Page 17 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

Ella blew through the precinct doors and made a beeline for her office, because Ella had the key – or one of the keys – to this sordid freakshow burning a hole in her pocket.

The missing pages. Stuffed down the victim’s throat. A message delivered via corpse.

There was no doubt about it. The murder of Sophie Draper had a whole lot to do with this unpublished manuscript. So now, Ella needed to know everything about this damn thing so she could find the person behind it.

Ella hit her office at a dead run. She couldn’t get inside fast enough, and when she did, she immediately clocked Ripley still nose-deep in Halo of Blood.

‘Dark,’ Ripley said. ‘I annotated the hell out of this thing. Just finished.’

Ella said, ‘You read that whole thing in an hour?’

‘Yeah. Well, I took a break halfway through to use the bathroom, if that’s alright with you.’

‘Shush. What did you find in the book?’

‘It’s a real page-turner, but not in a good way. It follows a guy named Cain, some loser. It’s a revenge fantasy. Porn for freaks, basically. I have no idea who’d want to read this shit.’

‘I think we know who.’

‘But here’s the weird thing – there are sections missing. Entire chunks of it just ripped out, including all the death scenes. And the finale. I don’t even know how this masterpiece ends.’

Ella’s guts took a greasy lurch towards her shoes. All of the death scenes. As in, more than one.

‘How many sections are missing in total?’

‘Four, by my count. Including the ending.’

Four murders scripted but not yet staged. Dangling plot threads just waiting for their auteur to hem them into the fleshy fabric of his magnum opus. So, by Ella’s reckoning, Sophie Draper was just the beginning.

‘Well,’ Ella said as she reached into her pocket and came up with an evidence bag. ‘This might help fill in some of the blanks.’

Ripley, to Ella’s surprise, pounced on it. ‘The hell is this?’

‘Little something our coroner found. Looks to me like pages thirty-one to thirty-three.’

Ripley narrowed her eyes at the sheets of sodden A4 trapped behind plastic. ‘The coroner found them. As in… they were attached to the victim?’

‘You don’t want to know,’ Ella said.

Ripley reached out to take the papers but Ella pulled them back. ‘Whoa. We touch these pages, we might contaminate evidence.’

‘Fine. Kill my curiosity why don’t you.’

‘Consider it murdered. These were down the victim’s throat. Our killer must have stuffed them down there, but that means that this manuscript and our dead angel are definitely connected.’

Ripley reached out and took them this time. She pinched them between her fingers. ‘Four missing death scenes. That means three more victims.’

‘Exactly. Get those pages to the lab and get them scanned. Get photos too. Close-ups clean enough to read so we can devour the details.’

‘Oh great. I can’t wait to read even more of this garbage.’

‘If reading a book is all it takes to catch this guy, I’m alright with that. Just get that thing processed, because if he stuffed those pages down Sophie’s throat then he must have touched them.’

‘On it, boss. Want me to get your dry cleaning while I’m at it?’

‘Yes please. And a caffeine overload, because we’ve got some reading to do. We need to comb every line of this stuff for clues to our unsub's identity. Psychological profiles, locations of significance, anything that might point us in the direction of our perp's real world alter ego.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘We need to highlight every mention of a street name, business, park bench – hell, even a particularly offensive piece of graffiti. Because I have a feeling that Cain and Drago LaChance might be the same person.’

***

Ripley laid the notepad down and spun to Ella beside her. ‘Alright, where do you want to start?’

Ella tapped the manuscript with a marker pen she’d already chewed to death. ‘The main character. What do we know about him? Paint me a word picture.’

‘His name is Cain, and he’s a mess of a man. He calls himself Cain. No one else calls him that.’

‘What do they call him?’

‘Nothing. He’s an anonymous narrator. He doesn’t reveal his real name.’

‘Cain,’ Ella repeated. Her brief time at Sunday school had finally come in useful. ‘The original outcast.’

‘He’s got some issues.’

‘Hit me.’

Ripley ticked off the list of on her inky fingers. ‘Works a dead end job as a cleaner. Cleaning up the messes the beautiful people leave behind, that sort of thing.’

‘Working class hero,’ Ella said. ‘Where does he clean, exactly?’

‘Bunch of different places. Hospitals, offices, small businesses. He works for a temp agency.’ Ripley flipped to the next page of notes.

‘He’s got some health issues too. Coughs a lot, gets these weird episodes where he completely zones out.

Goes into what he calls fugue states for big chunks of time and comes back with no clue how he got there. ’

Ella pushed to her feet and strode over to the whiteboard and uncapped a marker pen with her teeth. She began slashing words across the virgin canvas in black strokes.

Cain. Cleaner. Sick (respiratory).

‘Physical description. We got one?’

‘Yeah. But why are you writing descriptions of a fictional character?’

'Best way to catch a ghost is to give him a face.' Ella said. 'I'd bet my ass this character is a self-insert. He's writing what he knows.'

‘Could be. Narcissists can’t help inserting themselves into things.’

