by Cole McCade
But slowly he made himself pull back, taking a deep breath, trying to settle the sensation as if he’d been picked up by some great hand, shaken fiercely, and then set down with everything inside him in all the wrong places, floating in that vessel of anguish.
“I have to look,” he rasped out. “I can’t…not. For them, and so I can help you with this.”
“Malcolm.” Seong-Jae let him go, but kept one hand curled loosely against his arm. When Malcolm looked up, those dark eyes were on him, shadowed in the airplane’s low interior light, but soft with that warmth that Seong-Jae only seemed to let out for Malcolm, watching him so intently it seemed as if he could see through his skin to take in all the pain inside. “If this is too much, you do not have to. I do not want to force you into this. I will finish this assignment, and return home to you when it is over.”
Malcolm smiled faintly. “I like when you say that.”
Seong-Jae cocked his head. “Say what?”
“That coming back to me is coming home.” Malcolm rested his hand over Seong-Jae’s, clasping it against his arm, his lover’s warmth soaking up into his palm, before he made himself turn back to the laptop. “I’d rather stay with you. The idea of knowing you’re dealing with this alone…”
“I would not be alone,” Seong-Jae pointed out with a touch of acid. “I would have Aanga. Which is actually worse than being alone.”
“…until you tell me what happened with you two, I am very not comfortable that you’re on a first-name basis,” Malcolm muttered, but managed to crack a smile. He wasn’t serious, not really…but it was better than flashing those horrible stark after-impressions through his mind’s eye again and again, reliving them already without even looking at the photos. Taking a deep breath, he flipped the laptop’s lid up again. “Here we go.”
Objective, he told himself.
Be objective.
And, ignoring the raw-edged and terrible beat of his twisting heart…
He made himself look.
And take the whole thing in.
Rather than look directly at the bodies, he focused around them. The space looked to be some kind of old barn, maybe a warehouse. He could make out some kind of machinery in a dim-lit space, but depth of field left it blurry, the bodies crisp in the foreground. Vertical wooden slat walls with faint gaps between, allowing lines of sunlight in that seemed too bright against the rest of the room, painting thin slats on a dirt floor.
“Where is this?” he asked, frowning, tabbing out to pull up a text report scanned in blocky typewriter print, an entire half-crumpled page with that particular look of something that had been copied from print to digital.
“An old cattle farm,” Seong-Jae said, leaning against him, his warmth still so solid against Malcolm’s side. “The milking barn, to be precise.”
“So that was milking machinery.” Malcolm scanned the report. Los Angeles, 1989. So well before Seong-Jae’s time; this was a killer with a long fuse, it looked like—or something had stopped him from acting for a long period. The report was scarce, mostly detailing the bodies as dismembered and naming the victims, with an additional page tacked on to the PDF that had clearly been added years later. “Was the machinery used in the act?”
“Not that I could tell.” Seong-Jae tapped the screen again, on the added page. “This is my analysis.”
Malcolm scanned the short, precise sentences written across the page, so very Seong-Jae he could almost hear their tone. Sentences, and…mathematical diagrams.
A spiral inside a rectangular box that had been divided once again into smaller rectangles.
“I recognize this,” Mal said, and scanned the text, reading aloud but keeping his voice low, confined to the huddle of their close-pressed bodies and the secretive cocoon of space they’d made for themselves. “The suspect appears to have made his choices in dissection based on the alignment of the victims’ proportions. Specifically, he identified areas which did not comply with the generally expected presence of the Golden Ratio in the victims’ anatomy, and incised sections from their flesh until they did.” Malcolm stopped, staring. “…oh.”
“Yes,” Seong-Jae said. “Precisely. ‘Oh.’”
Malcolm tabbed back over to the image of the crime scene—then scrolled through several more, tapping the right arrow to flick through multiple shots of the same scene from different angles, just trying to move fast enough that he wouldn’t focus too hard and throw up right into the convenient paper bag tucked into the seat back in front of him.
