S.R. Hughes's Blog: The Froth-Mouthed Ravings of a True Lunatic, page 6

Ch. 10 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Ten

Friday came and they still hadn’t found Robert Robertson, Jr.

Booker paced his condo. He followed the same path Robert Robertson, Jr., had traced in a mirror image condo under four hundred feet away. His mind ran through facts and figures, case details, things they knew and things they knew they didn’t know. Bob-Bob’s-son (where had that name come from?) had taken his knives when he’d fled his condo, but he’d left both of the officers’ standard-issue pistols. He’d cut the faces off of two victims only to reattach them again. He’d stopped carving at a teenager’s jawline just to throw the boy out of a window, instead. Why?

Booker hovered over the two step staircase from dining room to living room. His wall-mounted flatscreen stared emptily out. A couch, a sectional, and a coffee table waited vacantly. An orange prescription phial full of clonazepam sat next to a glass of water, a can of faint-flavored seltzer, and an ashtray so far unused.

He entered the living room and stood there. He turned to face the blank flatscreen.

Did something bubble and warp in the reflections there?

He stared.

Virgil had convinced the City Council to begin the new and newly-enhanced curfew that Sunday. He’d reached out to various community leaders; some had agreed to bring their groups inside after eight, others had refused. Both had their reasons. Patrols had doubled city-wide, tripled in suburban Denton, and everyone in the OMPD knew they’d start clocking overtime by Monday. What nobody knew was what was going to happen next.

He could’ve turned on the national news, but he didn’t want to see that. He could’ve turned on the local news, but he didn’t want to see that, either. His new TV even allowed him access to a half-dozen streaming services, each a door into vast escapism, but Booker didn’t want to escape. He wanted Robert Robertson, Jr., in handcuffs, with the chain in his palm.

Such tunnel vision served as a gift and a curse. It provided port from the storm of the world without. It imprisoned him in the storm raging within.

He’d left Boston after a mental health incident. The department had put him on indefinite paid suspension. Days after what had happened, he found himself forgetting it. By the time he testified in his defense, he couldn’t actually remember what had happened. He knew it by rote, what he’d read in the report. He’d entered the building alone, back-up en route, and ascended the (descent) stairs with his sidearm drawn. He’d heard something from the end of a second floor corridor (slap and whimper slap and whimper) and had approached with his sidearm drawn. He’d turned the corner and he’d seen it.

The thing that had happened next, they called it an ‘officer-involved shooting.’

And he couldn’t even remember it. Except in flashes, intrusive panic attacks, breathless there-again hallucinations calmed by clonazepam, fluoxetine, and aripiprazole.

Something moved beneath the television-screen reflections…

Before he’d started working with the Oceanrest Metropolitan Area Police Department, he’d done some research on the town. Or, technically, the ‘small city.’ Oceanrest had a below-average occurrence of rapes and an above-average occurrence of murders. The fact that most stood out to him, however, and to plenty of other internet sleuths, was that Oceanrest held the dubious distinction of having the majority of its homicides occur during serial, sequence, or spree events. It had carried that distinction for over half a century, excepting six years in the seventies when the established Québécois mob battled it out with an intrusive faction of the Italian-American mafia.

But generally, people didn’t just kill each other in Oceanrest. Almost every murder on the peninsula had some kind of weird aura around it, either in motivation or execution, and even the simplest ones turned out strange in some unexpected way later on.

A shape bulged against the glass of the flatscreen. Booker squinted.

What the hell?

His phone rang and he blinked. The reflections settled, all flat and normal. The blank screen stared at him, daring him to accuse it. He took off his glasses and rubbed his face. When the phone rang a second time, he moved to retrieve it.

“Booker here,” he said, answering.

“John,” Castellanos replied, turning his name into half a flirt. “How are you?”

“I’m…” he trailed off, catching commotion in the background. “Al, what’s going on?”

“Mmmm.” She chuckled. “I’m at La Femme Rouge.”

A bar, a strip-club, and zoned multi-use through some decades-old arcanum of corruption, and so also a floor of ‘rental units’ that on-the-books never served as a brothel, La Femme Rouge represented exactly the kind of place Castellanos needed to avoid while working a case. And also in general. “Are you fucking kidding me?” Booker asked.

“The only joke here is on us.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“Come have a drink with us, John. Come on.”

“Us? Who’s ‘us?’”

She howled with laughter on the other end of the line. When her voice returned, she said, “Nobody. I’m alone. Until you get here, at least.”

“What?”

“I need you to pick me up.”

“Jesus Christ…”

“I found a piece of evidence,” she said. “I meant to show it to you earlier but…started drinking, instead. Don’t interrupt. See, I found it, and I watched it, and I really turned it over in my head, and, John…I know how it’s all going to happen.”

Trenches dug his brow deep. “What are you…? What?”

“Come pick me up, I’ll tell you all about it. I’ll even tell you how it ends.”

Alejandra Castellanos hung up on him.

Booker stared at his flatscreen and his flatscreen stared back. He didn’t really want to know if anything moved or rippled beneath the reflections, anyway. He grabbed his keys from the table, took his seltzer water to-go, and left his condo.

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 9 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

Bob had misinterpreted things. He had to admit that, at least.

The thought had first crossed his mind as he’d grabbed the first cop’s arm and hauled him bodily into the foyer. The blade met the man’s throat somewhere in between the two points, jamming all the way in until the edge of the blade caught on bony vertebrae and jerked out of Bob’s control. Bob had let the other man stumble balance-less through the foyer and into the kitchen, one hand flapping dumbly at his neck.

He’d jammed a steak knife into the second cop’s back. Even with his strength, the tip of the weapon barely pierced the knife resistant vest. The cop had jumped, jabbed, and had spun toward Bob. Bob had grabbed the cop’s arm, had flung him through the open condo door. The second guy tripped on the first guy’s blood. 

Bob’s memory fragmented around that point. He remembered two gunshots, the second cop having unholstered his weapon, and he remembered, having lost the steak knife at some point, grasping the man’s head in both hands and slamming it into the edge of his kitchen counter. After that…

Something about an app?

He’d fled the condo immediately. He’d thrown some spare clothes into an old gym bag, along with a spare pair of boots, a pair of sneakers, his freshly-cleaned knife, and a second, smaller knife just-in-case. He’d remembered to take off the Mask only after he’d driven all the way into Deer’s Head.

