CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Ella Dark spent her days staring mortality in the face, but here in the so-called Execution Chamber of a cheap haunted house named the Crypt of Despair, mortality had never looked so wrong.

Because in front of her, a masked man hung from the rafters, swaying gently on the end of a rope that groaned with each sway of pendulous motion. Luca placed a hand on Ella's shoulder. She wasn't sure if he was comforting himself or her.

‘You gotta be kidding me,' Luca said.

There was no kidding here. The victim was unidentifiable, given the mask – a white thing with streaky tears of red around the eyes – but the owner of this place had apparently confirmed him as Benjamin Clarke.

Sheriff Redmond scrubbed a hand over his face, then turned away from the scene. 'This is hellish. Who does something like this?'

Ella tried to view the scene with a detached eye, but the visual of the hanged man demanded a moment of tribute. Whatever this was, it wasn't the work of a garden-variety psychopath. This was the twisted vision of someone beyond repair.

‘Who found him?' she asked.

‘The owner of this place. Harry Gibbs. The guy's in quite a state.'

‘Not surprising. How did he find him?'

‘Victim's an electrician, apparently fixing the lights in here. Gibbs brought him a coffee and found him... strung up.'

Luca asked, ‘He suspicious?'

Redmond shook his head. ‘Man's in his seventies. Frail as hell. Can barely lift a toothbrush.'

Ella took a step closer and inspected the contours of the body. She noted the thickness of the rope, the lack of any loll in the victim's head. Then, her attention was drawn to the red blotches beneath the man's clothes. Two of them.

‘Our killer stabbed him,' she said. ‘Ankle and stomach.'

Luca joined her. ‘Incapacitate him, then hang him from the beams. That takes a ton of strength.'

‘Vic was dead before the killer hanged him. Look closer.'

He did, then shook his head. ‘I'm not seeing it.'

‘The angle of the head. He's looking straight down. Hanging kills by snapping the neck, which makes the head loll to the side.'

‘Maybe it just choked him?'

‘There'd be abrasions around the neck from the rope. Believe me.' Ella thought back to a case from last year, one she'd tried desperately to forget.

‘Okay, so he killed him with the knife, then somehow pulled off this elaborate staging?'

Ella pointed to the fallen stepladder beside them. ‘I'm guessing this ladder had something to do with it. It would definitely require strength, especially in the upper body, but I've seen it done before. Bodies are quite malleable in the few minutes after death.'

Redmond jumped in. ‘While I appreciate the insight into this lunatic's mind, shouldn't we be figuring out who he is? It has to be someone close to this place, right?'

Ella and Luca shared a uniform sigh. Ella thought back to Natasha Langston, the poor woman with mirrors in her eyes. Then Van Allen, the teddy-bear clutching villain. And now this. An electrician who, as far as Ella knew, had no connection to this business other than being a hired tradesman.

But there was something else. A new piece of the jigsaw that changed the whole picture.

‘I don't think our unsub is as prepared as we thought.'

Luca surveyed the carnage. ‘How d'you mean?'

‘How could our killer know that Natasha Langston would be in the mirrored room? How could he know that there'd be an electrician on a ladder in here?'

‘You think he's improvising? But what about the teddy bear? And the mask?'

‘I don't know about those, but unless our killer has intricate knowledge of the behind-the-scenes stuff, it feels to me like he's just working with what he's got.'

‘Opportunistic and organized? That's a dangerous cocktail.'

Redmond made a hmph sound. Ella recognized it as sheriff language for ‘get to the point.'

She turned to him. ‘First of all, cameras. What do we have?'

‘Same old story. There are cameras outside the building, but they're avoidable. The owner's gonna send us the footage regardless.'

‘Good. Were there customers in here at the time the owner found the body?'

‘Yeah. One group of ten going through the maze.'

Ella's ears perked up. ‘Just like with Van Allen.'

‘We'll need their names,' Luca said.

