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Ella”s heart rate reached dangerous levels as she burst into the evidence locker with Luca hot on her heels. The room was a claustrophobe”s nightmare: cinderblock walls and metal shelves crammed with the detritus of a thousand broken lives.

And there, squatting in the middle, was the wheelchair. The same damn chair their unsub had used to cart Harry Shepherd”s corpse to his final resting place

Ella circled it like a shark tasting blood. This thing was the key, the loose thread that could unravel this whole mess. But only if it gave up the goods, spilled its secrets like a stool pigeon under the hot lights.

‘What”s the word, Chief?’ she asked, trying to keep the hungry tremble out of her voice. ‘Tell me the lab jockeys found something juicy on this hunk of junk. A partial print, a hair fiber, anything.’

Harland just shook his head, jerked his thumb at a nearby table. ‘Nothing on the chair. But take a gander at what was tucked in the seat pocket.’

Ella wheeled around, zeroed in on the plastic baggie laying there like an accusation. Inside was a length of wire, black and sleek and coiled like a snake ready to strike. She snatched it up, squinting through the plastic.

Some kind of cable. Nylon coating stretched tight over copper guts, the end a spiky mess of frayed fibers. Like it”d been ripped from its other half, an electronic umbilical snipped too soon.

A spasm shot through Ella”s guts as the penny dropped. The vic”s neck wounds. The doc babbling about PVC and pressure. This was it. This was the garrote, the murder weapon. This unassuming little length of wire had choked the life out of two – no, three – people. Bitten into their flesh like a starving dog on a bone.

‘Son of a bitch,’ she breathed.

Luca sidled up beside her. ‘What? What is it?’

Ella”s gaze never left the cable. She tilted it, watching the light play off the ravaged end. ‘Our murder weapon. Has to be. The freak used this to garrote them. Archie, Georgia, Harry. All of them.’

Her partner snapped his fingers. ‘The coroner said there were nylon tracings around the victims’ necks. This must be what our killer used to strangle them. An electrical cord.’

She held it up to the light, squinting at the smudged letters printed along its length. ‘What the hell is a Midas Pro?’

‘A Midas Pro?’ Luca asked. ‘That’s a microphone cable. The high-end stuff.’

Ella shot him a look, something stirring in her mind, something hazy but visible. ‘A microphone cable?’

‘Yeah. Singer in my old band swore by them.’

The world tilted, lurched. Ella felt like she”d just stepped off a cliff, plunging headlong into the abyss of epiphany. The clues whirled through her brain in a maelstrom of disparate data points. The mask. The pillory stocks. The strangulation. The microphone cable.

It all slotted together like the tumblers in Satan”s lock.

She lunged for the evidence table, scrabbling for the bag with the shattered mask. Ripped it open with trembling hands, latex snapping as she jammed on a pair of gloves.

‘Ella? The hell are you doing?’ Luca sounded miles away, tinny and distant.

She ignored him, already spreading the shards out on the tabletop. Sorting them, arranging them, trying to make order from chaos. It was a jigsaw from hell, all jagged edges and mocking frowns. A curve here, a jutting shard there. The ghost of a frown, a slit for a mocking mouth.

She felt possessed, consumed. A madwoman on a mission, the need to know burning through her like a fever. The mask fought her, pieces slipping and sliding under her frantic fingers. But slowly, surely, it took shape. A face swam into focus, cracked and crazed as a funhouse mirror.

There. It wasn”t perfect, wasn”t complete. But it was enough. Enough to see the shape of it, the specter rising from the fragments like Lazarus shambling free of his tomb.

Ella straightened up. Took a step back, a strange calm settling over her. The calm of absolute, undeniable certainty.

‘Guys,’ she said, quiet as the grave and twice as deadly. ‘I think our unsub is a comedian.’