But he had no listed address, and if she didn’t find him tonight, there’d be another body by morning.
All she had was a pelican figurine that was supposed to tell her where he was.
The pelican.
She’d pushed it aside when Ripley told her to, and Ripley had been right to say it, because Ella had been running on fumes and not every pelican in Louisiana was the same pelican.Except this one was.She knew it the way she knew her own handwriting.
Edgar Borden.Lindsey Doyle.Austin Creed.
Creed.
‘Oh shit,’ Ella breathed.
Ella felt the thought land before she could articulate it.She lunged across the desk and grabbed the Creed file.The NOPD photographs.She'd looked through them yesterday in this same office.She flipped past the holding pens and the skinning table and the hatchery.Past the kitchen with the single plate and the tea-stained counters.Past the living room, the hallway, and the utility room with the chest freezer.
The bedroom.
She found the shot.Austin Creed’s unmade bed.The bedside table.Box of painkillers.Penknife.Two receipts.And there, on the far side of the table, a music box.
With a pelican sitting on top of it.
And an identical pelican at that.
The photograph was slightly out of focus and the colour was washed by the camera flash, but it didn’t matter because she wasn’t comparing paint jobs.She was comparing shapes, and the shape was identical.Borden had carved his figurine from memory, or from a photograph, or from a description that Doyle had given him, but either way he had recreated the pelican from Austin Creed’s bedside table.
That’s where he was going.That’s where he was waiting.Edgar Borden had laid out the whole thing like a trail of stones, and the last stone pointed to serial killer’s abandoned farmhouse.
He was luring her there.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Edgar Borden sat in the dead man’s kitchen.He put his hands on the table, because she’d told him it helped.
And it did, or at least it used to.Find a surface and let your fingers do the thinking when your head won’t shut up.Lindsey had said that to him during a Tuesday night lock-up round, leaning against the bars like she had all the time in the world, and he’d thought it was bullshit until he’d tried it at three in the morning with the walls closing in and discovered she was right.She was usually right.
Edgar’s free hand went to the object on the chain around his neck.It wasn’t a cross or a symbol or any of the usual things men wore against their chests for comfort or superstition.It was a figurine, and that figurine was all he had left of the man he used to be.It was a unicorn, and the memories that surged back felt like they belonged to someone else, as they always did, but then he was suddenly able to smell the smoke and taste the ash one more time.
Edgar Borden.Husband, father.Blue collar through and through, and damn proud of it.A carpenter by trade and one of the best in the business.
He’d had it all.The picket fence and the two car garage.A little girl who looked at him like he’d personally hung the moon and a wife who still laughed at his stupid jokes after fifteen years.They hadn’t been rich but they’d been happy.
And then the day came.
It’d been a morning like any other.Edgar had woken up, kissed the wife, hugged his girl.Then he'd decided to take his tool collection, expansive as it was, and give it a thorough cleansing, and thorough cleansings required the application of a generous amount of linseed oil.Any carpenter in the world would tell you that if you combine linseed oil with elbow grease, then you have a miracle fluid on your hands.
A few hours later, his whole collection was gleaming again, and he threw the rags in the trash in his basement – his workshop – and headed out to a few jobs.
He’d returned home about six PM, and as he’d drawn closer to his house, the first twinges of dread began curling in his guts.There were people on the street – too many for a sleepy cul-de-sac on a winter’s evening.Then the cruisers had come into view.The ambulances.The strobing lights.
And at the center of it all: his house.Hishome.A blackened, smoldering husk where his castle had once stood.
In that moment, he swore his soul had been cut clean from his body.The ground fell out from beneath him and suddenly, someone was screaming.It took him a long dazed moment to realize it was him, howling his child’s name as he scrabbled at the pavement.Trying to find purchase, to haul himself vertical andget to herbut his legs wouldn’t cooperate.
Then there were hands on him, dragging him back from the edge.Forcing him to meet the gaze of a police officer.
‘Sir, I need you stay calm.’
Calm, they’d said, while he stared at the ruins of his life.But they didn’t need to say anymore, because he’d known.Christ, he’dknown.