The plane hadn’t even taken off yet.
He couldn’t exactly blame air sickness.
Two male, two female. One man and woman older, the other woman just past adulthood if he had to guess, the other a boy, thin and reedy and gangly. He was the worst, his body chopped in the most places, right down to finger-bones, while the others might only be sliced across their upper arms and thighs, or carved in half along the torso with proximity and pressure the only things keeping the bulging, shining edges of organs from slipping free.
He flipped back to the report. “Family,” he said. “Mother, father, daughter, son. Related to the killer?”
“Not that we are aware of,” Seong-Jae said. “The initial investigators traced all known associates, from business contacts to neighbors to family members. I did a later trace, but after more than twenty years I did not uncover anything more conclusive. It would appear they were a random target. Possibly chosen for the isolation of the farm, allowing the killer to work without being observed easily by passers-by or alerting anyone with cries of distress. Possibly simply the site appealed to him, considering he seems to show a propensity for hanging from the rafters of spaces, staging his kills against a large backdrop.”
“So this is a trend. And your profile is certain of a male suspect?”
“The violence and nature of the crimes is indicative of a white cisgender male suspect, yes,” Seong-Jae confirmed. He was speaking in that careful monotone again, and breathing slowly through flared nostrils, those subtle signs that he was keeping himself in tight check—and Malcolm reached over to once more cover his hand, squeezing as Seong-Jae continued, “He finds these people aesthetically displeasing to him and feels entitled to alter their appearance through force with no regard for their lives, simply to please himself. That level of entitlement combined with the much higher incidence of violently sadistic crimes in that demographic makes it likely, particularly in incidences with multiple victims in a single crime scene. We are not dealing with another Sarah Sutterly.”
“Okay. Okay, then.” Malcolm took a deep, shaky breath, forcing himself to keep looking. “So the son…he’s not through his growth spurt. That’s why he’s been torn apart more. His proportions were more awkward, more asymmetrical and strange.”
“That is the conclusion I came to, yes.”
“And—wait.” Malcolm frowned, flipping back a few more images until he hit one with a straight head-on shot. “The positioning of the bodies.”
“Yes,” Seong-Jae said softly. “You see it.”
At first Malcolm couldn’t quite quantify what he was seeing, just that there was a pattern. The bodies were spaced as if dividing the image into parts: an empty section on the left, then two bodies spaced evenly apart, then the other two—the son and the daughter—clustered so close together they almost looked like they were holding hands for comfort.
“Zero, one, one, two,” he breathed as realization sank in. “Empty space, one body, one body…two bodies. The start of the Fibonacci sequence.”
“Just so,” Seong-Jae confirmed, and Malcolm shook his head.
“So the Fibonacci spiral, the Golden Ratio, the sequence…wait.” He leaned in, squinting at the screen. The edges of the cuts, and how they were almost…fluted with narrower incisions. “…he cut them on a spiral, didn’t he. This is all mathematical.”
“That is the pattern I recognized, that linked the cases,” Seong-Jae confirmed. “The adjustment of the body parts to suit
the Golden Ratio, where the size of comparative proportions reflect the same ratio as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the proportions, and the mathematical elements of Fibonacci sequences and spirals incorporated into both the dismemberment and the mutilation of the bodies. He cuts them apart, and strings them back together according to his estimation of mathematical perfection. This is why, once I identified the pattern, the suspect was labeled on official record as the Golden Ratio Killer.”
“Fucking hell.”
Malcolm slumped back in his seat, tabbing quickly through the photos again, searching for patterns, looking to see what Seong-Jae had seen. He stopped, though, on a close-up of the woman. She was pale, almost too pale, even for post-mortem pallor, but…what made him stop wasn’t her haggard, sunken-in face, the coarse earthy warmth of it sagged in by death to leave her cheeks hollow and her blankly open eyes sunken, her dark hair straggling limply into a face that had somehow been drained of all personhood to just leave her an achingly empty doll. Marina, the file had said her name was. Marina Grisham.
