Page 80 of Girl, Unmasked
He blinked up at her, eyes puffy and bewildered.‘The last victim?I….uh… don’t….’
Ella slammed a hand on the bars and made the poor bastard jump a mile.‘Kid, if you say you don’t know one more time I’m going to kill you myself.Now, startthinking.The fourth angel in your stupid book.Who is it?Where does the murder happen?’
LaChance's face scrunched up like he was constipated, but it was a better reaction than ignorance.
‘The last death is Judith, when Cain becomes the Angel of Death.’
‘Right.And in the real world?’
‘It’s meant to be his masterpiece.That’s when Cain reveals he’s dying and this whole thing is a last ditch effort to see heaven, because he doesn’t believe…’
‘I don’t need the subtext.Where’s this fourth murder happen?’
‘A theater,’ LaChance said.
‘Which one?’
‘I made up a name.Not a real place.’
A public display.Just what she needed – a crowd of rubberneckers contaminating her crime scene before she even knew where the damn thing was.
‘Who's the victim supposed to be?In real life, I mean.All the others were people who wronged you somehow.This last one's gotta fit the pattern, so extrapolate.Who’s your Judith?’
LaChance went so still he could have been a ventriloquist's dummy.Even the twitch in his cheek subsided.‘I don’t…
Ella’s look silenced him.‘It has to be someone you told Ezra about.How does he know about all these people who wronged you?’
‘I… must have told him, but I don’t remember doing it.’
Ella stared at him, really stared, and for the first time saw past the bluster to the broken man beneath.The lost soul so disconnected from the world that he'd poured all his pain into the page, only to have some maniac turn it into a blueprint for murder.
This was getting her nowhere fast and the clock was ticking down like a time bomb.She had about thirty minutes left to figure this out.
‘This might be the last time we meet, Drogo.Whatever happens, good luck.’
Back to the war room.
CHAPTER FORTY TWO
Ezra Borgman had been a human punching bag since the day he slithered out of the womb.Life had taken one look at his squalling, red-faced self and decided to wind up for a haymaker that never stopped swinging.After a while, he stopped hoping next year would be better than the last and just started praying it just wouldn't get worse.
He’d been born breached to a mother who clocked out during delivery and a father who made himself scarce before the cord was cut.His formative years had been an obstacle course of dumpsters and back alleys.School was no better.The rejects and the losts always found each other, but even among the dregs, ugly little Ezra was the bottom of the barrel.
That was the only education he ever got.How to take a punch, how to crawl inside himself until the worst of the blows rained down on the shell of his body instead of the raw, wounded thing shivering inside.
Never smoked, never drank and tried to do everything by the book.Even so, the big man upstairs still thought it fair to poison his stomach with something untreatable.
Cancer.It was a new low, even for his luck.
Four months, give or take.The doctor had delivered the news like he was reading off a grocery list.
No family to bid him a fond farewell, no friends to toast the man he'd once been.Just a couple rented suits at the city columbarium, a pine box in a muddy hole, and an ignominious slide into the boneyard of obscurity.
It was almost funny, in a bleak sort of way.Like the universe had grown tired of toying with him piecemeal, just said ‘Hell with it,’ and cut his strings in one final snickering snip.
But still, Ezra had nodded at the doctor, signed the paperwork, and shown up to work that night right on schedule.
That month, the temp agency had landed him a thrice-weekly night clean at Eagle Eye Publishers, whoever the hell they were.
