CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

11.27.

‘This is it,' Ella barked. ‘Herald Street.'

Beside her, Luca gripped the door handle as Ella floored the gas – the smart boy knew better than to backseat navigate.

No picket fences here. No American dream wrapped in a neat little bow. Just darkness stretching out like the hand of God himself, ready to smack down any poor schmuck dumb enough to wander in.

Then Ella saw it. Squatting at the end of the road like a gargoyle with indigestion - Baxter"s den. One house on a dead-end street. Fitting for a killer with a one-way ticket to hell.

The Baxter place. Ella recognized it from Riley"s muddled directions. Quaint, almost charming – if you squinted past the darkness bleeding from its windows. The kind of house the Cleavers would call home before Wally went off the deep end and started drowning the neighbors.

Ella slammed the brakes on, grabbed her Glock and checked her ammo levels. The home was shrouded in darkness. The driveway gaped like an open wound. No signs of life. no car skulking under the carport.

Just a crumbling porch and a door firmly shut.

‘Let's go. Time is running out.'

She and Luca jumped out and made their way up the brick steps. Old things, rounded by rain and wind. This mausoleum of a place had stood longer than its owner"s sanity, that was for damn sure.

Caution to the wind, she pounded a fist on the door. Paint flaked under her knuckles.

Come on, she said to herself. Please don't say we're too late.

Nothing.

But Ella expected as much.

Luca checked his watch. ‘Thirty minutes left, Ell.'

‘Don't remind me.'

She stepped back, craned her neck. Moonlight glinted off glass; black mirrors staring back. And there – a wink of silver. A window cracked open, casually vulnerable as an unsnipped thread.

‘What"re you thinking?' Luca. Reading her mind like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup.

‘I"m thinking we quit pussyfooting and barge right in.'

‘Probable cause. Heard of it?'

It was times like this you had to play fast and loose with the rules. Anything could be probable cause if you believed it enough.

‘We"ve got a trail of bodies and a ticking clock.' Ella was already moving, skirting the side of the house. ‘Probable cause is staring us in the face.'

Luca hurried to catch up. So professional, so by-the-book you could smell the ink. ‘If this is a dead end…'

‘Then you can stand in line to kick my ass. But right now?' Ella crouched, braced her hands on the sill. ‘Right now, we"re flying blind. And that window is singing our song.'

Luca huffed – frustration or amusement, she couldn"t tell. But he leaned down, laced his fingers into a step. Ella took the boost. She heaved herself up and hauled ass through the uncanny grace of a contortionist.

The sash squeaked, glass rattled. For a sliver of a second, Ella was a girl again – climbing the trellis under her dad's window. To scare him, to tell him she loved him. One or the other.

Reality crashed back, cold as the linoleum under her feet. She"d tumbled into a kitchen laced with lemon Formica and nicotine stains. A relic from the days of duck-and-cover, the world poised on the knife-edge of oblivion.

Not much had changed.

Luca followed like her shadow. They rolled to their feet, hands flying to holsters. Ella"s piece sat cold and heavy at her back. Her best friend, her constant companion. She'd introduced its business end to faces of countless psychopaths, and tonight it might just meet another.

Luca jerked his chin, eyes gleaming like new dimes. Ella returned the nod; a soldier reading smoke signals on the wind. They spread out, scoping the lay of the land. The Baxter homestead wasn"t huge – a few rooms, some closets. Easy to clear, if they kept their heads on a swivel.

But it wasn"t the space that worried Ella. It was the silence – that thick, strangling quiet. Like a blanket of spiderwebs thrown over a mirror. If there was a victim on the cusp of drowning in here, he sure as hell didn't seem to mind.

‘Seth Baxter, FBI!' Ella called into the dark.

She didn"t expect an answer. A ghost didn"t pick up its phone.

They flowed from the kitchen into the living room. There was a couch that looked like a beached cetacean. A TV that remembered the Moon landing. Not a whole lot else. No madman in the rafters. No trophies on the coffee table.

Luca materialized at her elbow. A flick of his eyes – upstairs or deeper? She cocked her head towards the hall. They moved as one; well-oiled gears grinding towards resolution.

But the bedroom was a bust, as was the bathroom. They regrouped in the hallway, and Ella holstered her gun.

‘Hawkins, this place is barren.'