It was her arms.
Her arms had been severed just below the biceps muscle, then reattached with a gap of almost an inch between the sections, just empty air and a thin thread of shining wire, strung together like a mannequin.
That was what made him stop, frowning as he leaned closer to the screen.
“Why the gaps?” he asked, even if he more than dreaded the answer.
“The space represents the flesh that should be there.” Seong-Jae reached over to flank the beginning and ending stump of Marina Grisham’s upper arm with his fingertips, framing the length of it. “He felt these areas were too short, so he lengthened them with empty air to meet the necessary ratio.” He let his hand fall, regarding Malcolm solemnly. The lines around and beneath his eyes seemed just a bit deeper, echoing the hollow-eyed feeling racking Malcolm, haggard and strained. “This was an initial test kill. He was still not certain of his methodology. He would not continue using this technique for long.”
“Okay,” Malcolm said slowly, reluctantly. “Show me the next file. Show me the escalation.”
Rather than answer, Seong-Jae only gently brushed Malcolm’s hand from the touchpad, a touch that was at once brisk and yet comforting, warmth to warmth and keeping them always somehow in contact.
As if, as long as they kept that feedback loop of touch, of comfort between them…
They would survive this.
This witness to the nightmare of the human soul.
Seong-Jae navigated back to the root folder, then clicked on another of the numbered folders, expanding another window full of files and thumbnail images. He tapped another photograph.
Malcolm braced, and forced himself to take it in.
Two men, this time. Twins, he realized immediately—identical symmetrical faces, strong bone structure, identical haircuts, so striking they were instantly recognizable as the same face mirrored opposite each other. They were strung up from metal hooks that disappeared behind their backs, and Malcolm tried not to imagine what they were gouged into when the men were naked.
Naked, and covered in thin red lines.
No gaps this time.
No gaps, but something was still…off.
He tilted his head, studying the corpses, the angle of their bodies hinting they’d been swaying slightly at the time the photograph was captured. The pallor of their bodies was different, as if…
“Cold storage,” he murmured. “A meat locker?”
“Ah,” Seong-Jae confirmed. “One year later, in nineteen ninety. A slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Los Angeles.”
Malcolm’s eyes widened. “Exactly one year?”
“To the date.”
“…and the next was one year apart again? Then two? Nineteen ninety-one, then nineteen ninety-three?”
“Then three, in nineteen ninety-six,” Seong-Jae said softly. “Then five, bringing him to two thousand and one. Then he simply…stopped.”
“He was actually slowing down his kill cycle, instead of escalating as most serials do,” Malcolm said. “Because he was timing them by Fibonacci numbers.”
The Fibonacci sequence—a mathematical sequence that was frequently found in repeating, spiraling patterns in nature, from the heart of a sunflower to the branches of a fern’s leaves. The sequence was endless, beginning with zero, then one, only for the next number to be the sum of the previous numbers. Zero plus one equaled one, then one plus one equaled two, one plus two equaled three, two plus three equaled five, three plus five equaled eight, and so on into infinity.
“Yes.” Seong-Jae inclined his head, dark eyes flicking with forced dispassion over the screen. “If that had been recognized sooner, considering the exact dates…perhaps he could have been intercepted before he went dormant.”
“Are we sure he went dormant?”
“At the moment…until we review the new case file, I am not certain, and it is highly probable the new file is sparse on information. Aanga will likely need to provide context, but…”
“We can probably glean enough on our own. Just…let me get caught up with what the two of you already know.” Malcolm narrowed his eyes at the screen. “…no gaps this time. So he shortened, and didn’t bother lengthening. Maybe he found the empty gaps displeasing. Neat edges, all sliced together.”
“As you say.”
