CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Ella Dark had seen her fair share of interrogation rooms, but this one took the cake for most depressing. The Yamhill precinct's excuse for an interview chamber looked like it'd been cobbled together from spare parts. A rickety table, two chairs that'd seen better days, and lighting that flickered like a dying firefly. The whole setup screamed ‘we're working with what we've got' – which, in this case, wasn't much.

Carter Langley sat across from her, looking less like a cold-blooded killer and more like a kid who'd been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His eyes darted around the room, taking in the peeling paint and water-stained ceiling tiles. Luca leaned against the wall, arms crossed, doing his best impression of a hardboiled detective. Ella had to admit, he pulled it off pretty well. Must be all those old noir flicks that clogged up her TV back home. She'd already given him hell for breaching Carter's apartment without a warrant, so she had to hope that the results justified his breaking of protocol. If not, the director would chew her ass out.

Ella leaned forward, forearms on the table. They had three dead bodies stacked like firewood and burning with unanswered questions. Time to start flicking some matches.

‘Carter Langley. HangingLangley. Which name would you prefer?'

Carter's tongue flashed across cracked lips. ‘I don't care, because I didn't do nothing.'

‘That's where you're wrong, because you did a whole lot of something. So how about we cut the ‘who, me?' crap and get to the part where you start singing?'

Carter waved his hands around and said, ‘Ooh, so I broke into some old building. Don't you guys have real crimes to solve? Like maybe those two murders?'

Ella's ears pricked up. ‘You know about them, huh?'

‘Everybody does.'

‘What do you know about them?'

Carter sat back and folded his arms like he had an ace up his sleeve. 'Only what I've read on the news. Why?'

‘Why? Maybe because there are videos of you at two of the crime scenes. Shadowland and the Crypt. Ring any bells?'

‘I was there to film,' Carter snapped. ‘It's what I do. It's not my fault I saw some guy running around Shadowland.'

‘What exactly did you see?' Luca chimed in.

'Nothing. Just a guy in a creepy mask. Thought it was just one of the actors or something. Yes, I was at the Crypt the other day, but what's that got to do with the murders?'

Ella remained quiet while Luca pushed off the wall and reached into his jacket. He pulled out the camera he'd found at Carter's place and dumped it on the table like it was radioactive. ‘Nevermind the Crypt. What about this? Found it in that toxic waste dump you call an apartment.'

Carter looked at it like he'd never seen it before. ‘My camera? You stole my camera?'

‘I did more than steal it. I looked through it.' Luca played the scene that Ella had already watched prior to the interrogation. It was a short selfie video of Carter standing over the bloodied torso of a woman beside a riverbank. Ella couldn't verify its authenticity it, but the blood on Carter's knife in the video looked real enough.

‘That? Well, I'm glad you think it's real, because it's a shot for my film.'

Luca said, ‘Fake, huh?'

‘Yup. Swear on my life.'

‘We thought it might be, but we also figured you're the type of person to hide in plain sight.'

‘I got proof. On my computer. Behind-the-scenes stuff, y'know? And that girl? She's alive. She's an actress. I can give you her freaking address.'

Ella and Luca exchanged a loaded glance, half skeptical, half intrigued. A silent conversation in darting eyes and raised brows.

‘Alright, hotshot,' Ella said. ‘If you're so innocent, why'd you run when I caught you at the asylum? Guilty conscience?'

Carter's smile faded. He looked five years younger, some scruffy kid dragged in for penny-ante vandalism. ‘Look, it wouldn't be the first time I got busted for trespassing. I panicked, okay? Didn't want another fine on my record.'

Ella let his words hang in the air like smoke. She wanted to believe him, wanted to cling to the hope that this scrawny, basement-dwelling twerp wasn't smart enough to be their guy. But twenty years on the job had taught her one universal truth: everybody lied. Perps sung choruses of ‘not me, I'm innocent', right up until the cuffs clicked and the cell door slammed.

But something was nagging at her. Three murders, all vastly different, but they all told the same story. A teddy-bear clutching conman, mirrors in a woman's eyes, a hanging man wearing a bloody mask. These weren't the signature of an amateur. And Carter, for all his bluster, reeked of the small-time chump, vainglorious but lacking the brains or backbone for the genuine bloodletting.