After ditching his car on the border of Deer’s Head and Denton, hoofing it north through a coastal park shared between the two suburbs, it occurred to him again that he’d perhaps misinterpreted things. If the cops had really believed they’d shown up to knock on the door of a serial killer, he wouldn’t have caught them so unprepared. So they’d shown up for some other reason and he’d preemptively killed them. Which effectively destroyed his anonymity.

“Fuck,” he scolded himself, leaving his blood-soaked rags in a copse of trees overlooking stony beach. “Fuck,” he repeated, bathing in the spray of the Atlantic, scrubbing himself with leaves snatched off of tree limbs. “Fuck,” he said again, changing into the first of the two changes of clothes he’d packed, and the only pair of sneakers.

He exited the park in southwest Denton and, wearing his gym bag like a backpack, jogged north through the suburban streets.

When had it gotten so late?

He kept a strong pace, winding northeast. Late afternoon tinged with sunset. When had he woken up? He waved at a young couple pushing a stroller down the sidewalk across the street. What had taken so long? How many minutes had it taken him to kill his quarry? It had felt so short…

The knife and Mask, secure in their own pocket, never shifted in his bag. The spare boots and extra clothes did, annoying him with every few strides.

As sunset reached its warm watercolors across the sky, Bob jogged through the forest north of Denton. He made his way due east even after the hiking trails stopped moving that way, even after he had to crash through shin-high foliage to keep running. Somehow, middle-aged and having not exercised in over a year, Bob never lost his breath.

The forest thinned. Bob crossed a half-mile of over-built roadway dividing the rest of the Oceanrest area from the collection of rotten, withered neighborhoods called Squatter City. Blue-purple twilight painted the sky, by then.

Oceanrest’s economic decline had started in the early eighties—some argued the late seventies—and dove, dove, dove until it cratered in 1999. It stayed bottomed-out until 2008, when the rest of the nation fell to meet it. In the decade since, Oceanrest’s slow-and-steady recovery had started to reinvigorate and refresh long-barnacled swaths of the peninsula. But it was too late to save Squatter City. The city and county had knocked down and condemned too many houses, and too many other houses had burned or collapsed in insurance scams, and too many other houses had burned or collapsed under the burden of their own disuse, and what few structures still remained served as shelters for squatters who had lived there long enough to establish rights.

And so Squatter City was, seemingly forever, Squatter City.

A couple street lamps still buzzed their halos down over Old Main and Lafayette, and Bob noticed five disheveled people chatting to each other on the steps of an old three-floor Victorian.

He turned sharply west. The farther a person traveled from Old Main and Lafayette, the fewer street lights buzzed and flickered through Squatter City’s darkness; and fewer witnesses gathered in such ominous shadows.

Bob walked along asphalt so long unmaintained the potholes and cracks had torn it apart. He passed empty lots and multi-floor wrecks. A couple blocks north of Lafayette, Bob stopped and knelt. As purple twilight peeled away to black night, he changed clothes again, wearing the boots this time, and pulled the Mask on over his head. When he stood, he felt different. They felt different. 

His lungs filled, inexhaustible, somehow larger than before.

To the east and northeast, the last houses still standing in the long-ago suburbs waited, slouched and ramshackled, wounded and curled. To the northwest, Bob had heard about a tent city that had formed.

Bob and the Mask headed east.

They drifted through overgrown brush and foliage, through knee-high weeds and grass. Even as night slicked ink across the sky, Bob still saw the world as if frozen in eternal mid-evening. Along with the Mask, he scanned his surroundings for an opportunity.

They stopped.

Directly north, they saw a cul-de-sac’d trio of abandoned houses. Two had collapsed into inaccessibility, entire floors sagged and rubbled, but the third stood sturdy. It wore scabs of plywood and two-by-fours over numerous wounds and scars. Someone had claimed and maintained it. On the fringes of the sub-civilization fringing civilization, someone had dug in, isolated, alone.

Did the Mask smile, or did Bob?

Why not both?

They approached. Circling the house, they searched for an easy opening. Boards blockaded the front and back doors. Bay windows, the same. But whoever nailed everything up had to enter and exit without un-nailing things, so somewhere an uninhibited ingress existed. They took their time. Whoever had claimed the place had covered up the windows, after all. Who would see them?

there

Bob noticed it, too. A glassless frame falling into a dark basement, their entryway waited behind a half-crushed shield of weeds. They walked up to it and got down on their stomach to peer inside. Even with his somehow-enhanced vision, Bob had to squint to make anything out.

Opposite the narrow, broken-window entrance, a shoddy staircase led to the first floor. Between the ingress and egress, however, lurked five bear traps, rusted, barely distinguishable from the dim, and eager to snap. The squatters had installed a secondary security measure, as well: second-hand Christmas ornaments hung from a dozen clotheslines criss-crossing the cellar.

Bob and the Mask studied the obstacle course for several minutes before proceeding.

They slid through the frame and landed on the unfinished floor. Mold crawled the walls. Dankness soured the air. Slowly, they maneuvered the trapped room. As fit as he’d become, Bob felt sweat beading up from his scalp. His breath steamed him as he bent, bowed, twisted, stepped, crouched, stretched…

They put a heavy foot on the basement landing. Grinning, they began their ascent.

(every ascent is also—)

As they reached for the door topping the steps, something jangled around their ankles.

Bodies shuffled above.

“Who’s there!?” a man shouted.

“Who the fuck is there!?” a woman shouted.

They stepped over the tripped clothesline and stood in front of the door.

The couple shuffled around overhead. They picked up tools, probably weapons, and rumbled the floorboards toward the basement. The Mask and Bob waited, knife ready. Beyond the closed door, the couple whispered and hissed at each other. The hammer of a firearm cocked. The two people fidgeted, shifting weight, moving a couple feet away from and toward each other. The Mask and Bob waited, knife ready.

Two minutes passed. Five minutes. Eight.

“Check it,” the woman said.

“You check it.”

“You’ve got a fucking shotgun jackass.”

“Maybe it was nothing,” the man suggested. “I mean, it’s been like half an hour.”

Ten minutes had passed.

The Mask and Bob stood, ready. Waiting.

After a long silence, the woman said, “Maybe it was just an animal.”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

“Shit. This shit’s making us fucking paranoid.”

The Mask and Bob shifted their weight on the step. It creaked.

“What was that?”

“Okay, okay. I’ll check. It’s probably just a rat or something. Get me the flashlight.”

