Page 16 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

Outside the coroner’s door, Ella figured that if she hit the gym as much as she hit the morgue she have the abs she had when she was nineteen.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen an autopsy table without Ripley by her side, but hopefully the old dog was making some headway with Halo of Blood.

‘Agent Dark?’ the woman said. ‘I’m Maggie Jacobs. You’re here about Miss Draper, I assume.’

‘You assume correct,’ Ella said.

‘Come right in. I hope you’ve brought your best stomach.

’ Maggie stepped back and let her pass. The autopsy room was an icebox, and it had the signature aroma of tangy medical fluid, like something between a swimming pool and a public toilet.

In the center of the room squatted an autopsy table with its occupant shrouded in a crisp white sheet.

Ella's stomach did a slow roll as she eyed the lumpy silhouette.

No matter how many bodies she saw, that first moment always got her; the suckerpunch reminder that under all the mystery, they were dealing with the dead.

The people who couldn't speak for themselves anymore, who needed people like her to give a damn when it mattered.

‘Thanks for seeing me. I appreciate you doing this so fast.’

Maggie moved over to the room’s centerpiece and gently removed the white sheet.

Ella knew it was coming, but the sight still took the wind out of her.

Sophie Draper – or what had once been Sophie Draper – was sprawled on the slab.

Her skin was the color of dirty chalk, mottled with the blooming violet of postmortem bruising.

Pinpricks to the forehead from where the barbed wire had been jammed, and of course, the twin pits where her eyes should have been.

Stray scraps of optical nerve dangled from the ragged holes.

Ella gave the poor woman a momentary silent tribute.

She’d seen death in all its myriad forms but this was new territory.

‘Awful,’ Maggie said. ‘This woman’s body has been put through the wringer. I’m sorry we all have to see this.’

‘Talk me through it, doctor. I don’t even know where to start.’

‘Eyes,’ said Maggie as she probed the ocular caverns with her pointer. ‘Enucleated, only the second time I’ve seen it in twenty years. Perp used a scalpel or straight razor to nick the optic nerves behind the eye.’

‘How clean?’ Ella asked.

‘Clean enough, but it’s not exactly heart surgery to remove an eyeball. Get the knife in, scoop it out. It’s grim work, but if you’ve got a strong enough stomach, it’s doable.’

Ella pretended like she didn’t already know the ins and outs of eyeball removal. ‘What about the things he replaced the eyes with?’

Maggie reached over to her instrument tray and snatched up a plastic bag. Inside were two dirty-white globes.

‘These. Definitely not oysters.’

Ella took a closer look at the little pearls. The size of lychee berries, dulled by residue Ella didn't want to contemplate. ‘Marbles?’

‘Marbles indeed. They’re due for forensic analysis sometime today.’

Cheap glass, mass produced. Dime a dozen, any general store would sell these. There was probably no way to trace them, Ella thought, but what did it matter? Knowing where they came from wouldn't change what happened.

Maggie moved her pointer to Sophie’s skull. There was a light smattering of pinpricks, faint as freckles, speckling an otherwise pristine landing strip of skin. ‘Punctures where your perp lodged barbed wire around her head. Nothing notable about that.’

‘Defensive wounds?’ Ella asked.

‘Nothing. No skin cells under the nails or bruises to the hands or feet. The only bruising I found was to the back of her skull and her left hip.’

Theories began to percolate but none felt quite right. ‘Her left hip? As if she fell?’

‘Yup. Finding a cause of death was a challenge, because I naturally assumed it was blood loss or nervous system shutdown. But your forensics team told me there was a lack of blood at the scene, so once I went with the theory that all of these lacerations were done postmortem, it left only one result.’

‘Which was?’

‘Trauma to the brain.’ Maggie pointed to the side of Sophie’s head. ‘There’s a distinct bruise here, covering the temple and the rim of the skull.’

Ella slotted the pieces into place. ‘Our unsub knocked her unconscious with a blunt object.’

‘Yep, hard enough to kill. Any impact to the temples can result in brain damage or death with enough force. If your perp immediately begun mutilating the body as soon as she collapsed, her nervous system could have been shocked into failure.’

It was a small mercy, at least. Sophie Draper died in a split-second, unaware that she would become a mutilated angel in the afterlife.

‘Tox reports?’

‘Clean as holy water. No drugs, no poison. Just a few traces of ethanol that had been there for a while.’

Damn. Ella had been hoping for something to sink her teeth into; maybe ketamine, GHB, any of the old standby date rape specials. Anything to tell her how the unsub had gotten the drop on a grown woman in the sanctum of her own home. ‘What about the cuts on her back?’

‘Thought you’d never ask. Any chance you could put those toned arms of yours to use?’

‘Come again?’

‘Grab her bottom half and help me flip her over.’

Ella recoiled at the idea because putting her hands on a victim of such a senseless death felt wrong in many ways, but she shuffled forward all the same.

She snapped on a pair of gloves and took her place at the table in a clumsy echo of the coroner’s efficiency.

She and Maggie each cradled half of Sophie’s body and eased her onto her front.

Ella leaned in for a closer look and wished she hadn’t.

Shoulder to waist, Sophie’s back was a portrait of red and black. Gouges drew lines from her neck to the base of her spine, deep enough to dig through dermis and down into the wet red beneath.

