Page 69 of Girl, Unmasked
Needle in a haystack, but what else was new?She had to think like her unsub.Had to put herself in his scuffed shoes and musty jacket.Where would she call home if her frontal lobe had long since clocked out?
Leaning redwood.Those two words rang in her skull.She banked left and searched the skyline for any trace of arboreal tilt.But all she saw were clapboard and crumbling chimneys.
Another turn.This block was much the same, except the boarded windows had graduation to plywood.However, there was no redwoods in sight.Not even a sapling.
Ella ground her teeth and swung the car around.The next block was more of the same – a smorgasbord of urban blight with a side of tetanus.She crawled past each house, neck craning as she searched for anything remotely tree-like.
Nothing.
‘Come on, you leafy bastard,’ she growled.‘Where the hell are you hiding?’
Each street blurred into the next in a labyrinth of chain-link and rotting clapboard.Ella was getting damn close to playing bumper cars with the next sagging porch she saw.This was taking too long.Every minute she wasted playing arboreal I-Spy was another minute her unsub had of claiming his fourth victim.
The sun had started its lazy dip toward the horizon by the time she hooked a right onto what felt like the hundredth cookie-cutter street.The cruiser’s dash blinked 4:57PM, so any minute now, she’d hit the post-work rush.This task was bad enough without a steady stream of traffic to boost her irritation, so maybe she needed to call in assistance on this one.
She laughed the idea off instantly.Call in an APB on a tree?Even the greenest rookie would laugh her off the force for that one.No, she was on her own out here.
Ella was just about to say screw it and head back to the precinct when a flash of green caught her eye.Ella slammed the brakes.She threw it in park and stumbled out, then squinted into the watery dusk for a better look.
And there it was.
A redwood leaning a solid thirty degrees off true.
The kind of thing you couldn't help but notice if you lived in its shadow.
The bungalow that cowered in the tree’s shadow was a picture in neglect; paint flaking, shutters barely hanging on.
But it was the rusted-out Buick hulking in the driveway that stopped Ella dead in her tracks.And more importantly, the scarecrow of a man currently loading it up like he was prepping for a road trip.
Ella felt her blood freeze and boil in the same instant.Wiry frame swimming in a jacket two sizes too big.Shoulder-length black hair lank with grease.Pale skin like he hadn't seen the sun in years.
Goosebumps erupted across her skin.For a second, her lungs forgot how to function, because she was staring at a man she’d seen in grainy-picture form only an hour ago.
It was him.
Drago LaChance in the flesh.
The man she'd spent two days dissecting, crawling through his diseased gray matter in search of some scrap of sense.And here he was, not fifty feet away, about to drive off into the sunset like he hadn't left a trail of corpses in his wake.
Ella's pistol leapt into her hand of its own volition.She was vaulting the vehicle hood and storming across the before her brain had fully caught up with her feet.Her grip on her Glock anchored her to reality and kept her flying apart at the seams as she closed the distance.
Twenty feet.Fifteen.Ten.
The man was coming and going out of the house, and as far as Ella could tell, he hadn’t noticed her.
Now she was close enough to see the pallor of his skin and individual sweat beads on his forehead.Her thumb popped the retention snap, and she brought her off hand up to cup the weapon's butt.
Feet shoulder width.Elbows relaxed, not locked
His head turned, and clearly his peripheral vision caught that something wasn't right.
But it was too late.Far, far too late for him to do a damn thing except give her a perfect profile shot when he finally noticed the hornet's nest he'd just kicked.
‘FBI!Freeze!’
Ella had Drago LaChance dead to rights and he knew it.
She could see it in the way his eyes bugged out of his skull, in the full-body flinch that said he was about to take a one-way trip to Connecticut State Prison.