More shuffling crossed the floorboards. Ten minutes became twelve. Another whispered conversation happened that neither Bob nor the Mask could make out. Footsteps approached the closed door, one set leading and the other trailing behind. The Mask and Bob took deep, steady breaths. They held the knife ready.

The man opened the door with the flashlight in one hand and the shotgun slung over the other elbow.

Behind him, the woman screamed, lifting the barrel of her semi-automatic.

The Mask and Bob plunged the blade into the man’s chest. It cracked through ribs and pierced his lung. Left-handed, they reached out and grabbed his shotgun. With a jerk they tossed it down the basement steps. The man hit them in the side of the head with his flashlight but they barely felt it. They ripped the knife free of the man’s lung and plunged it into the softmeats of his guts instead. With their left hand around his waist, knife so deep inside of him that they could feel his warmth up to their right wrist, they stalked toward the woman.

Turn Back ...Coming Soon... Table of Contents

Ch. 9 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

“We’ll be moving the curfew from ten o’clock down to eight,” Virgil said, white mask on top of a pile of papers in the center of his desk, his hands folded over it. “And the exception we made for the protesters, the ‘right to assemble’ exception…that’s going away.”

“When?” Castellanos asked, leaned against one of the two chairs on the lower-status side of Virgil’s desk.

“Friday.”

“Are you serious?” Booker asked.

Virgil nodded.

“People are bussing in on Friday,” Booker said. “There’s an article in the Oceanrest Chronicle.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” Virgil replied. “We’ve got a goddamn murderer on the loose and five hundred out-of-towners coming in to attend a rally. Earnest, you think I wanted this to happen?”

Booker tapped his foot on the floor. “Is this already done?”

“More or less, a'yeah,” Virgil mumbled in answer.

Booker restrained the impulse to stand.

“This doesn’t go well,” Castellanos said. A strange quality underscored her voice, a tone or pitch Booker had never heard in all his years working beside her. It prickled the general dread he’d stopped by his apartment to take clonazepam to treat, earlier. It darkened the room. “I know you think you’re making the right call, here, Chief, but you’re not.”

“Two officers are dead.”

“Friday isn’t the day. It has to be today or it has to wait until Monday.”

Folding his arms across his chest, Virgil leaned away from his desk. Scowled. He moved his cheeks around like a man who’d once chewed a lot of tobacco but had years-since quit.

“She’s right,” Booker added. “It’s tonight or…” he shrugged.

“We can’t get it all worked out tonight,” Virgil said, throat sandpaper gruff. He coughed and swallowed. “How about this: I send an e-mail to the rally organizers explaining the situation, and meanwhile I convince the Mayor to convince the City Council to start the new curfew on Sunday?”

“Better,” Castellanos replied, the aberrant undertone already fading.

“We’ll have to increase police presence around the protests…just on account of the serial killer and the extra few hundred tourist-types.”

“It’s ugly," Booker said. "But it's better than nothing."

“Who knows? Maybe we'll find Robert Robertson, Jr., before Friday,” Virgil muttered. It sounded like the wind-whistled skeleton of a joke.

“No matter what move we make, it’s the wrong one…” Castellanos’ voice had returned to normal. She twisted the puzzle cube in her hands, nearly finished. “He has us tied up with his consequences while he’s somewhere in the wind.”

“They found his car and cellphone,” Virgil said.

“You didn’t tell us?” Booker asked.

Virgil shrugged, a sigh unfolding his arms. “He’d abandoned them not far from his condo. The car’s still being towed in for a full dress-down. The phone should be on its way up here in, ah…in a minute or two.”

“Traffic cam footage?” Castellanos asked.

“On its way.”

“If he’s on foot somewhere on the peninsula…we have to be able to find him by Friday.”

“In earnest, Book, I really hope so.” Virgil sighed again, a decades-heavy one, and sat back up in his seat. “Anyway. Thanks for your input. You can get back to your case, now. I’ve got calls to make.”

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 9 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

At the center of the Blackwood mansion, three capacious rooms, each three stories tall, clustered into a cavernous honeycomb, the Blackwood Library. The largest ingress/egress from each room opened into a small entry hall for each of the mansion’s three wings, such that traveling from one wing to another required a person to pass through.

Thirty foot inbuilt book shelves walled the chamber, stuffed with hardbacks and grimoires and dusty old notebooks, accessible and navigable via several brass ladders running along brass rails; a library metro. 

A sprawling labyrinth of archival detritus filled the rest of the space. Shoulder-high piles of books and notes, stacks of VHS tapes and DVD cases, boxes full of rattling cassettes and legal envelopes, antique book shelves and old filing cabinets—all manner of towering documentation formed the maze. And at its unicursal core, Nora and Olly kept their office.

Jerry-rigged from two massive desks, two leather armchairs, and more recently, Deirdre noticed, a yoga mat, their ‘office’ wasn’t much. But it provided the adopted, teenage siblings a place to hide away, burrowed in a nest of research and theory, their laptops their only connection to the outside world. It provided a place they felt safe and sheltered, even from their loving—if occasionally overbearing—father.

Both siblings wore their hair in variations on the undercut. Nora, seventeen, had chestnut roots at the base of her bleached-white locks, the sides and back shaved to the scalp, the heavy body on top braided and woven into dense Celtic knots that spilled unevenly down her back. Olly, nineteen, their sharp bone structure already accentuated by curling facial tattoos, wore the dark length of their crown at a harsh angle across their forehead, barely missing their right eye.

Nora, narrow, bird-boned, cloaked herself in layers of oversized, second-hand clothes. Baggy jeans belted her waist somewhere beneath a tent of hoodie bought at a Bush-era punk show she couldn’t have possibly attended.

Olly garbed their own athletic frame with somewhat more sophisticated, if pricier, tastes. A purple suit jacket, so fine it shined, draped from their shoulders, sleeves rolled halfway up their golden-amber forearms. The white button-up beneath, accented in small purple-black skulls, either had short sleeves or its own sleeves rolled up even farther. Below a thin, silver-clasped belt, black denim vanished into high-top fashion sneakers, black with purple features.

“Kids.” Victor stood between two bookshelves and six file cabinets all arranged into a makeshift threshold, a broadening of a tight hallway of filed research into Nora and Olly’s equally-makeshift office. He gestured to Deirdre and Paul, just behind him. “You have visitors.”

