Page 54 of Scarred By Sin

Had the women stayed in this space willingly or been drugged to the point where they couldn’t move or call for help?

Footsteps in the hallway preceded Sylvie’s return. She handed Brook a pair of latex gloves, paper booties, and a face mask. Brook pulled them on, and Sylvie did the same.

As they stepped into the room together, Theo appeared in the library doorway. He had his phone pressed to his ear, and his single brown eye took in the open bookshelf and the hidden room beyond it in a single glance.

“I need a forensics team sent to the Ellingham estate,” Theo instructed whoever was on the other end of the line. “No remains. Two or three members of Dr. Kessler’s team will be sufficient. She doesn’t need to be present.”

He stayed in the doorway, not entering the room, understanding without being told that the fewer people inside the space, the better, until it had been properly documented.

Brook moved carefully along the worktable, her gloved hands at her sides, studying the equipment without disturbing it. The microscopes, the glassware, the dried compounds in their labeled jars. Everything pointed to a man who had been conducting serious, sustained research over a period of years. This hadn’t been a hobbyist’s workshop. The precision of the layout, the labeling system, and the sheer volume of documented specimens all spoke to a researcher who had maintained professional standards even when the professional world had turned its back on him.

What interested her most was the stack of journals.

They were arranged on a shelf beside the worktable, a column of notebooks with dark covers, each one thick with pages. Dust had settled over them in a uniform layer, but the block lettering on the cover of the top journal was still visible beneath the gray film.

Brook leaned closer, careful not to breathe directly on the surface.

The letters took shape through the grime-coated layer.

A name.

Helen Uche.

Their first identified victim.

Brook gently lifted the cover of the journal and turned to the first page. The handwriting inside was small, precise, and densely packed. Dates ran along the left margin. Observations filled the center of each page. Compound names, dosage amounts, and physiological responses were recorded in the clinical shorthand of a man who had been documenting his work with the rigor of a published researcher.

She didn’t read every word. She didn’t need to. The structure of the entries explained what she needed to know within the first two pages.

Arrival date.

Initial assessment of the patient’s condition.

Treatment protocol.

Daily observations.

Nestor Ellingham had been treating these women, documenting their progress, recording every compound he administered and every response their bodies produced. The entries were careful, methodical, and written by a man who believed he was doing important work.

Brook turned several pages, scanning the dates and the entries. The journal's tone shifted as the pages progressed. The early entries were clinical, even hopeful. The later entries grew shorter. The observations became less detailed. And on the final page with writing, a single sentence occupied the center of an otherwise blank page, written in a hand that was noticeably less steady than the rest.

Brook closed the journal gently and straightened.

“This case was never about a serial killer.”

Sylvie, who had been surveying the lab without touching anything, turned to face her. Theo remained in the doorway, his phone call finished, his arms crossed, waiting.

“These women came here voluntarily,” Brook said as the profile she’d been altering had just found its foundation. “They were cancer patients who had exhausted their options. They heard about a botanist who believed he could treat them and came to this estate, hoping for one last chance. Nestor took them in. He treated them in this room, documented everything, and when they died, he buried them in the greenhouse.”

“He wasn’t a killer disposing of his victims.” Sylvie came to a stop in the middle of the laboratory, her gaze resting on the cot. “He was a man laying to rest the people he’d failed to save.”

“Which means the actual case is Nestor Ellingham’s murder.” Brook stepped back and removed her gloves. Since she didn’t plan on disturbing any more dust, she also removed her mask. “Either someone found out what he was doing, confronted him for reasons we haven’t identified yet, and killed him, or his murder had nothing to do with the remains in the greenhouse.”

Thirty years of silence, three decades of unanswered questions, and the man at the center of all of it had been trying to save lives, not take them. But that didn’t make what he’d done right. He may have believed he was helping those women, and maybe in his mind, he had been offering them something that conventional medicine had given up on. But what Nestor Ellingham had done was illegal, and regardless of his intentions, he had robbed their families of whatever time they had left. The last days, the last conversations, the chance to hold someone’s hand and say goodbye. He’d taken that from those families, and no amount of careful documentation or reverent burials could give it back.

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Brooklyn Sloane