Page 39 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

Ella's office looked like a paper bomb had detonated. Pages from Halo of Blood covered every available surface, and she’d been over the damn thing so many times she could recite passages in her sleep. Not that sleep was an option right now.

But for all her studying, for all her attempts to pry open the lid of this psychopath's skull and peek at the maggots writhing inside, she was still coming up empty.

Oh, she had pieces, but nothing she could sink her teeth into and use to claw her way to the truth.

The first two killings had followed the script to the letter, right down to the barbed wire halos and posed bodies.

But the third, the slaughter at Bookshop Obscura, had been a deviation.

A detour into unknown territory, and damn if navigating it didn't make her feel like a blind rat in a maze built by a sadist.

But it was the specter of victim number four that really had her guts churning. Judith, the mysterious final woman. The cipher without a last name or distinguishing characteristics, just a blanket hatred from a man unhinged enough to consider murder his magnum opus.

Ella ground her knuckles into eye sockets that felt lined with crushed glass. She was burning out and she knew it, running on fumes and stubbornness, but what choice did she have? The clock was ticking, and every second she wasted was another second Judith's number ticked closer to coming up.

‘Think, Dark, you dumb bitch,’ she snarled at herself. ‘There's gotta be something you're missing.’

But the pages just stared back at her. The words blurred and ran together until they looked like blood swirling down a drain, and wasn't that just a kick in the head? Even the goddamn ink was taunting her now.

Fury rose up and pressure built behind her temples until she was sure her skull would split at the seams. She wanted to scream, tear her hair out at the roots, punch something until the world made sense again.

No. She had to channel the rage into something beneficial. The walls in this place had enough holes as it was, and another hole wasn’t going to bring Judith any closer to safety.

She picked up a handful of pages of the manuscript and began rifling through them, drawn to the scenes that Ryland had found online.

At the first crime scene, they’d found pages of the book stuffed down the victim’s throat, but that little ritual was noticeably absent from the second and possibly the third.

Why?

And then, like a gimpy transmission finally slipping into gear, something caught.

There, buried in the purple prose like a splinter under a nail. A line she’d read earlier but had completely overlooked in the heat of the moment.

Tonight, Cain would not spend his evening staring at the leaning redwood outside his window and wishing for something more.

No, his journey had taken him past the park, past the spiral monument, across the river and into the beating heart of this cesspool he called a city.

His destination was the home of a woman who'd set this whole thing in motion twenty years ago.

Just a bit of scene setting, a smear of local color to make the nightmare seem more real. But it was the context that made Ella think. This little gem was set right before the balcony angel, and these pages were missing from the Martina Payne scene.

The unsub had all the time in the world with Martina, and he still didn’t leave these pages behind like he did with Sophie.

Now, why wouldn’t the Angel Maker do this? Did he forget to bring the pages with him to the scene?

Unlikely. This killer remembered knives, barbed wire, blunt instruments. Hell, even feathers. He wouldn’t forget the most important part of the ritual.

That meant they held some clue that the unsub hadn’t intended to leave behind.

Authors wrote what they knew, even the crazy ones. Especially the crazy ones. They mined their lives for material, used places and things that had meaning to them, even if that meaning was twisted beyond all recognition.

So what if the details in that paragraph weren't just a product of LaChance's diseased imagination? What if they were real signposts, landmarks that would lead her straight to his lair?

‘Past the park, past the spiral monument, across the river,’ she muttered. There was indeed a park on the south side of the city, abutting the river, because she’d passed it on the way here.

But that still left a lot of ground to cover, and she needed to narrow it down quick if she had a prayer of finding Judith before the blade fell. She scanned the passage again, and this time her eyes snagged on the opening line.

Tonight, Cain would not spend his evening staring at the leaning redwood outside his window.

A leaning redwood.

There were a few redwoods in this city. Great big bastards. Not millions of them, but the ones that did occupy Norwalk were impossible to miss.

But a leaning one? One that had taken a visible tilt, probably from age and weather and the inexorable pull of gravity?

That was rarer, and it was the kind of thing that would stand out, even to a mind as cracked as LaChance's. The kind of landmark a soul could use to navigate by, especially if they could see it from their window every damn day.

An electric current zinged through her veins. She suddenly felt like she’d been rebooted and all of the things that were bogging her down an hour ago had been erased.

One more item on the list.

Ella hurried out of her office and found her new friend Ryland in his office. She said, ‘Hey, Ryland, sorry to bother you, but is there a monument in this city?’

Ryland spun in his chair. ‘What kind of monument?’

‘A spirally one.’

‘Now you’re asking.’ Ryland scratched his hairless chin. ‘You know what, there’s something like that about five miles south of here. This big metal thing, looks like crap, to be honest. Why?’

There it was. That was all Ella needed.

‘Because I think our killer lives pretty close to it.’