CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

Ella”s marker squeaked across the whiteboard like nails on a chalkboard as she laid it all out for Luca and Harland.

This was it. The home stretch.

The whiteboard was a ballad of lines, underscored words and half-cocked theories. She stepped back, surveying her handiwork with a critical eye. To an outsider, it might look like chaos, like the ravings of a madwoman. But to Ella, it was a roadmap to the twisted mind of their unsub.

Harland leaned back in his chair with his arms crossed. He looked a picture of defeat, but Ella could see the glimmer of interest in his eyes. Luca, on the other hand, was perched on the edge of his seat like an eager student.

‘Explain,’ Harland said.

‘First things first - our vic”s COD.’ She tapped the board, the words ”MICROPHONE CORD” underlined thrice in bold red strokes. ‘Strangled, garroted, however you wanna slice it. But the weapon of choice? That”s key.’

Harland grunted. ‘Could be anything. Singer, theater geek, American Idol washout.

Ella shook her head, impatient. She jabbed a finger at the crime scene photos tacked up in a gruesome row.

‘There’s more to this than a fancy noose. Look at how he posed them. Archie on those pallets, Georgia on the bandstand, Harry on that fountain. You see a pattern there?’

‘Not really,’ Harland said.

‘Our unsub wasn”t just posing bodies. He was staging them. Quite literally staging them. They were all elevated, like they were on a stage.’

Harland shifted a little. She could see the gears grinding in his head, the stubborn blue-collar pragmatism warring with the unavoidable truth. But he wasn”t quite ready to cry uncle. Not yet.

‘Putting on a show, huh?’ he asked. ‘You sure you’re not grasping at straws here?’

Ella had to grin. He sounded just like Ripley.

‘No, there’s a lot more. When me and Hawkins talked to the vics’ families, both mentioned something that we completely overlooked.’ The details clawed back at her, as fresh as a papercut. She turned back to the board, tapped another set of underlined words. ”COMEDY CLUBS,” they screamed in lurid green.

‘Mrs. Newman said Archie frequented bars, comedy clubs, and the theater sometimes. Georgia’s sister said that Georgia got blasted at every dive bar and comedy club in town. Same song, different key. See?’

Harland shook his head, incredulous. ‘So, what? Our unsub”s hitting the open mic circuit?

Ella ignored the comment and steamrolled ahead with the momentum of a freight train. ‘And then there’s this.’ She underlined the word ‘TRAGEDY MASK.’

‘What about it?’ Harland asked.

‘Comedy and tragedy. Two sides of the same coin. The theater masks. The universal symbol of the human condition.’

‘Right, but if he was a comedian, wouldn’t he use a comedy mask?’

”No. Something happened to our unsub that set him on his path. He”s gone from comedy to tragedy, and this is the result. Laughing turned to screaming, somehow. Something flipped the script on this guy.”

Harland stood up and walked over to the crime scene photos. He zoned in on a glossy picture of Harry Shepherd hanging from the memorial fountain.

‘Chuckles,’ Harland said. ‘Last night’s vic was hanging from a memorial to a comedian.’

‘Bingo,’ Ella said. ‘That’s why the lack of stocks. Because the location was the punchline.’

Harland harrumphed, bushy brows colliding like mating caterpillars. ‘Alright, let’s say you’re on the right track. What do the stocks have to do with this? Archie and Georgia were both locked up in stocks. Why?’

Ella blew out a breath, dragging a hand through her hair. The eternal question, the niggling little itch that had dogged her since they’d stepped foot in this city.

‘That”s the million dollar query, Chief. The one piece that doesn”t quite...’

‘Laughing stock,’ Luca broke in.

Ella”s head snapped around so fast she damn near got whiplash. Until now, the rookie had been deathly silent.

‘Come again?’ she said.

Luca met her gaze, steady as a surgeon”s hands.

‘Laughing stock,’ he said again. ‘He’s being literal. Transposed his pain into tangible imagery that he thinks will help overcome his trauma.’

Ella”s jaw hit the floor like a sack of cement. Dammit. The kid had done it again, put the pieces together while she was still fumbling in the dark. A hot flush of envy seared through her guts, green and ugly as a five-day-old bruise. How the hell did he do it?

‘Laughing stocks,’ she repeated.

Luca rose out of his chair. ‘Stocks are used for humiliation, right? Display the victims, let the public take their shots. Our unsub’s doing the same. He’s trying to be funny. It’s a visual gag.’

Ella could have kissed him. Again.

‘Holy crap, Hawkins. Good catch.’

But even as she said it, even as she pasted on a smile and played nice, that jealous little voice in the back of her head wouldn”t shut up. Wouldn”t stop whispering that she was obsolete and this fresh-faced rookie was everything she was but better.

But before she dwell too deeply on it, Harland jumped in. ‘Hold the phone. Laughing stock?’

The agents turned to him. ‘It mean something?’ Ella asked.