Time was leaking away. Each vanished second was another nail in some poor dam-worker's coffin. And here they were – chasing dust bunnies while Seth Baxter did the backstroke in someone else"s blood.

‘You're not kidding. There's barely enough room to swing a cat, let alone host a water machine from hell.'

The house was a goddamn shoebox – every nook and cranny on view like a two-dollar peep show. If Baxter was drowning people in some murder contraption, he needed a bigger sandbox to do it.

‘Yeah, he doesn't shit where he eats. If he's killing people, he'd going it somewhere else. This place is a front, a mask. Someplace to hang his coat and pretend to be a real person.'

‘You think he"s got a secondary location?'

‘I do. You?'

‘There's no other alternative. But where? He's local, so it's gotta be somewhere in Liberty Grove.'

‘Bingo. We need to turn this place upside down. He must have left a breadcrumb here somewhere.'

Luca"s grin could"ve guided ships to shore. ‘I"ll take the high road, you take the low?'

She punched his shoulder and gave him the nod. They scattered like buckshot, a whirlwind of slamming drawers and creaking cupboards. No stone unturned, no mattress unflipped. Hell, Ella would"ve ripped up the floorboards if she thought Seth Baxter might have left a clue between the joists.

Ella swept the kitchen, the detritus of a solitary life. Clutter and cans, a layer of grime, no amount of scrubbing would purge. She pawed through the junk drawer – rubber bands and dull pencils, a handful of dead batteries. Nothing jumped out to bite her in the ass.

The fridge then – center of the universe, a veritable Rosetta Stone of the suburban underbelly. She wrenched it open, glass rattling in the frame. A six-pack of Schlitz, some moldering Chinese leftovers. She skimmed the take-out menus, the smiling magnets. Nothing screamed "murder lair, next exit."

A calendar hung front and center – one of those charity jobs with the big-eyed mutts and treacly quotes. Sentimental dreck to hide the cracks in the plaster. But the pages were pristine, the squares blank as an alibi. No doctor"s visits, no birthdays. Just a white fog of amnesia.

Useless. All of it. Ella shoved the door shut with a grunt of disgust. Crossed to the counter, rooted through the detritus. Bills and junk mail, a nest of rubber bands and orphaned keys.

No maps. No expedient X marking the spot. Just the dust and dross of a life interrupted.

Upstairs, it didn"t sound Luca was fairing much better. She could hear him tossing furniture, and God knows what else.

‘Ella, up here,' Luca shouted.

She was moving before he finished the sentence, taking the steps two at a time. At the top of the landing, Luca guided her to a door half-hidden in the shadows. Ella cocked her head, frowning. She"d assumed it was a closet, a cubby for moldy sports equipment and moth-eaten winter coats.

‘What's this? A closet? And a locked one at that.'

‘Not a closet,' he said. ‘Look closer.'

Ella did. And felt her pulse kick into overdrive.

There, at the base of the door. A thin line of light. That meant there was a window in there, so it was more than just a closet.

‘Son of a bitch,' she said.

‘Who lives alone and locks a room?'

Ella jiggled the knob. ‘Someone with something to hide. Someone who might expect the police to come knocking.'

‘You're the lock expert, Ell. Can you get in?'

Ella pulled out her keyring and dropped to her knees in front of the lock. She found the segment of guitar string – her faithful amateur lockpick – and shoved it inside. She located the tumblers, turned slowly and heard the click.

It never failed.

‘Nothing's ever locked,' she said as she pulled the door open.

‘I ever tell you you're my hero?'

‘Can it. We've barely got twenty minutes before the fireworks go off.'

Ella and Luca rose as one and crossed the threshold into the unknown. A crackle of energy ripped over Ella's skin. The animal awareness of a predator poised to strike.

The room was small, cramped. An afterthought tacked onto the house like a rotten tooth. Sloping ceilings, bookshelves buckling under their own weight. A beaten metal desk hulked in the corner, its surface a junk heap of papers and discarded electronics.

Ella began pacing, then settled on the bookshelf as her starting point. Titles glared out like accusatory fingers.

Fluid Dynamics.

The Art of the Pendulum Clock.

Engineering Marvels of the Ancient World.

Cheery stuff, real feel-good material. She filed through them, searching for some hidden inscription, a love note from a sociopath. But they were as mute and unhelpful as all the other dead ends in this godforsaken burg.

