“That’s creepy,” Gabe said.

“No kidding,” Ruby replied, her eyes still fixed on the cut-out. Where her face should have been, Ruby could read words like tender and succulent and that somehow made her skin crawl even more. What kind of sinister scrapbooking was their killer up to?

“Find the kitchen scissors,” Ruby said. “We’ll send the scissors and magazine to forensics to pull prints.”

Ruby carefully closed the magazine back up and the hovering cop nodded intently.

“We’re not going to be able to hold anyone on cutting faces out of a magazine,” Gabe said as he began going through the kitchen drawers.

Ruby nodded grimly. That was the awkward part of the gray area of clues. They sure seemed insidious but they weren’t a crime.

“At least we’ll have something to compare to,” Ruby said, “if we get a match; it’s proof he was here.”

Gabe opened a drawer, revealing a clutter of charging cables and a pair of scissors. Ruby reached in with her glove and carefully placed them next to the magazine before she pulled off her glove.

She did not mention her deeper fear that the lab wouldn’t even have enough time to process prints before the killer struck again.

When killers outpaced science, too much of her job became educated guesswork. It was more about cracking human behavior than following the evidence.

Ruby's nervous energy was starting to pulse. She moved out of the kitchen, into the living room, carefully avoiding the flecks of blood in the carpet. They had to comb the place for anything that would help point them in the right direction faster.

Balloons bobbed around the living room, their shiny ribbons trailing beneath them. On Pearl’s shelves, there were elegant candlesticks and bookends not unlike the decorations in the magazine, but most of Pearl’s décor seemed to be family photos. Some even went far back into her childhood, a young girl posing with her siblings in front of one of those splotchy studio shoot backdrops. She smiled out from the photos, her family happy.

It bordered on being cliché, but Ruby wondered if seeing those happy family portraits infuriated the killer on some level. What was his family like? What about his life led him to believe killing young women was something he needed to do?

If the killer had access to Pearl’s home before the party, he could’ve learned so much about her so quickly. It was all readily on display.

“These are school colors, right?” Gabe indicated the two-toned clusters of balloons. “Maybe it was somebody she went to school with.”

Ruby turned away from the shelves, giving her attention back to the temporary flare of the party. In an illogical way, the balloons seemed in poor taste now. Part of Ruby wanted them gone, to avoid it feeling like they were celebrating death.