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Kneeling in a pool of blood, elbows resting on a wooden chair, hands locked together in prayer.
Mike clutched his hand to his mouth but screamed anyway, more than loud enough for the cameras to pick up.
CHAPTER ONE
Ella Dark’s apartment had been scorched from floor to ceiling in a blazing inferno about two months ago. Refurbishments had now restored the place to somewhat livable, but soot still lingered in the air, a reminder of what had once gone down here. If nothing else, it reinforced the notion that while her battles hadn’t been without scars, she’d still come out on top.
She found herself lost in the blank canvas that was her living room wall, freshly painted but still bearing the marks of a fire beneath. A few more coats and it would be back to normal, the landlord said. Ella still saw a seared rectangle of various shades of black, at the center of which was a vague circle, moving and rotating and inviting her inward. Perhaps a doorway to another realm. A world of death and despair, where blood lined the streets and murder victims replayed their dying moments over and over again. A primitive world where severed heads sat atop barbed wire fences and esoteric cults worshipped giant, faceless creatures. Maybe they even had law enforcement in this imaginary universe, but the horrors were so vast that the police just let the monsters run amok.
Ella abruptly ended this effort in creativity with a shake of her whole upper body, like a dog having just returned from the rain. She wasn’t sure where the daydream had come from, but she reminded herself of the old saying about staring into the abyss. Best not to dwell on her subconscious musings, she thought, because there wasn’t much positivity going on back there at the moment.
Instead, Ella began sorting through her things, piecing together the fragments of her charred belongings to see if they were fit for repair. Most weren’t, so they went in the trash pile. She had the foundations of a livable space now: furniture, kitchen necessities, doors that didn’t leak when it rained. But now she needed the little things. The books, mementos, and framed photographs.
But her attention kept darting towards the four objects lying on the living room table. One week ago, she’d done battle with a serial killer the press were now calling the Key Master. Not the most inventive name they ever came up with, but accurate given that he’d turned out to be a career locksmith. During her final showdown with this human monster, the two had destroyed all the belongings in Ella’s dad’s old building. Blood had been shed, old relics had been destroyed, and new ones had been unearthed. Ella had found a rusted lockbox stashed away in a secret compartment of her dad’s treasured cabinet, and so she’d taken it to a key-cutter friend of hers to break it open.
The contents had not been what she expected.
In her wildest ideas, she thought she might find a letter from her dad to an old lover. Maybe some childhood photos. Perhaps some of Ella’s baby hair or something belonging to her mom.
No.
Nothing of the sort.
Because inside the lockbox had been a matchbox, a cigarette lighter, a cigar, and a tiny bag of tobacco.
For seven days, she’d pored over the belongings like they might hold the secret to her father’s mysterious death. In 1995, as a naïve five-year-old girl, Ella had found her father dead in his bed. She replayed the moment nightly, although the details differed with each imagining. Sometimes her father was dressed, sometimes not. Occasionally she’d see blood, sometimes a glimmering knife on the bedroom floor. In her later years, she’d even started seeing a figure stalking the landing whenever the incident manifested in her nightmares. Which parts were suppressed memories and which were complete fabrications was a mystery she could never solve. Even the most dedicated shrink couldn’t exhume the real details from the depths of her subconscious because they’d continually distorted over time, like she’d played Broken Telephone with herself for twenty-five years.
The only hard evidence she had to go on was the autopsy report, which had concluded that her father had died from cardiopulmonary failure, which only meant that his heart had stopped unexpectedly. Even Ella had to admit that this wasn’t evidence of murder, but her dad was thirty-five and as fit as an athlete at the time of his death. Healthy people in their thirties didn’t just drop dead, especially when in the last few months of his life there’d been a lot of suspicious activity.
Ken had been taking out large sums of money from his bank account on a regular basis, and in the months before his death he’d run dry. He had no expensive habits that she knew of. She knew most of his were belongings untouched, and years of detective work had instilled the ability to spot a junkie when she saw one. Her dad wasn’t one, so where the hell was this money going?
More bizarrely, Ken had taken out a loan of thirty-thousand dollars only a few months before he died, and the group he’d borrowed it from were notorious underground sharks. The Red Diamond Group. They ran underground gambling dens and liquor joints around Virginia, although whenever the Diamonds were mentioned, talk of murder was never far away. If someone in Virginia woke up dead under suspicious circumstances, the namethe Red Diamondshung loosely on the tongues of locals.
On Ken’s receipt for his loan, she’d found the initials OWA. She’d uncovered a member of the Diamonds named Owen William Angels, a man who’d been on trial for murder back in 2002. Unfortunately, his whereabouts now were unknown, but her partner Ripley had found one very important detail about him; he was still alive. Somewhere in the country. He had no known address, probably so that investigating bodies couldn’t find him.
Ella fidgeted with the matchbook, still full of unburnt sticks. Not a single one had been broken, nor had the other items in the lockbox been touched at all. The tobacco was sealed, the cigar still wrapped in cellophane, the cigarette lighter still full of fluid. They were more like mementos than objects that had a practical use. Tiny trophies, never to be touched or used or, considering where she’d found them, even admired.
What the hell did they mean?
The cigarette lighter was nondescript. A standard, green, plastic lighter that her dad could have picked up from any store in the country. The tobacco was the Winston brand, whatever that was. And the cigar was made by a company called Darjeen. Ella had never heard of either company, or seen any of their products on grocery store shelves in passing. Must have been some nineties brands that died out, she guessed.
But the matchbox was a different story. There was no brand name on the small and rectangular flap, only the name of a bar: Black Horse Tavern.
It wasn’t a name she was familiar with, and she’d refrained from looking too closely into the place because, as much as she hated to admit it, she was beginning to think these trinkets meant nothing. As far as she knew, her dad didn’t even smoke, so these were probably just the trappings of a filthy secret. Or maybe he did smoke before she was born and so he locked these items away as a symbolic gesture of his relinquishment.
Lots to ponder, but she feared she’d come up against yet another brick wall. The failures always hit harder after a glimmer of hope. She wasn’t sure she could take another setback on this one because so far it had been obstacle after obstacle. The more she dug, the further away she felt.
The Black Horse Tavern.
Ella grabbed her laptop. Better to disappoint herself now than further down the line. Stamp out misery before it turned to resentment.
She searched for the name along with a few other keywords. The results popped up, barely any accurate matches. Places in D.C. and Baltimore with the same name, but her dad would never have frequented where the city folk went. If he wasn’t on a first-name basis with the bartender then he wouldn’t be caught dead in there.
Ella got to page three of the results before giving up and going back to page one. She adjusted the search parameters and put quotation marks aroundBlack Horse Tavern,then added inAbingdon,the name of her home town.
One result with an accurate match.
Black Horse Tavern. Located at 132 Barfield Avenue. No opening hours. No contact information. No known owner.