Luca, God bless the boy, had fallen on that metal desk like a starving man on steak. Papers flew in a whirlwind of receipts and scribbled notes. He muttered to himself like a one-man pep rally in the face of dwindling odds. Ella couldn"t make out the words but his tone rang clear as a bell – frustrated determination, the hallmark of a hunter on a cold trail.

She left him to his excavation and turned her focus to the walls. Faded photos stared back in a rogues" gallery of Loss, American-style. Generations of Baxters in black and white, overalls and feed store caps. Holding pitchforks, grins slipping in the sun. Just another hard-luck clan scratching a life from the dirt.

Until Seth and Jessie.

There they were, tucked in among the ghosts. Two peas in a pod, a couple of carrion birds roosting on a wire. That same hard, hungry look around the eyes as their forebears. Like they"d been weaned on sour milk and broken promises.

Ella leaned in and snagged her eyes on Jessie, tracing the lines of that fine-boned face. Just a slip of a thing. Hollow-cheeked, knobs for wrists. The kind of delicate that only comes from too little for too long. These murders – they were all for her. Her death was the catalyst to these. Ella tried not to think of the whole butterfly effect that set these homicides in motion, but she found her mind wandering to faraway places.

She snapped out of it before it could waste more than a few precious seconds. It was time to find a lead before another corpse washed up by the morning.

Through the photos, the faces, the backdrops, the people she had no names for other than Seth and Jessie.

But buried in the jumble, a single photo shone out like a rose in a white field.

Adrenaline shot through her veins. Her blood suddenly rose a few degrees. Sweat burned her forehead.

A photograph of Seth and Jessie, cheek to cheek, haloed by dying sun.

And behind them, a weathered clapboard sign flapped like a hanged man.

Starlit Meadow Farm.

The breath left Ella in a rush. Riley"s quavering voice floated up, a half-remembered snippet of local color turned rancid prophecy.

Jessie had taken over the family farm, poured her heart and soul into that place.

Of course. Jessie's farm. Where else would Seth stage his magnum opus? On the very ground that his sister once owned – and now he might have inherited. No way Baxter would"ve let that farm go. Not after everything, not with his baby sis moldering in the boneyard. He"d keep it close, hoard it like a dragon with a belly full of gold.

The scene spun out in sepia tones. Seth, broken and reeling, slinking home to lick his wounds, to curl up on a bed rapidly cooling with absence. Alone in this mildewed mausoleum, choking on rage and promising retribution on the bastards who"d stolen his light.

‘Uh, Ella?' Luca said.

But Ella was lost. A shiver worked its way down her spine as the pieces fell into place with the sound of tumblers dropping. What better place to kill the people who'd taken his sister?

‘Ell?' Luca nudged again.

She whirled, hand halfway to her holster before she registered his tone. Not fear, but grim excitement. ‘The farm, Hawkins. That's where Baxter's killing these victims.'

He held a scrap of paper aloft, pinched between two fingers like a squirming rat. ‘Yeah. I know.'

‘Huh? What?'

‘Look.'

She was across the room in three strides, snatching the page from his grip. A battered invoice, speckled with coffee rings and smears of old grease. But the header was clear as the writing on the wall.

INVOICE.

RENOVATION WORKS: STARLIT MEADOW FARM

DESCRIPTION OF WORK: FARMHOUSE DOOR, brICKED UP, MINOR REPAIRS.

PAYMENT: $1500, CASH ONLY

CONTRACTOR: JEREMIAH CLANCY.

Ella's vision swam. Her heart clambered for freedom from her ribs as her world narrowed to that gritty scrap of paper.

‘It's an invoice,' Luca said. ‘That's how he got Clancy to the farm. That's why we couldn't pin down Clancy's last whereabouts. Baxter hired him – then killed him.'

Ella checked the time.

11:40.

‘Twenty minutes.'

‘Enough time to finish this,' Luca said.

They were gone, back through the house, pounding down the stairs. Ella didn"t pause until she reached the car. Then, she was sliding behind the wheel with Luca in pursuit.

‘Get the address, Hawkins.'

‘Got it. It's two miles from here.'

Tires suddenly chewed up the road and spat gravel. They peeled out in a shriek of rubber and burning oil, pointed towards the dying heart of Liberty Grove.

Towards Starlit Meadow Farm, to see this unsub – and his monstrous death machine – in the flesh.