4

Are you fucking kidding me?” Atwood slammed his fist on the desk loud enough for everyone in the office to hear, heavy enough to topple a small glass of water. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he barked.

Standing in front of his boss with a vacant expression, Lester merely shook his head. He was wondering the same thing. Maybe his kids, his job, and his life had finally gotten to him, maybe it was The Masquerade, maybe he had just ceased to give a fuck.

Atwood brushed the empty glass to the floor before wiping his hand on the seat of his pants and dropping a sheet of paper on the spillage. He stared at the paper as the water slowly seeped into it, turning it translucent. Lester watched his boss’s face the whole time and noted, oddly, that he seemed to calm down. Eventually Atwood flopped back on his chair.

It was early morning and the room outside his office was buzzing with activity; tired, hung-over, and eager detectives sat at their desks or hot-footed it around the office, all pretending not to be staring, not to be trying their best to eavesdrop. Many of them couldn’t believe what was happening. They had seen their boss angry before, but not at Lester. He was an exemplary worker, the one who did everything by the book and never stepped out of line.

“Who do you think you are?” Atwood asked. There was malice in his question, but he spoke calmly, almost through gritted teeth.

“Excuse me, sir?”

“You heard me,” Atwood said. “And don’t call me sir. I know you don’t give a shit about me, about what I think and about the orders I give you. If you did, you wouldn’t have taken the piss out of me last night.”

Lester nodded politely and kept his attention fixed on the floor, where it had been for most of the morning. His boss had had an early start, and for most of that time, he had been trying to reach Lester, getting angrier and angrier. When Lester finally did show, ambling into work an hour late, Atwood was at his boiling point and had practically dragged Lester into his office.

Last night, when Lester was being shouted at and then ignored by his children, when his daughter was calling him worse than shit and his son was worrying he would die of embarrassment—if his friends didn’t get to him first—the police were called to Richard Mass’s house. When Annabelle and Damian were conspiring in Annabelle’s room, concocting a plan to run away from home, and while Lester was downstairs drowning his sorrows with a large bottle of blended scotch, Mass was telling the police everything that had happened, along with several things that hadn’t. When Annabelle and Damian were making plans to move out of town and stay with their grandmother, and when Lester was unconscious on the sofa, drooling like a sick dog, Atwood was waking to news that one of his detectives had gone rogue.

“You’re lucky,” Atwood told Lester, who didn’t feel very lucky at all. “Mass is an addict, a waste of space, and a liar. He is also the biggest idiot we’ve ever come across, and that’s what’s saved you from being locked up instead of him.”

Atwood couldn’t have been more correct in his assumption of Mass, but it was one that Lester had also made. In his anger and his disbelief, Mass had immediately phoned the police, telling them it was an emergency. He had hoped they would catch Lester before he left, giving him the satisfaction of watching the police arrest one of their own, but his haste had been his downfall. He didn’t have enough time to hide his drugs, nor did he have enough time to inform his friends he had invited the enemy to his door.

It began as a simple investigation, but it resulted in a raid involving several police vehicles and a forensics unit. They arrested Mass and a number of his friends, with many of them facing serious charges of possession and possession with intent to supply. Mass had also attempted to grow his own supply of cannabis, and while the product of that attempt was pathetic at best, it was still enough to add another tick to his rap sheet.

“What he says still has to be recorded,” Atwood warned. “I can disregard most of it, and I don’t think too many people will ask questions about that, but you’re still in deep shit.”

“I understand.”

“Do you though?” Atwood wondered. “I mean, why? Why did you do this? This job has been like a second home to you for over twenty years, this is your life now, why would you risk that?”

“Maybe that is why,” Lester said. “Maybe I’m tired. Maybe I’m sick of this.”

“Maybe?”

Lester shrugged. “Maybe it’s just because my kids hate me, my wife is dead, and I missed Eastenders last night. Maybe I don’t really know why.”

Atwood nodded slowly and then picked up a pen from his desk. He tapped it idly against his chin and then against his desk, watching it absently. “What do you want me to do?” he asked eventually, the pen now immobile.

