CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Remember, we need the name of the artist and the song. Are you ready to play Test Your Metal?
I’m ready, Dave.
She knew from muscle memory that she’d been drugged.
It was not the first time she’d been drugged, and the weariness and weakness and patchy hallucinations were alarmingly familiar to her body’s immune system.
She blinked herself to something approaching alertness, and was first taken aback by the perimeter of bricks keeping her captive.
A brick wall. Where was this? Outdoors?
No. It wasn’t outdoors.
Next – and she was surprised to discover this – she was not bound in any way. She was merely sitting in a wooden chair, but still had full use of her hands and legs. Or at least, as much use as she could get out of them, which right now wasn’t much.
Historically in serial killers, a lack of restraints on the victim meant a quick death.
She pushed that thought aside and focused again on the brick walls. Upstairs, she’d seen a metal door. She remembered that much. And a man in the living room who was bound.
The two thoughts collided into one. Upstairs was victim number four, and she – presumably victim number five – was down in the basement.
Then the room arrived all at once and she understood why she’d been thinking about metal.
The thing stood eight feet in front of her, on the flagstones, lit by a single bulb in the rafters.
It came up taller than a man. Black iron, hinged down the front, the two doors standing open as they had on the cartridge paper upstairs.
The inside of each door was set with rows of iron points the length of her finger, blackened at the tips, arranged so that the points of one door would meet the points of the other when the doors closed on what stood between them.
The iron maiden.
Greaves had drawn it. Varro had built it, and now she was seeing it in three dimensions.
Her mouth filled with saliva and she swallowed against it.
She didn’t let herself look at it for long. There was the rest of the room to take in, and the rest of the room made no sense until it did.
Gym equipment. That was the thing that didn’t fit, and it sat right in the middle of everything.
A bench and a loaded bar and a rack of plates and dumbbells ran up in a line from small to monstrous.
A full-length mirror was bolted to the wall facing the bench, and Ella looked into it and saw herself on the floor, small and slack and bloodied at the neck, and she made herself look away from that too.
In her dusty reflection, she also saw a distinct lack of weapon at her hip.
It was what hung beside the mirror that stopped her breathing.
A skeleton, strung up against the concrete on a length of wire, articulated at the joints so it kept the shape of a standing man.
It was enormous. The long bones of the legs, the cage of the ribs, the great yoke of the shoulders, all of it built to a scale she had only ever seen in one place, in an intake photograph of a six-foot-eight man with a face too small for the breadth of him.
Thomas Greaves had come home, and his protégé had hung him where he could watch.
‘You should be quieter when you break into people’s houses,’ a voice said.
Several inconsistencies became apparent. While it was a fair point, and one Ripley made all the time, the voice that spoke it didn’t belong to her partner. And besides, she idly remembered that, according to Roy at MCI Jessup, Simon Varro was completely mute.
But perhaps more concerning was that the voice belonged to a woman.
Ella rolled around on the floor, wincing through the pain, and glimpsed the opposite side of the room.
There, casually squatting in the corner of the room, was a slight, familiar-faced blonde woman.
‘Surprise,’ the woman said with a flourish.
Drugs.
Hallucinations.
It couldn’t be anything else.
Under no other circumstances would she have followed the trail on a completely unrelated murder investigation – only to wind up in a basement with Lindsey Doyle.
‘You,’ Ella breathed. ‘You’re Doyle.’
‘Great detective work, Ella.’ Lindsey Doyle brandished Ella’s Glock 19. She sniffed the barrel, then pointed it in Ella’s direction. ‘I don’t want to shoot you, so don’t make me.’
‘What’s… going on?’
Lindsey Doyle cackled so loudly it echoed through the basement. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t figured it out yet. Or have you?’
Ella briefly remembered that yesterday she’d entertained the possibility of these two cases being intertwined, but hadn’t given it any thought beyond that. The only connection was prisons.
‘No.’
‘Don’t disappoint me, Ella. Think harder. Think about everything.’
‘I can’t think… when I’m poisoned.’
‘Oh please, it’s just a tiny amount. Nothing like what we put in the others. We wanted you conscious for this.’
‘We? You mean…’
Doyle came closer, then she crouched about ten feet away from her. ‘Did you really think a disabled mental patient could pull all of this off? You’re more na?ve than I thought. How’s your memory holding up? Still perfect?’
Far from it, Ella thought. ‘No.’
