An exhausted Evelyn draped herself across the sofa and let her legs dangle over the armchair. She had been out all night, doing who knew what, and returned smelling of cigar smoke and sweat. Her usually luscious hair hung limply as she swept it away from her neck.

  I’d deciphered the entire journal by hand. Fifty loose leaf pages of handwritten notes lay strewn across the coffee table. I massaged my sore wrist and rubbed my tired eyes. I wished I had never read the contents of the warped diary, but I also couldn’t look away from the terrible words. I drew a page toward me and read aloud:

  “‘The pleasure of hating runs deep and swift,’” I said. “‘It is a violent yet invigorating adrenaline rush. I cannot stem this flow of satisfaction, not when the climax is so desperately rewarding.’”

  I flipped the page over and continued on to the next paragraph as Evelyn’s contempt grew visible in the lines around her mouth and eyes.

  “‘She screamed and begged for mercy,’” I read on in a monotone. “‘Like the others, she slammed her fists against the walls and pleaded for her life. God, they’re so fragile, aren’t they? Each one always puts on a tough front—all these feminists off to fight the patriarchy—but when faced with certain death, they are reduced to the truth of their existence. She was inferior. A cat in a cage, only cunning when the situation allowed it.’”

  Evelyn covered her eyes, though it looked like what she really wanted to do was plug her ears. “I didn’t ask for the read-through.”

  My fist shook, and I relinquished the page before the urge to destroy it consumed me. I wanted to throw the journal off the balcony and fire a shotgun after it. I wanted to stuff it into a box with a live grenade and watch it explode. I wanted to bury it in the earth and suffocate the horrible ideas the writer had enclosed in the pages. And I wanted the writer to feel every prick of pain, every note of panic, and every last breath that the women in these pages had felt before he killed them.

  “There are no names,” I said bitterly, using my foot to cast the journal to the floor so I wouldn’t have to look at it anymore. “He must have known someone else might decode it. He doesn’t mention any of the women by name or describe their looks in any detail.”

  “You found the decoder ring in Wolf’s penthouse, right?” Evelyn asked. “Does that mean he did these things?”

  I framed my face with my palms and squeezed, using the pressure to calm the roar of rage that surfaced every time I read a passage from the journal. “The evidence points that way, but it doesn’t make sense. Wolf’s disease makes it nearly impossible for him to drag unconscious women around. He doesn’t have the strength or the stamina.”

  “He could be faking it.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “He has trouble standing and walking, and his skin is strangely elastic.”

  “Maybe he has an accomplice,” Evelyn suggested next. “Someone to do the grunt work for him so he can enjoy the effects of his labor unencumbered. Nothing in that journal says he’s the one who kidnapped and carried the girls to a secluded location. He could have hired someone else to do it.”

  “Megan Hollows had been tortured,” I reminded her. “She had a variety of wounds.”

  “Could have been defensive.”

  “She had been defending herself for days then.” I stood up, walked to the kitchen, and filled the kettle. When such chilling details came to light, it was helpful to have something warm on hand to soothe the soul. “By the time she fell, she was bruised and beaten from head to toe.”

  “That’s another thing that nails Wolf,” Evelyn said. “Megan fell from a great height. The penthouse is over thirty stories up.”

  “The glass walls around the balcony are too high for someone to jump from or be pushed off,” I said. “She would have needed a stool to get over the edge.”

  “I don’t suppose you saw anything that could have been used as a stool in the penthouse.”

  I dug through my mental images of Wolf’s suite, but nothing came to mind. Everything he owned served a purpose, and the minimalist style of his living quarters didn’t support a murderer’s hobbies.

  Evelyn took a whiff of her own armpit. “Bloody hell, is that me? I desperately need a shower.”

  Feigning disinterest, I pulled the whistling kettle off the small stove. “Where were you last night anyway? Hooking up with some hot city slicker?”

  Grinning, Evelyn gathered her oily hair and secured it in a messy knot at the top of her head. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “I would,” I agreed. “That’s why I asked. I can’t imagine Marie has you running wedding errands all night long.”

