Page 68 of Girl, Unmasked
Why?
And then, like a gimpy transmission finally slipping into gear, something caught.
There, buried in the purple prose like a splinter under a nail.A line she’d read earlier but had completely overlooked in the heat of the moment.
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.
Just a bit of scene setting, a smear of local color to make the nightmare seem more real.But it was the context that made Ella think.This little gem was set right before the balcony angel, and these pages were missing from the Martina Payne scene.
The unsub had all the time in the world with Martina, and he still didn’t leave these pages behind like he did with Sophie.
Now, why wouldn’t the Angel Maker do this?Did he forget to bring the pages with him to the scene?
Unlikely.This killer remembered knives, barbed wire, blunt instruments.Hell, even feathers.He wouldn’t forget the most important part of the ritual.
That meant they held some clue that the unsub hadn’t intended to leave behind.
Authors wrote what they knew, even the crazy ones.Especially the crazy ones.They mined their lives for material, used places and things that had meaning to them, even if that meaning was twisted beyond all recognition.
So what if the details in that paragraph weren't just a product of LaChance's diseased imagination?What if they were real signposts, landmarks that would lead her straight to his lair?
‘Past the park, past the spiral monument, across the river,’ she muttered.There was indeed a park on the south side of the city, abutting the river, because she’d passed it on the way here.
But that still left a lot of ground to cover, and she needed to narrow it down quick if she had a prayer of finding Judith before the blade fell.She scanned the passage again, and this time her eyes snagged on the opening line.
Tonight, Cain would not spend his evening staring at the leaning redwood outside his window.
A leaning redwood.
There were a few redwoods in this city.Great big bastards.Not millions of them, but the ones that did occupy Norwalk were impossible to miss.
But a leaning one?One that had taken a visible tilt, probably from age and weather and the inexorable pull of gravity?
That was rarer, and it was the kind of thing that would stand out, even to a mind as cracked as LaChance's.The kind of landmark a soul could use to navigate by, especially if they could see it from their window every damn day.
An electric current zinged through her veins.She suddenly felt like she’d been rebooted and all of the things that were bogging her down an hour ago had been erased.
One more item on the list.
Ella hurried out of her office and found her new friend Ryland in his office.She said, ‘Hey, Ryland, sorry to bother you, but is there a monument in this city?’
Ryland spun in his chair.‘What kind of monument?’
‘A spirally one.’
‘Now you’re asking.’Ryland scratched his hairless chin.‘You know what, there’s something like that about five miles south of here.This big metal thing, looks like crap, to be honest.Why?’
There it was.That was all Ella needed.
‘Because I think our killer lives pretty close to it.’
CHAPTER THIRTY SEVEN
The drive to the river felt like an eternity compressed into a handful of feverish heartbeats.Ella never thought of herself as a crazy person, even if some days it felt like a damn close thing.But this afternoon, she’d stared into the abyss of a psycho's mind and glimpsed something that passed for logic.And if the whispers from that pit of insanity were anything to go by, she was on the right track.
Ella had aimed south and hadn’t stepped off the gas until she passed the park with its stained benches and needle-carpeted grass.The spiral monument Ryland mentioned flew by a minute later, then she’d sped across the bridge to the other side of the river.
She found herself in an area that was not quite suburban, sure as hell not picket-fenced.The kind of neighborhood that made trailer parks look like the Taj Mahal; boarded windows and chain-link as far as the eye could see.
