Page 32 of Girl, Sought

‘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 searcheverything.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.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Ella's world had narrowed to the glowing screen in front of her, where a specialized reverse-image search algorithm was about to earn its taxpayer funding.

She'd loaded every angle of Alfred Finch's prized roach into the software. Each photo showed the same unfortunate specimen -Saltoblattella montistabularis, now reduced to fragments in an evidence bag. The crime scene photographers had captured it from multiple angles before collection, so she had plenty of source material to work with.

Somewhere in the vast digital ocean, there had to be a trace. No collector worth his salt would try to sell something this rare without proper documentation. Pictures were the currency of the collecting world - proof of authenticity, condition, provenance. Their killer had found Alfred Finch somehow, had seen this exact specimen advertised somewhere.

Across the room, Luca stood at the whiteboard like a man trying to decode ancient hieroglyphics. Her scrawled notes from last night's caffeine-fueled theorizing session covered every inch of available space. Red lines connected victims to theories, masks to motives, collectors to their collections. To anyone else, it probably looked like the work of a beautiful mind gone wrong.

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