Page 40 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

The drive to the river felt like an eternity compressed into a handful of feverish heartbeats.

Ella never thought of herself as a crazy person, even if some days it felt like a damn close thing.

But this afternoon, she’d stared into the abyss of a psycho's mind and glimpsed something that passed for logic.

And if the whispers from that pit of insanity were anything to go by, she was on the right track.

Ella had aimed south and hadn’t stepped off the gas until she passed the park with its stained benches and needle-carpeted grass. The spiral monument Ryland mentioned flew by a minute later, then she’d sped across the bridge to the other side of the river.

She found herself in an area that was not quite suburban, sure as hell not picket-fenced. The kind of neighborhood that made trailer parks look like the Taj Mahal; boarded windows and chain-link as far as the eye could see.

Needle in a haystack, but what else was new? She had to think like her unsub. Had to put herself in his scuffed shoes and musty jacket. Where would she call home if her frontal lobe had long since clocked out?

Leaning redwood. Those two words rang in her skull. She banked left and searched the skyline for any trace of arboreal tilt. But all she saw were clapboard and crumbling chimneys.

Another turn. This block was much the same, except the boarded windows had graduation to plywood. However, there was no redwoods in sight. Not even a sapling.

Ella ground her teeth and swung the car around. The next block was more of the same – a smorgasbord of urban blight with a side of tetanus. She crawled past each house, neck craning as she searched for anything remotely tree-like.

Nothing.

‘Come on, you leafy bastard,’ she growled. ‘Where the hell are you hiding?’

Each street blurred into the next in a labyrinth of chain-link and rotting clapboard.

Ella was getting damn close to playing bumper cars with the next sagging porch she saw.

This was taking too long. Every minute she wasted playing arboreal I-Spy was another minute her unsub had of claiming his fourth victim.

The sun had started its lazy dip toward the horizon by the time she hooked a right onto what felt like the hundredth cookie-cutter street.

The cruiser’s dash blinked 4:57PM, so any minute now, she’d hit the post-work rush.

This task was bad enough without a steady stream of traffic to boost her irritation, so maybe she needed to call in assistance on this one.

She laughed the idea off instantly. Call in an APB on a tree? Even the greenest rookie would laugh her off the force for that one. No, she was on her own out here.

Ella was just about to say screw it and head back to the precinct when a flash of green caught her eye. Ella slammed the brakes. She threw it in park and stumbled out, then squinted into the watery dusk for a better look.

And there it was.

A redwood leaning a solid thirty degrees off true.

The kind of thing you couldn't help but notice if you lived in its shadow.

The bungalow that cowered in the tree’s shadow was a picture in neglect; paint flaking, shutters barely hanging on.

But it was the rusted-out Buick hulking in the driveway that stopped Ella dead in her tracks. And more importantly, the scarecrow of a man currently loading it up like he was prepping for a road trip.

Ella felt her blood freeze and boil in the same instant. Wiry frame swimming in a jacket two sizes too big. Shoulder-length black hair lank with grease. Pale skin like he hadn't seen the sun in years.

Goosebumps erupted across her skin. For a second, her lungs forgot how to function, because she was staring at a man she’d seen in grainy-picture form only an hour ago.

It was him.

Drago LaChance in the flesh.

The man she'd spent two days dissecting, crawling through his diseased gray matter in search of some scrap of sense. And here he was, not fifty feet away, about to drive off into the sunset like he hadn't left a trail of corpses in his wake.

Ella's pistol leapt into her hand of its own volition. She was vaulting the vehicle hood and storming across the before her brain had fully caught up with her feet. Her grip on her Glock anchored her to reality and kept her flying apart at the seams as she closed the distance.

Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.

The man was coming and going out of the house, and as far as Ella could tell, he hadn’t noticed her.

Now she was close enough to see the pallor of his skin and individual sweat beads on his forehead. Her thumb popped the retention snap, and she brought her off hand up to cup the weapon's butt.

Feet shoulder width. Elbows relaxed, not locked

His head turned, and clearly his peripheral vision caught that something wasn't right.

But it was too late. Far, far too late for him to do a damn thing except give her a perfect profile shot when he finally noticed the hornet's nest he'd just kicked.

‘FBI! Freeze!’

Ella had Drago LaChance dead to rights and he knew it.

She could see it in the way his eyes bugged out of his skull, in the full-body flinch that said he was about to take a one-way trip to Connecticut State Prison.

‘Hands where I can see them, now!’

She'd imagined this moment a hundred times over the past two days, but now that that she was face-to-face with the monster behind the mutilations, all she felt was a sick, roiling disgust. She watched the expressions chase themselves across his face in slo-mo – shock, disbelief, the dawning realization that the game was well and truly up.

And beneath it all, something darker still. Like Drago LaChance was desperate enough to chew its own leg off if it meant escaping the trap.

LaChance's hands inched skyward in an act of reluctant surrender. But his eyes, those watery gray pits, they never stopped scanning.

Looking for an out.

Ella had seen that look on the faces of a hundred scumbags right before they did something stupid.

‘I didn’t…’ Drago began, but Ella held up a hand.