  “The wedding preparations are pretty much finished,” Evelyn admitted. In a sour tone, she added, “It’s almost as if we didn’t have to be here three weeks before the actual wedding date. What a waste of everyone’s time.”

  Acutely aware of Evelyn’s diversion tactics, I leaned against the counter and fixed her with a stare over the lip of my mug. “So if you weren’t doing wedding stuff, where were you?”

  “Do you ever get tired of playing investigator?” she asked lightly, drumming her fingers against her thick quad. “You ask more questions than my mother.”

  “Questions that you’re avoiding the answers to.”

  Evelyn’s lips tweaked in a smirk. “If you must know, I did hook up with a hot city slicker last night.”

  “Oh, really. Who?”

  She shrugged and looked away. “Someone I met in a bar. Doesn’t matter now. I’ll never see them again.”

  If she was lying, I couldn’t tell. I closed my eyes and let the steam from my tea waft across my face. The warm chamomile leaves unfurled, their arms reaching upward to fill my nose with their subtle scent.

  “You should get some sleep,” Evelyn advised. “If you’ve been reading that journal all night, it’s bound to be affecting you.”

  So I ambled up to the loft for a nap.

  A door snapped shut in the hallway, waking me from a trance. I lifted my feet from the sofa, but wait… hadn’t I been sleeping upstairs in the loft?

  Our room opened to the corridor, as if the wall meant to keep the suite private from the rest of the hotel had been demolished while I slept. Everything was positioned in a slightly different place than usual. The kettle lay upside down. My toothbrush stood on its tip, balanced on the corner of the coffee table. Evelyn’s owl-shaped locket dangled from the chandelier, rotating slowly. I reached for the locket, but the gold burned white-hot. I drew away, sweating.

  A beautiful woman in the hallway captured my attention: Angelica. She walked from her room, wearing the Saint Angel complimentary satin robe that hung in every room and holding an empty ice bucket. She nodded and smiled to an invisible being, then continued on to the vending room. The walls became transparent, so I could watch as she fit the bucket into the ice machine and pressed the button.

  The ice machine whirred loudly, but nothing came out of the dispenser. Angelica whacked the flat of her palm against the side of the machine and tried again. Still no luck.

  “Need some help?”

  The garbled voice did not belong to anyone in particular. In fact, it belonged to everyone at once. It was low and high, husky and smooth, masculine and feminine, all at the same time.

  Angelica moved aside for her helper to try the machine. A shadowy figure stepped into the vending room. It shifted the ice machine to the side.

  “What are you doing?” Angelica asked.

  “Helping,” replied the unknown entity.

  The shadow looked up, through the walls, and stared straight at me. It had no face, only a gaping mouth that dripped with blood.

  My eyelids flew open. The loft was dark. I lay on top of the bed covers, wearing the same satin robe that Angelica had been abducted in. The silkiness of the fabric against my skin made me queasy. I cast off the robe and threw it into a pile on the floor as I tried to separate the dream from reality.

  It was dark and cold. Evelyn, who usually adjusted the temperature before we went to sleep, was not there. I checked the time. It was ten o’clock at night. I had slept the entire day.

  The details of the nightmare slipped away, like water running out of cupped hands. Shivering, I put on one of Evelyn’s oversized thermal shirts and ventured into the hallway. I traced Angelica’s path from her room that night.

  In the vending room, I pressed the button for ice. The machine dispensed a few cubes then made an awful clanging racket. When I pressed the button again, the motor whirred, but no ice fell out.

  I braced my shoulder against the machine and pushed. It scraped a few inches across the floor, revealing a piece of the wall behind it. The thick plug for the machine had shifted, falling halfway out of the outlet. Instinctively, I pulled the plug out entirely.

  The outlet covering, not secured with any screws, popped off the wall. I knelt and peered into the electric box, using my phone light to see past the wires. A small black button looked out of place. Hoping to avoid electrocution, I eased my finger into the box and hit the button.

