‘I can get someone to transcribe it for you. These guys—’ Vasquez gestures at the other desks, although they’re all empty ‘—they’re trained to watch this kind of thing. They get regular counselling to make sure it doesn’t mess with their heads.’

Thistle looks at me.

I nod. Whatever it is, I’m sure I’ve seen worse. Done worse.

‘We can handle it,’ she says. ‘Show us.’

•

Vasquez is right. It’s bad.

Thistle and I walk out of Vasquez’s office, our steps heavy. Ride the elevator up in silence. I find myself looking forward to even the meagre daylight outside.

Thistle looks shaken. So am I, although I didn’t expect to be.

It wasn’t the blood that got to me. I’ve seen plenty of blood in my life. It was the agony. The confusion. Hours and hours of screaming. People turned into animals by their own terror. And the eagerness of the gloved hands, which I assume belonged to Fred.

The videos confirmed our worst fears about what Shannon is into. But it didn’t tell us anything about where he might be. And none of the people in the videos we saw—we watched a small sample of each one—look like any of the victims we know about. So either Fred isn’t the Crawdad Man, or he’s prolific. Or both.

‘How does a person even get a fetish for that?’ Thistle says finally.

‘Maybe fetish is the wrong word,’ I say. ‘I saw some true crime on his bookshelf. He might have started out with slasher movies, and then moved on to reading about real killers, and now nothing shocks him except … that. Maybe he’s addicted to being horrified.’

‘I bet that’d be a real comfort to the victims.’

A terrified face flashes through my head. Echoes of a scream. I shake it loose.

We reach the doors. It’s raining, the air not quite cold enough to turn the droplets into snowflakes. Thistle’s car is a short walk away, but we’re likely to be drenched.

‘I don’t think he’s shocked at all,’ she says. ‘I bet he thinks it’s funny. Like a school bully who laughs when he sees someone else getting beat up.’

This whole case is a mess. We have dozens of victims now, with less and less in common. Several suspects—Luxford, Fred, Warner, the wigmaker—with unclear motivations and unknown locations.

The one thing we knew about the woman we were looking for was that she was blonde. Now we don’t even know that. Armana Black said the woman who bought her hair was a brunette, but that it might not have been natural.

Thistle is evidently thinking along the same lines. ‘I don’t think Black has anything to do with those missing men,’ Thistle says. ‘You?’

‘Just a hard-working entrepreneur,’ I say, relieved by the change of subject.