“What do you mean?”

“With your job, Keats, with your fucking job.”

Lester smiled. “You could give me a raise.”

Atwood managed a half smile, his face twisted. It looked like he’d had a stroke during the point of orgasm. The expression was enough to wipe the smile from Lester’s face.

“I can’t keep you here,” Atwood said. “I think you need a break.”

“You’re suspending me?”

Atwood nodded and for the first time that morning, Lester felt a stab of panic. Not because he was losing his job, or because he would be going back to an empty house filled with nothing but pictures of times gone and all but forgotten, but because he was finally getting close to The Masquerade and he didn’t want to throw that away.

“Please, don’t.”

Atwood looked confused. “Pardon?”

“I know I fucked up, but I need this job.”

“You’re a strange one, Keats. First the blasé attitude, the ‘I don’t give a fuck’ expression that you’ve worn for weeks, and now this? What gives?”

Lester sighed. He hadn’t wanted to tell anyone about his theory until he had something more substantial than a feeling, but he sensed his chance would slip away if he didn’t open his mouth.

“It’s about The Masquerade, sir,” he began, bringing a half-smile to Atwood’s face as he grew more animated. “I have a theory that I want to test.”

“Go on.”

Lester sat on the end of Atwood’s desk, turning his half-smile into a brief look of revulsion, but Atwood was too intrigued to stop him.

“Do you remember the spree killer a few years ago, the kid who dressed up as Santa and—”

“Murdered a bunch of kids, set his house on fire. Of course I remember,” Atwood said slowly.

“Exactly,” Lester said. “There was no trace of him after that. Some assumed he died in the fire or killed himself some other way, but there was never any proof. They had him pinned as a loner, a spree killer getting revenge on the kids that had bullied him, so it made sense.”

“Okay.” Atwood shrugged. “What’s this got to do with The Masquerade?”

“Very little, truth be told.” Lester hopped off the desk and paced up and down in front of his boss, firing an accusing stare out of the office window as he did so, making sure that none of his nosy colleagues were listening in. “But I remembered something that the mother of three of the victims said. She said that when he killed her son and her husband, he sat down next to her and talked to her.”

“Where are you going with this?”

“She said he was bitter, cynical, that he hated the world and wanted the world to know it. She said he was also very intelligent for his age, but that she had never seen or heard anyone so twisted in her life.”

Atwood nodded. “And you think that this guy is The Masquerade, right? Because he talks to his victims?”

“Exactly.” Lester had stopped walking and was standing in front of his boss’s desk, taller and prouder than he had stood for a long time.

Atwood wasn’t convinced, but he didn’t fail to notice the detective’s manner or the look on his face. “You know that this doesn’t mean shit, right? These are killers, psychopaths—”

“—Sociopaths.”

“Whatever. They want to control their victims, they want that power, that dominance. They’re like Bond villains, only they actually go through with the murder.”

Lester nodded. “I understand that.”

“And these killings happened, what, one hundred miles apart?”

“Yes, but we don’t get that many sociopathic serial killers. It’s not farfetched to assume that Herman left town, got as far away as he could, laid low for a bit, and then resumed his work.”

Atwood paused for a moment and then asked, “And what if it is him? What does that mean, we still don’t know where he is. If Herman’s file is still open then we’re still looking for him anyway, what difference does it make?

“If we expose him then we strip away his mask, we take away the thing that has defined him. Then—” Lester shrugged. “I guess we just wait for him to make the next move and hope he fucks up.”

“He hasn’t put a foot wrong yet, what makes you think exposing his identity will make him do so?”

“Just a feeling, sir.”

Atwood nodded and then laughed a little. “This is fucking crazy,” he said. “But I’m with you on this. If you’re prepared to do the legwork, then you can investigate this. I’ll give you time off, let the men above me think I’m punishing you, and in that time I want you to investigate this Herman kid, see what you can dig up. How does that sound?”

Lester grinned from ear to ear. “Perfect.”