Free Out of the Blue: A Pengram Mystery by Scarlett Castrilli

Halloran had been so sure this killer had moved on to ply his trade elsewhere, and here was proof that he had not. Now my partner was beginning to doubt what else he had been so sure about previously.
    The ladder was set up beside the bales. I climbed up several rungs and looked over. Then I climbed up several more and stepped off onto a bale. The maze sprawled out below me. Some of the stacks were covered in weathered old tarps, and others had been left open to the elements.
    Halloran called, “Did he make his little Hollywood sets in there?”
    “Looks like it,” I said. “What kinds of decorations were in here before?”
    “Well, it’s been more than a decade since I was in there, but I still have some pictures we took of the girls going through it. It was stuff like a paper skeleton tied to a bale, bats hanging on a string, a couple of jack-o’-lanterns. A coffin that shook and howled when you walked by, I remember that. Thought it would scare the girls, but they just cracked up and tried to open it. There wasn’t much, honestly. You could see it all in a few minutes.”
    Either the killer had taken down those decorations, or the owner had already removed them before he died. “There’s no Halloween stuff now that I’m seeing,” I said, walking along the bales cautiously. Camping lanterns were in the corridor beneath me. It widened into a birthday scene.
    Grunting, Halloran came up the ladder. “Another Thanksgiving set?”
    “Happy birthday,” I said, staring down to the dolls sitting around a table. A stuffed layer cake in pastel colors was at the center, six gold candles with fake flames jutting from the top layer. Each doll had a plate and plastic fork, and one was wearing a fast food crown. A little pyramid of presents rested beside the cake.
    Halloran came up behind me. “I thought I’d seen pretty much everything,” he remarked.
    Another pair of camping lanterns was in here. I moved along the bales, noticing the fork just past the birthday room. There were no lanterns down the dead-end corridor that ran alongside the party. “He always gives them a choice,” I said. “You can go into a completely black space, or into a lit room.”
    “What’s the next room?”
    I followed the line of bales. “Looks like he went with Easter.” Plastic eggs were littered generously around a small living room scene. Chairs and an end table with an Easter basket atop it sat beneath hotel art hanging from a bale. One egg was crushed as if the victim had stepped on it.
    Chillingly, there were no hay bales blocking off the adjacent, unlit corridor. “Look at that,” I said in amazement. “This guy could have gotten out if he’d gone this way. But it was night and pitch black, so he went to Easter instead. The perp was so certain that the victim would do this that he didn’t bother to block off an escape route.”
    “The hell is that?” Halloran said.
    “What?”
    Putting on a pair of gloves, he got down to his knees and leaned over the side of the bale wall. He pulled out a purple plastic tube that had been wedged between the bales. “Why is that in there?”
    It was open on both ends. The answer came to us both, but he spoke first. “A spyhole. He was using this for a spyhole! It’s the height an average adult would need it to be to see through. Are there any more over there?”
    At a spot where the corridor narrowed, I stepped over to the other side. Then I looked back. “Yeah, I see several. He must follow along with the victim through the maze, just on the outside where they can’t see him. They’re in the corridors and rooms, nowhere else.”
    “Like a mad scientist watching the rat go through the maze.”
    “Were there holes in the partitions at the silk mill?”
    “I don’t know. Probably. They were old, beat-up things. Maybe he carved out a hole to watch and stuffed the piece back in when he was done. We’ll have to look them over.”
    I moved on to the last room, which was the one the