CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ella clawed her way out of the dream like she was digging herself out of a grave.
Austin Creed's face floated in the darkness behind her eyelids; his crooked smile, that dead-eyed stare she'd dissected in court. Four bodies in the bayou. Four families who'd never sleep right again. Four reasons she'd helped send him to the needle.
She jerked awake with Louisiana swamp water in her lungs and December sunlight stabbing through cheap motel curtains. Her heart slammed against her ribs like it was trying to break parole.
The dream clung to her skin, sticky memories of a courtroom in New Orleans last month. She'd spent twenty minutes on the stand breaking down Austin Creed's psychology for the jury and helped secure him a death sentence. Now Austin Creed waited on death row while appeals crawled through the system. Justice served cold, with a side of state-sanctioned homicide.
Punish death with death. The math worked out clean on paper but left chalk dust on her conscience that wouldn't quite wash away. Was she any better than him, really? Just another actor in the same bloody play, only her violence came wrapped in badges and court orders.
Then reality crashed back like a hangover. Masks. Collections. Two dead bodies. It was nine AM according to the clock beside the bed, and the rain outside had finally taken a hike and left behind that particular smell of wet asphalt that meant morning in any city, anywhere.
She rolled over and reached for the solid warmth of Luca, but her fingers met empty sheets and cold indents where his body had been.
She sat up and found him hunched over his laptop at the rickety table by the window. Music leaked from his earbuds – probably that thrash metal he insisted helped him think. His fingers attacked the keyboard with the particular violence of someone who'd been up way too long.
‘Good morning, sunshine.’ He yanked out the earbuds and spun around in his chair.
‘ Sunshine is grounds for justifiable homicide in Virginia. What are you listening to?’
Luca checked his MP3 player. ‘Slayer. What about you?’
‘I’m listening to you listening to Slayer. How long have you been up?’
‘Since about seven. Brain wouldn't shut up about collector forums. Been digging through auction sites, buy and sell pages, anywhere Alfred might have listed that roach of his.’
The morning light caught the stubble on his jaw, reminding her of other mornings, other motel rooms, before they'd tried to put their relationship in neat little boxes labeled work and not work. ‘Find anything?’
‘Dead end. These sites are locked up tighter than Fort Knox. A lot of collector forums require credentials, and most listings aren't even cached on search engines because they're technically temporary pages. As soon as an item sells, poof-’ He made an exploding gesture with his hands. ‘Gone.’
Ella considered it. ‘But Alfred’s roach didn’t sell, right? Surely it was still active when the killer arrived at his door.’
‘I have no idea. All I know is that I can’t any listing for a Saltobla- whatever.’
Ella's temples began to throb. It was too goddamn early for this. ‘So our killer's hunting ground is basically invisible.’
‘Yeah, because not only that, but Chesapeake PD emailed us some bad news about an hour ago.’
'It's too early for bad news, but tell me anyway.'
‘ Apparently, our buddy Finch was living in the Stone Age. No cell phone, no personal computer.’
‘You’re kidding? But his credit card statements showed him buying things online?’
‘Yeah, but the logs show he was doing that stuff from his work computer. And he worked at the Virginia Museum of Natural History.’
Ella pressed her palms to her eyes. She knew exactly where this was headed. ‘And we can’t search his computer because it’s government property.’
‘Give the lady a prize.’
‘Ugh.’
‘Need to get the proper clearance, fill out about 17 forms, sacrifice a virgin to the IT gods. It could take weeks.’
'We don't have weeks.' Ella stood, and her legs protested the sudden vertical existence. 'Our guy's not done collecting. He's got a taste for it now.'
‘Got any bright ideas?’
‘Maybe.’ The gears in her head started turning, grinding through caffeine withdrawal and motel-bed stiffness. ‘I was watching some show about antiques last night.’
‘Really? Antiques? You?’
‘Well, it came on, and I didn’t turn the TV off.’
‘See?’ Luca said. ‘I told you. That’s how they keep the ratings up.’
‘That’s not my point at all. My point was that before anyone placed bids on these items, they all saw them.’
Luca's eyebrows did that thing where they tried to merge with his hairline. ‘What?’
‘They saw them. No one’s going to buy an item they’ve never seen. To sell, you gotta show.’
Luca sat back in his chair. ‘Are you okay? Did you have a stroke?’
She brushed past him and made a beeline for the scattered case files she'd left strewn beside the nightstand. Crime scene photos spilled out as she rifled through – Eleanor in her porcelain mask, Finch pinned like an insect specimen. And there, near the bottom of the stack – the roach. Shattered glass and a crumpled Latin label. The only thing out of place in Finch's perfectly curated collection room.
Ella snatched up the photo and waved it at Luca like a battle flag. ‘Here. This is how we find our killer's hunting ground.’
Luca squinted at the image, uncomprehending. ‘It's a dead bug. You got a forensic entomologist hidden in your back pocket?’
‘No. We just need to find that listing, then we can see who messaged Finch about the bug.’
‘Great. If only I hadn’t spent the last two hours doing just that.’
She jabbed a finger at the photo, at the glossy carapace of the roach. ‘You’re searching by text. Image searches will cover much more ground if we use our image-reverse software. It’ll search everything. Or anything that's not encrypted, at least. Personal emails, text messages. If a picture of that roach exists, it'll find it.'
‘You couldn’t have told me this last night?’
‘I thought we’d be able to search Finch’s computer. Since we can’t, we need to take the back door.’
Luca shut his laptop and jumped to his feet. ‘Then what are we waiting for? Let’s get to the precinct. Best not to use federal databases on hotel Wi-Fi.’
‘You read my mind.’
First, she needed coffee strong enough to strip paint. Then she'd show Luca exactly how their bug-masked friend might have found his way into Alfred Finch's world. Because every collector needed one thing before they could make a sale: pictures. And pictures left trails, if you knew where to look.
The game was about to change. Their killer just didn't know it yet.