“Hey, Dee,” Olly said, using a nickname they’d picked up from Razz when Razz and they had dated. A nickname Deirdre still couldn’t hear without remembering the boy. Without remembering…everything. “You doing okay?”

Deirdre shrugged.

Nora set her logo-less, matte gray laptop aside. “Okay, cool. So before we get to any conversation, uh, Deirdre, you already know this, I think, but Paul, y’know, it’s been a while since you’ve been around and…well, anyway, Olly uses they/them pronouns. Even Victor still makes the occasional mistake, but if you don’t try, you have to leave. Like, immediately, like, right now. Good?”

“Uh…yeah,” Paul answered. “Of course.”

Nora bobbed her head once. “Alright, then. Uh. Olly and I are digitizing the library. I think those are all the updates.” From her perch, sitting on a broad desk with a pile of books piled on the corresponding chair, she peered over at Olly. “Right?”

Olly dropped their gaze from Deirdre. “Huh? Oh, yeah. Years of digitizing files ahead of us, plus figuring out how to get into college with a GED, uh…” they nodded a couple times. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“We need your help,” Paul said.

“Uh, yes. Obviously.” Nora rolled her eyes exclusively with her voice. “Usually when people show up unannounced in the middle of a quarantine, it’s because they need our help. So…”

“There’s a killer,” Deirdre passed Victor and entered the office. “The one on the news.”

Nora and Olly stared, attentive.

“We don’t know much. Me and Paul got kind of connected to it. Rehani, too, I think,” she explained. “It’s something that scares ghosts but it’s related to the killer, too. And we have…well, we have what we think is a case number.”

“It’s not much,” Nora said. “But it’s enough to find something.”

“We’re in,” Olly added.

Nora looked at Victor. “Vicky, please? Can they stay for a little while?”

Victor snorted and shook his head. “Like I’m cold enough to send them home when they say they’re mystically connected to a killer.”

“But that’s officially a ‘yes?’” Nora asked.

Victor turned to Deirdre and Paul. “Deirdre, I know you’ve had a number of home improvements done, lately, but if you want to lay low here for a while, I promise there’s no safer place on the peninsula.”

“What about me?” Paul asked.

“You live in a houseboat with two deadbolt locks and a combat knife. You’d be a damned fool to turn down the invitation.”

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 9 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Nine

Booker and Castellanos had gotten the call just before a scheduled witness interview. On their hurried way out, they told the desk sergeant to ask the witness to wait for them to get back. “How long should I tell ‘em it’ll take?” “Make something up.” And with that, they’d rushed out the door and into a car.

Two cops had died. They’d died in the same condo development where Booker slept. In the development, each three-floor, triple-entrance’d building housed eighteen units. The nine buildings lined three ‘streets,’ really parking lots, and Booker’s building ended the street that the killer’s building began.

And they knew with absolute certainty that the unit belonged to their killer.

Castellanos angled between squad cars and news vans. She parked haphazardly outside of the unspooling crime scene tape. As they exited the vehicle, the dozen-or-so local reporters, journalists, and media personalities pressed toward them. The six beat cops brought in to herd them did their job, however, and Booker didn’t hear any of the shouted questions.

Inside, they climbed the steps to the second floor. The double homicide wasn’t hard to find from there.

A uniform posted at the condo entrance checked their badges. He wore the same standard issue white medical mask that they all did.

“So, so far, all we know is the place belongs to some guy named Robert Robertson, Junior. Some old lady ‘cross the street saw him walk outside apparently covered in blood, get in his car, and take off. She called in ‘bout half an hour ago, so we got an APB out already.”

“How’d two cops end up here, anyway?” Castellanos asked.

“Someone called in a wellness check on the guy.”

Castellanos nodded, glanced over at Booker.

“Anything else?” Booker asked.

The uniform shrugged. “Not as I heard.”

“Thank you for your work.”

They stepped around the first spatters and sprays of dried blood and through the condo threshold. Double-layering thick latex gloves, they stepped around a crime scene tech taking photos of the foyer and followed the crimson streaks and splatters into the condo kitchen. The layout of Booker’s unit was a perfect mirror image. The deja vu unsettled that memory, that monstrous thing lurking at the ocean bottom of Booker’s skull.

He took a deep breath, steeling himself, and followed Castellanos onto the gore-smeared tiles.

The first corpse slumped just inside the kitchen, sprawled out. Booker knelt to peel away the tarp covering the corpse. He winced. It didn’t take a medical examiner to hazard a guess at the probable cause of death. A savage gash in the man’s throat yawned redly, skin unevenly carved, arteries, veins, muscle, and tendon sprouting stalk-like from the wound. He’d bled out within seconds.

Booker replaced the tarp, swallowing sourness from the back of his throat.

Yellow placards noted shell casings where the second officer had managed to unholster his sidearm and fire three times on the attacker. At end of the condo corridor, where the kitchen broadened into a dining room, Booker saw two bullet holes in the plaster. Three shell casings, two bullet holes. Had one of the bullets lodged its way into the perp?

The gun itself sat in the sink. Booker imagined the killer had slammed the man’s arm against the stainless steel edge of the appliance, disarming him. A couple feet farther along, more yellow placards indicated a spray of human teeth. They’d come out unevenly, battered loose. Judging from the heavy damage scraped along the edge of the kitchen counter, the killer had smashed the man’s face into the hardwood multiple times to free the bones from their sockets.

The crime scene tech from the foyer slipped passed him toward the bedroom.

Castellanos had already gotten ahead.

Booker stepped into the dining r—

—up the concrete steps, onto the second floor landing. His hands shook around his gun—

—he lost his breath at the sudden flash. For just a second, he’d felt completely elsewhere. With a gloved hand he braced himself against the dining room table. Some collision had tilted it off-center and toppled one of the surrounding chairs. More tacky crimson streaked and dribbled toward the bedroom. Shaking himself off, Booker stood. His panting had fogged his glasses. Pulling them off, he—

held his gun low, approaching—

blinked, dizzy. His legs shook but stabilized. He cleaned his lenses with his shirtsleeve and donned the glasses again. Adjusting his mask, he chuckled away the last of the dizziness and faint unease and entered the bedroom.

Blood pooled on the carpet just beyond the threshold. The second cop had collapsed there at some point during the struggle. Probably he’d lost consciousness. As Booker padded into the room, a camera-flash caught him by surprise. He jumped. The two crime scene techs paused, caught off guard.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Sorry,” they replied.

