The Butcher and the Wren

Wren gets ready to go to a night out with her friends, putting on a nice top and makeup for the first time in what feels like forever. She considers staying home with Richard, but he convinces her to go out, given that it is her friend Lindsey’s birthday. She meets her friends Lindsey, Jenna, and Debbie at a seafood restaurant and revels in their familiar and friendly chaos. The women enjoy food and drinks before Lindsey decides that she wants to go to a fortune teller. The group agrees—even Wren, which surprises the others. They walk down the street and Wren takes in the beauty of New Orleans at night. When they arrive at Bottom of the Cup, they decide to get tarot readings for each of them. Wren goes with the fortune teller Martine, who offers to record the audio of their session. Martine gives her a palm reading first, noting two lines that tell her that Wren is a natural leader who can easily become obsessed with work and that she also sees life in black and white and is very analytical, but she can miss the nuance of the grays in the world. Martine cautions that this can be detrimental to her “situation,” though Wren does not know yet to what situation she refers. Martine starts the reading. The first card, the Moon, says that Wren is not listening to her inner voice and is blocking messages. The second card, the High Priestess, says that someone in Wren’s life now or in the past is embroiled in a secret. The third card that Wren draws is the 10 of swords, and Martine warns her that betrayal is coming her way, that “he” has done something horrible, that Wren must stop “him,” though when Wren asks who he is, Martine simply tells Wren that she already knows. Wren is spooked and runs out of the room. She makes an excuse to her friends and lies about needing to go into work, shaken by Martine’s words. Martine gives her the CD recording of the session and Wren hurries to her car.

As she drives home, she spots John and his police partner, William Broussard, outside a bar. She goes in and joins them, chatting with them as they watch a news broadcast in which a man interviewed by a reporter argues that the killings are the result of the occult and the broader shift away from Christianity. The two cops scoff at the broadcast, and Wren laments that the Satanic Panic still has a foothold in society. In the middle of their conversation, John gets up and walks through the crowd, bumping into a man and spilling his drink. Wren watches as John approaches a flier advertising an upcoming jazz festival on Bourbon Street. It has the exact same embossed fleur-de-lis pattern as the paper found with the last body.

Jeremy watches through a screen as Emily wakes up, groggy from the chloroform and ketamine. She’s outside and struggles to recognize where she is. Jeremy turns on the intercom and begins to speak to his “guests” (83). He tells them that there is a flashlight near each of them and that they are in random places on his property. He tells them that they can escape if they just must make it through miles of The Bayou while he hunts them. He watches Emily find the flashlight, recognize his voice in horror, then check herself for marks. She notices the injection site of the ketamine, then feels a snake slither near her foot. She cries out but begins trying to escape after Jeremy speaks into the microphone again, prompting them to run. Through the speakers mounted around the property, Jeremy begins to play loud music.

Wren gets to work and sees John on a call with his boyfriend, Andrew, a prominent chef. John apologizes for using the last of the cream in his coffee, and Andrew reassures him and gives him a pep talk. Wren and John then visit Ben, the lab tech, who tells them that the paper from the flier is the same as the paper scrap that was found with the last victim. They cannot know if the next victim is already dead, and Ben calls the killer the “Bayou Butcher.” Wren’s thoughts scramble. 

She and John go to the police station to share what they’ve found. The jazz festival is tonight, so time is of the essence. They put together a team and formulate a plan to keep a heavy police presence at the festival, as it’s too late to cancel it and they want to avoid causing a mass panic. They plan to station a bevy of officers in the high foot traffic zones and at every entrance and exit, to make sure the killer cannot escape unseen. Wren is skeptical of the plan. The killer likes to blend in and wreak havoc from afar, not up close. She worries that they won’t be able to catch him.

Jeremy grabs his pistol and shotgun and heads off into the swamp as the music continues to play. He stops to water his magnolia bushes as he continues onward. He thinks back to his family: They didn’t understand his desire to dissect things to understand how they worked, especially not his mother after his father died. He watches the security feeds via an app on his phone and sees Emily hiding against the tree, unwilling to use her flashlight to avoid drawing his attention. She starts to run and finds Katie. Katie wants to find Matt, but Emily wants to escape and survive. They work together to run, but Katie frustrates Emily by constantly shining her flashlight around looking for Matt. Jeremy fires a shot at them, but they dodge it, and Emily drags Katie along as she screams and wails that she cannot do it. Jeremy relishes in Emily’s disdain for Katie and Katie’s panic. Emily and Katie continue to move until Matt finds them. Katie runs to him and hugs him, but Jeremy takes that moment to shoot Matt in the head. Katie screams, covered in Matt’s blood, but Emily takes off running.

