Page 13 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

Ella was back at her precinct, devouring the pages of Halo of Blood like she’d never read a book in her life.

She'd swiped the manuscript from Sophie's office – a decision her ego was still unsure about.

But her gut said it was important, and ninety-nine percent of cops would tell you to always trust your gut.

She was almost thirty pages deep in the grim little novella. She turned the pages with gloved hands, trying to suss out some kind of link between the twisted fiction and their all-too-real homicide.

According to the front page of the manuscript, Halo of Blood was written by someone named Drago LaChance, a handle so on-the-nose it had to be fake.

And so far, the book reads like torture porn wrapped in a teenager's idea of deep literature.

It was more blood than brains and enough purple prose to choke an English teacher.

But Ella was damned if she could put it down.

From what she’d gleaned so far, the plot followed a gentleman named Cain as he stumbled through his daily drudge of a life.

According to the first line of the chapter in front of her, Cain felt like an empty shell going through the motions in a world that hadn’t forgotten his name, but never learned it in the first place.

Ella continued skimming and would have rolled her eyes out of her skull if not for the possibility of this author having progressed from novelist to murderer.

The manuscript was chock full of woeful spiels about how God had, in the author's words, made it rain shit on poor Cain.

There was real 'pay attention to me' energy pouring from the prose, and Ella guessed it was the kind of prose of someone with real resentment running through their veins.

She read a section:

A cockroach skittered across his periphery, and he smashed it under his boot heel.

The crunch of carapace was viscerally satisfying.

A fleeting hit of power, control. He imagined her face under his foot instead.

Pleading, bleeding, begging for mercy, he wouldn't grant.

Wouldn't ever grant again. His lip curled in a rictus grin.

God had abandoned him. Left him to rot with the other dregs. But he'd show Him. He'd show them all.

Sheesh, Ella thought. Whoever wrote this probably took up permanent residence in their mom’s basement and probably needed a haircut.

Page thirty-two now, and the scene made her sit up and take notice. Cain, in all his incel glory, was stalking an unassuming woman down a back alley.

He followed, footsteps cat-soft, melding with the shadows like they were a part of him. A wraith, unseen, unheard. Death on two legs.

Ella's guts did a slow roll. The hairs on her forearms snapped to attention, charged with the certainty that this was important. She went to turn the page, to see how it all shook out – and nearly ripped the damn thing out.

Page thirty ended mid-sentence.

She eyeballed the bottom center of the page. Flipped back a page.

Three pages were missing. She’d jumped straight from thirty to thirty-four, which picked up on a completely new scene.

What the hell? She pawed through the surrounding pages, certain she’d find the absent scene wedged in there somewhere.

But nope. Nothing. Just a jump-cut in the already-disjointed story, leapfrogging the reader over what Ella would bet was the money shot. The story chugged right along as if old Drago LaChance figured his readers wouldn't notice a narrative hole the size of the Grand Canyon.

A headache was beginning to brew behind one eye, and before she could delve back into the pit of despair, Ripley shouldered her way through the door. Ella jolted so hard she nearly dumped herself out of her chair.

‘Jesus, Ripley. We got to put a bell on you.’

She flipped her the bird on reflex. ‘Don’t tell me you’re reading that? Get it to the lab before you contaminate it.’

Ella hesitated, still caught up in the cliffhanger.

There was a connection here; she could smell it.

But Ripley was right. This was evidence, and evidence belonged in the hands of the lab.

Handling it with her dirty paws wasn't doing a damn thing for the case except giving her a contact high from Dorito dust.

‘Alright, keep your panties on. It’s all yours.’

Ripley pulled on a pair of gloves and handled the manuscript by one corner. Ella removed her gloves and shook the sweat away.

Ripley said, 'Alright, I'll bite. Did you find anything reading this thing? Our killer uses it as a script?'

The resemblance was there, but without the missing pages, she had nothing to go on.

‘I don’t know. It follows some downtrodden guy, and I got to a scene where he was stalking a woman, but then the pages disappeared.’

Ripley eyeballed the manuscript like it was an unexploded bomb, then looked back at her partner. 'Disappeared?'

‘Missing. It jumps three pages right around where our protagonist is about to start, I assume, stabbing.’

‘Some writer this guy is. Couldn’t you work out what happened from the next scene?’

‘I was trying, but someone came in and took the book off me.’

Ripley edged towards the door. ‘Yeah, well, fingerprints are more useful than whatever it is you’re doing. We can get pictures of the pages, don’t worry. We just need to sweep it first.’

‘Fine. Get going. I’ll try and find out more about this Drago LaChance person, but something tells me he’s not going to be real.’

Ella waited until Ripley had cleared the frame before swinging her chair around towards her computer. Okay. Time to find out who was behind this manuscript-turned-murder manual.

Drago LaChance, she typed. Halo of Blood. She threw quotation marks around each term for more specific results.

She held her breath as the digital gears churned, then scraped the bottom of her mental barrel for a scrap of optimism that this lead might actually pan out.

Then the search results came back.

Ella grabbed her mouse and frantically scrolled up and down the page.

‘You gotta be kidding me,’ she said.