‘Right. So if we know what Cain looks like, we might know what our killer looks like too.’

‘Well, apparently the local kids give him crap for his hair. Calls it wiry about a dozen times. Says he’s gangly once or twice too, but the author’s not big on descriptions.’

Ella added to the profile. Tall, wiry. Ragged, unkempt hair. Street harassment from local kids. Weak, sickly, prone to coughing fits and fugue states.

It wasn't much, but it was a start. A vague sketch of a man who thought turning women into angels was an appropriate way to give the middle finger to the Lord. ‘Murders. What do we know about them?’

‘Not much. All those parts are missing. There are a few references to his angels, but that’s as much detail as he reveals. He only talks about the victims themselves, not the ways he killed them. We only see the aftermath.’

Ella halted her marker mid-sentence. ‘And what’s he say in the aftermath?’

‘It’s usually him in his shithole apartment having a one-sided argument with God about how these murders are all his fault for making Cain the way he is.’

Revenge against God? For what?

‘The victims. What did you find on them?’

‘They’re all women who wronged him, so turning them into angels is like irony.’

An icy wave spider-walked down Ella’s spine. She thought of Sophie Draper, violated and displayed. A message in ruined flesh.

‘Any names? Identities?’

'Just first names.' Ripley ticked them off. 'Emily, Gloria, Penelope, Judith. No last names.'

The marker squeaked across the board. Emily. Gloria. Penelope. Judith.

Four women. Four blank spaces where surnames should be.

Three more potential victims if she didn't figure this guy out in time.

'What else?' Ella asked. 'There has to be some kind of connection. You said they all wronged Cain? How?’

‘As far as Cain’s concerned, these women are a regular rogue’s gallery of sins.’

Ella poised at the board, eager to write something, anything. ‘Specifics. I need specifics.’

‘Emily was Cain’s old boss. Gloria was a teacher who humiliated him in front of his whole class back in school. Penelope was his ex-girlfriend who ripped his heart out.’

‘That’s more like it,’ Ella said as she attacked the whiteboard. ‘And the last one? Judith?’

'Judith was Homecoming Queen, Prom royalty, most popular girl in school, ruthlessly clichéd. Also Cain's long-time crush, apparently. Until she shot him down in front of the whole cafeteria. Cain’s been carrying a torch for his wounded pride ever since.'

Ella began chewing her pen. A pattern was starting to emerge, but the kind that could make a therapist’s head explode.

'So he's not targeting a type. There's no physical preference, no obsession with a certain feature or background.'

‘Nope. The only thing they have in common is the luck to be caught in Cain’s blast radius when he finally blew. They’re all personally connected to him.’

Ella blew out a breath and pushed her hair back. Damn, the thing felt like straw. When all this was over, it was time for a sharp left to the hairdressers.

It was all so goddamn clear in the book. The rejection, the humiliation, the narcissistic wounds that festered until he couldn’t take anymore. A motive with a twenty year history, all amplified by society's blend of isolation and entitlement.

But here in the real world, it was a different story. According to everyone they’d spoken to, Sophie Draper had no enemies. No obvious links between Cain's literary hit list and the very real woman currently on a slab.

If this unsub had killed Sophie Draper because she’d rejected his book, then there had to be a link between the two somewhere.

'Dammit,' Ella ground out between her teeth. 'No Sophie. No last names, no addresses. Of course it can't be that simple.'

'Maybe the answers are in the missing pages?' Ripley said.

She scrubbed a hand over her face. 'Lab's gonna be on them for a while. Gotta give them time to do their thing.'

As if summoned Ella’s the frustration, Detective Blythe chose that moment to appear in the doorway. Ella turned, and hope battled with dread as she clocked the sheaf of papers in his hands.

'Tell me you've got something,' she said. 'Anything.'

Blythe held up his haul like a hunter with a deer’s head. ‘Missing pages. Photographed for your pleasure.’ He slapped them down on the table and Ripley practically dove for them. ‘Our tech guy’s gone through Sophie Draper’s emails, too.’

‘And?’

‘Turned the poor kid’s eyes square, but he came up empty. No record of Halo of Blood being submitted electronically. Not a peep. Guess our boy submitted it old school.’

Snail mail. Useless.

'Fantastic. We've got a literal murder manual in our hands and no way to trace it back to the sicko who wrote it.'

‘But that’s insane,’ Ripley said. ‘Why would he submit it and leave off his contact details?’

‘Maybe he didn't,’ Ripley chimed in. ‘Maybe getting published wasn't the point.’

Ella thought about it, and her and Ripley’s shared mind burned brightly one more time. ‘Do you think?’

‘Why else? Even if Sophie had liked this manuscript and wanted to commission it, she could never have found this guy.

‘What d’you mean?’ Blythe asked.

She had to be right. There was no other answer. Even if Sophie knew the author in real life, he’d still have put his contact details on his manuscript somewhere.

Therefore, the manuscript had to be nothing more than an omen.

‘He sent this manuscript to Sophie to warn her she was going to die.’