“So his victims come out smaller than they started.” Malcolm curled his knuckles below his lower lip, nudging at it. “Is this a pattern? The number of victims is the sum of Fibonacci numbers? Four in the first kill. One, one, two. Now two in the second. One and one.”
“Yes.”
“…that’s…”
“Exactly,” Seong-Jae said gravely. “Considering the escalation of numerical values in the Fibonacci sequence…it sets the stage for extremely high kill numbers, if he is given the opportunity.”
“Fuck,” Malcolm swore. “What’s the largest so far?”
“The nineteen ninety-six scene.” Seong-Jae guided the mouse to navigate to another folder, clicking it open. “Twenty. A class of vocational students at a Los Angeles community college. One, one, two, three, five, eight.”
Malcolm scanned the images—taking in the same patterns, those thin spiral cuts, the limbs segmented and refitted with the edges not quite lining up where segments had been sliced out to remove the natural taper of body parts, sometimes entire torsos cut apart and fit back together in a strange jigsaw to create these compactly proportional dolls. The community college gymnasium of the 1996 crime scene looked like some kind of strange puppet assembly line, every student suspended from the ceiling, a few feet above the ground with their toes dangling.
He had to look away again.
He was trying to stay calm, but this was too much.
God, he hoped they ended this soon.
He couldn’t look at the names.
It felt wrong—it felt like disregarding their humanity, each individual life that had been severed as surely as their limbs, cutting them off from who they used to be to become something terrible, something cruel, a mockery of human perfection.
He was disrespecting the dead, by not letting himself know who they were.
But he couldn’t get through this, if suddenly he knew those faces by names and whispers, hints, wonderings about lives, loves, losses.
After.
After this was over, he would look at every face, every name.
He would stand at their graves, and say the right words.
But right now…
Right now, he needed to steel himself to be cold enough to catch this bastard.
He let his gaze drift without quite locking over the arrangement of bodies—two individual ones, then groups of two, three, five, eight.
“How does he cut so neatly?” he asked. “Was he using a bone saw?”
Seong-Jae shook his head. “Per forensic analysis, he used the wires and bladed edges. Apparently friction and repetitive motion with a thin steel wi
re can sand quite smoothly through bone very quickly.”
Malcolm was most definitely going to be sick.
“So we have a methodology,” he said, moving on quickly. “What about victimology?”
“I have not been able to pin that down yet. No one has. There must be a pattern, but it does not comply with the mathematical obsession.” Seong-Jae fell silent—then shifted deliberately to press closer to Malcolm. Thigh to thigh, now, until the space between them was almost too warm, pushing back the chilly airplane air with its strange, crisply artificial taste. “Thus far, as far as we can tell…we cannot discern the connection between the victims.”
“Opportunity, maybe.” Malcolm leaned back against Seong-Jae, letting those broad, angular shoulders hold him up just a little—even if he couldn’t help worrying about Seong-Jae. He could only imagine the sort of residual trauma this was bringing up, after years in the BAU. “He chose his victims based on their circumstances—the best way to isolate and entrap the desired number of targets, and assuming since humans are varied and strange, it’s pretty likely everyone in the target group would have some level of disproportion somewhere. Someone calculating murders mathematically clearly has the ability to plan circumstances with precision by seeking out the best possible scenario to stage his crimes. It wasn’t personal. Just situational.” He glanced over the photo again. “Something’s been bothering me. Why isn’t there more blood?”
Seong-Jae’s hesitation said more than anything, before he said slowly, “The details are in the autopsy reports, or I could tell you.”
With a deep exhalation, Malcolm dragged a hand over his face, running through his beard. “…let me hear it from you. I don’t think I can handle a clinical report right now.”
“He exsanguinated them.” Seong-Jae’s already quiet voice dropped to a somber hush, each word precise, careful. “Per forensics, while they were still alive. And they were likely still in some way alive for a few minutes longer when he began to dissect them. The exsanguination is another key marker of his crime scenes.”
