CHAPTER TWELVE
Ella stood back while Luca held court in their office. Detective Reeves joined and shut the door behind them. Her nerves sang like plucked piano wire as Luca loaded the memory stick into his laptop’s USB port.
After two dead collectors and zero solid leads, Ella was overdue a break. She prayed that somewhere in that 48 hours of footage, their doll-making, bug-loving psycho had made a mistake and shown himself on camera.
But experience told her that serial killers were human cockroaches. They were resilient little bastards who scuttled away the moment you flipped the lights on. Given how familiar her killer was with his victims, he certainly knew about Alfred Finch’s camera if he’d been to his house before. But did his ego override his survival instinct?
God, she hoped so. Some criminals were smart enough to give themselves Shakespearean death scenes but too stupid to check for security cameras. Those were her favorite kind.
A New Device Detected message popped up on Luca’s screen. One click later they were staring at a new folder with a single file inside. An MP4 with the filename Breeding_Room_CamSD.
‘Breeding room,’ Luca said. ‘Explains what Finch was doing in there.’
‘Play it, Hawkins.’
Luca obliged. He double clicked and his media player whirred to life.
The breeding room materialized in standard definition monochrome. Glass tanks marched along the walls like transparent coffins. Heat lamps cast alien shadows across a maze of tubes and wires that wouldn't look out of place in a mad scientist's lab. Ella guessed Finch needed eyes on this place 24/7.
The time stamp blinked in the corner: 09:03 AM, two days ago.
‘Fast forward,’ she said.
Luca hit the arrow key, and Alfred Finch's last two days became a silent movie. The breeding room strobed past in jerky stop-motion. The old entomologist appeared periodically, puttering between tanks like a fussy librarian. Check the gauges. Adjust the dials. Monitor the humidity. The audio picked up nothing but climate control white noise and the occasional scratch of something skittering behind glass.
‘Take it to this afternoon,’ Ella said.
Luca dragged the progress bar forward and suddenly they were watching the last normal moments of Alfred Finch's life unfold in real time. The empty breeding room sat as patient as a spider in its web.
Then, timestamped at 6:00 PM earlier that day, voices leaked through the speakers, muffled but clear enough to raise every hair on Ella's arms.
‘The roach.’
Ella put a hand on Luca’s shoulder. ‘Rewind that. Turn the volume up.’
Luca cranked the volume to the max then skipped the feed back a few seconds.
‘Mr. Finch? I’m here about the roach.’
Something cold and sharp lodged in Ella's chest. The voice oozed charm and menace in equal measure, like honey-coated razorblades.
‘Of course. Come in. Mr. Jones, was it?’
‘Yes. Call me Peter.’
'God damn,' Ella breathed. 'This is how he's getting close to his vices. He's posing as a buyer.'
‘Peter Jones. Fake name?’ asked Reeves.
‘Definitely, but run it through the system anyway.’
‘Can I take your coat? And your bag?’
'I'll keep it if you don't mind.'
Luca said, ‘His bag. Probably what he brought the tools in.’
Ella strained her ears and kept her eyes glued to the feed. She prayed for some movement that wasn’t on six legs.
‘You don't get color like that in captive-bred specimens.’
‘You must be very proud.’
Ella's throat closed up. Pride. That's what killed Eleanor Calloway too. Pride in her dolls, in her perfect little sanctuary. And now pride had Alfred Finch by the throat, leading him to slaughter like a lamb who thought the butcher just wanted to admire his wool.
‘I'm eager to see the roach, if you don't mind.’
Alfred's reply bubbled with the enthusiasm of a man who didn't know he was talking to his executioner. ‘Of course. I'll get it from my study. Please, make yourself comfortable.’
The voices continued their duet but Ella’s was already three steps ahead, mapping out the violence to come. Conversations like this probably happened in auction houses every day, except this one was about to end in blood and industrial-grade nails through human flesh. Beside her, Detective Reeves had gone still.
Then Alfred screamed.
The sound hit like a sledgehammer to the spine. Ella's hands clenched into fists. The breeding room remained empty on screen but that howl of pure animal terror carved itself into her memory, filed away with all the other sounds that visited her at 3 AM when sleep wouldn't come. Ella, Luca, and Reeves stared at row after row of glass boxes while their keeper died just out of frame.
Thuds followed. Then another muted scream.
‘Christ in heaven,’ Reeves said.
Luca removed his hand from the keyboard, like he was scared to touch it. ‘That was it. The moment he struck.’
Ella tried to picture it. The tightening of the garrote and the slow descent of Alfred Finch into the black. The timestamp read 6:07 PM. Seven minutes from arrival to homicide.
More thuds came. Something heavy being dragged. The sounds of a murderous perfectionist at work.
Reeves clutched the edge of the table and said, ‘No sign of him in that room, but…’
‘Keep skipping ahead,’ Ella interrupted. Her voice sounded strange, like it was coming from the bottom of a very deep well. ‘He’d inspect the house once the owner was dead, not before. Serial killers relish the violation.’
Luca skipped ahead in five second intervals. Minutes blurred past, each one empty as the last. Nothing but tanks full of sleeping insects and the soft hum of climate controls keeping them alive.
6:20 PM.
6:35 PM.
7:00 PM.
Ella was about to suggest they'd read this wrong, that their killer was smart enough to avoid the one room with a camera.
But then the door swung open, and her soul tried to evacuate through her feet.
No one in the room spoke. All three of them stared at the grainy figure that had walked into Alfred Finch’s breeding room, then abruptly halted two feet inside.
He entered like he owned the place. Like he'd bought and paid for every inch with the blood still cooling next door. He was tall, well-built under an expensive suit that hung wrong on his frame, like a wolf trying to squeeze into sheep's clothing. In one hand, he carried what looked like a giant, preserved spider in a wooden box.
But the face.
Or lack thereof.
‘What the f….’ Luca began.
A mask covered the killer's entire head like some biomechanical nightmare. Compound eyes bulged from a segmented shell and reflected the room’s green lights in fractured patterns. Articulated mandibles jutted below.
The killer was wearing a cockroach's head scaled up to human size.
‘Is that an… insect mask?’ stuttered Reeves.
Ella didn’t respond. Couldn’t respond. Because she was lost in thought, wondering what kind of perp would dress themselves in an insect mask to pin an insect collector to a wall in his own home. What was the point? He’d already shown the victim his face. There was no risk of anyone else seeing him, and a mask like that would draw more attention than not wearing a mask.
After five seconds of standing in the doorway, the bizarre insect-man turned and left the room.
Five seconds, but those five seconds had turned Ella's understanding of this case inside out.
She stared at the empty room on the screen while she cataloged the details. Two collectors, killed and slotted into their own collections. That cultured voice dripping with false warmth. A mask that had no practical purpose. The careful stagings. A trophy doll taken from one scene, a trophy spider from the other.
Luca slowly spun on his chair. ‘Ell, what the hell kind of killer is this?’
She replayed the sequence of events over and over in her head. Different tableaus but the same underlying signature - turning collectors into pieces of their own collections.
Then something clicked in her brain. She found a connection she didn’t know was there.
‘I don’t know, but I do know one thing.’
Luca eyeballed her. ‘And that is?’
Their killer wasn't just collecting victims. He was trying to join their world. To become part of something that fascinated him but remained forever out of reach.
This was transformation.
‘I think our killer is very, very lonely.’