepaper, sliding it into her pocket and checking the main door to the building with her hip, allowed it to close behind her.
A cool gust of morning air swirled through the unit. She hadn't slept particularly well on the plane, between attempts at memorizing her notepaper.
But also, she'd been kept up with apprehension.
Would there be another note? Another doll?
She moved to the mailbox, her keys shaking in her hand as she opened the receptacle and peered into the darkness. With the same shaking hand, she reached into the mailbox. The keys, looped over her pinkie, clacked against the metal.
She pulled out a stack of bills...
Ilse stared at the bills, feeling a chill sense of relief. She sifted through the three envelopes... Nothing. No postcard. No...
She frowned, glancing back towards the open mailbox.
A fourth envelope was stuck under the lip of the metal lid. Momentarily, Ilse stared. She dabbed her tongue against the inside of her dry lips, her fingers curling as if in protest against her waist.
Then, unblinking, she reached for the envelope and pulled the letter from inside her mailbox.
She dropped the bills. They scattered like leaves to a forest floor.
“Damn it,” Ilse murmured beneath her breath. She inhaled slowly, staring at the familiar handwriting looping the back of the envelope. “Schizotypal personality disorder. Borderline personality disorder. Psychotic disorder. Dahmer. Blonde hair. Ninety-four. Seventeen victims. May twenty-first,” She recited beneath her breath, using the memory device to calm her nerves.
Ilse had something of an encyclopedic knowledge where serial killers, their victims, and their psychoses were involved. A morbid fascination to some, but crucial in her line of work. At least, her usual line of work. Recently, she'd grown more and more involved with the agency.
Now, though, her focus had zeroed in on the envelope. Her rising sense of apprehension was rapidly replaced by a stony countenance. She scowled at the offending piece of parchment, and with shaking fingers, slowly tore the envelope.
As the paper ripped, her hands grew steadier, her eyes narrower, the faint huffs of breath regularizing.
And there it was.
Another postcard.
This time from Barcelona.
“s**t,” she muttered, staring at the old church on the front. The Sagrada Familia. This time, on the other side of the postcard, her tormentor had simply left a little smiley face and a single name. Hilda.
She stared at the image for a second, her heart pounding, and then she snarled, ripping the thing to shreds and scattering the pieces on the ground. She turned, marching up the stairs, ignoring the litter discarded behind her.
Whoever was taunting her wanted to make this her problem. But it wasn't. It was their problem, and soon, it would come with consequences.
Ilse just didn't know how yet.
She marched up the stairs, hands at her side, rather than holding the railing. Her eyes were still narrowed, and she refused to glance back towards the small, bits of ripped paper.
They knew she'd been in Barcelona. Whoever was taunting her, whoever was sending those postcards. Was it her father after all? Had she been mistaken? Or had his mistress faked her own death in the church for some unknown reason?
One of them, or both of them, were taunting her. Hounding her from her past.
The tragedy of the Muellers, the curse as some of her family members spoke of it, still haunted their lineage. Heidi was dead. Deirdre also gone in a car crash, Timothy was in prison, Hans and Dietrich dead from her father's rage after Ilse had escaped from the house. And little Kat was in an insane asylum.
And now the curse of the Muellers wanted to come for her as well.
But she refused to let it.
Her father couldn't reach her from prison. Her stepmother was either dead as well, or somewhere in Europe. Ilse was safe...
So why send the postcards?
What were they playing at?
Ilse reached the door to her apartment unit, pulling her keys from her pocket and feeling a rising sense of anxiety as she did. She felt prickles along her spine and shot a quick look down the hall. As she turned, she winced, feeling the faintest soreness along her side from the burns she'd received two weeks before.
She'd been in a hall then, too.
She'd been attacked.
But no one was there. The postcards were nothing. Ghosts were trying to haunt her, but none of it mattered now. As Ilse pushed into her apartment, her phone began to buzz.
She frowned, lifting the device, and then cursed.
A tele-conference with one of her patients.
