A rounded wooden door with iron hinges blocked our path. Once more, Evelyn heaved the heavy bolt out of place. Before she stepped out, she glanced both ways, then looked over her shoulder to give me the “all clear.”
Thwack!
While Evelyn’s back was turned, a black shape swung out of thin air and smacked her on the back of the head. Then, with a resounding crash, Evelyn fell backward, flat on her back, completely unconscious.
Panic flooded my veins. My heart and head pounded as I considered my options: run and leave Evelyn to fend for herself or stay, rescue my best friend, and potentially discover the real killer as well. Before I could make the decision, a sturdy figure with floppy blond hair stepped toward Evelyn. Once he had declared her less of a problem, he knelt to stare into the tunnel.
“Jack,” he said cheerfully. “I was wondering when you would find me.”
Jonathan Godfrey, with his twinkling eyes and handsome jawline, swung a flat club in one hand, no doubt the weapon he’d used to knock Evelyn out. He noticed my gaze.
“You like this?” he asked, flourishing the weapon. “It’s called a sap. The mafia used to use them. It’s filled with lead, and if you use it correctly” —he backhanded the sap against the concrete wall, sending another loud thwack into the air— “it doesn’t leave a mark. Comes in handy, don’t you think?”
My teeth clicked together. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
He laughed. “You believed that? You’re supposed to be some expert on copycat murders, aren’t you? When you showed up in Chicago, I figured out who you were. I gotta admit, you scared me. I was sure you’d bust me.”
“I did,” I growled. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“A bit late, don’t you think?” His charming smile was a hundred times creepier when Evelyn lay prone at his feet. “Besides, all this time you thought my father was behind the missing girls. Ha!” He shook his head. “You want to know the real reason he quit surgery? Because he couldn’t handle the blood. Can’t say I have the same issue.”
He nudged Evelyn’s torso, and I leapt forward.
“Don’t touch her!”
“Aww,” he cooed. “You love each other. That’s sweet.”
“How did you do it?” I said. “How did you convince the cops you were dead? I saw your body.”
“Did you?” His sick grin widened. “There are plenty of ways to stage a dead body, Jack. Then I paid the coroner to falsify my death certificate. He’s an old buddy of mine from school, and he owed me a favor.”
“Why fake your own death?”
“To throw you off the trail mostly,” Jonathan replied. “You were getting too close. As a matter of fact, so was my father. He recognized my work when Megan fell out of that window.” He blew a tuft of hair out of his eyes. “God, what a disaster that was. I don’t usually leave my work lying around like that, but Megan was an unexpected challenge.”
“What did you do to her?” I hissed.
“I was a perfect gentleman,” he answered. “I took her out on a nice date, bought all her drinks at the bar, listened to her whine about her pathetic bathing suit company. Then she had the gall to give the bartender her number while she thought I was in the bathroom. Can you believe that? I mean, can you imagine how I felt?” He pressed a hand to his heart. “Anyway, I forgave her and brought her up to the penthouse for a day of pleasure.”
“Yeah, right,” I scoffed.
“I didn’t kill her,” he said matter-of-factly. “She escaped her room and jumped over the balcony’s ledge.”
“To get away from you,” I reminded him. “She made a choice to die on her own terms rather than let you kill her.”
“She did make things complicated,” he agreed. “But I was able to continue right under your nose.”
“Where are Angelica and Marie?” I snarled.
“The bride and her bestie?” Jonathan asked, waving a hand. “They’re around somewhere. What I really care about, though, is you.”
“Me?”
He paced around me, studying me from every angle. “How’d you get down here?”
“I don’t even know where ‘here’ is.”
“I’m disappointed in your knowledge of Holmes lore then,” he replied. “Surely, when you figured out the building next door was owned by an Alexander Bond, you would have realized this is the Murder Castle.” He gestured above himself. “The Saint Angel is no more than a facade.”
“Alexander Bond,” I muttered. “That was one of Holmes’s alter-egos.”
“Ding, ding, ding!” he said obnoxiously. “Guess you didn’t read the bios closely enough, huh?”
“Half the stories from Holmes’s time were falsified,” I reminded him. “Even blueprints of the Murder Castle could have been faked. You based your entire agenda on a lie.”
Jonathan shrugged. “Or I accomplished the things Holmes’s couldn’t.”
“Like what?”
He beckoned me forward. “Step into my office.”
It took all of my might to cross over Evelyn without checking whether she was alive or dead, but I did not dare take my eyes off Jonathan in case he tried something stupid. As I emerged from the sewer pipe and saw what lay beyond, my stomach heaved.
In the sub-basement of the apartment building, Jonathan had built his workshop. It mimicked Holmes’s supposed set-up: a human-sized kiln, a blood-stained lab table, and several yellow vats, no doubt filled to the brim with acid. Most gruesome of all was Jonathan’s collection of skulls, lined up along a shelf he’d bolted to the concrete wall.
“You might have guessed by now that I’m not a doctor,” he said, trailing his fingers across the stained exam table. “I dropped out of med school, but I learned enough to take a fine interest in bodies and the way they work.”
“Cutting people open isn’t science if you’re doing it against their will and killing them afterward,” I said.
“But it’s so invigorating! And the smell—” He sniffed heartily. “God, I don’t know anything else like it. Everyone’s different too, like flavored lollipops.”
I counted the row of skulls. “Twelve. Is that a complete
