Page 2 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)
Michael Rankin's shoes squelched on the lobby's marble. Soaked through. Some asshole in a Porsche had taken the corner at Broad and Fifth like he owned the intersection, and sent a tsunami of gutter water straight through Michael's two-thousand-dollar Oxfords.
It was probably a sign he should go home. The world had ways of telling you to just give it up, but Michael had work to do, and bank fraud didn’t care how wet your shoes were.
‘Forget something, Mr. Rankin?’ Terrence, the security guard, didn’t look up from his crossword.
‘Pills.’ Michael patted his jacket pocket. ‘Blood pressure.’
‘Very well. Eight letters. Unlawful entrant. Any ideas?’
‘Intruder.’
Terrence tapped his pen on the desk. ‘Bingo. You stay safe up there, Mr. Rankin.’
Michael nodded his goodbye and left Terrence to his crossword.
Twenty years behind that desk and the man had never finished one, but Michael admired his tenacity.
Either that or he didn’t have much else to do down here, because Michael amounts small enough to avoid automatic flagging but large enough to matter. Death by a thousand cuts, except Henderson had been the one holding the knife.
Then the coffee machine on the other side of the room bubbled to life.
Odd. The machine was programmed to brew every two hours at his request. It surely hadn’t been that long since his last one? Then again, time moved differently in the wee hours.
Michael stood to grab a cup – might as well benefit from the robot barista – when the lights stuttered.
Once. Twice.
Then they died completely before flickering back to life at half strength, dousing the room a honey color.
‘The hell?’
Power cut? No. This place had enough backup power to last a nuclear winter. Power fluctuations didn't happen here. The new director’s paranoia covered acts of God.
He moved toward the door. Better to check with security.
‘What the…?’
The door wouldn’t budge. Michael pulled harder.
Nothing.
The magnetic lock should have disengaged the moment he touched the handle from inside. Fire code. Basic safety. Beside it, the biometric scanner glowed its usual blue, but when he pressed his hand against it, nothing happened.
‘Come on.’ He tried again. His thumb left a damp print on the glass. The scanner remained comatose. ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’
Michael's pulse hammered against his collar.
He locked himself in the office willingly, so why now was he so panicked?
The amber light made everything look diseased.
His mahogany desk appeared to be rotting from within, and the conference room suddenly reminded him of a slab in a mortuary.
Meanwhile, the coffee machine continued its gurgling in the corner.
He pressed both palms against the door and shoved. The reinforced steel didn't even vibrate. He might as well have been pushing against a mountain.
‘Hello? Terrence? Anyone?’
God dammit. What was the procedure for being locked in your office? Did such a thing exist? Michael grabbed the handset on his desk and hit zero for reception.
Dead.
Something wasn’t right. This had never happened before. Not in nine years. His cell phone sat beside his keyboard. Michael grabbed it and thumbed the screen to life. No signal. Zero bars.
In the heart of downtown Indianapolis, surrounded by cell towers, his phone registered nothing but electronic void. A sudden intrusive thought of escaping through the windows entered his mind, but there had to be a way out of here that didn’t involve a forty-floor drop onto concrete.
‘What the hell is happening?’
The coffee machine answered with one final hiss, then died.
Michael’s monitor then began to convulse.
The details on the screen bled like spilled paint in the rain, then turned into nonsense code.
It wasn’t the elegant programming Michael sometimes glimpsed when IT worked on his system, but something that could have been Russian or Arabic for all he knew.
His throat went dry. Michael had to move, if only to offset this alien surge of adrenaline. He leaped to the window and looked out but couldn’t even see the ground. Michael pressed his face against the glass, and that’s when he saw something that shouldn’t be.
A reflection.
But not his own.
Michael spun. His bladder clenched, and his mouth opened to scream or call for help or do something other than stand there like a deer watching headlights approach.
He was no longer alone in his fortieth-floor office.
A figure in black now stood ten feet away, in a place that should have been impossible to be.
His mind assembled the sequence of events; this reflection – this figure – had emerged from beneath the conference table.
How?
Even Houdini couldn’t get in here.
And then the figure moved fast. Too fast.
Michael's blood spread across the marble floor in the honey light. As warmth pooled beneath him, Michael thought of Emma, who would now spend another afternoon scanning empty bleachers for a father who specialized in disappearing when it mattered most.
And oddly, he thought of Terrence's crossword, which had been right all along.