Page 26 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)

‘Like butter. Quick. Let’s go.’ Ripley pushed in and they enterted the room that Ella had seen on Sinclair’s social media.

Her stomach dropped, because the place was much grander than the photos had suggested.

It was wall-to-wall memorabilia of the macabre.

There were framed newspapers along the left-hand wall, and a row of glass cabinets on the right.

The middle of the room featured six mannequins lined up in two rows.

They were dressed in the garb of infamous murderers, and the sight made her feel sick.

Ed Gein, in his flannel shirt and Kromer cap stood next to a clown-suited John Wayne Gacy.

Then there was Charles Manson, the Zodiac, Richard Ramirez.

And one face she knew all too well.

Below it, the placard read: AUSTIN CREED, THE MIMICKER .

The mannequin was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit – the same one she’d seen the real Creed wearing in court. The impulse that followed wasn’t a thought but a directive from her spine: to walk over, rip the mannequin’s head off and punt it into the nearest body of water.

‘This is hideous,’ she said.

Ripley was inspecting the artifacts in the glass cabinets. ‘I’d love to burn this place down.’

‘What have you got?’

‘Crap. Bad artwork, locks of hair. There’s a vial of Edmund Kemper’s earwax here.’

Ella hurried over to inspect it. Sure enough, she wasn’t lying. ‘That shouldn’t exist.’

‘You’re not kidding.’

Ella moved deeper into the room. She stopped in front of a display case that held a child's sneaker.

Pink. Size 3. The placard read Victim #4 - The Atlanta Child Murders .

Ella knew that case by heart. She knew the victim's name was Angel Lenair.

She knew Angel had been ten years old when someone strangled her and dumped her body in the woods.

She knew Angel's mother had kept the other sneaker for seventeen years before finally throwing it away.

True crime books and murder podcasts had romanticized this these kinds of things, but the people who consumed the details rarely understood what it was truly like.

They’d never smelled a decomposing body or had to tell a mother their daughter isn't coming home.

Never watched a killer smile in court while the families cry.

She forced herself to look at the display cases again. More hair. More fabric swatches. A tooth. An actual, gleaming human tooth with a brass placard: AILEEN WUORNOS - MOLAR.

But next to that was a true crime relic she never expected to see.

‘We should get out of here,’ Ripley said. ‘Before Sinclair catches us in his jerk-off museum.’

‘Mia, look.’ Ella struggled to get the words out, because she was staring at a familiar name etched into a brass plate.

‘What?’

Ella tapped on the glass. ‘There.’

Ripley leaned nose-to-glass. Ella saw her expression drop in her reflection. ‘That’s…’

The nameplate sat between Aileen Wuornos's tooth and a yellowed Polaroid of someone's basement. No dust on it. Fresh addition to the collection.

It was the kind of nameplate that sat on every executive’s desk in America, but this one had been taken from somewhere she’d visited recently.

MICHAEL RANKIN – SENIOR FORENSIC ACCOUNTANT – MORRISON proof that Sinclair had been in the room where Michael Rankin died. Proof he’d touched Rankin's desk and been dumb enough to take a trophy.

The anger and adrenaline assaulted her all at once. She was ready to cuff Sinclair, drag him out of here and haul him right in front of a judge with her own two hands. Once that was done, she could smash this place into pieces.

‘Who the hell are you?’

A voice erupted from the doorway. Not Eastern European. Not a woman.

Ella spun around and her gun was already clearing the holster. The man in the doorway matched his photo perfectly; long grey hair, a skinny neck, giant skull like a bobblehead. ‘FBI! Don’t move!’

Sinclair’s hands began to ascend in the gesture of surrender, but they were shaky, as were his feet. He was shifting his weight from one leg to the other, and you didn’t need to be a body language expert to know what that meant.

‘Don’t even think-’

But Sinclair became a blur. He vanished from the doorway out into the hallway.

Ella burst into a sprint, but there was already another body ahead of her.

Ripley flew like she’d somehow shed 30 years of her life as she crossed the space between the trophy room and the hallway in the blink of an eye.

Ella followed, and reached the doorway just in time to see Ripley gaining on Sinclair near the front entrance.

The bastard had his hand on the door handle when Ripley's fingers closed around his collar.

Ella had a millisecond to briefly feel sorry for Sinclair as Ripley yanked him back and slammed him against the wall. The cheap drywall Ripley had been bitching about earlier buckled under the impact.

Sinclair tried to squirm free. Ripley drove her knee into his stomach and when he doubled over, she grabbed his shoulders and introduced his face to the wall. Once. Twice. By the third impact, he'd stopped struggling.

When it was over, Sinclair lay crumpled at Ripley's feet. She stood over him without so much as a heavy breath, then smoothed down her dress and looked at Ella.

‘You going to cuff him or what?’