The Butcher and the Wren

This chapter (and also those focusing on Wren) begins seven years into the future, though this is not made apparent until Chapter 24. Dr. Wren Muller, a forensic pathologist, arrives on the scene of a murder at two o’clock in the morning in a Louisiana swamp. She finds the body of a partially naked young woman half-submerged in The Bayou. Two weeks prior, she evaluated the body of another murdered young woman who had pages of a book shoved down her throat, the only words legible being “Chapter 7” (12). Wren looks at the body in front of her and notes the laceration on her stomach that appears to have gutted her. Wren notices The Bracelet that the victim, whom they are calling Jane Doe, is wearing and wonders what her killer thought as he dragged her body to the bayou. She looks at the strangulation marks on Jane Doe’s neck and, based on the lividity of the body, puts the time of death at 10 hours ago. 

Wren asks her deputy coroners for a camera to photograph the body, especially Jane Doe’s bicep tattoo of hands holding a rosary and praying, and she quizzes the deputies about methods for time of death estimation. The police officers find a t-shirt and a horror book titled The Ghouls. As they load the body onto the gurney, Wren asks the corpse who is missing her. An officer mocks her for the remark, but Wren knows that the dead have told her many secrets.

Jeremy’s chapters are seven years prior to Wren’s storyline, but again, this is not yet clear. Jeremy drinks coffee and watches a news broadcast about two escaped prisoners convicted of murder before he goes downstairs to check on Katie and Matt. Matt tries to escape and shouts at Jeremy, so Jeremy kisses him and bites his lip until it bleeds and reminds him that he came to the house willingly. 

Jeremy goes to his data entry job. He forgets his key card, so he asks the receptionist to let him in. Her appearance disgusts him, so though she knows his name, he has not bothered to remember hers. She lets him in, despite Jeremy’s rude comment in response to her joking that he owes her.

Wren conducts an autopsy on Jane Doe. The strangulation did not kill her, but her abdominal wound did. Wren’s initial time of death estimation was several hours off, which is unusual. She also deduces, based on the blood patterns, that the victim died lying on her right side but was positioned at the crime scene on her back. Detective John Leroux arrives at the autopsy suite, hoping that Wren can give him answers. Wren tells him that the killer refrigerated Jane Doe.

Jeremy sits in his cubicle at work and scrolls through the news and social media and sees people holding a vigil for Matt and Katie, praying for their safe return, which he scoffs at. His coworker, Corey, approaches and talks to him about the missing couple and the similarities to a girl who was recently found murdered—another one of Jeremy’s six total victims thus far. He had not overlapped victims until he captured Matt and Katie, who arrived during the last days of past victim Meghan’s life, before Jeremy stabbed her in the stomach and killed her. 

Jeremy’s modus operandi is kidnapping people in their twenties and thirties from bars and nightclubs, though he keeps his method of murder different each time. He dumps all the bodies in The Bayou, earning him the “Bayou Butcher” moniker. Corey continues to talk about the missing couple in a blasé and disrespectful way, which earns him Jeremy’s attention. They joke about the missing couple before Corey returns to working, after inviting Jeremy to his upcoming open mic.

Wren finds herself frustrated by the Jane Does she cannot identify. She talks with John about the killer and his attempt to make her time of death inaccurate via refrigeration as she continues the autopsy. The police now accept that he is a serial killer and believe that he is leaving clues to the location of his upcoming body drops. This bravado frustrates Wren, who thinks about the BTK Killer and how his hubris led to him getting caught by the authorities due to his taunting and mocking the police. On the new body, police found a piece of paper with a fleur-de-lis pattern on it. Wren also sees a copy of the library card that was found with the book. It has the name Philip Trudeau, a man who lives in Massachusetts and hasn’t returned to Louisiana since he was in middle school, but the book went missing from the library 10 days ago. As she ruminates on this, she continues with the autopsy.

Jeremy clocks out and drives home from work, thinking about the nature of pain and its biological process. The first time Jeremy saw real pain was when his father brought home a dying doe, screaming in the bed of his truck. The doe was hit in the road, and Jeremy’s father brought it home to put it down so that it would not suffer in pain. His father put on music and showed Jeremy how to shoot the doe between the eyes, while explaining that animals shouldn’t be made to suffer needlessly. Jeremy thinks that this was one of the most pivotal moments of his life, seeing pain and suffering and death up close. As Jeremy gets home, he is excited by the idea that Matt and Katie become even more afraid when they hear the clank of his keys dropping into his copper storage bowl. Jeremy washes his hands, hangs up his shirt, and heads down to the basement.

Wren leaves the morgue and talks with John in the parking lot. He gets a call that confirms that analysts could not find any fingerprints on the book from the crime scene. Wren knows that every killer leaves threads to pull at, even a serial killer as meticulous as Israel Keyes, who buried kill kits all around the United States during his reign of terror. Wren then puts on a podcast to drive home and fixates on the name Philip Trudeau, the red herring name from the library card. Wren cannot shake the feeling that she knows that name, even though she trusts that John and the police investigated all Philip Trudeaus and the only one was in Massachusetts. She gets home to her rickety house and brews a pot of coffee quietly—she’s never liked wine to unwind—and is careful not to wake her sleeping husband, Richard. He wakes up anyway and comes downstairs to talk with her about her day and the case. He reminds her that she’s the forensic pathologist, not the detective, so it’s her job to work with the information she has, not track down new leads. Still, she can’t stop thinking about the name Philip Trudeau. She waters her plants and heads to bed, wondering if the killer waters his plants, too.

Jeremy drives to medical school, stuck in traffic, feeling jittery about what is to come. A radio announcement states that another woman’s body has been found, which fills Jeremy with a rush of adrenaline, knowing that that body was his kill. He thinks about the ME, the forensic pathologist, who is looking at his victims. They cannot know everything that Jeremy knows, he thinks to himself. The bodies cannot talk to them. Pathologists cannot understand death like he does, he thinks, because they have never killed. He also thinks that they cannot see the shift in his pattern coming and is drawn out of his thoughts by traffic starting to move.

Wren has a nightmare in which she is dying, then she sees her parents’ faces, but they look right through her. They cry and cling to each other and cannot hear Wren, no matter how much she calls out for them. A disembodied voice tells Wren that she’s dying, and her parents disappear. The voice taunts her as she realizes that her legs don’t work. A man, the owner of the voice, walks towards her, but she cannot make out his face. She tries to crawl away from him as he shouts at her to run.

She wakes up. She takes a moment to center herself and gets ready for her day. She’s tired of new bodies piling up and endless autopsies, and she misses seeing Richard. When she gets to work, she gives an overdose and a suicide case to her assistants to prep, then heads to the autopsy suite, ready to catch the killer.

Later, John asks Wren to come with him back to the crime scene, this time in an alley behind a bar. Wren thinks about how much foot traffic it gets but decides that drunk people would be less observant. John notes that the killer is choosing “hotel-art humans” for his victims (59), or people not at the top or bottom of society but in the forgettable middle. Wren agrees that it’s a good strategy—to avoid taking high profile victims but to avoid taking marginalized people to avoid a social justice reaction. As they turn to leave the crime scene, John spots a card in the crack of the sidewalk. It’s Wren’s business card, an older version that’s at least six months old. This scares Wren, who realizes that the killer knows who she is, but John tries to assure her that perhaps the killer just wants to let them know he understands how the process works. He gives Wren a security detail for the time being and promises to catch the killer.