CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘Ell.’
Something was nudging her shoulder.
‘Ell. Wake up.’
‘What?’ she muttered.
‘You know the rule? About waking someone up?’
‘Talk sense, Hawkins.’
Luca was annoyingly alert, it seemed, and he was half-dressed and had his phone in one hand. ‘You can only wake your partner up if it’s snowing or someone’s died.’
‘Hawkins, I swear to God-’
‘Check your phone.’
Ella scrambled to a sitting position and blinked away the grogginess. Memories of yesterday returned. The killer, the hanged man, the prison visit. Now Luca was talking about snow and dead people. As far as she knew, Luca had no idea what case she was working on.
Her phone was face down on the bedside table where she had left it last night before going to bed.
She’d put it on silent to focus but hadn’t turned up the volume before falling asleep.
She picked it up and turned it face up and the screen lit and stayed lit, because there was enough on it to fill the lock screen twice over.
Eleven missed calls. Ten from Ripley, one from an unknown number. The most recent was ten minutes ago, the first an hour ago.
The texts ran underneath. She didn’t read them. She didn’t need to. The pattern alone told her.
‘Jesus. What the hell happened while I was asleep?’
‘Look online. You’ll find it straight away. There’s a video. I assume the case involves you, because your phone’s been flashing like crazy for ages. Either that or you’re having an affair.’
She jumped out of bed, parted the blinds and looked out of the window. The grey Ford was still in the parking lot with two officers inside it. Above them, beyond the lot, beyond the access road, the city was waking up under a clear, thin sky.
It was not snowing.
Her phone began flashing again.
‘Mia,’ Ella answered. ‘Sorry, I was asleep.’
‘No kidding. Get to Rumford Avenue. Northwest, up in Brightwood. Number eighteen. You’ll see the cars before you see the house. And get ready, because it’s grim.’
‘Give me thirty minutes.’
‘Done. And check your messages.’
Ella hung up, then quickly went through her texts. She had a bunch from Ripley, one of which was an attached MP4 file. She opened it up.
She watched it through once, and didn’t manage to take it all in at once. The mind didn’t work that way with footage like this, even with her brain. It picked, it flinched, it grabbed at the parts it could distill and left the rest. Only after three or four playthroughs did she take it all in.
And take it all in she did. It was a man in a chair who was no longer in command of his own body.
It was a second figure standing over him, and the size of that figure, a man built to a measurement that men were not built to.
The hood. The bare arms. The ax in his hands was raised up high, the way an executioner might pose, for the watching, for the ceremony of it.
There was no question now. Whatever she and Ripley had been circling at the Renaissance faire, whatever had hanged Billy Hayes with a hangman’s noose, it had not stopped, and it had not hidden, and last night it had let the whole world watch it work.