Page 30 of Girl, Unmasked
This was rage and frenzy.
But that didn’t add up at all.Their unsub was precise, careful, able to ambush a lone woman inside her own home and leave no evidence of it behind.This unsub could remove a person’s eyes without blinking and carve up her flesh like it was wet tissue paper.These angel wings should have been flayed with the same finesse as the removed eyeballs and the pinprick stigmata in her forehead.
Ella tried to rattle something resembling sense out of the jumbled jigsaw her gray matter had become, because it didn't track.Their perp had gone from Michelangelo to a finger-painting kindergartner in the space between north and south on this corpse.
Rushed, rattled.Like he’d been interrupt mid-masterpiece and had to do a cowboy job for the finale.
Or perhaps he figured the front was where the magic happened, so he phoned it in on the back.’
‘That’s all I’ve got at the moment.Still waiting on swabs and I haven’t done a full internal yet, but if I find anything new, I’ll let you know.Help me flip her again would you?’
Ella and Maggie flipped her again with the same amount of grace as before.Maggie fiddled with the slab’s height mechanism and lowered Sophie down to a more restful position, except the angle wasn’t right, the trajectory tweaked just enough to send the corpse sliding to the side like a loose log on a slope.Ella grabbed and steadied the body.
And at that moment, Ella saw something.
Gravity plus poor positioning equaled a slack jaw, allowing Ella a perfect view to the back of Sophie’s throat.
Sophie’s lifeless head suddenly looked a whole lot more occupied than it had a minute ago.
Call it cop's intuition, call it the universe deciding to drop feces right on her head.But staring at this foreign object, Ella was certain of one thing.
Her day was about to get a whole lot worse.
‘Doctor.’Ella snapped her fingers, still cradling Sophie’s body.‘Look.’
‘What?’
‘There’s something in her mouth.’
‘Is there?’the doctor asked.
Ella stared with her jaw hanging slack while her brain tried to play catch-up with her eyeballs.No way.She blinked hard, half-hoping the hallucination would take the hint and disappear.
No.It stayed put.
There, nestled at the back of Sophie Draper's throat like the world's biggest tonsil stone, was something that sure as hell didn't belong.
Something pale and round – a button mushroom from hell peeking out between her throat muscles.
Marbles for eyes.Flayed skin.Barbed wire halos.Apparently all of that wasn’t enough for this psychopath.
‘I’m telling you.There’s something white peeking out from her throat.’
With the body repositioned and secured, Maggie plucked a flashlight from her instrument tray and shined it in Sophie's mouth.A second later, she winced like she’d been slapped.
‘What the…?’
Words crowded on Ella’s tongue, but she wasn’t sure which ones to voice first.‘You do an internal scan yet?’
‘No, not yet, only the preliminary external.We do that when preparing the body for the funeral.’
‘Got it.Can you remove this thing?’
‘Of course.Let me grab my tweezers.’
She grabbed the instrument off her table, not taking her eyes off the foreign object in Sophie’s mouth.
Gently, the doctor put her flashlight down and clamped open the victim’s mouth with her fingers.Then, with the delicacy of a safecracker, she descended into Sophie Draper's mouth with her tool.Ella stood back and let her work her magic.