‘There’s a club in town by that name. Laughingstock. Small place. Kinda seedy. Pretty much anyone can take a crack at stand-up over there. Cheap booze though.’

Ella felt her heart kick against her teeth. ‘There’s a club around here called Laughingstock?’

‘Sure is,’ Harland said.

Ella”s mind whirred like a slot machine hitting jackpot. A wannabe comedian turned tragic clown. Ella could see it unspooling in her mind”s eye like a snuff film on repeat. The unsub, a twitchy, maladjusted misfit. Stepping into those hot lights, that humid crush of a crowd. Desperation leaking from his pores, neediness cranked to eleven.

She spun to her computer, seized by a sudden urgency. Her fingers clattered over the keys in a machine gun ratatat. She searched the club name, the location, then scoured through the results in a frenzy; searching, ferreting, digging for that needle in a haystack that would blow this thing wide open.

And then...there it was. A thumbnail, grainy and dark but there.

But what caught her attention was the title.

Brutal Heckling DESTROYS Bad Comedian!!

‘Holy mother,’ Ella breathed.

Harland and Luca crowded around the laptop.

‘Whoa,’ Luca said. ‘Heckling destroys comedian?’

She clicked it, breath caught like a rabbit in a snare.

The video buffered, pixelated. A dimly lit stage swam into view, a lone figure hunched over the mic stand like a vulture on a carcass. The crowd was a faceless mass; an amorphous blob of drunken jeers and jostling shadows.

The heckling was already in full swing, but the comedian’s voice crackled just above the jeering. I just finished reading The Divine Comedy. Waste of time. I didn”t laugh once.

The boos rose like a wave, like a tsunami of casual cruelty cresting to crash against the stage. The figure - a man, pasty and soft in the cruel spotlight - seemed to crumple, folding in on himself like a house of cards.

It quickly crescendoed, bottles and glasses arcing through the air to shatter at his feet. And still he stood there, rigid and shaking, a quivering Jell-O mold of humiliation.

‘Christ almighty,’ Luca said.

Ella was laser-focused. On the video, it looked like the majority of the heckling came from a group of people near the camera. Some of the crowd remained sitting, clearly uncomfortable at the interruption.

Watching it seared Ella”s retinas, scorched her gray matter. It was like a peek through the gates of hell, all the unsub”s rage and humiliation and shattered dreams distilled down into one hundred and eighty seconds of digital bile.

And then the camera panned to a face in the crowd. A face beside the cameraman.

A single, sneering visage.

Luca leaned over her shoulder, so close she could feel the heat of him through her shirt. Could smell the clean musk of his aftershave, the lingering bite of department-issue coffee.

‘That’s… Archie Newman,’ Luca said.

Light into dark. Comedy into tragedy. And it all started right there, in one seedy little club on one shitty little night.

The beginning of the end. The origin story of a monster made, not born. All laid out in one hundred and eighty grainy seconds. Humiliation. Annihilation. The kind of total ego death you didn’t come back from. Not without some scars and a serious axe to grind.

‘This is it,’ Ella said. ‘This comedian is our killer.’

‘Look, his name’s in the comments section. Sebastian Doyle,’ said Luca. ‘Christ, this video’s got three million views. No wonder it sent him on a killing spree.’

‘Sebastian Doyle,’ repeated Ella. ‘Choked on his own flop sweat and fell to pieces in the spotlight. His shot at validation, at connection, blew up in his face. And it broke him. Snapped something vital and sent him spiraling straight into his own personal hell.’

Silence in the wake of her words. Harland and Luca staring like she”d just grown a second head. Or maybe like they were really seeing her for the first time - the jagged edges, the hairline fractures. The parts of her that understood the unsub, that could slip into his skin and feel the warp of that freakshow he called a mind.

But there wasn”t time to plumb those pitch-black depths. They were on the scent now, the unsub”s scent hot in their noses. And they had to move, strike while the trail was fresh.

‘I’ll get his address,’ Harland called and rushed out of the room.

‘We got him,’ Luca said. ‘God dammit, we got him.’

Ella pushed to her feet, already reaching for her pistol, checking the chamber. Ready to roll, to turn this city upside down until their unsub fell out like a rotten tooth. She rolled her neck, cracked a few joints, let old aches fade to background noise.

She was alive and crackling like a live wire with the thrill of the hunt. The quarry was in sight, the game afoot.

And damned if she”d let this ghoul slip through her fingers.

Harland scurried back in. ‘335 Reedswood Grove,’ he said.

‘Good work, Chief,’ Ella said. ‘That’s where we’re headed.’

‘You need backup?’

‘No. I need you to stay here.’ Ella pointed to her laptop. ‘Get your tech guys to identify any potential victims. Any hecklers, any raised voices. They’re all possible targets. Identify them and keep them safe.’

The chief nodded in understanding. ‘Alright. You two stay safe.’

Game on. Showtime. The big finish, and Ella was ready for her turn in the center ring. Step right up and come one, come all to the greatest show on earth.

‘Let’s do this, Hawkins.’