Throngs of reporters bunched together outside the campus gates like sharks circling in chummed water, the police and campus security holding back the curious while beyond the palisades, the deserted terrain reminded Gillian strongly of a post-apocalypse movie.

Wealth breathed out of every pore of the place, from the manicured lawns, flawlessly tended buildings, shady old trees, and lovely benches to the pathways and neat signs. The pretentious names on the buildings shouted privilege, yet a shadow hung over it all, and an unnatural quiet heralded the somber weight of death.

Scott House, really? Gillian scoffed. Cold hard cash brought legacies came into being, and this was familiar territory. She had an intimate knowledge of this world, information her colleagues would never learn. This universe of privilege, honor, wealth, and power reminded her strongly of home.

***

The door opened from the inside, and they stepped into a large foyer.

She barely glanced at the walls lined with framed mementos of the past, trophies in cases, and shiny gold plaques, her attention nailed to the group awaiting them beside Senior Detective Boss. She almost gritted her teeth as she recognized their "old friends" from the FBI, or the Federal Bureau of Idiots, as Colt called them.

Their whole team filed into the building and faltered to a standstill because Boss had that look on his face—the one that warned anyone with half a brain that his calm masked fury and none of them had ever seen him quite this livid.

Colt was the first to walk forward, and as if they were all bound to her by strings, her movement brought them forward too. When she stopped, they flanked her as if to protect her instead of just investigating a murder—if they weren't about to be sent home by the Feds.

"This is Holland and Bright; they are assisting us in this investigation," Boss introduced them with cool tones that spoke volumes to his colleagues, "and the body is in the great hall. Just follow the banners, and I will be right with you."

No one dared say a word as they all nodded. His clipped tones chilling, and still, they were all concerned for him. What unsettled detective Boss this much?

***

According to the comically sinister banners, the fraternity of Scott house has hosted the annual Halloween ball for the last thirty years. They followed their path to a pair of magnificent oak doors, sporting streaks of decorative blood with a fake ax that looked as if it was embedded into the righthand door from the other inside. Spider webs decorated the door, complete with an ominous and eerily realistic spider guarding the handles.

Yen Sue almost dropped her camera when she turned the handle, and it moved, squealing like a teenage girl before she realized it was a trick and swearing as everyone snorted with laughter.

It would have been a glorious prank if not for their fear of what they would discover on the other side and the intense sensation of something amiss haunting the air.

"I fucking hate spiders," Sue muttered, throwing open the doors, only to have a skeleton drop down right in front of her, and this time she screamed, but she wasn't the only one that reacted.

"Holy fuck," Colt muttered with her hand on her heart, and Gillian had the hardest time not laughing. Pranks like this were a staple in the boarding schools she attended, and it took a lot to startle her. Bannock swore a blue streak, and his partner held out her hand, stopping him mid-word. They had a swear jar, and considering he had just ripped through about seven expletives, he would be paying dearly.

Sue held the door and slammed it shut behind them.

The clever pulley system pulled up the skeleton, but none of them appreciated its genius of it. Bannock and Lanchester broke off mid-argument, and they all turned to see what caught their attention.

The pulleys also turned on a set of lights, illuminating parts of the room in sharp little light spots, which shrewdly lent just enough illumination to see in the darker areas and highlighted a skillful setup of ancient torture devices. They had turned the dance hall into a dungeon, the walls hidden by dark cloth, curtains, and fake rock.

A wooden path wound its way over the sawdust-covered floors to each display, and the stench of death and blood drowned out all other smells.

Finding the real body among the displays of lifelike wax figures being tortured took a moment but, once seen, could not be unseen. Preston Scott was the collection's centerpiece, clad only in his briefs, tied to the rack, and stretched until his limbs pulled from their sockets, but not until the members tore off.

He probably still lived when his killer gouged his eyes from their sockets and gutted him like a fish, pulling his insides through a cross cut into his abdominal area and dropping it on the ground beside him, confirming her suspicions that their vigilante had struck again.

But before ending his misery by tearing out his heart, Preston's executioner branded him with a symbol used in ancient times to mark a murderer for hanging. Brutally and methodically branding his arms, torso, and cheeks, leaving angry, raw burns on his skin. The discarded heart lay on a small silver platter, and it, too, carried the mark of a murderer.

They barely dared look at each other, knowing there would be very little evidence, and the proof they found would be useless. When this killer didn't strike again after the first time, she hoped he had disappeared back into the woodwork, but she should have known better—vampires had all the time in the world.

"Vengeance," Sue muttered, and she shook her head.

"This is his version of justice," she corrected as the door opened behind them, allowing in an odd little draft that sent chills down her spine.

The male Fed, Holland, knocked the skeleton almost off its hinges, causing the lights to flicker eerily, and if she hadn't seen what she did, she would have found it hard not to laugh at him.

"You have been here half an hour and done nothing. Is this your work ethic?" The blond female, Bright, attacked them as if they were responsible for the prank.

"Assess, strategize and execute, madam. We do not randomly enter a crime scene," Colt quipped, turning her back toward the Feds, and, like a well-oiled machine, they did their jobs, ignoring the two intruders as best they could.

Preston may have been a murderer and an asshole, but they would investigate to the best of their ability because they did what needed to be done when people died at the hand of others.

