Page 25 of Girl, Unmasked
‘Jesus, Ripley.We got to put a bell on you.’
She flipped her the bird on reflex.‘Don’t tell me you’re reading that?Get it to the lab before you contaminate it.’
Ella hesitated, still caught up in the cliffhanger.There was a connection here; she could smell it.But Ripley was right.This was evidence, and evidence belonged in the hands of the lab.Handling it with her dirty paws wasn't doing a damn thing for the case except giving her a contact high from Dorito dust.
‘Alright, keep your panties on.It’s all yours.’
Ripley pulled on a pair of gloves and handled the manuscript by one corner.Ella removed her gloves and shook the sweat away.
Ripley said, 'Alright, I'll bite.Did you find anything reading this thing?Our killer uses it as a script?'
The resemblance was there, but without the missing pages, she had nothing to go on.
‘I don’t know.It follows some downtrodden guy, and I got to a scene where he was stalking a woman, but then the pages disappeared.’
Ripley eyeballed the manuscript like it was an unexploded bomb, then looked back at her partner.'Disappeared?'
‘Missing.It jumps three pages right around where our protagonist is about to start, I assume, stabbing.’
‘Some writer this guy is.Couldn’t you work out what happened from the next scene?’
‘I was trying, but someone came in and took the book off me.’
Ripley edged towards the door.‘Yeah, well, fingerprints are more useful than whatever it is you’re doing.We can get pictures of the pages, don’t worry.We just need to sweep it first.’
‘Fine.Get going.I’ll try and find out more about this Drago LaChance person, but something tells me he’s not going to be real.’
Ella waited until Ripley had cleared the frame before swinging her chair around towards her computer.Okay.Time to find out who was behind this manuscript-turned-murder manual.
Drago LaChance, she typed.Halo of Blood.She threw quotation marks around each term for more specific results.
She held her breath as the digital gears churned, then scraped the bottom of her mental barrel for a scrap of optimism that this lead might actually pan out.
Then the search results came back.
Ella grabbed her mouse and frantically scrolled up and down the page.
‘You gotta be kidding me,’ she said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Drago LaChance was a ghost.
Ella had been chasing his digital trail for the past hour.She'd gone through every database and search engine she could think of and come up with nothing but cobwebs.No social media profiles, no Amazon wish lists, and not even a measly Twitter account chronicling his love of hentai, she assumed.
It was like the guy had been wiped from the face of the earth.
Or never existed in the first place.
She'd even stooped to scouring the scuzziest corners of the internet where incels gathered to swap manifestos, but even there, amongst the dregs of society, there was no sign of Drago LaChance.
The only hit was a geriatric in Wisconsin with a petty theft charge back in the eighties.Unless her unsub was in his seventies and lived ten states away, she was pretty sure she could rule this man out as a suspect.
Ella had devoured through every digital database at her disposal too; motor vehicle records, credit reports, criminal histories, ViCAP, AFIS, but this LaChance person remained elusive.For all intents and purposes, the man behind Halo of Blood was a figment of everyone's imagination.
She grabbed a section of her hair and scrunched it in frustration while she prayed for an intervention.It came in the form of Mia Ripley through the office door with the Halo of Blood manuscript clutched between her fingers.
‘Guess who just became the lab tech’s favorite ass-hat?’
