Page 9 of Girl, Unmasked (Ella Dark #28)
Over the years, Ella had been exposed to the entire spectrum of human mutilation, from missing heads to severed feet and everything in between.
But the victim in front of her now, Ella, struggled to recognize herself as a member of her own species.
This victim – Sophie Draper – was stripped bare and posed in some sick likeness of prayer.
Her knees dug into the carpet, her elbows were propped on the brown couch, and her head was bowed as if waiting for a divine intervention that was never going to come.
The woman's back was a glistening slab of meat where skin and muscle should be. Flayed open from nape to tailbone, thus resembling a pair of flimsy angel wings.
And around her head was a crown of barbed wire. Perhaps not a crown. A halo of metal that had been jammed down on her skull. The jagged points bit deep and loosened her flesh until streaks of blood slicked her hair and dripped down the side of her face.
‘Christ in heaven,’ Ella said. A sudden itch ran up her arms. The kind of itch no amount of scratching could fix.
Ripley just shook her head, then moved to the victim’s side. She gestured towards her face.
Ella inched closer on wooden legs as the sour stench of death billowed to meet her. She breathed through her mouth and tried not to gag as she crouched for a better look at what was left of Sophie’s face.
And her stomach dropped yet again.
Just smooth, blank orbs the color of bleached bone. Marbles, maybe, or polished stones, wedged into the bleeding holes that should have been windows to the soul.
Ella rocketed upright and staggered back a step as she fought against the whirlpool of nausea threatening to spill over.
She thought of every psycho she’d ever profiled and every corpse that had been violated in ways nature never intended, and quickly concluded that nothing in her mental catalogue came close to this.
She took a moment to ask herself some questions without answers. What kind of psychopath could look at another human being and see a canvas for whatever this was? Whoever did this wasn’t just removed from reality. They’d taken a flying leap off the deep end and taken up permanent residence there.
And then, Ella reached for her first conclusion. The white eyes, the halo, the scabbed wings.
‘She’s a fallen angel,’ Ella said.
‘Yup. There’s no dignity here,’ said Ripley.
The symbolism wasn’t exactly subtle. The unsub had tried to unmake this woman. ‘And he’s put in a lot of effort. Something like this takes hours.’
‘But why? What’s the point of this?’
A damned fine question, and one Ella knew would haunt her long after they'd loaded this woman into a body bag.
But right now, in this moment, all she could do was send up a prayer for the stranger lying out in front of her.
This stranger was about to become her best friend from beyond the grave, because whoever did this had just skyrocketed to the top of Ella's hit list, and she'd walk through hell to find them.
‘He's delusional,’ Ella said. ‘Mission-oriented. He doesn't see her as human. She's a symbol. A canvas he can use to paint his fantasies on.’
'We've got an eleven-hour window of death, so we'll need to trace her last whereabouts and see if we can find anything unusual.'
Ella nodded, tapping her lips as the timeline took shape.
She looked over near the TV and saw an overloaded bookshelf, some framed photos of a beaming Sophie with arms slung around friends’ shoulders.
A life forever stuck on pause. She tore her gaze away from the grisly centerpiece and forced her mind back into the groove of clinical detachment that was the only way to survive this job with her marbles halfway intact.
She took in the scene with a hunter’s eye, and one inconsistency stood out above the rest.
'Ripley, what's wrong with this picture?' She gestured to the floor, walls, and furniture.
‘You kidding me? I can see tons wrong with this picture.’
‘There are only a few drops of blood.’
Ripley squinted as she did the mental math. ‘Good spot. Meaning…’
‘Meaning all of this mutilation was done post-mortem.’ For this level of mutilation, Ella would have expected enough blood to float a ship, but the wide fan and air-spray arterial gush was conspicuously absent.
‘Small mercies,’ Ripley said and turned away from the body. Ella couldn’t blame her. There were some things the human mind just refused to process, no matter how many winters you'd ridden the Homicide merry-go-round.
‘So thankfully, the flaying or the enucleation wasn’t the cause of death. That also means he’s not a sadist.’
A sadist needed to see, hear and feel their victims suffer. If this mutilation was done postmortem, the killer wasn’t getting off on the victim’s her pain. The goal here was death, not suffering.
Ella continued, ‘He's mission-oriented, likely acting out a delusional fantasy.
We're looking for a history of mental illness, prior violence, antisocial behavior.
Someone who believes in extremes – black and white, good and evil.
No middle ground. Bad news is we're hunting a delusional psychopath who can't separate fantasy from reality. Good news is that he’s too far gone to fit in with civilized society.’
‘Why?’ Ripley asked, even though Ella suspected she knew the answer. Two years in and she still tested her occasionally.
‘These cuts.’ Ella gestured to the victim’s sliced-up back. ‘Far from surgical. It means we’re not dealing with a high-functioning psychopath like a surgeon or doctor. We indulged the idea, but we can rule it out.’
‘And the vic? Why her? Why here?’
‘Our guy could have just abducted a random victim off the street, but he went to all this trouble, risked exposing himself in front of all these neighbors.’
‘So, Sophie was targeted.’
‘One hundred percent.’ Ella pivoted and took in the rest of the apartment with Ripley in tow. In the kitchen, her eyes snagged on a mountain of white paper. The text on the top piece read ‘Memoirs of a Teen Idol.’
‘Huh,’ Ripley grunted. ‘What’s that? A book?’
Ella flipped through the pages and found three would-be books, one autobiography and two fantasy novels. ‘In their primitive forms. Manuscripts.’
‘What kind of person has manuscripts lying around?’
‘Someone who works for a publishing company.’
Ella caught sight of the woman-turned-angel through a crack in the door and suddenly felt paper thin.
This wasn't her first rodeo or even her tenth.
She'd spent more hours than she could count trying to untangle the logic of a psychopath’s mind, but something about this scene had hooked its claws in deep and was yanking for all it was worth.
Maybe it was the sheer senselessness of it all.
The waste and the fury and the rivers of bloodshed in service to a lunatic's vision.
A clatter of footsteps and low-pitched chatter drifted in from the living room. Backup had arrived in the form of a CSI techs.
‘You agents finished up? We ideally want to examine the body before nature takes its course.’
‘Of course. Looks like our time’s up,’ said Ripley. ‘How d’you want to play this?’
Ella dropped the manuscripts back on the table. ‘I’ll head to the precinct and see what I can dig up on Sophie Draper. I’ll comb through her emails, credit card statements, anything that might give us a lead on who might want her dead.’
Ripley pulled a face like she'd just bitten into a lemon and found half a worm. ‘Alright. I’ll brief the forensic guys. Try and speed this thing up. Take the car. I’ll get a lift back.’
‘You really are too good to me.’
‘Sing my praises later. Let’s get this ball rolling, because I doubt our killer’s going to stop at one.’
She wasn’t wrong. This case had serial written all over it, and they hadn’t even gotten elbow-deep in the entrails yet. ‘You’re on,’ she said.
Ripley sketched a salute and turned towards the new arrivals. Ella took her leave out of the apartment and breathed in the corridor air.
Sophie Draper. A stranger in life, but Ella's new celestial best friend in death. Now Ella needed to dig through every scrap of the woman's existence, turn over every rock and rattle every skeleton until she had a clear picture of this woman’s life.
And then she'd use that picture to paint a target on this killer's back.