Ella said nothing. She couldn’t speak past the brick wall in her throat.

‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ Maggie sliced through Ella’s self-flagellation. ‘Cuts begin at the shoulder and go right down to the mid-section in a triangle shape. I found traces of carbon in the wounds, so your perp used a stainless steel blade, probably a scalpel for this kind of accuracy.’

‘Accuracy? How accurate are we talking?’

‘Well, his linework is good, but the way he peeled the flesh back isn’t. He also sawed at the flesh when making the lines in a few places, which suggests your perp isn’t familiar with this kind of work.’

‘So not a butcher or hunter.’

‘None of the above, and definitely not a surgeon either. Your perp made a perfect triangle shape with the blade, which means he used something small and malleable. He’s got the strength to penetrate flesh like a chef scoring pig fat, but that’s where his abilities end.’

Ella blinked, and her mind kicked out of first-gear guilt into reverse faster than she could trigger-pull, then Maggie's words penetrated the fog of futility.

This was rage and frenzy.

But that didn’t add up at all. Their unsub was precise, careful, able to ambush a lone woman inside her own home and leave no evidence of it behind.

This unsub could remove a person’s eyes without blinking and carve up her flesh like it was wet tissue paper.

These angel wings should have been flayed with the same finesse as the removed eyeballs and the pinprick stigmata in her forehead.

Ella tried to rattle something resembling sense out of the jumbled jigsaw her gray matter had become, because it didn't track. Their perp had gone from Michelangelo to a finger-painting kindergartner in the space between north and south on this corpse.

Rushed, rattled. Like he’d been interrupt mid-masterpiece and had to do a cowboy job for the finale.

Or perhaps he figured the front was where the magic happened, so he phoned it in on the back.’

‘That’s all I’ve got at the moment. Still waiting on swabs and I haven’t done a full internal yet, but if I find anything new, I’ll let you know. Help me flip her again would you?’

Ella and Maggie flipped her again with the same amount of grace as before.

Maggie fiddled with the slab’s height mechanism and lowered Sophie down to a more restful position, except the angle wasn’t right, the trajectory tweaked just enough to send the corpse sliding to the side like a loose log on a slope. Ella grabbed and steadied the body.

And at that moment, Ella saw something.

Gravity plus poor positioning equaled a slack jaw, allowing Ella a perfect view to the back of Sophie’s throat.

Sophie’s lifeless head suddenly looked a whole lot more occupied than it had a minute ago.

Call it cop's intuition, call it the universe deciding to drop feces right on her head. But staring at this foreign object, Ella was certain of one thing.

Her day was about to get a whole lot worse.

‘Doctor.’ Ella snapped her fingers, still cradling Sophie’s body. ‘Look.’

‘What?’

‘There’s something in her mouth.’

‘Is there?’ the doctor asked.

Ella stared with her jaw hanging slack while her brain tried to play catch-up with her eyeballs. No way. She blinked hard, half-hoping the hallucination would take the hint and disappear.

No. It stayed put.

There, nestled at the back of Sophie Draper's throat like the world's biggest tonsil stone, was something that sure as hell didn't belong.

Something pale and round – a button mushroom from hell peeking out between her throat muscles.

Marbles for eyes. Flayed skin. Barbed wire halos. Apparently all of that wasn’t enough for this psychopath.

‘I’m telling you. There’s something white peeking out from her throat.’

With the body repositioned and secured, Maggie plucked a flashlight from her instrument tray and shined it in Sophie's mouth. A second later, she winced like she’d been slapped.

‘What the…?’

Words crowded on Ella’s tongue, but she wasn’t sure which ones to voice first. ‘You do an internal scan yet?’

‘No, not yet, only the preliminary external. We do that when preparing the body for the funeral.’

‘Got it. Can you remove this thing?’

‘Of course. Let me grab my tweezers.’

She grabbed the instrument off her table, not taking her eyes off the foreign object in Sophie’s mouth.

Gently, the doctor put her flashlight down and clamped open the victim’s mouth with her fingers. Then, with the delicacy of a safecracker, she descended into Sophie Draper's mouth with her tool. Ella stood back and let her work her magic.

‘The impact from turning her must have dislodged it, whatever it is,’ Maggie said. ‘Must have been wedged pretty good not to shake loose during transport.’

Ella watched as the tweezers disappeared between blue-tinged lips. One. Two. Maggie angled and maneuvered, like she was exploring a cave no human was meant to traverse.

‘Come on,’ Maggie muttered. ‘Come out.’

Then, a muffled grunt of triumph from the doctor. The tweezers began their torturous journey outward, millimeter by painstaking millimeter. At last they came into view.

And they were clenched tight around a long cylinder of white.

Maggie drew it out slowly

Ella squinted at the soggy wad pinched between the tweezers' claws. ‘Is that… paper?’

As Maggie took the object between her fingers, the world slowed down and Ella saw everything frame by frame. She instantly thought of Ripley, back at the precinct, reading through that demented manuscript.

Maggie uncurled the plume of white and laid them out on the table. Ella’s comments were confirmed.

Paper. Three sheets of it rolled together.

Pieces snapped together in her brain. Somehow, Ella had suspected what they were the moment she saw the white tips peering out of Sophie’s throat.

Then she saw the font, the typeface. Courier, size twelve, double-spaced.

They were the missing pages from Halo of Blood.