And then Tayen screamed and threw herself sideways with all her strength, ramming the chair to which she was bound directly into Diana's legs.
Diana stumbled, her arms pin wheeling as she tried to keep her balance.The gun discharged into the ceiling with a deafening crack, the sound echoing off the metal walls of the storage unit like thunder.Kari moved quickly, ignoring the pain in her head, throwing herself at Diana's midsection in a tackle that sent them both crashing to the concrete floor.
The gun skittered away into the darkness.
Diana was stronger than she looked, desperation and madness giving her a wiry strength that made her hard to pin down.She clawed at Kari's face, her fingernails raking across her cheek, going for her eyes.They grappled on the floor, rolling across the cold concrete, each trying to gain the upper hand.
Kari's vision blurred with every sudden movement, the head injury making it hard to track Diana's movements, to anticipate her strikes.She took a knee to the ribs, felt something crack with a burst of white-hot pain, but kept fighting.
Diana's hand found something on the floor—a piece of pipe, part of some abandoned shelving unit—and swung it at Kari's head.Kari jerked back just in time, the pipe whistling past her face close enough to feel the breeze of its passage.She grabbed Diana's wrist, twisted hard, and heard the pipe clatter away across the concrete.
Diana screamed—a sound of pure rage and frustration—and lunged for Kari's throat.Her hands closed around Kari's neck, squeezing with surprising strength, cutting off her air.Kari struggled, black spots dancing at the edges of her vision, her lungs burning for oxygen.
Then the roll-up door exploded upward with a screech of metal, flooding the storage unit with light, and Carter was there, weapon drawn, shouting for Diana to freeze.
Diana's hands loosened on Kari's throat.She looked up at Carter, at the gun pointed at her center mass, at the uniformed officers crowding in behind the detective.Something drained out of her then—the rage, the desperation, the mad energy that had fueled her.She went limp in Kari's grip, all the fight leaving her at once.
And then she started laughing—a high, broken sound that echoed off the metal walls, a sound that held no joy, no humor, only the shattered remains of a mind that had finally crumbled completely.
"It doesn't matter," she said as Carter cuffed her, her voice dreamy and distant."It doesn't matter what you do to me.Tayen won't leave me.She'll understand."
Kari ignored her.She was already moving toward Tayen, pulling the duct tape gently from her mouth, working at the bonds around her wrists with trembling fingers.
"You're safe now," Kari said."It's over.Your aunt sent me.You're going home."
Tayen collapsed into her arms, sobbing, and Kari held her while the backup units flooded into the storage facility, while paramedics arrived to check on both of them, while Diana was loaded into a police car still laughing that horrible, broken laugh.
It was over.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The hospital insisted on keeping Kari overnight for observation, despite her protests that she was fine, that she'd had worse injuries, that there was paperwork to file and loose ends to tie up.She had a concussion, two cracked ribs, deep bruising around her throat from Diana's attempt to strangle her, and enough scrapes and contusions to make her look like she'd gone ten rounds with a heavyweight boxer.
Carter had threatened to have her sedated if she didn't stay put.Coming from someone who'd seen her wrestle a serial killer on a concrete floor, the threat carried weight.
So Kari lay in the hospital bed, staring at the ceiling tiles and trying not to think too much.Thinking hurt almost as much as her ribs did.Every time she closed her eyes, she saw Diana's face—the tears, the desperate love, the absolute certainty that she'd been helping those women by killing them.It was the kind of madness that made a terrible sort of sense from the inside and looked like pure horror from the outside.
Carter stopped by around eight in the evening, carrying two cups of coffee that she'd smuggled past the nurses' station.She handed one to Kari and settled into the visitor's chair with a groan that suggested her day had been almost as long as Kari's.
"Diana's been talking," Carter said, wrapping her hands around her coffee cup."Can't stop talking, actually.The psych evaluator has been in with her for hours, and she just keeps going.Confession, justification, explanation—she wants everyone to understand why she did what she did."
"Did she confess to everything?"
"Everything and more.Five murders over three years—Jennifer Blake, Destiny Morales, Brittany Hayes, Megan Park, and Amanda Escalante."Carter's voice was flat, the detachment of a cop who'd heard too many confessions to be surprised by anything."She really seems to believe she was helping them.Saving them from the cruelty of a world that would have destroyed them anyway."
"What about her background?Did you learn anything more about the breakdown Vanessa told me about?"
"All true.Corinne Lindquist from Millbrook, Nebraska.She was hospitalized for six months after her runway incident at Fashion Week—diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, severe attachment issues, major depressive disorder, and a bunch of other conditions I can't pronounce.She was supposed to continue outpatient treatment when she was released, take medication, and attend therapy sessions.But she never followed up.Just reinvented herself as Diana Shepherd and went to work for Vanessa Caldwell, and nobody ever thought to check whether the kind woman helping vulnerable young models might be the one hurting them."
Kari thought about Diana in that café, so earnest and helpful, pointing her toward Pemberton while Tayen was bound and terrified in a storage unit across the city.The best liars, she'd learned over the years, were the ones who believed their own lies.
"There's something I don't understand," Kari said."Why now?Diana came here, reinvented herself.She was building a life here, but then she sabotaged it in the worst way.What caused her to snap?"
"It was Jennifer," Carter said, swirling her coffee.
"Jennifer?What about her?"
"According to a journal of Diana's we found, she'd kept a degree of distance from the models for years after Vanessa hired her.She helped them, supported them, but she held something back.Some part of herself she wouldn't let them touch."
