CHAPTER SIX

Ella rolled the rental car to a stop and kicked up a cloud of dust that hung like Oregon's version of L.A. smog. Ella stepped out in front of Shadowland and surveyed the scene. Cruisers dotted the lot, and two officers stood guard outside the entrance.

‘Doesn't look like much,' Luca said.

He was right. Shadowland was less of a building and more of a huge, grey container. More warehouse than haunted house. If not for the Gothic font above the door, Ella would think this place had pallets and forklifts inside.

They'd been in Oregon for all of an hour, and the place was pretty in a postcard kind of way. Towering pines, rugged coastlines, views that could make a city slicker weep. But there was something off, at least in Yamhill. Something simmering beneath the surface, like a maggot in an apple pie. Maybe it was the altitude.

They reached the entrance, where a cop who looked fresh out of the academy eyed them warily. Ella flashed her badge and said, ‘Feds. We were called in to assist.'

The cop glanced at her credentials. 'Yes, ma'am. Just a second.' He fumbled for his radio and muttered something Ella didn't catch. 'Sheriff will be here in a second.'

A moment later, the door creaked open, and out stepped a man who looked like he'd been carved from the mountains that surrounded them. Tall, broad-shouldered, with a salt-and-pepper beard that reached his chest. His eyes, sharp as a hawk's, sized them up in an instant.

‘Sheriff Hank Redmond,' he drawled, extending a beefy hand that could probably crush walnuts. ‘Welcome to Yamhill. Wish I could say it's a pleasure.'

Ella matched his grip. No limp fish handshakes for her, not in this town. ‘Happy to help out. I'm Agent Ella Dark and this is Agent Luca Hawkins.'

‘Appreciate you folks coming out. This is, well, new territory for us.'

Luca asked, ‘Not much violent crime around here, Sheriff?'

‘Hardly. Most homicides we get involve bears. But two murders in two days? Unheard of. Portland might be fifty miles away but it might as well be an ocean apart for how different we are.'

Ella took it all in. 'Understood. What are we working with? We've been briefed on the details in the police reports, but that's all.'

‘That's all we got right now,' Sheriff Redmond said. ‘Just waiting on the morgue. We're basically just waiting here to keep this place safe from… undesirables. Lots of dark tourism around here.'

Ella looked off into the distance. The sun was setting behind the Coast Range Mountains and the sky had turned a shade of purple Ella had never once seen in D.C. It was the kind of scene that made you want to breathe deeply and forget about the ugliness in the world.

Luca voiced her concerns for her. ‘Dark tourism? Here? I thought this was Bigfoot country. You know, grainy videos of men in costumes running through the woods?'

‘Nuh.' Redmond shook his head. ‘You're thinking of the Willamette Valley, forty miles south of here. Yamhill's ghost country.'

Ella pulled her eyes off the horizon. ‘Ghost country?'

‘Oh yeah. Yamhill's got more haunted spots per capita than just about anywhere else in the country. We've got haunted hotels, spook lights on the backroads, abandoned asylums – all that crap.'

Ella exchanged a look with her partner. Dead bodies in haunted houses in what was apparently the most haunted town in America. There was something here: a static image concealing the true picture.

‘Do you believe in that crap?' Luca asked the Sheriff.

‘I believe in my own two eyes, and what my eyes have seen is two dead bodies.'

Enough of the history lesson, Ella thought. ‘Can you show us the scene?'

Redmond led them through the doors and into Shadowland's lobby. Ella's eyebrows shot up, impressed despite herself. This was no rinky-dink operation. The space was cavernous, with high ceilings draped in flowing black fabric that seemed to absorb light. Each piece of antique furniture looked like it had been plucked from a different era. A chandelier hung overhead, and portraits of figures from bygone ages decorated the walls. A massive ticket booth dominated one side of the room, with intricate woodwork reminiscent of an old-timey circus wagon.

‘They really went all out,' Luca said.

