Page 43 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

Ten minutes gone, fifty left to prove she wasn’t chasing shadows.

Ella had paced from wall to wall so many times that her thighs had started to burn. With every lap of her office, she passed her evidence board with the faces of the victims staring back. The more she stared at them, the more the pieces refused to click.

Time to go over everything from the beginning, Ella told herself.

All of these murders were related to a manuscript called Halo of Blood, formerly The Angel Maker. The unpublished book was written by Drago LaChance, or Drogo Lachowski.

Lachowski had submitted to a single publisher – Eagle Eye Publishers, and it had been rejected.

Ella had discovered the manuscript in a drawer, and all of the kill scenes in the book had been removed.

Ella didn’t know whether or not Lachowski had submitted it with them missing, and in his current state, she doubted he’d remember, but there didn’t seem to be any alternative.

From that point, someone had re-enacted the scenes from the book in real life, and all of the victims were people from the author's life who'd wronged him.

Sophie had rejected Lachowski's manuscript, Martina had told him he would never be a writer, and Kane had humiliated him in public.

All of the victims had been killed indoors in isolated environments.

Proof of these homicides had been found on the suspect’s cell phone. He claimed to have committed them, but has no memory of them.

All of this evidence suggested that Drogo Lachowski was guilty.

But then, on the other side of the coin, Drogo Lachowski did not fit the profile of someone able to commit these acts.

Planned homicides like these required tact, guile, and a steady mind.

Although this unsub was capable of ultra-violent acts, he was not completely removed from reality.

He, at the very least, had the forward-thinking abilities to pull these murders off without leaving a trace behind.

That spoke of a mind that had at least one foot still planted in reality.

Drogo Lachowski, by his own admission, claimed that Halo of Blood – an eighteen-thousand-word novella- was subpar.

A psychopathic killer with delusions of grandeur, this great would never dismiss their own creation, especially not if they went to extreme levels to adapt it to reality.

He would be boasting of its greatness to anyone who'd listen.

So, where did that leave her?

Fifty-fifty. One half of her, certain Lachowski, was their guy, the other screaming that they had the wrong man in chains.

Ella turned to the cell phone on her desk. The one with Lachowski’s death gallery. Ella snatched it up, scrolled through the images one more time.

The images assaulted her retinas in rapid-fire.

Sophie Draper lay out like some blasphemous altar piece.

Martina Payne crucified against the night sky.

William Kane, with his innards laid out like tentacles.

She studied every photo one by one, but all she saw were sights she hoped would fade from her memory one day.

Ella jumped between other apps on LaChance's phone, but all she found was a minimal browsing history and ancient text conversations, most of them one-sided.

She navigated to the deleted folder – nothing.

She skimmed through the apps, although there weren't many installed.

A clock, a calendar, a map, a messenger app.

A notes app, never used by the looks of it.

What kind of writer doesn't use the notes app on their phone?

Even the drugged-out ones usually had something.

Then her thumb hovered over a cloud storage icon.

The same annoying one she had on her phone, too. One that non-consensually stole your files for apparent safe-keeping, then clogged up the storage capacity until you went in and manually deleted everything.

And next to the icon was that beautiful little checkmark. Synced.

Ella hit it, waited as the wheel spun. The app sprang to life with its familiar blue-and-white borders, then Ella came face to face with a login screen.

She mouthed a curse, but tapped the email bar anyway.

Saved email:

LaChanceDrago84@

The beat in Ella’s chest hit double time. ‘Please God have the password saved.’

Ella tapped the email address, and all of the credentials auto-filled. Ella exhaled like she was blowing out smoke from her last cigarette.

Then, like a gift from the digital gods, the app blinked open.

Thumbnails. Row after row of them, stretching off into digital infinity. Photos. Dozens. A hundred, maybe.

The pictures came into focus, and Ella couldn't scroll fast enough. She pulled up each image one by one and found the scenes that didn't make the cut in LaChance's scrapbook. The same shots she'd seen in his gallery, only from different angles, capturing every little detail of the three victims.

Close-ups of wounds, wide angles showcasing the full scope of mutilation. Barbed wire crowns and slashed throats and flayed skin. Some artfully composed shots, some so blurry she couldn’t tell what body part she was looking at.

These were the deleted scenes of LaChance’s gallery of the dead.

Pictures that the killer took were then deleted from the device, but blissfully unaware that the photos were instantly saved to the cloud storage.

But everything here, Ella had seen before. Hell, she’d seen it in the cold flesh. She needed something new, not just a rehash of the Angel Maker’s greatest hits.

Nothing helpful. Just more fuel for the nightmares she knew would come later, when she finally let her guard down long enough to sleep. A ball of frustration lodged in her throat, and Ella was about to put the phone back in its plastic bag when one photo in particular caught her eye.

She froze mid-swipe.

It was Sophie Draper. The first victim. The opening salvo in LaChance's one-man murder spree.

But this shot was different. Intimate. Invasive. Not some glossy crime scene photo snapped from a safe distance, but an extreme close-up of Sophie's face. So tight, Ella could count every eyelash.

The world telescoped down to a pinprick. Ella’s fast breathing suddenly short-circuited, caught behind a blockade of something too terrible to name.

Because this picture had been taken post-enucleation, Sophie no longer had human eyes.

In the bloody eye sockets lay two glistening, polished marbles.

Ella's fingers trembled as she pinched the screen and zoomed in as close as the phone let her. Her blood flash-froze, and her brain took a holiday hand in hand. All that existed was her and the phone and the secret it had tried so hard to hide.

She could see a reflection in Sophie’s eyes.

A face.

Sophie’s killer. The Angel Maker. Right there in black and white.

This face was thin to the point of gauntness. Steep angles, cheekbones that could cut glass. Bushy hair that stood on end, a patchy beard that clung to the jaw.

And unless Ella was going crazy, that wasn’t Drago LaChance staring at her.

But if not LaChance, then who?

Someone with access to his phone, someone who could upload these trophy shots without LaChance even knowing.

The gears ground so hard in Ella’s head that they may as well have sparked.

The pieces were there – scattered like shells after a massacre – and all she had to do was line them up and pull the trigger.

She was one neuron away from blowing this case sky-high.

Just needed that last little nudge to send her over the edge.

Her hand fell to her pocket. Something firm pressed against her leg. Something she’d forgotten she had.

Ella fished it out and stared a hole in it.

An empty pill bottle with a prescription reading: Mr. E. Borgman, Cytoxan (Cyclophosphamide) tablets, 25mg.

‘E. Borgman,’ Ella said.

The pieces she'd been juggling for days suddenly clicked into place, revealing a picture so obvious she wanted to slap herself silly for missing it. She'd been too blinded by her own tunnel vision to see beyond what her stupid brain had been telling her all along.

Yes, these murders were about Halo of Blood.

But maybe the author had nothing to do with them.

Maybe this was the work of a deranged fan.