  A pneumatic hiss of air released as a section of the wall depressed and slid out of place. Heart pounding, I shined the light into the darkness. It reflected off a shiny metal chute.

  I heard Evelyn’s voice in my head: Don’t do it, Jack.

  Yet, I couldn’t stop myself from clambering through the opening and sitting at the edge of the chute. I dangled my legs against the slippery metal but kept hold of the edge to stop myself from sliding. It wasn’t too late to turn back.

  I let go.

  A yelp of surprise escaped my throat, but the ride was surprisingly short. I sped down the chute like a child on a playground slide. After a quick drop, I landed softly.

  I clambered out of an industrial-sized laundry basket full of stale sheets, dusted my pants, and looked around. I’d come to a service room with a shallow ceiling. A large washer and dryer occupied one corner of the room, but they were covered in thick layers of dust and hadn’t been used in years. Old mini fridges were stacked in the opposite corner.

  I wandered out of the first room and into the hallway. In my head, I envisioned the blueprints from the Saint Angel’s in-house museum. The chute behind the ice machine must have led me to the thirteenth floor, which didn’t exist to the Saint Angel’s guests.

  This floor, it appeared, had once been dedicated to maintaining the Saint Angel, but fell into disuse in recent years. The broken machines, dusty linens, and piles of expired non-perishable room service items were evidence of that. The space seemed mostly devoted to storage.

  I wandered through the maze of the thirteenth floor, glancing through everything. The space spanned the entire length and width of the building. One open area was long enough to have a solid game of catch, but the low ceiling might have gotten in the way of that. If I reached up, the tips of my fingers brushed the highest point.

  When I peered into another storage room, my ribs clenched around my lungs. Personal belongings—luggage, bags, outerwear—overloaded the shelves and floor space. I spotted a familiar suitcase, light pink with a flowery name tag. Next to it rested a purple purse and a small carry-on bag. As my stomach inched into my throat, I crossed the room and flipped over the suitcase tag to see the name.

  Angelica Taylor.

  My vision clouded as a rush of adrenaline poured through me. I unzipped the suitcase and briefly shuffled through the items inside to confirm what I already knew. There was Angelica’s monogrammed bathroom bag and cheap phallic-shaped beads from Marie’s bachelorette party. In her purse, I found her phone, the battery dead, and her wallet with all her IDs and credit cards.

  I moved on to the next set of belongings. The suitcase was full of unique designer swimsuits and business cards with Megan Hollows’s information and Instagram handle printed on them.

  As expected, the remaining items belonged to the other missing women of Chicago: Britney Fielden, Bianca Mitchell, and Hannah Peterson. Another purse and jacket went unnamed, but I’d bet anything they belonged to Luis’s younger sister.

  It appeared the police had failed to acquire one essential piece of information regarding the missing women: they had all stayed at the Saint Angel the night they disappeared.

  I fumbled for my phone and dialed a number that I’d programmed into my favorites list. My blood boiled and my stomach surged as the other line rang.

  “This is Detective Kate Arnold.”

  “Kate, it’s Jacqueline Frye,” I said. “I’ve got something for you.”

  Her desk chair squeaked as she straightened up. “What?”

  “Evidence.” I stared glumly at the baggage around me. “Lots of evidence.”

  “Frye, where are you?”

  “At the Murder Castle.”

  15

  When Kate returned from the thirteenth floor, to which I’d found a readily-accessible yet concealed staircase, she did not sport the triumphant expression I’d expected. Rather, she looked tired and pale, and the weight of her job forced her shoulders to curl in toward one another.

  “Well?” I prompted.

  The police had kept me away from the floor below, but I hadn’t been able to return to my room. Stuck in between useful and useless, I’d paced along the fourteenth floor hallway until Kate came back to deliver the news.

  “Nothing,” she said.

  My shoulders slumped, matching hers. “Nothing? You’ve got to be kidding. All their stuff is there!”

  “We’re taking the luggage as evidence.” Kate wiped sweat from her brow. “Maybe we can pull some DNA off one of the items, but there’s no sign of the missing women. Not a drop of blood, sweat, hair. Nothing. The sicko must have had his fun somewhere else.”