Redmond didn't respond as he led them through a tunnel. Inside, the temperature seemed to drop ten degrees. The walls were lined with some kind of foam, molded and painted to look like rough-hewn stone. Ella had to hand it to them – in the dim light, it was pretty convincing.

They emerged into what looked like a decrepit Victorian parlor. Dusty furniture, cobweb-draped chandeliers, the works. In the corner sat a disturbingly lifelike old woman in a rocking chair with two dead eyes fixed on a television set. The detail was incredible, from the wisps of white hair to the gnarled hands folded in the old woman's lap. For a moment, she half-expected the granny to turn her head and start speaking.

Then Ella got her wish. Just as Luca passed by, the granny jumped out of her seat and shrieked a deafening cackle.

Luca let out an undignified yelp and reached for his pistol. ‘Jesus Christ! The hell is that thing?'

‘It's an old lady,' Redmond said.

Ella stared at her partner for longer than intended. ‘I think she likes you.'

Luca sheathed his weapon, then breathed a deep sigh. ‘At least someone does. Sorry lady, you're not my type.'

‘Too many wires?'

‘Not enough wires.'

They followed Redmond deeper through the maze. A witch's coven, a mad scientist's lab, a room with too many clowns.

‘It's about now that actors jump out at you,' Redmond said. ‘Seems dumb to me. No idea why anyone would want to put themselves through that.'

‘Couldn't agree more,' Luca said. ‘I guess some people want as close to the real thing as possible.'

Finally, a neon sign announced they were entering the Chamber of Reflections. The room where Natasha Langston had drawn her last breath.

‘This real enough?' Redmond asked as he held the curtain for them. Ella and Luca passed through, and Ella felt her heart turn to lead. The room was a dizzying kaleidoscope of mirrors, each one angled just so, creating an endless labyrinth of reflections. It was a funhouse on steroids.

But the illusion was shattered – quite literally. Fragments of mirror littered the floor, glittering like crystals. The largest mirror, directly opposite the entrance, was a spiderweb of cracks radiating from a central point of impact.

'Unsub made quite a mess, ' Luca said. He threw on a pair of gloves then tossed another pair to Ella.

‘No blood, despite this mirror being smashed to pieces. What do you think about that?'

Luca went over to the mirror and ran a finger along one of the cracks. ‘He avoided hitting skin. My guess is our killer pushed Natasha into this spine-first.'

‘There were no defensive wounds on the victim,' Ella said. ‘Which suggests a blitz attack.'

‘Sheriff, who had keys to this place?' Luca asked.

'Archie Grimshaw said Natasha had his only key. Archie's the owner of this place and the guy who found Natasha this morning.'

‘So the door was open?'

Redmond nodded. Ella breathed a silent curse. That meant Natasha had probably just forgotten to lock the door behind her, and that didn't do much to narrow down the suspect pool.

‘This Grimshaw guy. We checked him out?' Luca asked.

‘First thing. Clean as a whistle. His doorbell cam caught him getting home yesterday evening and not leaving until this morning.'

Another curse. This one louder than she intended. A toolbox lay overturned near the wall, its contents spilled across the floor. Paintbrushes, wires, and a half-empty bottle of what Ella guessed was fake blood. The props of Natasha's trade, now just markers of her final moments.

‘Any CCTV around here?'

Redmond scratched his bird's nest of a beard. ‘The good news is that this place does have CCTV. The bad news is that it wasn't activated.'

Typical. Technology was supposed to make her job easier but more often than not it just let her down. ‘Wasn't activated? Why?'

‘This place isn't even open yet. Archie said he had no reason to turn it on.'

‘Forensics been and gone?'

‘Yup. Nothing that stood out.'

Ella swept the room once more, taking in every shard of glass, every scattered prop. This place was a goldmine of potential evidence, but without blood or prints, they were grasping at straws.

‘Sheriff,' she said, turning to Redmond. ‘You said this place wasn't even open yet. How many people knew about it?'

Redmond shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘Hard to say. Word travels fast in a town like this. Plus, there was some local press about it.'

