“What the hell...” he said, staring into the garage.

Ruby's breath caught in her throat.

The glow from the garage came from a whole church's worth of candles, burning around a wall plastered in celebrity photos cut out of magazines. There were dozens of them, the edges overlapping, so many crammed in a small space.

“Those look like the victims, right? It's not just me?” Gabe asked.

There were distinct red-heads like Pearl, women in similar outfits to the clubbing dress Alannah wore, women with heavy, dark bangs like Vanessa.

“Yeah,” Ruby replied, still staring at the wall of photographs. “They all look like the victims. But why is he...?”

This was new. It wasn't like anything she'd ever seen before. She was a little afraid that if she looked too closely, there might be a photo that looked a little too much like her.

The candles flickered ominously.

The altar was part scrapbook, part middle school collage, all creepy.

The more she looked, the more Ruby hated it.

“Look at that,” Gabe said, pointing out one of the many faces adhered to the wall. “Doesn’t she look right out of Pearl’s magazine?”

Sure enough, the glossy paper image looked strikingly familiar. All the angles looked right. There was no way to be positive without a side-by-side comparison, but Ruby had a sneaking suspicion that Gabe’s instincts were right.

“They’re not all cut-outs,” Ruby observed, scanning over the messy patterns of shapes and edges.

Some of the images were square. Some of them were of Pearl herself.

“Forensics is not going to love this,” Gabe said. “Some newbie is going to get stuck matching pictures to magazines.”

Ruby finally tore her attention away from the shrine to analyze more of the garage.

Tucked in one corner, there was a cluster of repurposed milk jugs, all full of odd colored chemicals. Trays and a binder were wedged between them.

“Photography equipment,” Ruby murmured, attracting Gabe’s attention to her.

She picked up the binder tentatively, steeling herself for what could be inside. Photos of the bloody women would be reprehensible, but at least they would be evidence.

Inside, there were sleeves and sleeves of photo negatives. Ruby carefully pulled one out, squinting at it as she raised it to the light.

“It looks like a diner. It’s hard to tell for sure,” Ruby said, “but it could be the diner Pearl worked at.

There was nothing random about Pearl if the killer spent that much time watching her.

“What else is there?” Gabe asked, coming closer.

Ruby slipped the strip back into place before flipping through, only taking a guess at the organizational method at work. It was very possible they were in some kind of order and she didn’t want to mess that up.

She pulled out a second strip.

“This one looks like… a race, maybe? There are a lot of bodies,” Ruby said, handing it off so Gabe could look for himself.