Castellanos stood at the foot of the bed, staring at her cellphone.

On the mattress, the second body waited. Less deep dark crimson stained the sheets than the floor. The perp had laid the man out near the end of things, as the last life leaked out of him. The killing strike, a plunging, jagged stab through his chest, had come from the same sized knife that had carved the first officer’s throat open. Robert Robertson, Jr., had exited the room, retrieved his blade from the first body, and returned to use it again.

At some point after that, he’d cut the second cop’s face away from its moorings, peeled it free, and glued it unevenly back on again. He’d removed both eyes, jamming the brass emblem from the cop’s badge into one socket and placing an unwrapped roll of quarters inside the other. The quarters had spilled glinting over the sagging, misshapen visage like silver tears.

They hadn’t yet divulged to the press any details concerning facial mutilation.

Booker’s pulse drummed in his temples. Some dark thing ascended from the depths of his memory…

“Fireworks,” Castellanos spat, snapping him back to the present.

“Huh?”

“Two and a half hours before dispatch got the call. Look.” She pointed her cellphone screen his way. It showed an app where local users could post questions and updates about the goings-ons of their neighborhood. Someone had asked, hours earlier, if the sounds they’d heard had been fireworks or gunshots. A couple respondents hazarded ‘fireworks.’ But the reply Castellanos wanted him to see waited at the bottom. From user BRJr.

‘My teenagers swiped some fireworks from their aunt/uncle’s in NH. Confiscated now. Please don’t call the cops on us!’

BRJr. had ended the post with a crying-laughing emoji.

Another camera flash flared the room.

“Everyone wants to believe things are normal,” Castellanos murmured, so quiet she might not have intended for him to hear. “They just needed permission.”

“Robert Robertson, Jr.,” Booker muttered. “We saw that name before…”

Pocketing her phone, Castellanos turned to face away from the body. “When you called up the judge’s case history, it was one of the names.” She had the puzzle box back in her hands, again, though Booker hadn’t seen where she’d kept it hidden. “I guess even serial killers get divorces.”

Faint dizziness threatened Booker’s balance. His consciousness felt like the bulging surface of a still lake just before something erupted out of it. The feeling faded when he, too, turned away from the corpse. “We need to talk to Virgil.”

Castellanos stared into empty mid-distance. “Mm.”

“But, first…I need to stop at home.”

She nodded as if not paying attention. “It’s not too far out of the way.”

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 8 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

Bob awoke refreshed and re-energized, his body firmer, muscles stronger, and skin tighter. He climbed out of bed without a single groan and barely felt the need to rub his rested sockets before leaving the room.

The north-facing windows of his new condo, his neo-bachelor-pad, didn’t allow for much light. Bob flipped on the overheads, the sudden glare warping his flatscreen. As he lifted the remote control to turn on the news, he thought he glimpsed another figure standing behind him. The man had almost the exact same dimensions he did but stood a foot or two back and to Bob’s left. But nothing waited for him when he spun around.

When he peered back at the screen, he thought it looked like his reflection had just stretched out, some visual byproduct of the angle of the TV and the overhead lights, Bob’s position in relationship to everything else…

Bob turned on the local news. Waiting for the anchors to dig deeper into his case, he worked out on the living room floor. Years had sagged his paunch since he’d exercised regularly, but he had more energy now. And the paunch had already largely disappeared.

After forty-five minutes of improvised groundwork—calisthenics and plyometrics—Bob stood up. The people on the news hadn’t said anything about him, yet, but they would. He stepped up into the condo’s kitchen and started breakfast. Eggs sizzled on a skillet. He spooned high-protein yogurt into his mouth while they cooked. His mind wandered.

 He remembered Veronica and how he’d killed the woman who looked like her. He remembered plunging his knife into the judge’s body over and over again as the man’s struggles weakened against him. He remembered peering up from a teenager’s face (what had happened to his face?) to see her through the window.

Juliet, the east, and he, the sun.

He over-fried the eggs, plated them, and left them on the table. While they cooled, he jerked off in the bathroom, staring at the mirror. He thought about the texture of her hair, the cut of her jawline, the blaze crackling in her eyes. He crumbled, knees buckling, and caught himself on the edge of the bathroom counter. Cleaning up, he returned to his tepid eggs.

The Mask waited next to his plate. Had he left it there?

He couldn’t remember what he’d done with it, last night.

He sat down and ate. When he’d finished, he frowned. The news still hadn’t mentioned his story.

Someone knocked on the apartment door. “Mister Robert, uh…Robertson?” an authoritative voice called out. “This is Oceanrest Metro Police Department. We’d like to ask you a few questions. Are you okay in there?”

Bob stood, the Mask in his hand. Quietly, he approached the door. On the way, he picked up his knife. Beyond the peephole stood two blue uniforms, one watching his door and the other watching his across-hall neighbor’s.

Bob flinched at the next knock.

“Mister Robertson?”

Bob had always hated his name. 

He pulled on the Mask before unlocking the door.

Turn Back ...Coming Soon... Table of Contents

Ch. 8 / Pt. 3 : When They Wear the Mask

It took Deirdre longer than anticipated to stabilize the magic helping her diverse and esoteric crops to grow. She’d performed the ritual almost-weekly for almost-seventeen years and had learned that magic occasionally liked to remind its users that it wasn’t science. A practitioner could successfully trigger a spell three hundred times only to get a completely unexpected result on the three-hundred-and-first. Intellectually, Deirdre preferred the ill luck to interrupt a repeatable task, something that took hours to execute and hours to fix, as opposed to a cantrip thrown up in a desperate moment. Emotionally, it was still frustrating as hell.

The first hour-long ritual fizzled and died. After a muttered string of curses, Deirdre dusted herself off, fixed all the protections the ritual’s collapsed had tripped, and tried again. The second hour-long attempt unraveled unexpectedly; she lost control of the mystic energy, itself, and it spilled and rippled through her basement. The wards she’d had Shoshanna install stopped anything terrible from happening, but Deirdre felt them wane and flicker in the aftermath. Sweating and hungry, Deirdre rose from her second attempt with a groan and did what she could to reinforce the weakened wards. But a ward witch, she was not. To fully repair her defenses, she’d need Shoshanna’s help.

And for that, they didn’t have time.