‘I can do better than that. They're all locked away in one of the rooms.'

‘All of them?'

Redmond scratched his beard. ‘Well, nine of them.'

Ella clenched her teeth and then sighed. ‘So, we're missing one?'

‘Afraid so.'

Her frustration threatened to boil over. While they were chasing a teddy bear-obsessed madman, the real killer was plying his trade elsewhere. ‘So, the killer pulled this off and then slipped out? How?'

Luca was moving along the leathery drapes that passed as walls. ‘Pretty easily. These are just flaps, and they don't even reach the ground. Anyone can slip underneath these things.'

Ella moved over, hiked up one of the flaps and slipped under. She found herself in the interstitial space between the horror maze and the building's actual structure. Luca appeared at her side.

‘Told you,' he said.

Before Ella could formulate a response, she caught sight of something on the floor.

A spotty trail of red droplets.

‘Hawkins, look.'

Luca followed her line of sight. He kneeled down and swept a finger through one of the spots. ‘Fresh, but congealing at the edges. Can't be more than an hour old.'

She focused on the trail. The drips led to a battered metal door. A faded sign read ‘Emergency Exit'.

The killer's escape route.

Ella glared at the door, picturing the unsub sliding through and melting into the day, untouchable. She imagined putting her fist through the rusted metal. Imagined it was the killer's face.

‘Dammit, Hawkins. Our guy knows this place like the back of his hand.'

***

While Sheriff Redmond oversaw the forensics team at the body and the escape route, Ella and Luca went through the interview process with the nine patrons still locked in the Crypt of Despair's final room. One hour in and they'd already grilled eight of them, jotting names and checking IDs until her wrist ached. None of them were aware of the very real homicide that had taken place fifty feet away, but Ella guessed that they all suspected something serious had gone down.

Their stories all lined up – ten people went in, only nine came out. The missing link was a tall man in a leather jacket, gloves and mask. A white mask with blood streaks around the eyes, to be precise. The same one the killer had then planted onto his victim's face.

And much to her irritation, no one caught this mysterious tenth person's name.

One jumpy kid still needed questioning though. Ella sized him up; a skinny scarecrow in a ‘This Is My Costume' t-shirt. He clutched his knock-off Freddy Kruger hat in white-knuckled hands and visibly shook in his Converse.

She fixed him with a stare and moved in his direction. ‘Name?'

The boy gulped. ‘Jared Evans, ma'am.'

Ma'am. Ella always felt like the word added twenty years. ‘Got ID, Jared?'

He fumbled for his wallet with shaky hands then passed over his driving license. Ella gave it the once-over. ‘Says here you're 21. You in college?'

'Yes, ma'am. Senior at Glenville U.'

‘So how come you're not there on a Tuesday afternoon?'

Jared bit his lip and said, ‘No lectures on Tuesdays, miss. Plus these haunts are less busy about now.'

Ella wasn't the college police, but she just wanted to assess the guy's capacity for honesty. ‘Okay, Jared. Level with me. This tenth guy in your group – you remember anything about him? Anything at all?'

Jared's gaze flicked away, feet shifting towards the door. ‘No, not really. Guy had a mask on the whole time.'

‘Is that normal?'

‘Yeah. Some people like to immerse themselves.'

‘Even on Tuesday afternoons?'

‘Sure,' Jared said.

‘You notice anything about this guy? The way he talked, walked? Tattoos? Hair? Moles?'

Jared shook his head, but Ella caught the subtle tells of deception. His gaze darted to the left, a classic sign of accessing constructed memories rather than genuine recollection. He fidgeted with the brim of his Freddy Krueger hat, a self-soothing gesture, one she'd seen countless times in interview rooms. His stance had shifted too, feet now angled towards the exit as if his body was preparing for flight even as his mind tried to maintain the lie.

But most telling of all was the slight tic in his left eye. It was an involuntary muscle spasm that often accompanied stress or anxiety.

‘Jared, there's a neon sign above your head right now that tells me you're not giving me the full story.'