‘Save it for the police station.’

Ella was three steps away. Two. One hand on her cuffs, the other keeping her pistol trained on LaChance's heart. His throat bobbed. A bead of sweat tracked down his temple. His watery eyes darted in every direction; door, gun, face, back to the door.

Her finger stayed outside the trigger guard.

Ten feet between them now. Eight. Five.

Home stretch.

And then the bastard moved.

LaChance lurched to his feet and bolted for the house. Ella's finger twitched on the trigger but she held off; better to take this scumbag alive and wring every last detail out of him than risk a million unanswered questions.

LaChance slammed the door behind him and Ella hit it a second later, shoulder-first. The lock gave way with a crack and Ella breached the threshold with her pistol up and sweeping.

‘It’s over, LaChance!’ Ella shouted, but only silence responded. She looked around at the living room she found herself in, although the damn place was more like a rat’s nest.

Boxes everywhere, piled haphazardly from floor to ceiling. Newspapers and empty liquor bottles carpeting every surface. She was in a hoarder’s paradise.

He’s lost someone. People hoarded in the wake of tragedy, usually when a loved one disappeared. Holding on to crap was a psychological defense mechanism, even if that stuff had nothing to do with the person who vanished. Even so, this was the lair of a lunatic.

Ella swept the room. Checked the corners. Then she spun towards the back door and caught a flash of movement.

There. The ragged edge of a coat sleeve disappearing around the edge of the doorframe.

‘Freeze!’ Ella yelled as she launched in pursuit. She shouldered the door open with enough force to crack her bones, but the backyard was empty. Just a postage stamp of browning grass hemmed in by a chain-link fence.

No sign of LaChance.

And her blood was already singing a different tune, because LaChance wouldn't have bolted out the back. Not without a clear exit. Perps on the run always looked for the biggest sprawl to maximize their chances of escape.

He had to still be inside.

‘Drago,’ Ella called out as she paced back into the living room. ‘Come out with your hands up.’

Nothing but the creak of floorboards answered her. Ella edged forward and kicked aside a stack of newspapers. From her peripheral vision, she caught sight of a familiar face staring up at her.

Sophie Draper, smiling and alive. Next to it, a photo of Martina Payne accepting some teaching award.

Son of a bitch. He was monitoring the press coverage.

And it all but confirmed he was the killer.

Through the living room again, Ella kicked through the clutter and trash. There was a battered couch against one wall, something that passed for bookshelves on the other. She cleared away what detritus she could as she hunted for LaChance, but the place was a graveyard.

Next she dived into the kitchen, cleared the pantry, pulled pen cupboards, even emptied out the coat closet. She came up empty every damn time.

Even so, Ella knew LaChance was amongst this trash. Be it cop’s instinct or women’s intuition, but she could feel his greasy presence hiding, waiting for the perfect chance to slip out into the open.

Then a floorboard creaked overhead and Ella's head snapped up, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Gotcha.

Ella bounded up the stairs with her gun leading the way.

The upper floor was just as abused as the rest of the house – more crap, more empty bottles.

On the landing, Ella saw a bathroom to her left, door ajar.

Ella nudged it open with her foot, revealing a scene that would’ve made a hazmat team break out in hives.

Crusted sink, cracked mirror and a floor that looked like an explosion in a pharmacy.

Empty pill bottles with prescription labels on the front.

Ella scooped one up, clocked the details:

Mr. E. Borgman, Cytoxan (Cyclophosphamide) tablets, 25mg.

‘Borgman,’ Ella said as she pocket the bottle. ‘Got your real name you little bitch.’

Ella backed out onto the landing and saw a closed door at the end of the hall. Had to be a bedroom. Ella approached it sideways, presenting as small a target as possible. She tried the knob. Locked.

For a long moment, silence. Then, so faint she almost missed it, a muffled sob from the other side of the door.

If Ella’s disgust had a sound, it would have been nails on a chalkboard. After everything this maniac had done, now he had the gall to cry about it?

To hell with that.

She stepped back, put all of her weight onto her right leg and booted the door just beside the knob. The flimsy wood splintered first time and swung inward in a hurricane of dust. Ella surged through the opening, weapon up and ready.

The bedroom was a carbon copy of the rest of the house.

But no suspect.

Ella's eyes darted from corner to corner, cataloging possible hiding spots. Under the bed? In the closet?

The closet.

Sliding doors, one of them cock-eyed.

This was it. End of the line.

She reached out, grabbed the handle, and yanked the door wide in one smooth motion.

And crouched in the darkness, folded in on himself like crumpled paper, was the Angel Maker himself.

Ella exhaled, then stood there for a minute and stared down at the pathetic wreck of a human being before her. This was the monster who'd terrorized her city? This sniveling coward?

‘I give up,’ LaChance cried. ‘Lock me away.’

This wasn’t redemption. There was no such luxury. But it was something close. The knowledge that she’d dragged one more monster into the light, and then maybe his three victims could rest a little easier knowing their killer would be trading in his murder den for an eight-by-ten cell.

‘Drago LaChance, or whatever your name is, you’re coming with me.’