Luckily, the third hour-long casting took. Craned with effort, dripping splats of exhaustion to the floor, she pressed her palms to the carved cement floor and muttered the words <> in twenty-seven different languages. Eyes closed, she focused the gathered energy into images of a fellow gardener, a farmer, a distant ancestor, a thriving biome, a world blossoming and fruiting and growing wildly verdant. <> she said in Quechuan, in Mvuban, in English, in Lao, in Urdu, in Latin, in Cantonese.

The spell pulsed through her, crackling up her bones and vibrating along her skin. The dozens of sigils, glyphs, runes, and vèvès carved in the basement floor sparked, glowing bright and briefly before fading back to dim carven concrete. All the plants misted by the hydroponics shivered at once; some sprouted new leaves or tendrils or shoots. Some bulbed, blossomed, and fruited. The heat lamps flickered once and steadied.

She stood and brushed herself off.

Paul had taken a couple anti-histamines and one of her home-brewed allergy cures by then. He’d also smoked a third of a joint of cannabis mixed with psychic downers. The vague grogginess that followed left him less eager to make the thirteen mile trek to the Blackwood Estate than earlier. Besides, the sun had sagged westward, four o’clock had arrived, and the chances of their finishing the walk before dark had bottomed out entirely.

She showered, extra-careful with the bonnet, and fixed her hair in the bathroom mirror. She changed clothes—her earlier outfit sticky with sweat and hours of demanding mysticism—and fixed a late lunch. Paul checked his bank account before ordering a car to the nearest serviced location. The pick-up point blinked on his screen, just over an hour’s walk away. He rescheduled the ride.

Deirdre gave him an extra week’s supply of psychic depressants as a way of thanks.

###############

The car picked them up a mile south of Squatter City and drove them westward, skirting the northernmost reaches of Denton. Not far from the western coast, the driver turned northwest, where the peninsula broadened as it joined the rest of the state. A couple minutes after that, he turned north.

Bright white Castine elms flanked the tight curve of Blackwood Drive, the private road leading up to the Blackwood Mansion, itself situated centrally to the capacious Blackwood Estate. The Blackwood family had owned twenty-six acres of land at the end of their lineage, though they’d only developed the center nine. The rest served as a private forest, blurring the edges of the Estate into the broader wilderness around it.

The late Ambrose Blackwood, last of his name, had willed half of his fortune and properties to a once-homeless teenager he’d adopted, Nora. The other half he’d willed to his longtime romantic partner, Victor Monroe. Though the two had shared a life for over thirty years at the time of Ambrose’s death, they’d only gotten officially married in 2015, in Massachusetts. Not long after, in summer 2017, Ambrose Blackwood had boarded a plane bound for Cairo, where he went missing for several weeks before dying suddenly in a hotel restaurant.

Deirdre had known none of this thirteen months earlier.

Paul still didn’t know all of it.

The private drive banked sharply east near the mansion proper and, following it, they passed under an archway of vines grown over a gateless iron frame, framed itself by six foot hedges, and into a broad driving loop circling an ancient stone fountain. An angel stood at the fountain’s center, pouring an empty urn into a pool of stagnant water. Decades of snow and Maine damp had shaded its  in mold and algae.

The driver parked in front of the double-doored, three-winged mansion and let them out. He hesitated, expression unreadable beneath his facemask, but decided not to say whatever he’d wanted to say as Deirdre and Paul exited his vehicle. He pulled around the asphalt loop, under the vined arch, and away.

Deirdre and Paul stood there for a moment, unsure what to do next. Overhead, evening sunset sky purpled toward twilight.

The double-doors cracked open and inched apart. Victor Monroe stepped out of the mansion and onto the worn porch fronting it. He wore a black, medical-grade facemask; above it, sharp brown eyes squinted at them, crow’s feet gathering at their edges. A pump-action shotgun leaned against his shoulder, gunmetal grim against the bright colors of his nineties-era dad-sweater. A snapback cap crowned his head, one of almost fifty in a collection of lame tourist hats he’d bought with an irony that time and warmth and loss had turned into authenticity.

“Not your usual ride,” he said, lowering the shotgun into hands the shade of burnt umber and the strength of proofed iron. Taking another step forward, he leaned the weapon against a column running from the porch floor to the porch roof.

“Rehani’s busy,” Deirdre replied. “And Paul’s…”

“Mine’s still in storage,” Paul finished. “With a busted axle. And probably a dead battery.”

“I don’t like strange black sedans driving up here unexpectedly.” Victor had a rich tenor voice, a depth and resonance that suggested authority.

“We’re sorry,” Deirdre said. “I tried to call but it went to voicemail.”

“But you didn’t leave a voicemail.”

“I, uh…no, I didn’t.”

“I guess people don’t leave voicemails much, anymore,” Victor said. “Nora and Olly barely even make phone calls.”

Deirdre stepped toward the porch. “Vic…we could really use some help.”

Victor stared at them for a couple seconds, appraising. Finally, he picked up the shotgun, leaned it against his shoulder again, and sighed. “I’m not gonna send you back across the peninsula this close to dark. Come on in and tell us what’s going on. But first, I need to give you the rapid test.”

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 8 / Pt. 2 : When They Wear the Mask

In the dream that was also half a memory forgotten, Booker ascended the ramshackle steps of a condemned industrial building, sidearm drawn. Overhead, a kaleidoscopic swirl of stars and eyeballs bobbed and rolled and sank into viscous cosmic black. Only the quiet sounds of his own footfalls disturbed the silence. He ascended. Every ascent—

He stood on the second story landing, a square of smooth, often-stained concrete. The bubbling audience above hissed static. Down the corridor ahead, Detective John Bowman Booker heard something slap against meat. He heard something slap. His breath shook. As he entered the dim hallway, the walls around him unraveled. They scratched and scraped away into nothingness. A wet slap echoed into the void. A whimper.

Sweat beaded his brow. He walked forward, sidearm held low.

A silhouette like a purple-black slug squished out of the only doorway that still existed in the sprawling, wall-less hall. Shadows wisped off of it like steam. It bloated and surged, sliming forward, violet and ultraviolet and white and black and gray and purple, shimmering and shifting. A second slug followed, tumbling out behind the first. A third, a fourth, a fifth…as they multiplied, they grabbed the edges of the threshold like bloated, slimy fingers. Like something trying to pull itself through.

A wet slap, a whimper. A wet slap, a whimper.

Booker approached, breath bated, sweat slicking his brown cheeks, sidearm held low but with a thumb on the safety…

A slap. A whimper. The slugs arched into boneless knuckles, shivering. 