Time to call his bluff.

With calculated nonchalance, Ella plucked the prime photo from the pile under her desk. It was a photo of Gregory Van Allen, face down, clutching a teddy bear in death. She slid it over to Carter.

‘What d'you think of this?' she asked.

Carter's reaction was immediate and visceral. His face contorted in disgust, and he pushed the photo away like it was on fire. ‘Jesus Christ! What the hell?'

Ella watched him closely, reading his body language. The revulsion seemed genuine – not the reaction of someone who'd seen this before, let alone caused it.

Luca, picking up on Ella's cue, dropped another photo on the table. This one showed Natasha Langston, her eyes replaced with shards of mirror. Carter's reaction was, if anything, even more pronounced. He gagged, but couldn't turn away from the image.

‘What the…? What's wrong with her eyes?'

Ella felt a sinking feeling in her gut. This was not how a killer reacted to their handiwork. This was the response of an innocent man confronted with the horrors of murder for the first time.

But she had one more card to play. Ella pulled out the final photo – Benjamin Clarke's body, hanging from the rafters of the Crypt of Despair, that eerie mask fixed to his face.

Carter blanched, recoiling as if she'd thrown a rattler on the table. His bulging eyes raked over the impromptu morgue display, disgust warring with fear on every line of his face. He looked ready to spew, and Ella watched him, hawk-eyed, dissecting every flinch and flared nostril.

It was a gamble. If Carter was their killer, then these photos would be his masterpieces. He'd pore over them, pupils dilating, tongue flicking out to moisten dry lips. It's what they all did: reaching for that taste again, that ultimate high of holding a life in their hands and squeezing until the light went out.

But Carter just looked sick, nauseous, like a boy who'd stumbled into an abattoir. And for a terrible, plummeting moment, Ella knew they had jack-all.

‘That,' Carter said. He pointed to the picture of Benjamin Clarke hanging from a noose. ‘That mask.'

‘What about it?'

Carter's voice broke. His eyes widened, suddenly transfixed by the crime scene photo. Disgust morphed into something like recognition.

‘I've... I've seen this before.'

Ella and Luca locked eyes as a crackle of electricity shot between them.

We got something, Ella thought.

‘Where, Carter? Where've you seen this mask?'

Carter's eyes danced around the room, and Ella could sense the gears turning in his head. This wasn't a lie he was about to pull out of his ass – this was genuine recall.

‘I don't know. I mean, I can't remember. But it's in one of my videos. From an exploration, a few months back. I'm sure of it.'

Ella's pulse thundered in her ears. This was something. Not much, but something.

‘Think harder,' Luca urged. ‘Was it in a haunted house? An abandoned building? In town or out in the sticks?'

Carter scrunched his face in concentration. ‘I'm sorry, I just can't remember. I've been to so many places, filmed so much stuff. It's all kind of a blur. But I definitely saw it because I remember thinking it was weird as hell.'

Ella waited a second, then tried a different approach. ‘Look at the mask, Carter. Think about the context when you saw it. Use Hebbian Theory. Was the place light, dark? A house? An old building?'

Carter eyed like she'd sprouted a second head. ‘Hebbian Theory? The hell?'

Luca leaned over the table. ‘Ignore the memory nerd over here. That detail is locked in your brain somewhere, and you're staying here until you've remembered it, alright?'

Her partner, as much as she loved him, was doing it again. Undermining her.

‘Not sure we can do that, Hawkins,' she said.

Luca fixed her with a look that said yeah, but don't tell him that. ‘Besides, you're staying here until we can confirm your alibi for this afternoon, when our third victim dropped.'

‘I was at home. Neighbors can vouch for me. I was hanging with them,' Carter said.

Ella stood up abruptly. ‘Get thinking, Carter, because we've got a long night ahead of us.' She made for the door in silence.

‘I just remembered. It definitely wasn't a haunted house,' Carter said.

Ella turned back and asked, ‘Sure about that?'

‘Definitely. I've only been to four haunted houses, and they were all recent. I saw that mask months ago. Back in summer, I think.'

She nodded at him, then walked out into the corridor.