CHAPTER NINETEEN

Luca's eyes burned like he'd been staring at the sun. The precinct swam around him. He blinked and for a moment, the world titled sideways.

Was this real? Sometimes, in moments of solitude, Luca wondered if he'd ever left his old job in Massachusetts. Maybe he'd fallen asleep during a session, and this whole FBI gig was some fever dream cooked up by his overworked brain.

But then he'd smell Ella's shampoo on his pillow, or feel the phantom ache of a bruise from their last chase, and he'd know. This was his life now. For better or worse.

Just a year ago, he was a small-town shrink, listening to bored housewives and unfaithful husbands and ungrateful kids. Now he was elbow-deep in the detritus of human depravity, chasing shadows and monsters that wore all-too-human faces. The irony wasn't lost on him. He'd spent years helping people face their fears, and here he was, surrounded by the very things that went bump in the night.

What would he say to his old colleagues if he saw them now? ‘Hey, remember when I helped Brenda Cabot overcome her fear of public speaking? Yeah, well, now I'm trying to catch a guy who turns haunted houses into actual crime scenes. Talk about exposure therapy.'

The laughter died as quickly as it came. He opened his eyes and stared at the screen without really seeing it. The names and faces of the victims swam before him – Gregory, Natasha, Benjamin. Real people, reduced to case files and crime scene photos.

Luca's hand drifted to the cell in his pocket. He had the sudden, irrational urge to call his old mentor, Dr. Rosenberg. What would the old man say about all this? Probably something cryptic and vaguely Freudian, knowing him.

‘The pursuit of monsters, my boy,' he could almost hear Rosenberg's gravelly voice, ‘is often a reflection of the darkness within ourselves.'

Yeah, that sounded about right. He could practically smell the pipe smoke and scotch that always seemed to linger around the old professor.

Somewhere outside, Ella and Sheriff Redmond were fighting the good fight. Battling bureaucratic nonsense and penny-pinching policymakers. The shutdown of every ghost house had thrown this two-bit town into a tizzy, like someone had urinated in the communal moonshine. The haunt owners were up in arms, and the mayor was foaming at the mouth.

But Luca guessed that was his life from here on out. Putting fires out with his face and getting no thanks for it.

And now, flying solo in the precinct, Luca felt unmoored. He glared at the whiteboard, the scrawled names and dead ends staring back like a crossword puzzle in a language he couldn't read. He was still waiting on the names and CCTV footage from the owner of the Crypt of Despair, now two hours later than expected.

On a whim, Luca pulled up a browser and started searching. Maybe some enterprising local hack had caught wind of the murders and decided to make a name for themselves. But as he scrolled through page after page of mundane local news – barn dances and bake sales – he came up empty. Not a whisper about Benjamin Clarke's swan dive into the great beyond.

He navigated to the videos page to see if maybe any cops here had leaked it to the national outlets, but Luca caught a whole load of nothing. He scrolled down the list of recent videos, then stopped in his tracks when he saw a thumbnail he recognized.

Or half of it, at least. The thumbnail showed a gangly kid's face pasted over a picture of the Crypt of Despair. The title screamed brEAKING INTO A HAUNTED HOUSE GONE WRONG in all caps, like typography's version of a panic attack. The channel name was ‘HangingLangley,' which sounded less like a vlogger and more like a rejected Batman villain.

Luca clicked play, bracing himself for the kind of mind-numbing inanity that made him question the future of humanity. The video opened on a kid with more acne than sense, standing in front of the Crypt of Despair.

‘What's up, ghost gang?' the kid – presumably Langley – shouted at the camera with all the charisma of a wet paper bag. ‘It's ya boy, coming at you live on Columbus Day! Everything's closed, but that ain't gonna stop us from getting our scare on!'

Luca watched in fascination as the guy pranced around what was clearly a locked building. After five minutes of fumbling with locked doors and proclamations of imminent success, the video cut to Langley looking dejected.

‘Sorry, guys,' he whined, ‘place is boarded up tight! Thanks for watching, don't forget to smash that like button!'

Luca sat back while his mind raced. So here he had some kid – reasonably tall, so could very well have been the figure on the CCTV footage – promising to break into a haunted house the day before a very real murder took place in there.

On its own, the video was nothing. Just another attention-starved kid trying to go viral in a never-ending race to the bottom.

But something clawed at the back of Luca's brain. Coincidences weren't always coincidences.

He dove into HangingLangley's channel and found plenty more of the same. Break-ins. Urban exploration. The kind of high-risk hijinks that would have given Luca's dear old mother a heart attack.

Then, buried in two pages deep, Luca caught something.

Another badly-designed thumbnail. This time, with another similar visual.

SOLO HAUNT AT THE SHADOWLAND – GONE WRONG (REAL) (NOT CLICKBAIT).

All caps? Two sets of parentheses in one title? Who was this person?

Clickbait or not, Luca's blood swapped its customary caffeine for ice water. He clicked the thumbnail and willed the screen to load faster.

Langley's face filled the screen, pasty as the underside of a catfish. It was night outside, and Langley was running, out of breath. He spoke directly to the camera.

‘Hangers, listen up, because I'm only going to say this once. Shit got real at Shadowland tonight. I'm talking real. '

Luca felt a shiver shimmy down his spine. The hell was this guy talking about?

‘Sorry, right, so Shadowland. It's a new haunted house around here. I was going to break in, do a solo haunt like I did in the last vid, but while I was scoping the place out, I saw this guy in a mask run out. Just like, totally haul ass. It freaked me out, seriously.'

The video cut off with the abruptness of a guillotine blade. Frozen on Langley's mug, terror etched into every pimple and pore. Luca checked the date the video was uploaded. Two nights ago. The same night, Natasha Langston was killed in that very building.

Luca remained calm. He gave his mind a second to process everything and arrived at two potential conclusions.

Number one: this vlogger, this discount douchebag, might've stumbled ass-backward into their killer. Seen him in the flesh lived to monetize the tale.

Number two: HangingLangley, whoever he might be, had something to do with these murders and was doing his best to cover his ass.

It was too perfect. Too neat. Like the universe had decided to gift-wrap a killer and drop him right in Luca's lap. And that's what scared him most of all.

Because in all his years of studying the human mind, of peeling back the layers of trauma and neurosis, Luca had learned one immutable truth: the world was chaos. Messy, unpredictable, resistant to the neat categorizations and diagnoses that people like him tried to impose upon it.

So why did this feel so scripted?

What if this vlogger asshole was casing the joints, learning their layouts and using these stupid videos as justifications for him being at least two crime scenes?

Whatever it was, he needed to track down HangingLangley.

But first, he needed his partner.

Luca rushed to the door, peered his head around the corridor and shouted, ‘Ell! Where the hell are you?'