Booker inched toward the threshold.

Slap, whimper, slap, whimper…

(a lock and a key)

The vile creatures, oozing and heaving, didn’t react to Booker as he neared them. They strained, struggling to haul something out of the lightlessness beyond. Booker couldn’t control his breath. His hands shook.

He turned to meet the monster, pistol raised.

YOUR DUTY IS TO APPREHEND

“John?”

Booker jerked awake, Castellanos’ hand on his shoulder. The dream that was also a memory forgotten faded, sinking back into the silt bottoming his brain. He blinked and peered up at his partner. “What?”

“We fell asleep.” With a mug of coffee in each hand, she gestured to the broad table, the splay of cold case documents across it. 

Blinking again, Booker found his glasses resting on top of an old crime scene photo next to him. He donned them and found a small drool stain newly printed on an old witness’ statement. He tried to wipe it away with his shirtsleeve. “Shit.”

“I already talked to the Chief,” Castellanos continued, setting one mug of coffee in front of Booker as she walked around the table. Her own coffee went down next her puzzle box, now half-finished. “Brought him up to date on everything we’ve found so far.”

“Which is nothing,” Booker said.

“The subject is a male, of average height and weight, wearing a mask. Probably white.”

Booker sighed, giving up on the old witness statement. “Which is just about nothing.”

Castellanos racked a multi-colored column around the puzzle’s axis; set the box aside. “Did anyone ever tell you, you mumble in your sleep?”

“What, you spying on me?”

“I tried. You never know what comes up in someone’s head when they’re sleeping. But I really mean ‘mumble.’ You don’t so much say words as make sounds. Syllables. You toss and turn and slur out parts of words, but just parts of them.”

“You watch me sleep?”

“I heard you sleep.”

“Whatever.” He shook his head, chuckling despite himself. “And do I snore?”

“No. You don’t snore.” She grinned.

“Yeah, well, you do.”

“I do not.”

“You wouldn’t know.”

“Are you spying on me, now?” she retorted.

He shrugged. “I tried. I mean, you never know, right? What comes up in someone’s head.”

Castellanos chuckled softly, leaning forward. Arms crossed over layered paperwork, she made the end of her laughter somehow the obvious end of the banter. The glint in her eyes changed. Booker’s amusement faded, too. “So what do you think?” she asked.

He took a deep breath, trying to coax his brain into remembering their research from the night before. He picked up the mug of coffee and sipped. A pleasant “Huh” wafted out of him unbidden. “This is…fresh,” he added.

“Just brewed,” Castellanos responded. “But now…what do you think?”

Booker sighed. “Honestly? This shit’s flimsy. The cold case has some similarities to ours, sure, but nothing we could build a lead out of.”

“Both killers wore masks.”

“That’s not much. None of the witnesses from the seventies or the nineties could even describe the thing.”

“None of our witnesses could, either.”

“Not yet,” Booker replied. “We got two more coming in this afternoon to interview.”

Castellanos picked her puzzle box up from the table. “What about the…facial violence?”

Booker folded his arms, palms cupped to elbows. “What about it? Our guy cuts the faces off his victims and then puts them back on again.”

“He only did that with the judge.”

“He got halfway through cutting the—the kid’s face off, too.”

“But he didn’t reattach it,” Castellanos pointed out.

“He didn’t have time.”

“He did. He chose to push the kid out a window, instead.”

Booker frowned but nodded. “Maybe. In the cold case, though, the killer just destroyed the faces. Slashed and stabbed them until there wasn’t anything left. All the victims had to be ID’d through tattoos and birthmarks…”

“Maybe this is how he—or she or they—escalate. Maybe this is the next step.”

“I don’t think so. Besides, 1976, 1992, 2020? If this is one killer escalating, he’d—or she’d or they’d—have to be, what? Sixty, give or take?”

Castellanos racked and rotated the puzzle box. “What if it isn’t one killer?”

“Then we have a whole different problem on our hands,” he replied. “And the best way to solve it is to catch the guy we’re after now.”

Castellanos turned her focus to the puzzle. She twisted and turned the box around in her palms. After a few seconds, she glanced back over at Booker. “Maybe we’ll learn more when we talk to the new witnesses this afternoon.”

But that afternoon, they got the call. The witness would have to wait.

Turn Back What Happens Next? Table of Contents

Ch. 8 / Pt. 1 : When They Wear the Mask

Chapter Eight

Deirdre woke up just after nine in the morning, having collapsed into unconsciousness twelve hours earlier. Surging awake with shock and panic at the smash-cut of one day into the next, she twisted around to grab her phone. Her night’s paperback tumbled to the floor, along with her notebook and memo-pad. Paul had texted her back at 10:16 PM.

‘Just out of the precinct. Exhausted. Heading home. I’ll come by your place as soon as I wake up. Have some ideas.’

She put her phone back down on the bedside table—a reading lamp, a recycled-wood coaster holding a tall mug of water, a stack of notebooks and paperbacks and memo-pads gathering dust—and climbed out of bed. She changed clothes but wore essentially the same outfit. She touched up her hair in the bathroom mirror, still trying to squint wakefulness into her eyes. She refilled Samedi’s supply of dry food and water and headed downstairs.

For breakfast, she fried two organic eggs, free range from a family-owned farm, and stirred a cup of oats, berries, and sliced nuts into a bowl of yogurt. She drank black tea empowered by a simple ritual and the added ingredients of black pepper and dried, ground-up Bee’s bread. She took her tea with a splash of cream. Only halfway through the meal did it occur to her that she hadn’t eaten a proper breakfast in weeks. The realization paused her halfway through chewing.

She might’ve killed the kidnappers and rapists responsible for Razz’s death, the human monster neo-Nazis who’d drugged an unknown number of women into mumbling somnambulance and sold them into servitude—she might’ve sharpened and splintered their last terrible moments alive, but they’d taken everything from her. They’d even taken breakfast.

She finished eating.

Leaving the dishes in the sink, she returned upstairs to clean both of Samedi’s litter boxes. Bagging up the considerable heft of deposits, she carried the excretion back to the kitchen and threw it into a twenty-gallon bin.

The doorbell rang.

Deirdre’s hand reached reflexively for her revolver but somehow she’d forgotten to attach her holster to her belt that morning. Quietly, she padded down the main thoroughfare of her home, unlit candelabra framing her, toward the most secure front door she’d ever imagined. She hesitated between door and stairwell.

