“Miss Van Horn?”

That’s right. Use her name.

“Miss Van Horn? Detective McGowan here. I’m entering your living room now.”

Then: the living room, a narrow hall, a small office, a bathroom, a bedroom. All of it undecorated. McGowan would’ve guessed these walls had at least one framed picture of the team. A trophy on a bookshelf. A plaque, a ribbon, an award.

If there’s one thing Carla McGowan has learned through detective work, it’s that people display what they’re proud of. What they identify with. Who they are. Yet if she had to determine who Wanda Van Horn was by way of this illegal search, she’d say…

“I haven’t found it yet.”

Her eyes alight on the top of a set of basement stairs. The steps are carpeted, indicating finished space below.

McGowan waits. Listens.

Then she moves quietly to the top step, eyeing the distance to go.

At the carpeted bottom, already more color than anything up here. What looks like graffitied snakes upon gray brick walls. Words and names.

One of those:

Daphne.

McGowan steels herself. Keeps the gun chest-high.

She doesn’t announce that she’s coming down. Hardly breathes as the words on the wall get bigger, easier to read, and she sees Daphne’s name in full:

Daphne Vann.

It’s not even the name that chills her. That makes it suddenly hard for her to stay in this house. To not be out in the world, on the streets, in the homes of the remaining members of the basketball team.

Nor is it the black graffitied heart that harbors the monster’s name.

It’s the second name with it, bound by the + sign:

Wanda Vann.

“Wanda Van Horn,” McGowan says, unable to stop herself, even as she descends the steps, even as she sees more of the basement wall she approaches, even as the black snakes become something more like strands of black hair.

Wanda Vann

Daphne Vann

A simple thing to overlook. But it feels like the reason more than one girl has died in all this. It feels like McGowan was so blinded by her impatience, her duty, that she didn’t pay attention to the details of her job.

When she reaches the carpet, she already knows what she’s going to see. This wall and the one opposite it show the same tendrils of black hair, growing thicker, darker, as they head deeper into the basement, until they meet at the far wall, where the head and the face are painted with enough detail to scare McGowan stiff.

It’s Daphne. It’s a shrine to Daphne.

This is what Coach Wanda cares about.

“Christ…”

There aren’t many places for someone to hide down here, but McGowan keeps the gun up all the same. It takes a few seconds before she realizes she’s pointing the muzzle at the face itself, the giant features rendered in blue spray paint, as if the woman this basement is dedicated to is actually there, the distance of one Samhattan cellar away.