Page 31 of Girl, Unmasked
‘The impact from turning her must have dislodged it, whatever it is,’ Maggie said.‘Must have been wedged pretty good not to shake loose during transport.’
Ella watched as the tweezers disappeared between blue-tinged lips.One.Two.Maggie angled and maneuvered, like she was exploring a cave no human was meant to traverse.
‘Come on,’ Maggie muttered.‘Come out.’
Then, a muffled grunt of triumph from the doctor.The tweezers began their torturous journey outward, millimeter by painstaking millimeter.At last they came into view.
And they were clenched tight around a long cylinder of white.
Maggie drew it out slowly
Ella squinted at the soggy wad pinched between the tweezers' claws.‘Is that… paper?’
As Maggie took the object between her fingers, the world slowed down and Ella saw everything frame by frame.She instantly thought of Ripley, back at the precinct, reading through that demented manuscript.
Maggie uncurled the plume of white and laid them out on the table.Ella’s comments were confirmed.
Paper.Three sheets of it rolled together.
Pieces snapped together in her brain.Somehow, Ella had suspected what they were the moment she saw the white tips peering out of Sophie’s throat.
Then she saw the font, the typeface.Courier, size twelve, double-spaced.
They were the missing pages fromHalo of Blood.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ella blew through the precinct doors and made a beeline for her office, because Ella had the key – or one of the keys – to this sordid freakshow burning a hole in her pocket.
The missing pages.Stuffed down the victim’s throat.A message delivered via corpse.
There was no doubt about it.The murder of Sophie Draper had a whole lot to do with this unpublished manuscript.So now, Ella needed to know everything about this damn thing so she could find the person behind it.
Ella hit her office at a dead run.She couldn’t get inside fast enough, and when she did, she immediately clocked Ripley still nose-deep in Halo of Blood.
‘Dark,’ Ripley said.‘I annotated the hell out of this thing.Just finished.’
Ella said, ‘You read that whole thing in an hour?’
‘Yeah.Well, I took a break halfway through to use the bathroom, if that’s alright with you.’
‘Shush.What did you find in the book?’
‘It’s a real page-turner, but not in a good way.It follows a guy named Cain, some loser.It’s a revenge fantasy.Porn for freaks, basically.I have no idea who’d want to read this shit.’
‘I think we know who.’
‘But here’s the weird thing – there are sections missing.Entire chunks of it just ripped out, including all the death scenes.And the finale.I don’t even know how this masterpiece ends.’
Ella’s guts took a greasy lurch towards her shoes.All of the death scenes.As in, more than one.
‘How many sections are missing in total?’
‘Four, by my count.Including the ending.’
Four murders scripted but not yet staged.Dangling plot threads just waiting for their auteur to hem them into the fleshy fabric of his magnum opus.So, by Ella’s reckoning, Sophie Draper was just the beginning.
‘Well,’ Ella said as she reached into her pocket and came up with an evidence bag.‘This might help fill in some of the blanks.’
