Page 48 of Girl, Unknown

“Yes. Three times,” Mason yelled. “If you let me loose, I’ll tell you everything.Everything.”

Ella relaxed her grip, removed one hand off his wrists and reached into her back pocket. Mason shuffled to a sitting position, breathing heavily. He was a scrawny thing, certainly not the apparent MMA fighter that he’d mentioned in his forum posts. He finally met Ella’s gaze, and in his eyes she saw suppressed rage, panic, uncertainty. She took the moment to size him up from top to bottom, to try and picture this twenty-something boy invading homes, strangling, and stabbing women. His muscle tone was sorely lacking, but Ella had known plenty of weak stranglers in her time, and it didn’t take brute strength to penetrate flesh with a hunting knife.

Mason suddenly shot back to life. The young man tried to jump to his feet, but there was no momentum to his movements. Too jerky, too unpracticed. Ella lunged forward and snapped her handcuffs around his wrist in a single motion. Less than a second later, Mason was fully cuffed, back on the ground, face-down.

Ella hauled him up to a standing position, holding him from behind, keeping one foot between his legs as she marched him to her car. She didn’t put it past this little runt to try and run even in cuffs.

Ripley came out of the front door with Mason’s mother in tow. She was hammering on Ripley’s shoulder in hysterics, demanding answers. Ripley had something in her hand, something she didn’t have when they first entered the house.

“What took you so long?” asked Ella.

Ripley turned to the frenzied mother, rested her hands on her shoulders and said something Ella couldn’t make out. The mother miraculously accepted the comment and backed down, but her expression betrayed her inertia. The look on her face suggested she’d just been told the earth was about to be eaten by the sun. If Mason Price was indeed a murderer, then perhaps it was.

Ella opened the rear door and stuffed Mason inside. The young boy was malleable in a way other suspects weren’t. He willingly got into the car without much resistance. Usually, the car-stuffing was the symbolic representation of their future life in a prison cell, so they fought it to whatever degree they could.

Mason did not.

Ripley slammed a stack of papers on top of the car. “This is what took me so long.”

Ella took them, shuffled through them. “What the hell?”

“Saw them on his desk. Caught my attention. What do you think?”

Mason’s head was lulled against the window. He turned and saw the papers in Ella’s hand, then he started to laugh.

“I think we have ourselves a murderer in this car,” Ella said.

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

After fifteen minutes of deep reflection, Ella began making her way to the holding cells in the Davenport PD precinct. She checked her phone and saw one message from Ben, one message from the director. Both wanted them to call her, but both would have to wait. Ben would want to know when she was coming home and the director would want an update on the case status. She didn’t have the answers either of them wanted, but she was close.

More important was the stack of papers clutched in her hand. She rifled through them once more as an officer unlocked the holding cells and signed her in, weighing up the two disparate but equally disturbing possibilities fighting for her attention.

Either Mason Price was a serial killer, or he was an obsessed fan. The scales tipped in neither direction, evenly balanced on the imaginary Lady Justice sitting front and center of her mind’s eye. The papers were printouts of nearly every detail about their ongoing case, from major news pieces to unchecked rumors plaguing sleuthing websites. Mason had pictures of the victims in both life and death. There was a shot of Katherine Parkinson’s lifeless corpse – one even Ella hadn’t seen. He had Vanessa May’s yearbook photo, Abigail Cartwright’s holiday snaps.

Ripley and Sergeant Grant were already inside, conversing near an empty cell, unchecked grins plastered on their faces. When Ella approached, Ripley said, “I’m feeling him, Dark.”

Grant added, “I know this kid. We had him in here years ago.”

Ella furrowed her brow. Mason Price had no criminal history according to the police database. “What for?”

“Illegal journalism. Sneaking into crime scenes, snapping photos.”

Ella checked the photo of Katherine’s body again. “Explains how he got this,” she said. “But there’s no criminal record on his file?”

“You wouldn’t see it. He was a minor at the time. Seventeen I believe. I wanted to try him as an adult but the courts disagreed. He ended up with a slap on the wrist.”

“How about that, Dark? We’ve got ourselves a dark tourist. A murder voyeur. It’s not a leap to think he’d go from gatecrashing crime scenes to creating his own. Plus, you know, I hate to generalize, but…”

Ella piled up the circumstantial evidence in her head, and she had to admit that plenty of pieces fit the profile. Some of them slotted in like a glove, while a couple others could be inserted with a little wrenching. “Basement-dwelling woman-hater. Online troll turned violent. Misguided beliefs amplified by his peers and this is his way of unleashing his frustration, or maybe impressing other people in his circle.”

“You said it.”

Grant said, “I don’t know a whole lot about the Internet; all I know is that it helps freaks find other freaks. This guy’s got a distorted worldview. The crap I see online does not correlate with my experience in the real world at all.”

“Some people can’t separate fantasy from reality,” Ella said. “Time to see what this creep has to say for himself.”

Ella led the way down the corridor, found Mason’s six-by-eight cage. No iron bars, just solid walls and a steel door with a tiny glass partition for light. Grant unlocked the cell and waited with Ripley at the door. Ella walked in and found Mason tucked up neatly against the wall. He looked small, vulnerable, hunched on a broken chair, framed by barren gray walls.

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