CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The bones of Thomas Greaves lay scattered across the rubber matting, and Ella stood among the wreckage of it all and tried to be sure the woman had been real.
The mind did things under poison. She knew that better than most. It built faces out of shadow and put voices into empty rooms, and Ella half wanted to file the whole thing under hallucination and be spared the burden of it.
A blonde woman in the corner of a basement. A door in a wall that no longer looked like a door. It would have been easier to have dreamed her.
But Ella looked at the bullet scars embedded into the rafters, three of them, raining a slow drift of dust into the light. She looked at her holster where he Glock should have been.
And she knew.
The drugs had taken her legs and her stomach and any clarity in her thoughts, but they had not put a woman in this room.
Lindsey Doyle had been here. Doyle had stood ten feet away with the gun she’d taken off Ella’s own hip, and Doyle had walked out through a wall while Ella was held off the ground by a giant’s arm.
Not a ghost. Not a fever. Real, and gone.
Ripley dispersed from a group of officers who were inspecting the very real human bones heaped near the wall. She came and sat next to Ella on the basement floor.
‘I expected the worst. I didn’t expect this.’
‘It’s pretty rough, even by our standards.’
‘You seen a doctor about those wounds yet?’
Ella touched her neck. ‘I had a once-over. Apparently I burst a blood vessel.’
‘Nice. And the poison?’
‘I’m fine poison-wise. I sicked it all up. They only injected me with a small dose.’
‘Sure. Ketamine’s a recreational drug in some places. You’ll be fine.’
‘Agreed,’ Ella said. ‘Any sightings of her?’
Ripley shook her head. ‘No, but Vernon’s got guys looking everywhere for her. He’s pulled cops from the MPD to cover more ground.’
‘Good. Once I’m done here, I’m going hunting for her too. Are you coming?’
‘Like hell you are, Dark. Recover. We know Doyle’s in the city or close enough. She can’t hide forever.’
‘No, but she can train more serial killers to do her bidding. Why did none of those guys – Borden, Winters, Tanner – mention they had a mentor? They should have mentioned it straight away to get diminished responsibility.’
‘They might still. They’re all still awaiting trial. Oh, and did you consider the possibility that Doyle might be lying?’
‘Of course.’
‘Consider it harder, because I think she was just messing with you.’
Ella wasn’t so sure. ‘But how did she know that I was the one who caught those killers? That’s not public knowledge.’
‘Dark, if there’s a serial case in America, there’s only two people it’s going to fall to. That’s me and you. Doyle was probably just playing the odds.’
‘Maybe. How’s the victim?’
Ripley glanced at the pool of blood about twenty feet away. ‘Which one?’
‘The innocent one.’
‘Well, I don’t know about innocent. Thomas Greaves wasn’t guilty, and Barton put him to death.’
‘We don’t actually know that Thomas Greaves wasn’t guilty, by the way. I’m not taking the word of a pathological imposter as gospel. We’ll probably never know the truth.’
Ripley said, ‘Nope, but I do know that this Simon Varro guy murdered three people and was planning on murdering at least one more. We took his hood off, by the way.’
It only now occurred to Ella that she hadn’t seen Simon Varro without his mask on, at least not in the flesh.
The hood was the whole of him, she thought. It was the only self he’d ever managed to hold onto. Strip a man of every other way to say who he was, leave him mute and copying strangers and in the end he’d sewn himself an identity out of black cloth and worn another man’s life.
‘I haven’t seen his face.’
‘You’re not missing much. He’s got Henry Cavill’s body but not his face.’
Ella laughed, despite the circumstances. It wasn’t funny. Nothing about this was funny.
‘Simon Varro was a harmless guy. He hadn’t offended in – how long?’
‘Ten years, according to his file. And then Doyle comes along and convinces him to do… all this.’
Ripley nodded. ‘It’s a real shame. He did all that good with his workshops. And now his whole life has gone to hell. All that hard work’s been undone.’
Ella took in the admittedly surreal scene. Gym equipment, including a now-bloody weight plate. A toppled medieval torture device. The bones of a long-dead man who may or may not have committed murder in life.
‘The good that men do gets buried with their bones, but the evil that men do lives on.’
Ripley raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s nice. What’s that, Shakespeare?’
Ella looked at the iron thing wrecked on its side, at the spikes gone dark and wet, at the scattered blood of a man who’d loved a dead murderer enough to wear his skin. She climbed to her feet, stretched off the pain and helped her partner up.
‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s Iron Maiden. Come on. Let’s get out of here.’