Page 49 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)

Ella surveyed the chaos of the theater. The uniforms were doing their thing, corralling witnesses and stringing up enough crime scene tape to gift wrap the Ellalyn Tower.

The EMTs were checking on Kirsten Lawler and Ezra Borgman, the unassuming angel of death himself, was being dragged out in cuffs, still spitting blood.

‘Hell of a thing,’ Ripley said.

‘You keep saying that..’

‘Could be worse. We could be zipping the place up and tagging toes instead of mopping up blood.’

‘Your bedside manner needs work, Mia.’

‘I’m no doctor.’

She huffed a laugh, immediately regretted it as her battered diaphragm spasmed. Christ, she was getting too old for this stuff. Chasing down psychos and trading blows like she was back in the ring. She'd be lucky if she could crawl out of bed tomorrow without the aid of a crane.

But damn if it didn't feel good. The ache in her muscles, the throb of her split knuckles. The knowledge that she'd put herself on the line, body and soul, and come out the other side. Bloody and bruised, sure, but alive.

Ripley must have caught the look on her face. She bumped her shoulder with hers, gentle, mindful of her various hurts.

‘Great work, Dark. This Lawler woman would be on a gurney if it wasn’t for your stubborn ass.’

Ella ducked her head. Praise from Mia was a rare thing, but it was an effort not to play it off with her usual wiseass deflection.

‘Yeah, well. You know me. Always gotta be the debutante at the ball.’

‘Seriously. What you did was pretty much supernatural. Putting it all together, seeing the pattern when the rest of us were still trying to figure out which way was up.’

Ella shifted, uncomfortable with the sincerity in her voice. She was acting like she'd just pulled Excalibur out of a stone and declared herself queen of the realm. She'd never quite known what to do with praise that didn't come with a side helping of sarcasm.

‘It was Ryland that found the stuff on the web. Hell, even Borgman tipped his hand with that stupid book. I was just the chessmaster.’

‘Don't sell yourself short, Dark.’ Ripley tipped her chin at the stage, the rust-brown pool of drying blood where Ezra Borgman's not-so-illustrious literary career had come to an end.

‘You're the one who made that shot. Figured out just the right amount of Looney Tunes physics to make it work. That's not nothing.’

‘Got lucky,’ Ella muttered, but she could feel the traitorous heat creeping up her neck all the same.

Goddamnit, was she blushing? She'd just pounded a serial killer into pudding in front of a live studio audience, and here she was going all schoolgirl over a little compliment from her partner. Pathetic.

But if Ripley noticed her discomfort, she was kind enough not to mention it. She just nodded, like her downplaying was the most natural thing in the world.

‘Luck's got nothing to do with it. You've got a gift. Or a curse. One of them.’

Ella pressed her lips together and bit back the automatic denial. The knot in her chest, the one she'd been carrying since she’d laid eyes on that first mutilated angel, loosened and unraveled like a half-assed alibi under interrogation.

She was right. Of course she was. For all her rough edges and emotional constipation, Ripley had always been the voice of reason in their partnership.

‘So this Borgman creep,’ Mia said. ‘What was his deal, anyway?’

‘He was Drago LaChance’s caregiver. Well, unofficially.

He was basically a deranged fan. He worked at Eagle Eye as a janitor, found LaChance’s manuscript and became obsessed with it.

Then he ripped the contact details off the manuscript – which is why we couldn’t find them – then tracked him down in the flesh. ’

‘Right. How does that explain the three dead bodies?’

‘Borgman thought LaChance’s book was a message meant for him. He turned the book into live action so that LaChance would get attention for his work.’

‘But why? What was so special about that crappy book?’

‘Borgman found an affinity with the main character. Both beaten down by life. Both had terminal cancer.’

‘Both had stupid haircuts,’ Ripley said.

‘That too.’

‘That guy learned a lesson tonight. If cancer doesn’t kill you, Ella Dark will.’

‘Not sure if I should laugh at that or not.’

‘So, he was trying to make his idol famous. People have killed for weirder reasons.’

Simple as that, Ella thought. Trying to make his idol famous. The irony was that, even though Borgman didn’t finish his mission, it probably worked.

‘You ready to get out of here?’ she asked. ‘I’m very much ready to go home.’

‘I was ready five minutes ago.’

Ezra Borgman might be headed for a jail cell, but Ella and Ripley were headed back to Washington D.C.

Ella watched the taillights of the patrol car carrying Borgman disappear into the night. Tomorrow there'd be paperwork and press conferences and a hundred questions to answer. But tonight, she and Ripley had stopped a killer from creating his final angel.

‘Think Vernon will be impressed?’ Ella asked.

‘I don’t care what Vernon thinks, and neither should you.’

‘True. Let’s go.’

Ella took one last look at the Orpheum Theater, then she turned and followed her partner into the night.

Tonight, the angels could finally rest.