Page 61 of Girl, Unmasked
So he waited.He was a predator, perfectly-still in the urban jungle.
The minutes stretched on.Sweat beaded on Cain’s forehead and trickled down the back of his neck.He resisted the urge to check his watch, to fidget, to do anything that might draw attention to himself.Just another face in the crowd, anonymous and forgettable.
His thoughts turned to the woman from last night, and how his actions had already pervaded every news outlet in the United States.In less than a day, she'd become a nationwide sensation.Pundits and talking heads frothing at the mouth, whipping the public into a frenzy.
And it was all because of him.
It was a heady feeling, this newfound power.To know that with a few carefully orchestrated moves, he could send ripples of fear and awe across an entire country.
But as intoxicating as this power was, Cain reminded himself that it wasn't the point.The power was merely a side effect.Every angel was a love letter to the person who’d saved him, and everything else was just a perk of the mission.
Movement at his target location snapped Cain back to the present.The lone customer he'd observed entering earlier was now leaving with a brown paper bag clutched to her chest.
Cain's muscles tensed, ready to spring into action.But not yet.Not until the coast was truly clear.
He counted to sixty and kept his eyes on the shop.No one else entered.The street remained busy, but no one paid any attention to the unremarkable man standing in the shadows.He watched as the customer ambled down the sidewalk, disappearing around a corner.
It was time.
With as much casualness as he could muster, Cain stepped out onto the sidewalk and merged seamlessly with the flow of pedestrians.Nothing to see here, folks.Move along.
At the door, he readied himself, stepped inside.In one fluid motion, he flipped the sign from ‘OPEN’ to ‘CLOSED’ and slid the bolt home.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Ella's office felt more like a war room than a detective's workspace.Ryland had commandeered her desk and spread printouts across its surface like a general plotting battle strategy.
Ripley said, ‘Tell her, Ryland.’
‘I dove into the dark web, used some custom crawlers to sift through the digital sewage.Deployed packet sniffers, traffic analysis tools – the works.LACHANCE666 left breadcrumbs all over the place, if you know where to look.’
Ella spat, ‘The picture.You said you found a picture.’
‘Right, sorry.’Ryland fished a grainy printout from his pile.‘LACHANCE666 had posted on several forums.On one of them, he used this as his avatar.’
Ella snatched the paper.The image was a blurry mess, like it had been taken on a webcam from the Stone Age of technology.But even through the digital muck, she could make out a face – long black hair, pale face, nose big enough to land a jet on.
A stone of nausea lodged in her gut.Was this Drago LaChance?Had this man killed two people already?
Looking at him, the kid barely looked strong enough to swat a fly, but all things considered, mutilation didn’t require strength.Anyone could carve out eyeballs and slash a throat as long as they had functioning limbs.
But there was another problem.The man in the picture was not Roger Blackwood.
Ella thought it over, but she couldn’t make assumptions based on a grainy photo found in the darkest corners of the Internet.‘Let’s not put our eggs in one basket.We’ve got a guy in our interrogation room with a solid link to Martina.For all we know, this could be a picture of anybody.Mia, can you run this through image recognition software?’
‘On it,’ she said and left the room in a hurry.Ella turned back to the pile of printouts on her desk.
‘What else did you find?’
'Excerpts.Several of them.LACHANCE666 has been posting on multiple dark websites.Mostly shock and gore pages.'
Ella snatched up the first paper and began combing through.
Tonight, Cain would not spend his evening staring at the leaning redwood outside his window and wishing for something more.No, his journey had taken him past the park, past the spiral monument, across the river, and into the beating heart of this cesspool he called a city.His destination was the home of a woman who'd set this whole thing in motion twenty years ago.
Ella skimmed the pretentious details and went straight to the action.That would let her know what section of this bloody manuscript Ryland had unearthed.
Cain stood on the balcony, the night air cool against his feverish skin.Below him, his angel hung suspended, a masterpiece of flesh and wire.Her arms stretched wide as he embraced eternity.The barbed wire crown bit deep and drew rivulets of blood that glistened like rubies in the moonlight.He'd slit her throat with surgical precision, letting her life drain away before fashioning her into this divine form.Now she was perfection incarnate – no longer the sniveling, pathetic creature who'd scorned him, but a beacon of terrible beauty.
