Page 74 of Girl, Accused

Thomas Walsh was not her killer.

Adam Canton was not their killer.

The killer was Sister Mary Elizabeth.

A shrill, piercing sound shattered the moment. The flashlight in her hands became a cell phone again when Mia Ripley's name strobed on the screen.

Ella pushed the answer button and shouted down the line. ‘It’s Sister Mary. She’s the unsub.’

Before Ripley’s words could reach her ear, something stirred inside the mirror world in front of her. A shadow detached itself from the corner, expanded in size, loomed closer. Ella was distantly aware of noises coming through the phone line, but her attention was elsewhere.

She spun on her heels. A figure materialized where empty air should have been.

Sister Mary, draped in black clothes that dissolved her edges into shadow, silver blade clutched in her hand.

Time collapsed into crystallized moments that stacked atop each other. In one, Sister Mary's arm scythed forward, with her blade forming a deadly pendulum aimed at Ella's throat. In the next, Ella dropped the phone with Ripley still connected and the flashlight still burning.

The knife came at Ella with a backhand that suggested four victims had rendered Sister Mary an expert in slashing throats. Ella caught the woman's wrist with both hands. The impact traveled through bone and tendon, up to her shoulders, down to her feet. Ella twisted Sister Mary's knife hand until tendons stood out like wire beneath skin. The blade dropped from suddenly nerveless fingers and clattered to the floor. Ella kicked it away. It skittered across the floor and disappeared into darkness beyond the phone's illumination circle.

Sister Mary’s free hand suddenly lashed out, fingernails raking across Ella's cheek, opening lines of fire that immediately wept blood. She released Mary's wrist and shoved her backward with both hands. The woman staggered, balance compromised by her injured knee. The phone's light cast her in fragments; an eye here, a hand there, the curve of a grimace.

Ella's Glock materialized in her hand. She trained it on the nun-turned-killer, who was now standing in front of her mirror.

‘Don’t,’ Ella breathed.

‘Shoot me.’ Sister Mary’s voice was a gentle thing. A Sunday School teacher voice.

‘Don’t make me.’

‘Go on. Kill me.’

With the gun steady between them, Ella truly saw the woman for the first time. Sister Mary was nothing like the looming specter of judgment Ella had constructed in her mind. She was small, barely five-four, with a frame built for slipping through shadows. Natural ginger hair pulled back tight enough to hurt. But it was her face that snaggedElla's attention. Sister Mary had thick foundation from her forehead to her chin, poorly matched to her neck, like she was hiding something.

‘I’m no killer,’ Ella said.

‘Neither am I.’

‘Why’d you kill them?’ She kept her sights on Sister Mary’s shoulder, but in the near-darkness a clean shot was impossible. If her bullet caught Mary’s abdomen, she could bleed out right here. Ella knew Sister Mary was her unsub, but she needed hard evidence of it, and dead suspects didn’t confess.

‘I was just messenger,’ Sister Mary said.

‘Their sins. How did you know about them?’

‘Can’t you figure it out?’

‘No.’

Sister Mary laughed. ‘Police. Pure envy. Jealous of real justice.’

Ella’s finger itched on the trigger. Discharging bullets in near darkness was best avoided, but the alternative was hand-to-hand combat, and a woman this slender could easily slip from her grasp.

‘Is that right?’

'Yes. They were easy to find. Grant, Torres, and Harper were all over the news. And have youreadSummers’ book? It angered me so much I left it on her desk.’

‘With a message inside.’

‘Yes. Now, are you going to shoot me?’

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