Page 26 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

Ella's hotel room was a war zone, and insomnia was the invading army.

She sat on her bed as she pored over the mountain of files in front of her.

She'd been at this for hours now, and they'd called it a day on the precinct at the new director's request, who'd called Ella and told her they needed to start fresh tomorrow.

Edis would never have done that, and Ella didn't know how to feel about it.

So here she was, trading her desk for a bed. It was the same crap, just a different ceiling.

But Ella couldn't switch her brain off. Every time she shut her eyes, Sophie Draper and Martina Payne were there waiting for her.

Their ghosts were asking her why she hadn't been quicker, smarter, and better.

Their faces swam before Ella's gritty eyes in a flipbook of post-mortem shots that had seared themselves onto her eyeballs.

Two dead women, two lives ended by a psychopath with an angel fetish. Two women linked by death, and now Ella had to find out if they were connected in life, too. Ella reached for her coffee thermos but found it empty, then briefly contemplated the merits of an IV drip.

The CCTV angle was a bust so far. Either her unsub was slicker than grease or the business owners of Norwalk had collectively decided that security cameras were passé.

Her mind circled back to Eagle Eye Publishing.

If the killer had stuffed manuscript pages down Sophie's throat, it meant one of two things: either he'd had access to the pages after submitting to Eagle Eye, or those pages had been missing when he'd sent it in in the first place. If it was the former, it meant that their killer had access to the manuscript while it had been locked in Sophie Draper’s drawer.

And that raised a lot more questions.

Ella had already hounded every publisher in the USA that she could find, from the literary giants to the one-man offices. So far, none of them had received a copy of Halo of Blood in their mail or inboxes.

Her gaze fell on the book William Kane had given her – House of Shadows by Kirsten Lawler, whoever she was.

Another loose end that needed tying up. The author had been in the room at the writing class, so Ella needed to track her down and see what she remembered.

Hopefully, her memory was a little better than Kane's.

It might be a long shot, but Ella would take her leads where she could get them.

She'd deal with it tomorrow. Or today, technically. When her eyeballs didn't feel like they'd been sandblasted, and her brain wasn't running on fumes. She needed to get horizontal, if only she could summon the clear-headedness to actually sleep.

She leaned back, intending to rest her eyes for just a moment.

But to her shock, her body had other ideas.

Before she could muster up the willpower to reach for another case file, deliriousness ambushed her.

Then she let sleep rise up and pull her down, down into dreams of barbed wire halos and paper wings stained red.

***

No, Mia Ripley hadn't gotten the director job at the Bureau.

She'd had a week to process that fact because she found out before everyone else, and the sting of it had only disappeared once she got out here in the field with Ella. Once she saw Slick Rick in the flesh and got back to work, the pain had subsided, and determination had taken its place.

Just because she wasn't the director now didn't mean she couldn't be one day.

In fact, she could argue that the whole ordeal had lit a fire under her ass, because now she had something to fight for again.

She'd been at the top of the detective ladder for almost thirty years, and perhaps being at what she perceived to be the highest point she could go for so long had made her complacent.

She'd never considered going higher – never even realized she could – until she found out Edis was leaving.

Now she stared at the labyrinth of code scrolling across her laptop screen. Green text on black was making her cross-eyed.

This was the dark web, and the world – including Ella – still believed that Mia Ripley was a technophobe. That wasn’t true anymore, because since returning from retirement, she’d taught herself a whole new set of skills.

The clock blinked 2:00 AM, but sleep could go to hell. One half of Ripley's mind was on the pages of Halo of Blood, and the other was on the news pieces she'd just devoured. So Ripley dug in, ready to sift through the digital sewerage and hopefully come up smelling like roses.

Ripley had already combed through every legit news site and social media platform, and Drago LaChance might as well have been a ghost for all the digital footprint he left behind.

'Halo of Blood' turned up squat apart from some Finnish metal band, and unless their frontman had ditched the microphone for a scalpel, she was scraping the barrel.

So she’d turned to the elusive dark web, but the dark web wasn't exactly Google.

Its search functions were more like throwing darts blindfolded and praying you hit something besides your own foot.

Her latest rabbit hole had led her to a forum dedicated to ‘transgressive fiction.’ It was nothing but graphic violence and bizarre erotica; the literary equivalent of a snuff film.

Not exactly Ripley's usual bedtime reading. But the search had pinged on the word 'angel' cropping up in a few of the stories, and she figured it was worth a look even if it did mean wading through the cesspool of human imagination at its most depraved.

What she found made her wish for the relative wholesomeness of regular smut.

Story after story, each one sicker than the last. Tales of torture, dismemberment, and violations so vile they defied description.

Some even hint at atrocities against victims too young and innocent to fathom.

It made Ripley want to scrub herself in bleach, then watch videos of puppies until the sun came up.

She waded deeper. Next up was Pretty Little Death Machines, a story that wasted no time discussing dead sex workers in motel bathtubs.

Ripley flicked to the next story, something that began with a basement, a blow torch, and a woman tied to a chair.

Another one, a mother of young boys who'd discovered her true calling, gutting drifters and dumping them in alleyways.

Click. Scroll. Another digital hellscape. Tweens hacked to bits at a sleepover, perky blonde babysitters hung from chandeliers, Prom Queens pickled in jars of their own viscera. What was she even looking for here? She wasn’t sure, but something had its hook in her now.

Three more stories later, Ripley was ready to wave the white flag of screw-this. At least she’d tried, she guessed. Took a deep dive into the shallow end only to find out the pool was filled with used needles.

But enough was enough. Transgressive had taken a hard left into batshit insanity. Maybe Ripley wouldn’t be giving Ella any good news by sunrise after all.

But something stopped her finger from pressing the close-tab widget.

One more, that little voice slithered. A psychologist would tell her she was falling victim to the gambler's fallacy, or the sunk cost fallacy.

One of them. That she'd invested so much time into this, she wouldn't be able to pull back until she'd found something that justified her time.

Ripley hovered. Common sense dueled with the twitch in her detective gland, and every nerve burned with the almost-knowledge that the missing piece could be a few more clicks away.

Fine, she told herself. She’d already gouged out her mind’s eye while she was here. Might as well continue until unconsciousness dragged her down.

She scrolled and found more titles like headlines from a serial killer's wet dream.

And then, there it was.

A post near the bottom, tucked away like an insect hiding from the light. Unremarkable at first glance, just a line of text flagging itself in this endless circle-jerk of weirdness.

Ripley did a double-take, blinked away the grit, and read it again.

Three words.

Sleep deprivation had to be kicking her ass, she thought, because there was no chance in hell that what she was seeing could be real. Surely her brain had hit its quota of curdled human wreckage and thrown in the towel for the night, and now hallucinations were bubbling to the surface.

But no. There they were, in black and white.

The story was called The Angel Maker.

And it was written by LACHANCE666.