Page 35 of Girl, Lured

Ella sensed a joke was on the horizon. “Ten-twenty-eight. I dunno. I just searched some religious passages online while I was waiting for you.”

“It’s all Hebrew to me,” Ripley said.

Ellafought hardtomaintain a stoic expression, despitetheurgetogrin itching at her cheeks. “How long?” Ella asked. She had to know.

Ripley smirked. “Had that one backed up for years.”

The motel doorcreaked openand Sheriff Haleemerged, evidence bags in his hands, his face pale white.Achill seemed to radiate off him, likeafog rolling in fromthenearby lake. The poor guy had seen three dead bodies in as many days, and that was as many as he’d seen in his whole career. This case had definitely thrown him in at the deep end, Ella thought.

“How’s it looking in there?” asked Ripley.

The sheriffdrew inalong, cleansingbreath,probably to rid himselfof thecloying tasteof deaththat had seeped into his lungs. “Brutal. One stab wound in the chest, nothing stolen, no prints or hair samples but they’re still going over.”

Ella motioned towards the long evidence bags clutched between his fingers. They looked like they held notebooks. “What we got in there?” she asked.

The Sheriffproudly presentedthe evidence bagsas if they weretwoprized trophies. “Thought you might find these useful. We found them in the victim’s rucksack. Notebooks. Two of them. Pages and pages of stuff about this guy’s life.”

“Anything useful?” Ripley asked as she took them off the sheriff’s hands.

“I didn’t read much of them, but literature isn’t my forte. What I did read, I couldn’t understand.”

Ella took one and held it up to the light. Black cover, white pages, around three-hundred pages thick. The thought of rifling through a conspiracy theorist’s inane ramblings sapped her energy like she was being gnawed at by a ravenous vampire. “Oh, Christ,” she said. “Please God, let’s throw these in a woodchipper and be done with them.”

“Huh?” asked the sheriff.

“Don’t ask,” Ripley said. She turned to her partner, “There could be something in here. Whoever did this to Gary knew him. If these can point us in the direction of friends, colleagues, enemies, whatever – then it’s worth a shot.”

The woman had a point, but Ella would be damned if this wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever had to do in her life.

“One read through then I’m done,” she said.

“Agreed.”

“Come on,” Ella said, unlocking the car. “Let’s get this over with.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Back at the precinct, Ella laced herself with caffeine and got to work. Ripley sat opposite doing exactly the same, equally as perplexed by the absurd paragraphs forcing their way into her eyeballs as Ella was. The notes began five weeks ago, when Gary’s house had first burned down, and somehow he’d filled six-hundred pages in less than forty days. He’d documented absolutely everything that happened in his life during this short period, and the result was the most perplexing, badly written autobiography ever self-published.

“I hate to speak ill of the dead,” Ripley said, “but this guy was batshit insane.”

Ella said, “It’s weird. He seemed mostly fine when I spoke to him. At least until he started screaming.”

Ten minutes into reading, Ripley said, “I can’t take much more of this. This should be the plot of the next Saw film. Read five minutes of this garbage. People would tear their eyeballs out.”

Ella struggled to disagree. As it turned out, Gary Weathers was perhaps the most paranoid man to ever live, and he seemed to think that a cult were following his every move and leaving behind cryptic clues of their activities.

“You got to the cult part?” Ella asked.

“Yes. I’m ready to kill myself.”

“You know there’s never been any Satanic cults proven to exist? There’ve been groups of teenagers who’ve sacrificed animals and things, but no actual, mass-scale cults ever discovered?”

Ripley downed what remained of her coffee and said, “I was a police officer in the eighties, Dark. Believe me, I know. The quack psychologists that peddled that crap set behavioral science back about a hundred years.”

Ella was desperate for a distraction from the task, anything. “That long, you think?”

Ripley picked up the notebook and slammed it back down. “Thirty-five years later and we’re still fighting this crap. In fact, it’s worse than ever because these days everyone wants to think they’re important, so they call themselves…” Ripley flipped back a page. “Targeted individuals. These people need to learn that sometimes you’ve gotta eat shit and like the taste.”

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