Oddly, the Feds were not all over this like white on snow. Why did the other divisions hold this crime scene for their squad, undisturbed and with the body left in place? Was it because they suspected it was the Vigilante Killer and they had handled the previous murder, but why then was Boss just watching them and observing the Feds? And the Feds just stood there regarding him and watching them. It was like a standoff.

Not once in the five hours it took to process that crime scene did Boss or either of the Feds budge from the room. In response, everyone else just kept at it.

An officer brought in the girl who found the body, and Colt interviewed her to one side where the body would not be in her direct line of sight.

"What were you doing here?" Colt asked.

"I was in charge of painting the backgrounds and forgot my phone. It took a while before I could find someone to come with me, it's creepy here at night, and I didn't want to come alone. No one was supposed to be here at night, but I have the keys, and I know the security code." She sobbed, glancing toward the rear almost as if she couldn't help herself.

"So, if you hadn't broken the rules, no one would have been around until morning?" Colt asked.

"If I hadn't returned for my phone, no one would have been in here until at least five tomorrow evening. The prep team was scheduled to get everything ready for the party."

"When did you pack up?"

"Around four this afternoon, I was the last to leave. We've been working on the décor on and off for six weeks. This event isn't considered a priority, and we must do everything in our spare time." She fished a shredded tissue from her pocket and did a poor job of wiping her face.

"Did you know Preston?"

"Yes, everyone knows him." Something about the way she said it conveyed that she wasn't fond of him.

"Did you like him?" Gillian asked, finally free to ask questions now that she was "officially" a detective.

"Almost everyone thinks he is... was some kind of god."

"Detective Beaumont asked if you liked him," Colt backed up her question, and she couldn't believe how great it felt to hear those words. This was something she earned for herself, not something her bloodline and her parentage assured her.

"We went out a couple of times. He wanted sex, I didn't like his attitude, and he wanted to force the issue. I bit him, and he slapped me. He said I'd slept with other guys; why did I think I was too good for him? He said I am a nobody, he'd take from me what he wanted, and I'd be grateful, or he'd have me kicked out of school." Bitterness pulled at her lips.

"Why did you deny him?"

"I've only been with one guy, and it was a mistake. When we split up, he said it was because I had loose legs, and he got tired of sloppy seconds. His friends started pretending they handed me from one to the other." The look in her eyes wasn't hard to read.

"They ruined your reputation, and Preston wanted to capitalize on it?" Colt asked, and she nodded, looking vulnerable. "Why did he think he could threaten you?"

The girl looked at Colt as if she thought the detective was stupid.

"Are you kidding me?" she wasn't crying anymore; she was pissed. "I am here on a damned scholarship, and this is a prestigious school full of rich pricks that think they are gods. One wrong word and you're out, and if you get kicked out of this school, good luck getting into another one. You'd be lucky to fry burgers at Macdonald's." Bitterness glowed in her eyes, and those dark shadows told Gillian that Preston wasn't the first one to press his luck. Colt didn't get it, but she did.

"Are you the only one who didn't like Preston?" colt asked.

"No, but no one at this school is capable of what I saw." She seemed so sure of herself, but she had no idea.

"Thank you for your time." We watched her being escorted away.

"Get us somewhere to conduct interviews that isn't here," she requested, and I obeyed.

***

Colt spoke to half the campus. Everyone knew Preston, and he had more admirers than haters, and although none of them would have been able to do this to him, the interviews had to be done to establish a timeline.

"So, the coffeehouse where Preston met his buddies to discuss the Halloween party and settle arrangements for alcohol and food was the last place anyone saw him alive. Preston left in his car to visit his girlfriend, but the vehicle is nowhere on campus, and he never arrived at his destination," Colt recapped.

"Yes, she thought he got hung up with his friends, called his phone twice, and got no answer. She left him a quite interesting message and went to bed—her roommate vouched for this. The tracking system on the car isn't working, and we've not yet located the vehicle." Gillian filled in, avoiding Boss' gaze without turning her head far enough to look at either of the Feds.

"Pack up—we're done," Boss commanded.

"SDC Boss? Someone just reported a red Porche with a vanity plate in a Scrapyard," Bannock reported and showed us a picture on his tablet.

The car had been pressed and put with others of its kind.

"What does the owner say?" Boss asked.

"He was out of town, this car isn't one of his, and someone locked the dogs in their cages. They had been drugged so bad they still aren't quite able to get to their feet."

"What about security cameras?" Holland asked.

"They were tampered with. The alarms were disconnected, and the security company never got an alert. This killer is tech-savvy. He got in here without setting off the alarm, and according to the log, it was engaged at four this afternoon, but shortly after four fifteen, a system error shut off everything and put the cameras on a loop. He had five hours to do all this," Bannock said.

"And no one saw a stranger around campus?" Bright asked.

"During the afternoon, this part of campus is virtually abandoned," Colt said.

"I would assume our killer knows that, and if he does, he was a student, faculty, or cleaning crew member," Bright interjected.

"We are already working that angle," Colt assured her.

"Work faster. This is a high-priority case; if you don't get results soon, you will work mall security."

Gillian and Colt's gazes met as they realized why this case had been kept for them, and it was not because it was the Vigilante Killer. The odds of finding this murderer were slim, and the Feds wanted no official part of it, despite it being their territory. Someone would pay the price if this went south because Preston was the son of a powerful man, and it wouldn't be Bright and Holland.