Luca piped up from where he was examining the control panel. ‘Any disgruntled employees? Maybe someone who got passed over for a job here?'

'Not according to Grimshaw. He was the only guy working the office, and he had a few actors lined up to help him out.'

‘What about competitors? Any other haunted houses in the area that might've seen Shadowland as a threat?'

‘A bunch. No shortage of haunted houses around here, and Halloween time is when they all come alive.'

Ella and Luca exchanged a look. ‘How many haunted houses, exactly?' she asked.

Redmond regarded himself in one of the room's twisty mirrors. ‘God, must be eight, maybe ten.'

A swift headache gripped Ella's skull. ‘That's not good.'

‘No?'

Ella massaged her temples with one hand and looked back at the pile of broken shards at her feet. She thought about the blitz-attack, the bloodless death, the mirrors inserted into eye-sockets. Redmond was saying something, but Ella's churning thoughts drowned everything out.

Luca said, ‘Sheriff, two victims in two days is technically a spree killing, but the psychopathology here suggests a serial offender.'

‘What's the difference?'

‘Spree killers snap and take out all their victims in one fell swoop, but our unsub here is much more methodical. He has a mission in mind. He can control his rage and channel it into…' Luca gestured at the debris. ‘This.'

‘Couldn't he just be a pervert?'

‘Far from it. Police report didn't mention any signs of sexual assault, plus lust killers tend to maintain a consistent victimology. So far, he's killed a man and a woman, fifteen years apart in age.'

‘And if there are ten haunted houses around here,' Ella chimed in, ‘then this could be two of ten.'

Redmond's expression fell faster than a corpse in concrete shoes. ‘How do you know? Couldn't this just be two and done?'

‘It's possible, but we have to work on the assumption he has victims in mind.' Ella mentally rifled through historic cases of mission-oriented offenders; David Berkowitz, Rodney Alcala, Joseph Paul Franklin. She'd never heard of one that stopped at two. ‘Killers like this view their murders as necessary, sometimes even noble. He's trying to say something, cleanse something. We just need to figure out what.'

The sheriff clawed at his bushy beard. He looked like he'd aged a decade in the past few minutes. ‘This is just what we need. Real scares to go with the fake ones. The ghost folk around here are going to eat this up.'

Ella took one last look at the scene and concluded that there wasn't much else to see here. No CCTV, no witnesses, no shortage of hiding places. Just one unlocked entrance that anyone could have breached.

She asked, ‘What's the population around here, Sheriff?'

‘Twelve-hundred last time I checked. Minus two.'

Ella did the napkin math. The director had told her to keep this case close to the chest, but small towns offered an advantage cities didn't. In New York, neighbors wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire, but towns like this? They were full of busybodies and gossipers and curtain-twitchers. Which meant someone knew this killer.

'Get the news out there,' she said. 'Newspapers, websites. Hell, sky write it if you have to. I want everybody in Yamhill to know what happened here.'

Sheriff Redmond's bushy eyebrows shot north. ‘You kidding? That's asking for a whole lotta attention.'

‘Uh, Ell?' Luca this time. ‘Edis told us to keep a lid on this.'

Ella waved off their concerns. ‘Yes he did, but if our killer's a local, and chances are he is, someone knows him. A town this small? I'd bet my ass that everyone knows everyone's dirty laundry.'

‘It's true,' Redmond admitted grudgingly. ‘Can't sneeze without half the town offering you a tissue.'

‘Exactly. And if we've got someone with a vendetta against haunted houses, someone will know him. Besides, people don't just wake up one day and decide to kill two people. Our guy's in the system somewhere.'

Redmond still looked skeptical, but he nodded slowly. ‘Alright, I'll put the word out.'

‘Great. Just keep the finer details to ourselves. Now, we need to check out crime scene number one. Is it far?'

‘Couple of miles,' the sheriff said. ‘You can follow me.'

The thrill of the hunt burned in her veins. Two bodies, two haunted houses, one psychopath playing puppeteer with the Grim Reaper.

Time to cut those strings.