At the festival, Wren begins to smell a decomposing body, though she cannot tell if it's an olfactory hallucination or the real thing. One of her technicians begins to panic, and Wren snaps at them to calm down. The smell increases, clearly real, and she grabs John and tells him and the other officers to look for blowflies, which are deeply attracted to rotting bodies. They follow a cloud of flies to one of the smaller stages. With the help of a police officer, Wren and John make it to the back left side of the stage and investigate the small door that leads under the stage. They find the decomposing body of a woman. Wren crawls beneath the stage to get a closer look, and she finds that the woman was violently attacked, with cuts, bruises, lacerations, and old and new blood all over her. In her right hand is a map for St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 with a red X marking a certain spot. Wren also sees a smartwatch on the woman’s wrist that looks pristine, as if she was not wearing it before she was killed. Wren touches the screen, and it asks for a passcode, which Wren doesn’t know. She asks John to look at the map and tell her what grave plot number is marked; it’s 1503. Wren puts the code into the watch, and it opens, revealing a timer with 45 minutes left. The police quickly block off the area to prepare to move the body, and the concertgoers look on with fear.

Jeremy is thrilled after killing Matt and watches gleefully as Katie tries to wipe the blood and brain matter off of her face as she runs away. One of their flashlights dies, which Jeremy relishes as he imagines their fear rising. He follows them as he hears Katie start to yell that her leg is going numb, which means that his plan is working. In her IV bag, he dosed her with modified Jamaican ginger, or “Jake,” which can cause “Jake leg” as the neurotoxin present in the modified plant causes nerve cell death and muscle paralysis. Katie falls into the fetal position on the ground and Emily tries to help her keep moving, but Jeremy shoots Katie in the leg, shredding her knee. At this, Emily flees, leaving Katie behind. Jeremy takes a bowie knife from his belt and slits Katie’s throat.

Wren and John rush towards St. Louis Cemetery No. 1, and Wren calls an ambulance for the person they hope will still be alive if they get there before the timer goes off. John wonders if it’s a trap, and Wren reminds him that they must treat it as if it isn’t so that they can best help the person in danger. Will and other police officers will back them up, and as John drives them down a busy street full of people living their normal routines, Wren hopes that the ambulance will see “more action” than her when they get there (125).

Emily runs from Jeremy through the swamp as fast as her feet can take her. Her fear and panic exhilarate Jeremy, who keeps pursuing her. She hides behind a tree, and he taunts her, shouting her name while reminding her that he’s Cal, even though he knows that she knows who he is. He shoots his gun in the air and tells her again to run. She sprints for the fence she sees, but when she tries to climb it, she’s shocked by electricity. Jeremy tells her that he’s offended that she didn’t think he’d have an electric fence, and as she tries to crawl away, he grabs her by the throat and pulls her up to her knees. He puts drops of tropicamide in her eyes to blur her vision. While he holds her and she frantically blinks, he pulls out his bowie knife. He gives a speech about “C5, stay alive” (129), which indicates that if a person’s spinal cord is severed from the C1-C4 vertebrae region, they will die; if the cord is severed from C5 or below, paralysis may occur, but the person will likely live. Jeremy expresses his disappointment for her failure to answer his questions about the vertebrae as a medical student but tells her that he’s not a monster and will not sever her cord in the C1-C4 region. Emily pleads with Jeremy and promises not to tell anyone if he lets her go, but she feels a stabbing, burning pain. He pulls his knife out and tells her that he chose her lumbar region to sever.

Wren and John rush through the cemetery, desperate to get to the correct plot. Wren meditates on the choice of location; the killer is making the dead into the witnesses of his depravity. They reach the plot, and it’s a freshly dug grave. Wren is horrified that it is an inground burial and not an above ground entombment or a dying person left in the open. They find an egg timer at the scene with 20 minutes left. She, John, and the other police officers dig, uncovering a casket. Wren wrenches it open and finds the body of a woman, covered in vomit and blood, with bare, raw feet caked in dirt. The timer goes off, and the woman is still.

Jeremy wakes up rested, though he only slept for two hours. He watched Emily suffer and cry out to him for help until he fell asleep. He puts on a fresh shirt and searches for Emily, calling out her name and taunting her once more. He sees her resting horizontally against the fence and worries that she died from her wound, even though it was not in the C1-C4 region. When he examines the body, he finds that it is Katie, not Emily. Emily used Katie’s body as a conduit to avoid the electric fence. Jeremy realizes that he made a mistake, but he does not worry. Emily is still partially blinded from the tropicamide and bleeding from her wound. He’ll catch her, though he feels no relief at the thought.

Wren composes herself and begins to palpate the woman’s carotid artery. She finds a very weak pulse and shouts for help. As they load the woman up in the ambulance, Wren and John look at the casket. There is a skeleton still in there, meaning that the woman was buried with the casket’s original inhabitant. There are claw marks in the lid, showing that the woman was buried alive. John thinks that the killer has won, but Wren reminds him that they found the girl in time; she’s still alive and must have something that can help them catch the killer. John looks close to breaking and states that any further loss of life is on his hands for his failure to catch the killer.