The Hunt for the Big Bad Wolf (Someone Else's Fairytale #3)

Blood Ritual

Persons killed by Carl Eisner:

Jordan Hawkins, age 9

Kylie Matthews, age 7

Sara Klein, age 11

Alicia Rourke, age 8

Esperanza Dominguez, age 8

Teresa Ramos, age 29

Teresa Ramos was the mother of Esperanza Dominguez, and she was home when the abduction took place. It is not known how Eisner planned to remove the girl from the house, but he quite often offered to babysit his victims. In an exchange that will never be known, Eisner shot Ramos and took her child, Esperanza, whom he killed less than three hours later.

***

I always noticed the size of our rooms—not because I was especially proud of them, but because I was still weirded out by them. The feeling that I was living someone else's fairytale intensified whenever I was confronted with the luxuries I had and didn't particularly care about. My only issue with my old trailer home was that it wasn't a good investment, didn't build equity, and was difficult to evacuate from in case of a fire. Were these not the case, I'd be quite happy to still live in one just like it.

Our living room had a cathedral ceiling with a stained-glass skylight that I did love. It was an intricate ivy pattern with the prettiest shades of green going all the way from emerald to olive. When the sun shone through it, it'd refract through little prisms set in the center of the white flowers on the vine and produce a million little rainbows. Given that the sun was down, the ceiling was opaque but still pretty.

The carpet gave noticeably under my bare feet. I'd never had the impulse to remove my shoes before stepping into my own house before I'd moved here. Other people's houses, yes, but my own, never. Even our cleaning staff wore little cloth booties over their shoes.

Our couch was so plush that sitting down on it was like being enveloped in a big marshmallow hug. More than once, Jason had had to wake me up after I fell asleep there after dinner. I took my seat, pressed the button on the remote to go back, then pressed another to play the episode from that opening scene.

As my husband settled himself down with his arm around my shoulders, I couldn't help but wonder what it was about this episode that had him so down.

***

The sun was almost setting and cast a rich, orange light over the desert. A mouse poked its head out from its dusty burrow, and birds wheeled high overhead. Just beneath their lazy circles of flight was a blue compact car, abandoned in the still-wet mud. Its windows were all rolled down and its doors and trunk were wide open.

Behind a nearby rock crouched a man breathing hard in fear.

***

"Really?" I said to Jason. "The one black person on your show has to be the perp?"

"Ye-ah." He shrugged, pulled his iPad out of the drawer in the coffee table, and started to prod its screen.

"He doesn't have Hope with him. That's bad, isn't it?"

Hope was the fictitious version of Esperanza, Eisner's last victim, and was only missing on the show so far.

Jason shrugged. "I actually don't know the final outcome for that one."

***

Clayborn, the slender, no-nonsense detective, picked her way across the muddy ground in her high-heeled boots, her trench coat blown by the wind so that it looked like a cape. Her sea-green eyes squinted and her mouth pressed into a firm line.