‘Why?’
‘You’ve got nimble fingers,’ Ripley said.
There was no point arguing.Ripley had a point.So, gingerly as a safecracker, she reached out.The flesh was cool under her latex-sheathed fingers, rubbery in a way that sent a shudder down her spine.It was harder than it looked in the textbooks; a human head had a surprising heft to it, even in the clutches of rigor.But Ella was nothing if not persistent, and after a few seconds of creative yoga, she found herself staring directly down the mouth of a murdered English teacher.
She probed the wound as she searched for any hint of soggy paper.
But there was nothing.If their perp had left another breadcrumb, it wasn't hiding in Martina Payne's throat.
‘No pages.Not unless it’s really deep in there.’She straightened up with a groan, feeling every one of her forty-two years in the creak of cartilage and the slow ache blooming at the base of her spine.‘Nada.Our guy's not in a giving mood tonight.’
A meaty hand landed on her shoulder, steadying her as she swayed on protesting pins and needles.Ripley, always ready with the assist.Maybe the coroner will have better luck.’
‘Yeah, sure.’But her mind was already running the numbers.There had to be some common denominator between the vics that would lead her straight to their perp's black heart.
‘We need to look into this woman’s life.See if anything overlaps with the first victim.And get somebody on that boyfriend.’
This was just the lull, Ella thought, because she didn’t need to be psychic to know that this killer planned to take at least two more lives before retiring.
Somewhere out there, their unsub was hiding, and Ella wasn’t quitting until she found him.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Drago LaChance jolted awake like a corpse shocked back to life on a slab.He found himself inhabiting a world that somehow managed to be both too bright and too dark at the same time, and for a disoriented moment, he had no goddamn clue where he was.
But then the room swam into soggy focus.Water-stained popcorn ceiling.Cold wooden floor.Crooked blinds holding back the yellow light from the streetlamps outside.His apartment.Home sweet hellhole.Somewhere to his left, his clock blinked an angry 1:13, but Drago had no idea if that was AM or PM.Time had a way of slithering sideways when you chased your meds with whatever bottom shelf liquor his state welfare afforded him.For all he knew he could have been out for days.
Drago groaned and pawed the nightstand for the pill bottle that had become his constant companion of late.Shaky fingers rattled the dregs; enough to stave off the shakes until dawn if he was lucky.
He tossed back two.Or was it four?Didn't much matter at this point as long as they did their job and brought him one step closer to that sweet black nothing.
Drago needed his phone.Needed to anchor himself in reality before he floated away completely.But the nightstand was bare save for a now-empty pill bottle.
Panic clawed at his chest.Where the hell was his cell?He needed to know what godforsaken day it was, what month.
And most of all, he needed to check that his last memory before he blacked out had been real and not some fever dream.Had Ezra been by?Sometimes his caregiver moved things around when he tidied up, though Drago could never figure out why the man bothered.The place was beyond saving.
Drago hauled himself upright, felt along the walls, stabilized himself.He rubbed his eyes until starbursts exploded across his vision, like his brain cells had committed mass seppuku in protest of their mistreatment.
But no amount of pressing thumbs to sockets could black out the images flickering behind his retinas, because what he’d seen in the news had not made sense.
Just as the first tendrils of hysteria began to curl in his guts, his hand closed over the familiar rectangle of plastic and glass.There.On his nightstand.The screen lit up and Drago squinted against the glare.1:14AM.So it was night, or early morning.It didn’t matter much, because the blinds stayed firmly shut at all times.
And there, at the top of the screen was a notification.Or the ghost of one, anyway.The remnant of whatever had caught his eye before he tumbled down his most recent pharmaceutical rabbit hole.
Drago tapped it with a trembling finger, and the screen resolved into a web browser.Some trashy tabloid site, garish ads crowding the borders.But it was the headline that seized him by the throat and squeezed.
Local Woman Found Dead.Gruesome Display Shocks Connecticut City.
The words swam before his eyes, refused to resolve into anything approaching sense.But the photo below the headline told him all he needed to know.
A body.A woman.Strung up like a marionette, suspended between the steel railings of a balcony.Blonde hair clumped with gore.Arms extended in a grotesque parody of angelic welcome.And the crowning touch, that mocking halo of barbed wire.
Drago's hands spasmed, nearly sending the phone clattering to the floor.No.It couldn't be.He was hallucinating, still in the grips of some narcotic nightmare.Because the alternative – that the scene before him had somehow clawed its way out of his drug-addled brain and onto the front page – was too terrible to contemplate.
But no matter how many times he blinked, how hard he bit the inside of his cheek, the image remained.
It was real.All of it.The murder.The mutilation.The staged tableau ripped straight from the tattered pages of his very own novella.Somehow, impossibly, the dark fantasies he'd only ever dared commit to paper had manifested in flesh and blood and barbed wire.
