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

victim must have started in. This one had been done up to look like a church, an altar with a Jesus statue and candles with the Virgin Mary on the glass. One candle was still burning. Sitting in two pews was another collection of dolls. There was a line of vomit on the floor in here that extended to the corridor.
    A mouse skittered out of a crevice in a sagging bale, ran along the wall, and vanished into another crevice. With the maze hanging out here almost a year now, it had to be playing host to a multitude of rodents.
    I looked up to the house. Over a hundred feet in the distance, large trees shielded the windows almost completely. The woman who lived here would have had to be outside to see much of the maze. Also, all of the lanterns within the bales had been placed on the ground. The light to reach the top of the maze would have been minimal.
    Halloran dropped over the side of the bales and into the Easter room. He bent down to the floor.
    “Find something else?” I called.
    “A driver’s license for one Francisco Hernandez,” Halloran said. “Picture matches the victim. Thirty-two. Darby address. It was in this big blue egg that was cracked open.” Making an Evidence bag appear as if by magic, he slipped the license inside.
    “The cracked one was pink.”
    “No, this egg isn’t broken. It was cracked open with the license pretty visible.”
    I thought of the prop hand that had been among the Christmas presents. “Somehow he made Chloe open up the gift . . . and he wanted this man to open up the eggs. He may have left that egg open on purpose so Francisco would notice his license and stop in there.”
    “It doesn’t look like these eggs have been touched,” Halloran called as I backtracked to Easter. “Maybe the victim was so panicked that he didn’t notice his license between the halves of the egg. He just stepped on that other one and charged on through.”
    “Shake the eggs,” I said.
    Halloran lifted a purple egg and shook it. “Doesn’t sound like anything is in there.” Cracking it open, he confirmed it. Then he stuck the halves back together and put it down in the exact same place he’d found it. Moving to another one, he shook it. “Nope.”
    I watched as he went through them. A blue one rattled. Cautiously, he opened it up to reveal jellybeans. “These look about a million years old,” he said. Closing the egg and returning it beneath a chair, he pulled a red one from the Easter basket. “Something is in this one, too.”
    Since there didn’t seem to be any present danger, I dropped into the room and landed in a stagger beside him.
    “Graceful,” Halloran said. “Practically ballet.”
    “I missed a calling.”
    Halloran opened the egg. “Oh, that’s lovely. A bloody toe.”
    “Real?”
    “Fake.” He showed me the toe, which was a withered, pinkish-gray stump with blood around the nail.
    “It could be mistaken for real if you’re freaked out, possibly drugged up, and it’s night,” I said.
    He capped the egg and dropped it into the basket. “But Francisco didn’t poke around and find it, it seems like. He even threw up on the go.”
    “Why a man?” I asked. “Most of these assholes have a type. A specific sex, a race, an age group. I would have thought this would be a teen girl or young woman, likely white.”
    “He’s got a type. Breathing type,” Halloran said.
    “He’s not sexually assaulting them, but something about this . . . the intensity of it is so sexual to me,” I said.
    “Maybe he identifies as bisexual.”
    “I think whatever his sexuality is, it runs a distant second to his psychopathy. Whether the victim is male or female, this is the ultimate power game. He puts them here against their will, and he controls every detail of what they see. Maybe he even controls what they hear. He gives them choices of where to go but they aren’t really choices at all, and he knows precisely which way they’ll pick. He gets off on the control, and his