Beads of sweat gathered on the poor kid's forehead, then the dam broke. ‘Alright, I did talk to him. Just a little.'

Ella arched a brow. ‘And?'

‘He was… normal.'

‘A man in a white mask and leather jacket is normal to you?'

‘Well, no, but that was just his costume. The guy walked and talked like anyone else around here. Local accent, definitely Yamhill. What's so important about this guy anyway?'

‘You'll find out soon enough. How was this guy acting?'

‘He looked… bored.'

Ella wasn't sure she heard him right. ‘Bored? At a haunted house?'

‘Yeah. He kept to himself. Didn't really get involved.'

‘And you said you talked to him? What did he say?'

Jared opened and closed his mouth like a fish on land. His eyes flicked to Luca a few feet away, as if seeking an ally, but found only an impassive stare.

‘You know, just everyday things. I only made conversation because he looked a bit lonely. A bit lost.'

Ella's patience was wearing thin, but at least she was getting somewhere, even if she was moving at a snail's pace. 'What exactly? Anything he says stand out?'

Jared glanced back at his friends for a second, then leaned closer to Ella. ‘He said something about this place… not being real.'

Ella blinked hard, as if trying to reset her brain. ‘He said what now?'

‘I'm being serious. I can't remember it word for word, but he definitely said something about this not being real. I remember that part because it was so weird.'

Ella's synapses lit up like a forest fire. Something wasn't adding up here. Was their unsub some kind of thrill-seeker, chasing a high he couldn't get from the tame scares?

‘Did he elaborate on this? You must have said something in response?'

‘I wanted to,' Jared protested, ‘but then the scares kicked off and interrupted us. After that, I saw him sneaking out.'

Ella's jaw went slack for a moment before she caught herself. ‘Rewind a second. Sneaking out?'

Jared pointed to the flimsy drapes that passed as walls. ‘We were in the undead room, a few rooms back. I saw the tall guy duck under the walls.'

‘You saw him leave? And you didn't flag this up to anyone?' She took a deep breath and reined in the sudden wave of frustration.

‘I just thought he was ducking out! People do that sometimes.'

Ella's mind short-circuited. The urge to grab the kid by his scrawny shoulders and shake him silly was almost overwhelming. ‘And that was it? Any other revelations? Maybe this guy sprouted wings and flew away?'

‘Sorry, ma'am.' Jared waved a hand. ‘I didn't think it was anything to be concerned about.'

‘Well, maybe…'

Luca came over, put a hand on her shoulder and said, ‘Thank you, Mr. Evans. You've been a great help. If you can think of anything else, please tell the uniforms outside.'

Jared nodded and scuttled off. Luca met her stare.

‘The hell was that about?' Ella asked.

Luca ushered Ella out of earshot of the interviewees, close to the exit. ‘That poor kid was already terrified and you put the boots to him.'

She drew in a measured breath through her nose and bit back the sharp retort dancing on her lips. ‘I was handling it, Hawkins. We needed information, and I was getting it.'

‘Not like that. Now, that kid's not gonna be helping us if he can help it.'

Her posture stiffened, unconsciously putting an extra inch of space between herself and her partner. Luca looked down and caught it.

‘You putting distance between me and you now?'

A sour taste flooded Ella's mouth. Nothing about this case made a lick of sense. What the hell connected the vics? And what was the deal behind this creep professional haunts fake ? At this point Ella half-expected to find Casper the unfriendly ghost waiting in the parking lot.

‘Sorry. It's just… you know.'

‘I know? You want me to make a feminine hygiene joke?'

‘No. But you know what we have to do now.'

Luca scanned the room then drew a breath through clenched teeth. ‘Yup. Something we should have done yesterday.'

‘Let these people go. Then we'll go outside and give the bad news to the sheriff.'

They had no choice. It was time to pull the plug on this circus. If the killer wanted real, Ella would give him a real ghost town to play in.