Page 78 of Girl, Accused

Ripley eased them sideways. The beam creaked. Protested. Three steps to the platform. Two. One.

‘Dark, grab her!’ Ripley screamed.

Ella holstered her Glock and extended both hands. Her palms were slick with sweat, and for one hideous moment, she thought Sister Mary might slip through her fingers and plummet to the concrete below. But then her grip found purchase on the woman's clothing, and she pulled hard.

The three of them landed on the platform in a graceless heap. Ripley rolled to her knees, never letting go of Sister Mary's arm.

The fight seemed to have drained out of the killer the second her body hit metal. Maybe she'd finally realized she wasn't getting the death she wanted. Not the glorious martyrdom of a suicide leap, not the blaze of a bullet. Just cuffs and concrete cells.

‘Jesus, Dark.’

Ella propped herself up on her elbows. ‘Bad choice of words.’

‘How many times have I gotta save your ass?’

‘You didn’t save me. You saved her.’

‘Same difference. Cuff this bitch.’

Ella fished her cuffs out of her back pocket, threw them to her partner. ‘Do the honors.’

Sister Mary had accepted her fate. Ripley locked the cuffs in place and rolled her onto her back. ‘You committed the worst sin of all, sister. You underestimated a woman with nothing to lose.’

Ella caught her breath. Up here, the air was different. She’d never ended a case at an altitude of sixty feet before. Sister Mary spat out a cocktail of fluids. Sweat, blood, phlegm.

‘I told you G was better,’ Ella said. She nodded at Ripley. ‘Except this G stands for grandma.’

CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

Sixty feet of empty air separated Ella from the ground, and for once, she didn't mind.

Her legs dangled over the edge of the I-beam where, an hour earlier, Sister Mary and Mia Ripley could have easily plummeted to their deaths. The beam no longer felt like a tightrope between life and oblivion. Now, it was just a piece of metal.

Up above, night claimed the sky. Down below, red and blue lights pulsed across the construction site. Cops moved through the shadows like insects in a kicked anthill, documenting, photographing, gathering. Sister Mary Elizabeth sat in the back of Westfall's cruiser with her head bowed. Whether in prayer or simple exhaustion, Ella couldn't tell from this height.

‘You got here fast,’ Ella said.

Ripley was sitting beside her, giving her own middle finger to vertigo. ‘Broke every speed limit possible. Pretty sure the speedometer hit a hundred at one point.’

‘Awesome.’

‘I’d be banned from driving if it wasn’t Westfall’s car.’

Ella laughed. ‘How’d you find me here, anyway?’

‘Gunshots leave a trail, Dark. I heard them a mile away.’

‘But how’d you know I was here?’

‘You said on the phone you were coming to the church. When I was at Walsh’s house, I saw a document with Sister Mary’s signature. She’d signed the ‘i’ with the little cross as the dot.’

Ella fit the pieces together. ‘Just like at Harper’s murder scene. The scene she rushed.’

'Yup. She probably wrote that message on the wall by muscle memory. That's when I realized she was our killer. I tried calling you a bunch of times, but it went straight to voicemail.'

‘Probably no signal in that concrete box of hers.’

‘I heard gunshots when I was down the road. Then I got here and saw a smoking car. A minute later, two people appeared in mid-air.’ Ripley tapped the beam. ‘I thought, yeah, that’s classic Dark.’

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