Chapter 1
TEDDY
The only motel in Bellmour, Missouri, has water pressure like a leaky garden hose and a coffee maker that smells faintly of mildew.
I've stayed in worse. I've stayed in better.
After eighteen months of bouncing between field offices and motels that charge by the hour, I've stopped having opinions about beds.
The window faces east. That's all I needed.
From the second-floor balcony, past the dumpster and the cracked asphalt of the parking lot, I can see the Ferris wheel turning above the tree line, the red, gold, and blue lights. The carnival sits in the fairground on the edge of town, and at night, the whole thing looks like a fever dream.
The Seven Sins Carnival. Cute name.
I drop into the desk chair and flip open my laptop.
The contents of the case file have been sitting in the same arrangement on the spare bed for three days now—printouts fanned across the comforter, a yellow legal pad I've filled and re-filled with the same names, the same dates, the same dead ends.
Six adult men, six small towns, six disappearances spaced over years.
Different states. Different jurisdictions.
Different sheriffs who all sound the same on the phone.
Nobody noticed because nobody was supposed to. Or they weren't allowed to.
John Fields in Iowa—widowed, lived alone, ran a feed supply business with a quiet IRS problem. Last job was selling food to a carnival menagerie. Gone four days before his sister called it in.
Abel Hawthorne in Indiana—retired pastor. Pastor. That one made me sit up. Two prior allegations sealed because the diocese paid. Carnival had been in his town the week he vanished.
Three more like that. A Missouri rancher with a domestic charge that never stuck. An Ohio judge whose name showed up in a custody scandal nobody ran. A Kentucky businessman with two daughters who'd both filed restraining orders by twenty.
Then number six. Logged last month. Ezekiel Moore. Same shit as the rest of them. Respectable church-going community member. His wife, Mary, reported him missing days after a carnival left town.
I've thought of nothing but the Sanctum of Ash for over three years.
Two years where Quantico finished the polish on a man the military and the Secret Service already shined to a high gloss.
Then a year and a half of chasing my tail.
Governor Langford pulled every string he had to put me on the cult, and I have repaid the favor with a stack of dead ends tall enough to lean on.
Somebody's been killing off these so-called Prophets. Slowly. Carefully. The pattern's there if you squint. I've been staring at them for years, and every time I got close, the trail just stopped. Like somebody knew I was coming and put the dishes away.
This is the first time it hasn't. Someone at HQ gave me something I can actually work with. Missing men and towns visited by this particular carnival.
I pour the bad coffee, take a sip, set it back down. Poke the laptop awake.
The corporate filings load slowly on cheap motel Wi-Fi. Seven Sins Entertainment, LLC. There are only two names on every document, every license application, every insurance binder, every permit pulled in every county the carnival's set up: Elias Vale and Silas Crowley.
That's it. Two signatures. Two men running a multi-state operation with a payroll big enough to need a real accountant, and they've decided the paperwork stops at them.
I run the names. I've run the names before. I run them again because that's what you do at ten at night in a motel when you've already eaten the diner's grilled cheese and you're not going to sleep anytime soon.
Elias Vale. No record before the aughts. Social security number issued late—he was almost an adult. He has a Nevada driver's license. His tax returns are clean. His credit history sounds like he was born at twenty with a checking account and a business plan.
Silas Crowley. Same pattern. Same year, more or less.
Maybe they'd go unnoticed if it weren't for a governor's daughter named Basia Langford getting a stalker named David, who wouldn't shut up about a place called the Sanctum.
If it weren't for a hacker named Ethan Kane, who uncovered a whole bunch of kids popping up all over the place around the same time with no birth certificates.
I lean back. Crack my neck. Look out the window at the wheel.
Could've been a coincidence. But we have missing men. And two ghosts running the carnival that was in town for every disappearance.
I pull up what I have on the traveling carnival.
The Seven Sins website is gorgeous, and you can buy a ticket online in about four clicks, but you cannot for the life of you find a face on the about us page.
The performers are masked in every promotional image.
Stunning, elaborate, creepy masks. I still don't know the faces underneath.
I've been here three days. On day two, I parked the rental at the far end of the fairground lot in the afternoon, blended with the families coming in for the early shows, walked the main path with a corn dog in one hand, and marked attractions.
The layout's pretty typical. Big Top in the center, mirror maze to the north, fortune teller off the main drag in a tent that smells like cloves from twenty feet away.
The Ferris wheel and the carousel anchor the south end.
There's a perimeter of food stalls. Behind all of it is the staff area—trailers in neat rows, fenced off, private.
The keyboard's getting warm under my hands as I work, scrolling through the spreadsheet.
I cross-reference the carnival's tour schedule against the disappearance dates.
Six for six. The first one I could write off.
The second, I could call a coincidence. By the third, I'd have wanted to know why the locals weren't already on it.
And that's the part that keeps me up at night. If these were normal men, I'd have a serial case and a task force and a media circus by now. But all of these disappearances got suppressed by someone with a hell of a lot of clout. I'm lucky they got spotted and brought to my attention at all.
I shut the laptop. Stand. Look at the lights coming from the fairgrounds. I can faintly hear the haunting music brought over by the breeze.
Surveillance from a distance only gets you so far. I've gotten what I'm going to get sitting in this motel. Just permits, plates, vague websites.
Tomorrow night, I'm getting closer. Tomorrow night, I'm watching the show.