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But before she dwell too deeply on it,Harland jumped in. ‘Hold the phone. Laughing stock?’
The agents turned to him. ‘It meansomething?’ Ella asked.
‘There’s a club in town by that name.Laughingstock. Small place. Kinda seedy. Pretty much anyone can take a crack atstand-up over there. Cheap booze though.’
Ella felt her heart kick against herteeth. ‘There’s a club around here called Laughingstock?’
‘Sure is,’ Harland said.
Ella's mind whirred like a slot machinehitting jackpot. A wannabe comedian turned tragic clown. Ella could see itunspooling in her mind's eye like a snuff film on repeat. The unsub, a twitchy,maladjusted misfit. Stepping into those hot lights, that humid crush of acrowd. Desperation leaking from his pores, neediness cranked to eleven.
She spun to her computer, seized by asudden urgency. Her fingers clattered over the keys in a machine gun ratatat.She searched the club name, the location, then scoured through the results in afrenzy; searching, ferreting, digging for that needle in a haystack that wouldblow this thing wide open.
And then...there it was. A thumbnail,grainy and dark but there.
But what caught her attention was thetitle.
Brutal Heckling DESTROYS Bad Comedian!!
‘Holy mother,’ Ella breathed.
Harland and Luca crowded around thelaptop.
‘Whoa,’ Luca said. ‘Heckling destroyscomedian?’
She clicked it, breath caught like arabbit in a snare.
The video buffered, pixelated. A dimly litstage swam into view, a lone figure hunched over the mic stand like a vultureon a carcass. The crowd was a faceless mass; an amorphous blob of drunken jeersand jostling shadows.
The heckling was already in full swing,but the comedian’s voice crackled just above the jeering. I just finishedreading The Divine Comedy. Waste of time. I didn't laugh once.
The boos rose like a wave, like a tsunamiof casual cruelty cresting to crash against the stage. The figure - a man,pasty and soft in the cruel spotlight - seemed to crumple, folding in onhimself like a house of cards.
It quickly crescendoed, bottles andglasses arcing through the air to shatter at his feet. And still he stoodthere, rigid and shaking, a quivering Jell-O mold of humiliation.
‘Christ almighty,’ Luca said.
Ella was laser-focused. On the video, itlooked like the majority of the heckling came from a group of people near thecamera. Some of the crowd remained sitting, clearly uncomfortable at theinterruption.
Watching it seared Ella's retinas,scorched her gray matter. It was like a peek through the gates of hell, all theunsub's rage and humiliation and shattered dreams distilled down into onehundred and eighty seconds of digital bile.
And then the camera panned to a face inthe crowd. A face beside the cameraman.
A single, sneering visage.
Luca leaned over her shoulder, so closeshe could feel the heat of him through her shirt. Could smell the clean musk ofhis aftershave, the lingering bite of department-issue coffee.
‘That’s… Archie Newman,’ Luca said.
Light into dark. Comedy into tragedy. Andit all started right there, in one seedy little club on one shitty littlenight.
The beginning of the end. The origin storyof a monster made, not born. All laid out in one hundred and eighty grainyseconds. Humiliation. Annihilation. The kind of total ego death you didn’t comeback from. Not without some scars and a serious axe to grind.
‘This is it,’ Ella said. ‘This comedian isour killer.’
‘Look, his name’s in the comments section.Sebastian Doyle,’ said Luca. ‘Christ, this video’s got three million views. Nowonder it sent him on a killing spree.’
‘Sebastian Doyle,’ repeated Ella. ‘Chokedon his own flop sweat and fell to pieces in the spotlight. His shot atvalidation, at connection, blew up in his face. And it broke him. Snappedsomething vital and sent him spiraling straight into his own personal hell.’
