“Thank you, detective. We’ll take it from here”

Special Agent Lee Min Ho stood in the small barn’s wide doorway and scanned the dimly lit interior. Dusk fell on an ancient wood floor covered in dust disturbed by numeroud foot prints. Shafts of light streamed from cracks in the sagging roof.

Long abandoned. A natural choice.

“I’m sorry Agent Lee, my team is here,” The detective replied. “They can work the scene.”

Lee Min Ho stared at the dective, making him squirm. He broke the contact and looked around the small room. It was one rectangular room roughly fifteen by forty, covered by a tin rood. Interior walls formed by six-inch grayong wooden planks. A dust covered wooden bucker rested in the corner. A worktable sat on the corner.

He turned his head towards the main attraction. The woman’s body was glued to the wall, her arms wide, wrists limp. Just like the other three.

Just then Krystal walked in the room, his partner. She is a forsenic psychologist. She went near the body which was hanging on the wall, staring at the woman’s body. She caught Min Ho’s get-rid-of-the-detective glane and turned to face him.

“I’m sorry, detective,” she said in her most reasonable tone of voice, “but i'm sure you can appreciate our position here. Give my team a few hours. If this isn’t our guy, you’ll be the first one to know”

The detective glanced briefly at Min Ho before nodding and left the crime scene.

“Tell our team to start on the outside,” Min Ho said flatly. “Give us a minute. Bring Eun Ji in when she arrives.”

Kim Eun Ji, the forsensic pathologist, would determine what the body could tell them post-moterm.

Krystal headed for the van without comment.

Min Ho turned his attention back to the small barn. The shack. The farm shed. The killer’s nest.

The rest of the story was here, in the dark corners. The walls had watched the killer as he’d methodically and cruelly ended a woman’s life.

The worktable had heard the killer's words as he confessed his passions and fears in a world turned inside out by his compulsions. It had witnessed the victims pleas for mercy. Her dying moans.

Careful not to step on the exposed markings in the dust, Min Ho entered the room and approached the wall on which the woman was murdered. He stood still, filtering out the sounds of voices from a dozen law enforcement personnel outside. The hum of rubber on asphalt from the main road two hundred yards down the driveway settled in with the sound of his breathing. Both faded entirely as he brought his senses in line with the scene before him.

Her torso rose pale in the glow of a single light shaft. As though by magic, her body seemed perched on the wooden wall behind her, both arms stretched out on either side. Two round dowels that supported much of her weight protruded from the wall under her armpits. Her heels were together, each foot angled away from the other to form a V.

A white veil of translucent lace had been carefully arranged to cover her face, like a bride.

She was except for thin cotton and the veil. Blond. White. Everything about the placement was symmetrical. Each hand was set in identical form, with thumb and forefinger touching, each shoulder, each hip had been carefully manipulated into perfect balance. All but her head.

Her head slumped gently to the left so that her long blond hair cascaded over her left shoulder before curling under her armpits. Through the veil he could see that her eyes were closed. No blemish, no sign of pain or suffering, no blood.

Only blessed peace and beauty. She could as easily be an angel painted by a famous artist. The perfect bride.

This woman here is the fourth victim. The bride Killer they been after has striked again with his fourth bride. He peered closer and felt strange words of empathy well up inside of him.

“She’s beautiful” Krystal said behind him.

Krystal walked past him, eyes fixed on the woman, touch his arm gently with her fingers as she passes. Her breathing was steady, slightly thicker than usual. She was mesmerised by this Killer’s handiwork.

Min Ho and Krystal has been working on this case for months and they are still not close to finding the killer or his notion for killing these beautiful woman.

“What a shame” Kim Eun Ji’s voice cut softly through the room, grasping what the other two were too proud to verbalize. The forensic pathologist stepped up next to Lee Min Ho, withdrew a pair of white gloves from her bag then set it down. “What do we know?”

Min Ho would have preferred to spend more time alone with the victim, but the opportunity had passed. “No ID. Discovered an hour ago by two teenagers.”

They stared at the woman in a moment of silence.

“Heol…She’s beautiful,” Eun Ji said.

“De.”

“This makes four.”

“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”

The pathologist approached opposite KrystaL, who remained quiet, lost in thought as she studied the body with searching eyes.

Eun Ji sank to one heel and gently lifted the woman’s toes for a better view under the foot. “Care to tell us how you think it happened before I begin my preliminary examination?”

He wasn’t ready, of course, not yet, not without a complete analysis of evidence still to be gathered. But he’d been credited with an uncanny ability to accurately judge events from the thinnest of evidentiary threads.

 “Male, size eleven by the shoe prints. They were here for a while, maybe a day…”

“How so?”  Krystal asked.

 “That smell. It’s baked beans. He was hungry, so he ate. You won’t find the can. He wouldn’t leave any DNA evidence in here.”

“She was alive when he brought her here?”

“Yes. And he killed her like the others, by draining her blood from her heels. No struggle. A tarp under the table caught most of the trace evidence – bodily fluids, skin cells, hair. He was careful not to use too much force, keeping her on the edge of control and submission. She was lying prone, sedated, conscious and fully aware when he numbed her heels and drilled up into them. He was forced to clean up the blood on the table and floor where it ran off the tarp. Then he sealed the wounds, lifted her into position, held her long enough for the glue on her shoulder blades to dry on the wall, reopened the wounds on each heel,