Page 29 of Girl, Sought

Luca slipped out. Ella barely noticed. She was back in the labyrinth, following the thread. Seeing patterns in the murder, the dolls, the bugs. She glanced back at the whiteboard and let it speak its peace. The story was there, albeit buried in crazy. A killer who took a piece of his victims’ worlds, made it his own and stitched their obsessions into his skin like a deranged quilt.

It made sense. It didn't make sense. Ella's head ached with the contradiction.

She settled in for a long night of digital archeology, because behind that bizarre insect mask was the face of a serial killer who lived somewhere in this city. She wasn’t quitting until she found him.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Two hours of deep diving and Ella had jack squat to show for it. Eleanor Calloway and Alfred Finch might as well have lived on different planets for all their lives overlapped.

Two collectors. Two obsessions. A whole lot of nothing between them.

Eleanor's digital footprint read like a monk's diary. Weekly grocery runs to Food Lion. Utility bills paid ahead of schedule. The occasional splurge at antique shops and vintage stores. No gym memberships, no streaming services, no hefty bar tabs. The woman had lived her life in a pre-internet bubble.

Alfred Finch walked a different path entirely. Academic conferences in cities Ella had to Google. Research grants. Publishing royalties from papers with titles like ‘Breeding Patterns in Rare Scarabaeidae Species.’ Monthly donations to entomological societies she'd never heard of. The man had built his whole identity around insects, from the specialized equipment he imported to the custom-designed breeding room where his killer's voice had first leaked through those speakers. His life seemed to rotate around dead things that crawled.

Their paths should have crossed somewhere in this collector's paradise of a town, but the digital trail said otherwise. Their orbits had never intersected. Not once. Not at coffee shops or gas stations or anywhere else in Chesapeake's tangled web of commerce.

Two obsessives living in their own little worlds. The only thing they had in common was the way they died.

Ella had also searched for preserved cockroaches for sale and found nothing. She’d dug deep and pretty much hit every result withSaltoblattella montistabularisin the meta-data and come up empty. Wherever platform Alfred Finch had been selling his precious roach through – and the same platform through which his killer had contacted him – wasn’t easily discoverable on the surface web.

Night pressed against the window. Ella’s coffee had gone cold hours ago and congealed into something that now looked like motor oil. The precinct had emptied out and left behind that peculiar silence that came with government buildings after hours.

Ella's eyes felt like someone had taken sandpaper to them. She glanced at her whiteboard, where her earlier scrawls looked like something out of a psych ward. Red lines connected victims to theories, theories to question marks, questions to more damn questions. Luca had pinned up a screenshot from Finch's security footage - their bug-masked killer frozen mid-performance.

A soft snore dragged her attention across the desk. Luca had finally surrendered to gravity, his head pillowed on a stack of files thick enough to choke a horse. One arm dangled toward the floor like a broken wing. He'd made a valiant effort, bless him. Matched her cup for cup, brain wave for brain wave. But even Luca had his limits.

‘Hawkins.’ When he didn't stir, she reached across and flicked his ear like she used to do back when they were just partners without all these complicated boundaries between them. ‘Time to rejoin the living.’

Luca jerked awake with the particular confusion of someone who didn't remember falling asleep. ‘What? I'm awake. I was just resting my eyes.’

‘Sure you were. And I'm the Queen of England.’

‘Your Majesty.’ He scrubbed his face with both hands. ‘They have a King now. Not a Queen.’

‘Tell England I said sorry.’

Luca squinted at his watch. ‘Come on, Ell. Let's go to the motel. We'll be no good to anyone if we're exhausted.’

The suggestion hit a nerve she didn't want to examine. Sleep meant letting go, and letting go meant giving their killer more time to plan his next performance. ‘I just need another hour. I've almost cracked-’

‘No, you haven't.’ His voice had that edge she knew too well, the one that meant he was about to go full mother hen on her. ‘You've been saying that for hours. You’ve heard of the sleep debt, haven’t you?’

‘The what?’

Luca looked into his coffee cup then decided against drinking it. ‘The difference between the amount of sleep you need and the amount you actually get. If you need eight hours but only get five, you’ve got a sleep debt of three hours.’

‘And?’

‘Every hour is a week off your life.’

Ella cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘You made that last part up.’

'Yeah, I did, but the point remains. You don't want to die at 35, do you? We can go to the motel and watch trash TV about ghosts or aliens.'

And there it was - the fundamental difference between them laid bare in one casual suggestion. Luca could compartmentalize. Could step away from the horror show and recharge his batteries. Could pretend, just for a few hours, that they weren't hunting a man who turned people into pieces of his collection.

Ella couldn't. Murder cases lived in her head and took up space that should've been reserved for normal human functions like sleeping and eating and maintaining something resembling a life outside of the Bureau. Part of her envied his ability to step away and compartmentalize the darkness into neat little boxes. Her brain didn't come with an off switch. Never had.

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