Page 26 of Girl, Sought

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 thannotwearing 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.’

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The spider wouldn't sit right.

For twenty minutes now, he'd been adjusting its position in the glass cabinet. A millimeter left made it look off-center. A millimeter right made it loom too much over Margaret. The doll watched his efforts with those arsenic-laced eyes, probably judging his inability to get this one simple thing right. Story of his life.

His hands shook as he opened the cabinet again. The tremors hadn't stopped since Alfred Finch's house. Adrenaline crash, maybe. Or possibly the four cups of coffee he'd mainlined since getting home. He’d been tempted by whiskey, but in preparation for this operation, he’d learned that alcohol was best avoided until everything was complete.Disorganized offendersutilized alcohol for the pre-murder confidence boost and post-murder celebration. He needed neither, because if there was one thing he did well, it was organization.

He went back to his fast-growing collection. His stomach burned but he couldn't sleep yet. The display had to be perfect.

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