  “You swept the basement?” I pressed. “You checked all the hidden passages I told you about?”

  A radio on Kate’s belt blared. She turned the volume down. “My team’s still down there, but they’re coming up short too. This place may be built like Holmes’s Murder Castle, but I’m not seeing gas chambers, a crematorium, or the killer’s workshop. These passageways were most likely built because of Prohibition, not because some jerk wanted to kidnap and confuse women.”

  “Regardless, someone’s using them for that purpose,” I said. “You can’t ignore the signs. A private staircase leads up to the penthouse, and I found a hidden room in Jonathan’s—”

  Kate lifted a brow as I cut myself off. “You were in Jonathan Godfrey’s penthouse?”

  I held my tongue, but Kate wasn’t stupid.

  “How’d you get up there?” she asked casually. “Private staircase?”

  “The front desk gave me a key card,” I reminded her. “I had access.”

  “Presumably, that key card was supposed to be for Pearl Godfrey. How did you get it?”

  I looked at my feet. “She dropped it.”

  “So you broke in.” Kate, to my utter shock, laughed and shook her head. “Man, I’ve never met a private investigator like you before. Anyway, what about this hidden room?”

  I cautiously made eye contact with her. “Wait, that’s it? You’re not going to arrest me for breaking and entering?”

  She shrugged. “You technically didn’t break anything. We’ll chalk it up to investigative purposes. Tell me what you found.”

  “A padded room,” I said. “The entrance is in the wall between the door that adjoins the two suites. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never find it.”

  “You found it.”

  “I knew what to look for,” I said.

  Kate counted on her fingers. “So we’ve got a dead rich dude, the missing women’s gear, secret passageways, and a kinky padded room. What’s it add up to? Theories?”

  “Wolf Godfrey,” I sighed. “It’s the only thing that makes sense. He’s known as an eccentric loner, and he lives at the Saint Angel. He knows this building better than anyone else. Maybe he’s been feeding his Holmes obsession by seducing women who stay here.”

  “Evidence?”

  “He tried it with me,” I replied. “He took me to lunch and paid for everything. Told me his whole sad story and tried to pit me against Jonathan. Then he showed me his penthouse, but he freaked out when Jonathan showed up.”

  Kate pushed her tongue into her cheek. “What happened after?”

  “Wolf shoved me into the secret passageway so Jonathan wouldn’t see me.” I crossed my arms and paced across the short width of the hallway. “Jonathan repeatedly said his father was a liar. Maybe he knew too much about Wolf’s hobbies. Maybe that’s why he killed him.”

  “Got a few problems with that theory,” Kate bluntly pointed out. “First of all, by Jonathan’s account, Wolf was out drinking the night of Megan’s murder. Second, I’ve been neck deep in Wolf’s medical reports. He’s in no condition to lug dead bodies around.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. “But what if he’s working with someone? Maybe his partner kidnapped Megan while Wolf was out. That way, Wolf had an alibi.”

  “Is there any record that Wolf was gambling that night?” Kate asked. “Did you check with the casino he reportedly visited? Ask for their security footage?”

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood. “It didn’t occur to me to do that. I took Jonathan’s word.”

  Kate clicked her tongue. “In this business, you can never take anyone’s word.” She clapped my shoulder. “That’s okay. You’re new at this. Don’t beat yourself up about it. What else ya got for me?”

  The cipher ring burned a hole in my pocket. Kate might have been cool with me using the key card to get into Wolf’s suite, but she probably wouldn’t feel the same way about my thievery.

  “I decoded the rest of the journal,” I said. “It’s more of the same. The writer brags about his conquests and compares them to Holmes’s crimes.”

  “I’ll need the journal,” Kate said. “Maybe we can match the handwriting to someone else’s.”

  “Sure. No problem.”

  For once, I didn’t care about handing my hard-won evidence to the police. The journal wasn’t giving out any more clues, and I didn’t want it near me anymore.

 

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