Stafford knew that Ledger had been pushed all the way to the edge by what Santoro had done to his family. Okay, there was the edge, but this was past that. And that called to mind a whole raft of Nietzsche quotes, and as he walked into the room, he spoke them aloud, fitting each like puzzle pieces to Ledger’s fractured psyche.

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”

That was often not true, as Stafford knew. Santoro proved that with virtually everyone he went to work on. Most people crumble under a certain level of pressure. And even if they survive, they’re crippled by their own immutable awareness of how fragile and powerless they truly are.

But when that statement was true, in those rare cases, then it was a cosmic verity.

Santoro had tried to break Ledger’s heart and mind and will, but instead, he’d made him into this. Into a monster.

Maybe Santoro didn’t understand that. He’d won so often with people, broken the unbreakable, that he’d lost perspective.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

Santoro—and possibly Kuga—were drinking their own Kool-Aid, believing the hype that was scaring the piss out of the tourists in the business.

He walked through the room, seeing the blood, matching it to the bodies in his photos. This was where the last stand had been.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

The Christmas Eve slaughter had been Ledger’s abyss, and he’d looked way too close. He’d become a monster. An actual monster.

Stafford stopped by the wall over the bed. It was smeared with thick blood that had now dried to the color of bricks. He studied it in exactly the same way he studied the brushstrokes of Van Gogh, Paul Wright, and Philippe Pasqua. There was so much to learn from the way an artist applied his brush, or knife, or fingers.

This was artwork.

Of a kind.

There were strokes within it. Fingers had played on this wall, moving through the red, running blood even as the corpses lay cooling around the room. Even as the smell of death permeated the air.

“There is always some madness in love,” he said. One of Nietzsche’s less frequently quoted insights. “But there is also always some reason in madness.”

So, what then, was the reason in this madness? What was Ledger saying to himself, or about himself?

He did not believe that it was a cry for help. Nothing as weak as that, or as pedestrian. And yet there was a message here. He could feel it.