“Dammit...,” she kicked the door closed with her heel, latching it. Then, she winced, feeling a familiar sense of unease. She opened the door again, checked the hall, closed it.
But the unease remained. So she opened the door a third time, inhaled faintly, breathing long and reciting, “Brown hair. Brown eyes. Forty-two. Bundy. Thirty victims. Forty-six. November twenty-fourth.” Then, with slower motions, she closed the door again.
Her fingers had steadied once more. Whenever it came time to speak with a client, she always managed to find a sort of inner peace. Not so much from herself, but rather on their behalf. They needed her strong, so she made herself strong.
She rubbed absentmindedly at her wrist tattoo which read, Take captive every thought...
With another, longer sigh, she tossed her bag onto the single couch and moved to the sparsely ornamented apartment's kitchen table. Her behemoth of a computer was set up there, next to the wood-burning stove beneath the analog clock.
Ilse hated technology. She turned on her computer and it began to boot up. It would take a few minutes to fully come to life. Even her internet was far slower than anything she experienced while working in the field.
Not that she minded. She liked a slower pace.
She glanced at her phone again. 9:58. Two minutes before the appointment. She felt a jolt of anxiety. If she was late, even by a minute, it would eat at her for the rest of the session. The exact time, the exact numbers mattered to her. Counting OCD was common, though not necessarily tied to trauma. In her case, it was often triggered by auditory cues.
She waited, sitting in front of her old computer, glancing towards the small, detachable web camera she'd purchased on the cheap when first moving into the apartment.
As she sat, her phone began to ring again. This time, though, not from the alarm or reminder.
She glanced at the phone, hesitated, looked at the clock. 9:59. She hissed but answered. “Make it quick,” she said urgently. “I have less than a minute. Literally.”
A voice cleared on the other end. Then, slowly, as if making a point, the even-keeled tone of Supervising Agent Rawley came over the device. “Doctor Beck,” he said.
She didn't return the greeting, her foot tapping impatiently. Her computer had booted up now and with a sigh of relief she began navigating towards the video software.
“Hello? Can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes,” she said, her lips pressing together.
“Ilse, we have a case,” Rawley said. “We need you to come in.”
Ilse clicked the video software, sending her client a link at the same time. She hesitated, only now registering his words. “W—now?”
“Yes. Now.”
She let out a long breath. “I see. Umm... I have an appointment for the next hour.”
“Can you get out of it?”
Ilse paused, glancing at the clock. 10:00 exactly. Suddenly, her screen sparked to life, and a second video feed appeared. Ilse smiled politely, waving to her client as the woman settled her headphones.
10:00 exactly. Punctuality mattered.
“I cannot,” she said swiftly. She smiled towards her client, wincing apologetically and pointing to the phone. Then, loud enough for her client to hear, she said, “Sorry, I have something important. I'll be there in a little more than an hour.”
Then, she hung up.
She wasn't sure why she did it so abruptly. It wasn't like Rawley had ever treated her poorly.
But in that moment, sitting in front of her computer screen, facing her client, Ilse wanted to focus on just one issue at a time. To focus on the woman on her screen more than anything. She didn't need postcards taunting her, killers needing to be nabbed—right now, she just wanted to help the single individual person in front of her.
Sometimes it was important to focus on the bad guys.
Other times, all she wanted to do was help their survivors.
Agent Rawley would have to understand. She'd been clear when joining the agency that she wouldn't forsake her clients.
She only hoped he'd understand.
Besides, an hour wasn't too long, was it? Things could be delayed an hour without causing harm
At least, so she hoped.
“How you doing, Dr. Beck!” A voice crackled from the speaker above her webcam.
Ilse kept her smile affixed, cleared her throat and said, “It's going well. And how about you?”
The woman in the video paused, seriously considering this question, her eyebrows bunching. For a moment, Ilse felt a jolt of guilt. Perhaps she should have taken more time to answer the question as well? How was she doing?
Perhaps not as well as she'd hoped.
But better than she'd been.
The same couldn't be said for the source of this new case. She glanced at the clock. 10:02. Only fifty-eight minutes left.
- Writer
