The pub was busy.

Sophia took a booth and sat in the high-back wooden chair while Theo and Dorland grabbed a pint at the bar. She shifted back and forth in the uncomfortable chair.

Theo returned and plonked down the beer on the table. Some splashed up and over the edge.

“I will need to take those pieces of art from you. You understand why?”

“I understand, but I want it all back.”

“Why? What are you going to do with your art now? Now that you know it was made by a serial killer? Break it apart? Turn it into a shower room?”

Sophia laughed. “Are you mad? I can’t sell them now. As soon as collectors find out I own all the artwork of a serial killer, my collection may double or triple in value.”

“How sad that is,” replied Dorland.

“I just don’t understand it,” Theo said. “I was sure he would be more specific. Are you sure there are no other pieces of art?”

“Well, I can’t be sure but those are the only ones I could find listed on the Internet. Maybe he has a solicitor who could tell you more.”

“When we talked to the solicitor, he didn’t know of art anywhere but at Tipring’s residence. We will have to ask him again, I suppose. Doc was cocky but not as cocky as we thought. He didn’t disclose any information at all really. It could be surmised that he didn’t trust that police or his uncle at MI5 wouldn’t eventually find out what he’d done. So, he kept things a bit vague.”

“Based on what we know,” Sophia said, “Doc did up thirty-two pieces of art, and that means he’s probably killed that many people—most likely all women.”

“Thirty-two,” said Dorland. He shook his head and gulped down the last bit in his glass. “What a sick bastard. I can’t see how it’s true. How could he kill so many women and no one notice?”

Sophia wasn’t really listening. “Based on the poems, a lot of words have meanings like buried or watched. But he also used a few specific terms like iris or knees. I wonder what those mean?”

Theo and Dorland both put down their beers at the same time and looked at each other.

“Didn’t Tipring have a row of irises in his back garden?” Dorland asked his partner.

“You don’t think . . .” said Sophia.

“I couldn’t be . . .” started Theo.

“It wasn’t something we considered important. We need to get those flowers dug up and see what’s underneath. I don’t suppose the bodies are buried there, are they? I mean, he would have to dig pretty deep to add thirty-two bodies to that little space. And how could the neighbors not notice?”

Chapter Fifty-Four

On the way back into London, Theo rang SOCO and the coroner to meet them at Maddock Tipring’s house. The garden was so small that only three men could be out there at a time, and so the detectives let the investigators dig. Meanwhile, Theo counted the flowers that they dug up—thirty-two dirty, fake, faded irises.

“I thought it was an odd season to have these flowers still in bloom,” remarked Dorland, “but I never gave them a second glance. ‘They’re my sister’s favorite flowers,’ that’s all I thought at the time.”

Theo wasn’t really listening. He was concerned. They had been digging for an hour and hadn’t found anything resembling a body. Perhaps the poem was only symbolic. Perhaps he liked thirty-two irises to remind him of his disgusting deeds just as he used his morbid art to remind him.

“We found something, sir,” one of the men digging exclaimed.

Theo pushed past the others in the doorway. The men had hit something metal and were pushing the dark dirt off the cover. It was a tin box about the size of a shoe box. They continued to dig around the edges until finally it came up with a tug. The officers stared down at it as it lay on the ground. No one made any attempts to open it. Theo pulled gloves from his pocket and opened the lid. It wasn’t easy. Who knew how long the box had been buried there. He pulled it apart with two hands and it knocked him back. Some of the contents spilled out onto the grass.

“What is it?” asked Dorland.

Inside the tin were many triangular-shaped objects. Theo reached in and placed one on his gloved palm.

“What are those?” Dorland asked again. “Arrowheads?”

The coroner leaned over Theo and said, “No, they look like patellas to me. Lots and lots of them.”

“What’s a patella?”

“A kneecap.”

Theo gingerly placed the patella back into the tin. “There are so many of them.”

Sophia came over and had a look. “After he killed them, he cut out their kneecaps. But they’re so clean.”

“Most likely he boiled them to remove remnants of muscle and tendons,” the coroner said.

“How easy would it be to remove a kneecap from a body?” she asked him.

“Well, with a good knife . . .”

Theo handed the tin to one of the SOC officers who bagged it up carefully.

“Shall we keep looking? Go deeper?” one of the men holding a shovel asked.

“Yes, a little deeper. I don’t want to miss anything else, but I don’t think the bodies are buried here.” He went back into the house. “I want to get back to the incident room. I’m in a great deal of muck for this but I want to find those bodies. I refuse to let Maddock Tipring laugh at us from his grave.”

Theo was quiet and pensive the whole way back and as soon as he entered, he fired off instructions like it was his last few moments on earth.

“I know we’re trying to find Yoder’s killer, but I feel the Maddock case and the Yoder case are somehow connected. To solve one, we need to solve the other. So, I want everything on Tipring, I want his tax records, his bank records, I want to know what he did for work, where he went to school, where he went to the dentist, who he dated, and what his hobbies were.”

Everyone stared at him, mouths open, not moving.

“And I want it now,” he shouted.

People shuffled off, not sure where to start, not sure what their assigned tasks were. Dorland went over to the board and started a list of tasks, placing officer’s names beside their assignments. Sophia followed Theo back to his office and managed to enter the room before he could slam the door in her face.

“Why are you so angry?” she asked.

“I’m not as angry as I am frustrated.” He sat down at his desk and began typing some notes into a document on his computer. Sophia sat down across from him.

“Let me help. I can get information on Tipring as easily as any of your officers.”

He looked up sharply from his keyboard. She could tell his immediate reaction was a negative one but then he sat back. “Sure. Whatever you can find will be a great help.”

She nodded and quickly set about sending a text message to the one person she knew was the master at information retrieval—Crystal.

“Aren’t you going to go and find information?” he asked her after a few minutes of her staring at him.

“No. If there is information to be had, it will arrive here.” She held up her mobile. Instead, she took out the poem, rewrote a copy, and handed it to Theo. “You might want this.”

He grabbed it from her.

She circled a few words on her poem—buried, knees, irises, hunt. “What did his family say about him? You did talk to his family members, didn’t you?”

“Of course we did. But the family wasn’t really close. His sister didn’t say much about him.”

“Can I read the report?”

He hesitated, but finally handed her the Tipring file. “I don’t know what you’ll find interesting. They didn’t know much about Doc at all.”

Sophia wasn’t listening; she was reading carefully.

“This tells us nothing,” she said finally. “Why didn’t you ask his sister important questions, like what his hobbies were or did he display psychopathic tendencies?”

“And why exactly would we have done that, Ms. Evans? He was the victim. It really didn’t matter to us at the time what the man did in his teens.”