Page 65 of Girl, Entangled

‘Huh? How is that possible?’

‘It says here: Mr Varro acquired clothing identical to the subject’s, including footwear and outerwear. He arrived at the subject’s place of employment, a hardware store in Beltsville, at the start of each weekday shift and stood across the road in the parking lot of an adjacent retail unit for the duration of the shift. He ate at the same diner as the subject, ordering the same meal, on the days the subject ate there. On weekends, when the subject attended church, Mr Varro stood outside the church for the length of the service. He made no attempt to enter the church or to address the subject.’

Ella asked, ‘Did he attack him?’

‘No. Varro just copied him, then the guy reported Varro to the cops and he ended up in a psych hospital. This is identity diffusion, Dark. Pathological mirroring. Which means he’s looking for an idol, a father figure. ‘

‘And he found it in Thomas Greaves, and he’s been wearing his skin ever since.’

‘Go. I’m on the way to Barton’s house right now.’

That confirmed it. Simon Varro, playing the part of Thomas Greaves, was her unsub. He’d found an idol, but that idol was dead. A dead idol never disappointed. They just got better and better the longer they were gone.

CHAPTER FORTY

The address on Curlew Street was the last house on the right before the road ran out.

It sat by itself at the end of a row of three, separated from its neighbors by a strip of yard on one side and a wire fence on the other. The lawn was knee-high in places and bare in others, and a section of the gutter on the front of the house was hanging off its bracket and swaying with no wind to make it move.

This was it. The home of Simon Varro. Few men could survive a bullet, but she imagined that Simon Varro was no stranger to pain. If anyone could take six bullets and keep on swinging, it would be a six-foot-eight, roided-up giant of a man.

Ella left the car across the mouth of the drive and went up to the house with her hand resting on the Glock. There was no car that she could see, and no driveway for a car to park. She tried the front window first. The blinds were down and pressed flat to the glass. She moved along the side of the house to the next one. Same. Round to the back. A kitchen window with a thin curtain pulled across it. She could make out the dark shape of a fridge and the suggestion of a table and nothing else.

She came back round to the porch and tried the handle.

It held. Locked, and solid in the frame, a better door than the house around it deserved, which told her something on its own.

Knocking would be a fool’s move. Alerting a serial killer to your presence was only a good idea if you could threaten to shoot him if he moved. If he smelled a cop, he could sneak out another exit and be on his way to Wisconsin within minutes.

Waiting was out of the question too, because if Simon Varro wasn’t here, then he was out catching his next victim. And given the hour, Ella figured that if he was striking, he was striking now.

So she did the only thing she could.

Ella stepped back, lifted her boot, and drove the heel of it into the door beside the handle.

The frame split on the second kick and the door swung in and banged off the wall.

Ella was through it with her Glock up and the dead air of the house closing in, and she found herself in a kitchen. It was a long room, but the light was on, and that suggested someone was home. Ella moved along the wall with her shoulder against the wall and her Glock raised.

It became clear that the kitchen had been used in the last hour, because a mug had a small pool of coffee in the bottom, and it hadn’t yet developed a film over the top.

She listened. The freezer. The road outside. Her own breath. That was the inventory of the house.

A man Varro’s size would have made the floorboards speak. However, the boards were quiet. She glanced into the sink and saw a syringe in there, with crystals of light yellow liquid in the tube.

She could call out, or she could keep the gun up and clear the rooms one by one.

The second option seemed the safest – and the most likely one to take Simon Varro down without issue.

So she continued on, and through the kitchen door she came into a hallway. There were three doors in total, and Ella tried the first one in line. Locked, but given it was solid metal with an equally metal frame, she guessed it descended into a basement. She crept to the next one, pushed it open and found the sparsest office she’d ever seen. One desk, piles of junk. It was devoid of living souls, but curiosity propelled her inside.

When she reached the desk, Ella’s heart rose to cardiac arrest levels.

Because sitting there on the desk were drawings.

In the same style as the one she’d brought from the prison gift shop.

The first depicted another scene that she’d stood in in the flesh. It showed a man kneeling at a low block with his hands bound behind him. The hooded figure was drawn out of scale, twice the height of the kneeling man, his shoulders as broad as the page allowed. He stood with his ax raised. Curtis Brennan, drawn before there was a Curtis Brennan to draw.