Girl, Sought (Ella Dark #24)

EPILOGUE

The J. Edgar Hoover Building devoured light. Even on clear nights, the concrete behemoth seemed to bend shadows around its edges like a black hole consuming stars. But tonight, with December clouds choking the sky, the place radiated a specific kind of darkness.

Ella's brain felt like it was wrapped in barbed wire, courtesy of Lawrence Winters and his impromptu jar-to-skull introduction. The painkillers had worn off somewhere between Chesapeake and D.C., leaving behind a new breed of headache.

‘Still time to bail,’ Luca said as they crossed the underground parking garage. ‘Whatever Edis wants can wait till morning.’

‘If only. He’s never summoned me at midnight before.’

‘Maybe he's finally promoting you to his job.’

‘We can dream.’

They made their way through the front doors, through the foyer and toward the elevator. They stepped inside Ella pushed the button for the top floor. She watched the floor numbers tick by, each one cranking up the dread in her stomach another notch. By the time they hit the executive level, her spine felt like it had been replaced with a steel rod.

The elevator shuddered to a stop. Ella squared her shoulders as the doors rattled open.

And found herself staring down a twin set of grim-faced police officers.

Two cops with stony jaws and crossed arms – and from behind them emerged an exhausted-looking Director Edis. He had a thick folder lodged under one arm.

Ella's step faltered. This was new. In all her years, she'd never seen the Director warrant a police escort, especially not on his home turf.

‘Miss Dark.’ He jerked his head toward the open office door. ‘Please come with me.’

Luca made to follow, but the cops closed ranks. A blue wall of silent threat.

‘Just Agent Dark,’ Edis said. ‘Wait out here, Hawkins.’

‘The hell?’ Luca's hand twitched toward where his weapon would be if he hadn't checked it at security.

‘That wasn't a request.’ Edis's tone dropped another ten degrees. ‘Officers, ensure Agent Hawkins remains in the corridor.’

The uniforms shifted their weight, hands drifting closer to their weapons. The message was clear as a neon sign: this wasn't a friendly chat.

Ella shot Luca a look she hoped conveyed both apology and reassurance. His jaw worked like he was chewing glass, but then stepped back and raised his hands in that universal gesture of ‘fine, you win.’

‘This way, Agent Dark.’

Edis led her not to his office but to an adjacent conference room. The kind of place where they delivered news that redefined people's lives. He gestured for her to sit, then locked the door with a click that echoed like a bullet in her skull.

Something was very wrong here.

The wrongness lived in the way Edis wouldn't quite meet her eyes. In how his fingers drummed a steady rhythm against that folder under his arm.

‘Sir?’ The word came out steady despite the fact that her heart was trying to punch through her ribcage. ‘What's going on?’

Edis didn't answer. Instead, he opened the folder and began laying out photographs on the polished mahogany. Crime scene photos, based on the glimpses of blood and body bags. Ella had seen enough death to wallpaper the Pentagon, but something about these made her stomach try to crawl up her throat.

‘Do you recognize these people, Agent Dark?’

There were two photographs.

Ella leaned forward and clocked the first one. The air left her lungs in a violent whoosh.

Julianne Cooper - her former landlord. The woman she'd been trying to reach about her security deposit. Except now Julianne's eyes stared at nothing while her mouth had been – sewn shut? Neat black stitches in a perfect criss-cross pattern decorated her lips. The thread pulled the flesh into grotesque puckers, transforming her face into something that belonged in a nightmare rather than reality.

What the hell was this?

But it was the next photo that shattered her world into irreparable pieces.

Jenna Bradbury. Her former roommate. Her friend. The woman who'd seen her through breakups and breakthroughs, who knew how she took her coffee and which true crime podcasts kept her up at night. Sweet, scattered Jenna. The woman who’d moved in with little more than a beanbag chair and sixteen boxes of self-help books. They'd shared takeout and trashy reality TV, Jenna's eternal optimism the perfect foil to Ella's world-weary cynicism.

No smiles now. Just slack, bloodless features and a hideous criss-cross of black twine sealing those rosebud lips.

Both women she'd been trying to contact. Both gone silent weeks ago.

Now she knew why.

‘Miss Dark?’ Edis's voice seemed to come from very far away. ‘Do you recognize these women?’

She forced air into lungs that had forgotten how to breathe. ‘Yes. My landlord and my old roommate. I've been trying to reach them, but they weren't answering-’

‘When did you last have contact with either of them?’

‘I don't... a few weeks ago? Maybe longer?’ The timeline slipped through her fingers like mercury.

‘That’s funny, Miss Dark, because their phone records show that you contacted them recently via text message.’

'Text? What? I kept calling them, but they didn't answer. I can show you my logs right now.'

A cold, creeping dread slithered up Ella's spine. This was no ordinary murder. No crimes of passion or junkie desperation. This was planned. Targeted. The work of someone with a grudge and the ice in their veins to see it through.

‘Sir, I don't understand. Why are you showing me this? Why the officers outside? What’s going on?’

Edis removed his glasses, polished them with mechanical precision.

‘Because, Miss Dark, take a look at their mouths. They’ve been sewn shut.’

Ella forced herself to look again. ‘I know. I saw it.’

‘And forensics determined that the killer didn’t use ordinary stitching. They used strands of hair. Human hair. Your hair.’

The room started to spin. Ella gripped the edge of the table, trying to anchor herself to something solid while reality came apart at the seams.

‘That… can’t be…’

'Yes, it can. We have conclusive proof; therefore, starting right now, we need to place you under house arrest.'

She stared again at the photographs, in the accusatory emptiness of their dead-eyed stares, Ella saw her future unspool with merciless certainty. Herself in cuffs, dragged over the coals. Herself in an interrogation room, spitting desperate denials against a tide of damning proof.

Herself locked in a cage - maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.

But soon.