‘Clearly, because the answer has been in front of you for ages, and I don’t just mean with my current project.
I mean going back months and months. I left you clues everywhere, and you missed every single one of them.
I honestly thought you were smarter than this, but we’ve played you like a fiddle. ’
‘I don’t… get it,’ Ella breathed. The fuzziness was still there, but her nerve endings were slowly coming back under her control. She reached two fingers down her throat, brought up a pool of vomit and spat it out.
‘That’s it. Get the poison out for you. Then we’ll kill you.’
She hurled up another load of sick, then said, ‘Explain it to me.’
Doyle began pacing the room, looking somewhat frustrated. Ella didn’t know how long she’d been out, and perhaps it had only been seconds between her forced inebriation and waking up here. Mia and backup must be close.
‘Fine. I’m going to throw some names at you. Ready?’
Ella nodded.
‘Gabriel Winters. Maxwell Tanner. Edgar Borden. Do you recognize them?’
Ella didn’t have to think hard. Gabriel Winters as the Greensboro Whisperer. Maxwell Tanner was the Scarecrow. Edgar Borden was the Figurine Killer.
They were the last three serial killers she’d captured.
‘I caught them.’
‘And what did those lovely but damaged individuals all have in common, detective?’
The answer came much quicker than she anticipated. Doyle had given her the links and Ella’s subconscious snapped them together. ‘They all had… connections… to prisons. Like you did.’
‘Let’s give a big hand to the best agent in FBI, folks. She finally got there. It only took her six months.’
Ella spat the last of the vomit onto the flagstones and wiped her mouth on her shoulder.
Her head was clearing. The poison was coming up and out, and the room was holding still now instead of swimming, and into that stillness the thing Doyle had been steering her toward finally arrived.
Connections to prisons.
She’d known something was off. Winters, Tanner, and Borden were too prepared. They’d known things first-time killers had no business knowing. Because somewhere behind each of them had been a steadying hand, a voice telling them how to choose, how to wait, how to clean up after.
A mentor.
‘You taught them.’
‘I pushed them. The prison system gives you access to a lot of damaged men. Some want a God, some want a teacher. There’s a lot of people out with daddy issues, isn’t that right, Ella?’
Ella surged to a standing position on unsteady feet and lunged for Doyle. It could have cost her her life, but instinct was her primary force. Doyle sidestepped her and Ella landed against the wall. Doyle turned the gun back on her.
‘That was silly of you. But anyway, I think it’s time we put an end to this, don’t you?’
‘You won’t… get away. Your DNA.’
‘Is all over this scene? I know. But I’m not going to do the dirty work. My man has a mission to finish and you’ve stupidly inserted yourself into it. So, you have to die too.’ Doyle turned to the door and yelled, ‘Simon! Come on down!’
The basement door fell open and became a square of orange light. A silhouette filled the shape – consumed the shape, and the door shut again. It framed a hulking behemoth of a human being, so wide that he had to begin his descent sideways.
There he was.
The killer of three – possibly four – people.
All orchestrated by a completely different killer.
‘He’s my good boy,’ Doyle said. ‘Simon, come and say hello to Agent Ella Dark.’
Simon Varro reached the basement floor, and now Ella saw that he was dressed in full executioner regalia.
Her body wanted to respond in some way, but the drugs still had a hold on her.
If someone asked her tomorrow – if she was still alive tomorrow – she couldn’t be sure that all of this was some surreal dream.
‘Simon, did you finish off the man upstairs?’
Varro shook his head.
‘No? He’s still alive?’
Varro nodded.
‘Why?’
Varro pointed to the iron maiden with a gigantic hand. Doyle sighed.
‘Fine. Finish him off afterward. He’s not going anywhere. If you have to put someone in there, this wannabe hero will do.’
Varro shook his head again.
‘What? Just do it.’
Varro kept still, defiantly.
‘Simon, trust me. Just kill her. I spent a long time finding this device for you.’
‘He won’t,’ Ella muttered. ‘It needs to be the man, or his mission isn’t complete. The method isn’t the compulsion. The victim is.’
The coherence of which her comment came out surprised her. She must have purged enough poison from her system to be comprehensible again, and with that revelation came a newfound energy and newfound realization.
She was sharing a room with, amongst other things, the person responsible for the death of three people Ella held dear. Ella had the chance to kill her right now.
All that was stopping her was her own Glock 19 in the wrong hands and a colossal bodybuilder turned serial killer.