Emma leans closer. “What is it, Kristin?”

“They’re… Oh goodness. Oh, that makes me feel ill.” Kristin reaches out tentatively to poke with one finger. Her voice is a bare whisper. “Does he hang them all upside down like that?”

“Yes. He’s strong.”

“And he cuts them like that.… Oh my god.”

“He follows the same pattern. We don’t know why. We don’t know why he bleeds them, we don’t know why he cuts their hair.”

“It’s like he’s field dressing them.…” Kristin’s horror is being replaced by a strange, detached curiosity. “But you said he only takes their blood?”

“Yes.” Bell finds he’s caught some of Emma’s intensity. “You mean he hangs them like game?”

“She’s right,” Emma says immediately. “That’s what I thought when I first saw the scene. Like meat in a freezer.” She turns back to Kristin. “But he doesn’t gut them.”

“How strange…” Kristin tilts her head. “And how high up he’s suspended them! Is this photo from eye level? Ooh, yes. Here’s one that shows you.”

“What does it show?”

“They’re a bit more than six feet above the ground, aren’t they?” Kristin points. “This lady in the background with the gloves, she gives you a sense of scale. Why on earth would he put them up so high?”

“That’s a good point.” Bell squints at Emma. “He hangs them to bleed them, but he doesn’t have to pull them up six feet to do that. I don’t know much anatomy, but I know gravity.”

“Why so high?” Emma looks away, thinking. “Everything he does serves a purpose. So what’s the purpose of…” She looks back, scrabbles through the photos. “How would he be standing, in relation to the victims?”

Bell finds the pictures she needs. “There. They found plantar prints on the floor beneath the victims. He took off his shoes.”

“I don’t think that’s all he took off,” Emma says grimly.

“Ooh,” Kristin says. “Yes! He would be underneath, wouldn’t he? To get the spray.”

Bell frowns. “The what?”

“The spray. There’d be a big gush, wouldn’t there? That’s what happens when you bleed a deer, at any rate. Have you never been hunting?”

“Turkeys and coyotes, yeah.”

Emma looks at him, her face pale. “Bell, he cut them from high up, while he was underneath.”

“Maintain blood pressure in the head.” Oh my god. He presses a hand against the desk. “The neck, the carotid artery—”

“Yes, so it would spray out like a shower.” Kristin’s fingers splay open with the gesture. “I imagine that’s why he cut their hair.”

“Explain that for me,” Emma says immediately.

“He wouldn’t want hair or arms in the way.… Their arms are tied up, see?” Kristin lifts a photo, angles it. “I mean, he probably, I don’t know, dances around underneath or something. You can’t dance around and enjoy it when there’s arms and hair in the way, can you?”

She looks up, her eyebrows raised, as if the answer is obvious. And it is obvious, so obvious to someone who has the capacity to imagine it. Bell just didn’t have the ability before, to plumb those depths.