“It’s me,” Paul said from outside, barely audible through the steel and lead reinforcements. He continued, “Sorry, I meant…” but the rest of the phrase vanished in the muffle.

It took almost a minute to disengage all the door’s security.

Outside, she found Paul Somers standing next to a bicycle, wearing an overstuffed backpack as an unusual addition to his everyday wrinkled-pants, wrinkled-shirt, tangled-hair look. Noon sun blared down, lighting all green into brilliant emerald. Yet, somehow, deep in the Oceanrest forests, she knew the shadows fell as dark as twilight and a constant mist clung coolly to the ground…

“I meant to text you when I left, but…” he wiped sweat from his brow.

“But what?” she asked.

“Uh…” he hesitated. “Uh…but I didn’t?”

“Oh, cool, sure. Come on in. I love when people show up at my house without any warning.”

“We’re pursuing a killer together.”

“Sorry. I just…” she sighed. “The knock took me by surprise.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine.” She shook her head. “Anyway, what’s up?”

Paul walked his bicycle inside and the two of them entered her den. She left the frame locks disengaged to save time.

“I was thinking about that case number Rehani caught in that vision the other night.” Paul pulled off the backpack and paused, visibly searching for her cat. “And about, uh…well, how little we really know about what’s going on, here. Except that a psychic tells us that we can help stop it.”

Deirdre had a feeling she knew where this conversation headed. Had she had the same feeling earlier? Is that why she’d cleaned up both litter boxes and refilled all of Samedi’s food? “And your thinking led you where?”

“We know people who might be able to help us,” he sat on her couch, bike leaned against the armrest, satisfied that Samedi licked and dandered elsewhere. “People we can go talk to today.”

“Victor’s kids?” she asked, already knowing the answer.

“Nora and Olly,” he confirmed.

She nodded. Victor had recruited her as a once-in-a-while babysitter, which had helped pull her out of her initial depression, but between the siblings’ advanced ages—seventeen and nineteen—and Victor’s strict adherence to quarantine, they hadn’t called her in a long time. And it turned out that grief wasn’t a thing that vanished, merely a thing that waited. She cleared her throat. “It’s a thirteen mile trip.”

Paul set the backpack down by his shins. “That’s why I brought food and water. Do you own a bike?”

She didn’t, but she had Razz’s old one stored in the rubbled wreck that had once served as the Victorian home’s detached garage. “I don’t,” she said.

“Well. If we leave soon, we can still get there by sunset.”

“I need some time.”

“Oh. Sure, no problem. How much?”

“Ninety minutes, give or take.”

His eyes widened. “Oh.”

“I have an hour-long ritual to run in the basement to keep the crops stable, plus I’ll need a half hour to pack.”

He opened his mouth, thought better of saying whatever he planned to say, and nodded instead. “Yeah. Right. So we’ll get there just around or maybe a little after sundown. Is there anything I could help with, or would that just slow things down?”

“I think that would slow things down considerably.”

“I’ll just wait. And, uh…is there any chance you have any psychic downers available?”

About to turn around, she paused. “I thought the dead were being quiet?”

“They are. Mostly. But I can still hear some whispers and…” his jaw worked soundlessly. He didn’t want to say the thing they both knew.

He heard his daughter.

“I’ll see what I have in storage,” she replied.

Turn Back What Happens Next?

Ch. 7 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

Booker hadn’t believed Paul Somers. He hadn’t believed Deirdre, either.

He’d need to pay another visit to each of them.

The ex-profiler whose allegedly ‘ace’ profile had led him to a crime scene had little to offer beyond basics. The suspect was probably white, male, middle-aged, and of middle- or upper-middle-class income. The guy felt impotent in the face of whatever wreck his life had become and took out his rage and anxiety on people he believed represented the exterior causes of said wreck. Paul Somers had set up an illegal canvas of Denton in response to, essentially, statistical probabilities. And when Booker had asked Paul why the murderer wore a mask, Paul hadn’t had an answer. Still, the two vigilantes had ended up in the area somehow, and Booker didn’t peg them for accomplices.

Had Dr. Paul Somers been telling the truth? No way.

And ‘Deirdre Frankly?’ The woman with the fake last name? Please.

If Virgil LeDuff had kept them in jail…

Pulling his glasses away from his face, elbows on his desk, Booker buried his eyes into the heels of his hands and sighed. Two of Denton’s most vigilant night owls had called in with reports of suspicious persons in the area. Of course they’d targeted the wrong ones, Booker didn’t question that. Booker questioned what the wrong ones were doing there, why they’d confessed to chargeable offenses rather than tell the truth. Why Virgil had such confessions and had opted to release them.

His eyes squished as he rubbed them.

The interviews had eaten up most of the day. The crime scene techs had already cleared the area and Virgil had already held a press conference. The autopsy results had come back predictably: the perpetrator had stabbed the mother multiple times in the back, near the spine, and used her as a human shield while her son opened fire with a Malleus-manufactured .380 that the family kept for home safety. As the mother bled to death, used as a weight to off-balance her son, the perpetrator had reached around her torso and stabbed the kid in the abdomen four times. The perp had disarmed the teen, stabbed him in the palm, and dislocated his right knee. At some point, the killer had started carving the boy’s face off but had stopped to throw him out of a window, instead.

Why?

Booker’s palms rolled up his forehead and over the short bristle of hair growing from his scalp, his usually-tight Caesar growing into something else. “Asshole,” he muttered, referring to Virgil and his protection of these clear obstructions to justice but making the utterance non-specific in case anyone heard.

And someone did.

“I’ve got something.” Castellanos’ voice made him start, the woman seeming to appear just feet behind him. Her frayed hairs looked conditioned, her gaze, rested. A light application of make-up emphasized her features.

“What is it?”

“A cold case.”

“Shit.”

Castellanos rattled a new puzzle cube in her hands, this one with six rows and six columns. “Our guy isn’t the first sequence killer in Oceanrest to use the mask gimmick. There are a couple other similarities we might want to take a look at, too…”

“How cold is the case?” Booker asked.

“Seventy-nine through ninety-three.”

“Shit,” Booker repeated.

“Ready to get started?”

“Readier than I’ll be tomorrow.” He groaned out of his chair and picked up his glasses. Donning them before his facemask, he followed Castellanos as she walked away. Her puzzle box clacked and echoed in the near-empty precinct.

 

Turn Back ...Coming Soon... Table of Contents