Page 28 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)
‘Alright, alright,’ Sinclair threw his hands up. ‘I’ll lay it out for you, but you gotta believe me, okay?’
‘Get on with it,’ Ella said. Her patience was wearing thin. She needed to know if Alexander Sinclair was a serial killer and she needed to know before nightfall.
‘There’s not a whole lot of money in my job,’ Sinclair breathed, like the weight of a confession had been lifted. ‘My company is small. It’s niche. It’s not super profitable. The image is all… fugazi. You know what fugazi-’
‘We know what fugazi means,’ Ripley bit. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Sinclair Corp is legitimate. Truly. We really do make software security… but that’s not where I get my money.’
Ella could picture the end confession here.
The big house, the maid and the tech mogul persona.
Sinclair had it, but he was no different than the trust fund kid who posted yacht photos on Instagram while his credit cards got declined at the coffee shop.
Image was everything until someone looked behind the curtain. ‘So, where do you get your money?’
‘Those things. In my museum.’ Sinclair was gracious enough to look embarrassed. ‘I sell them.’
‘You’re a murderabilia seller,’ Ripley said.
Ella grabbed her partner’s wrist because Ripley had an itchy trigger finger, except the bullet was her fist. He’d just confessed to the cardinal sin of profiting off murder, which in Ripley’s eyes was barely one rung below murder itself on the deplorability scale.
‘Yes.’
Ella let the moment hang so the tension might cool, but Ripley was across the table, nose-to-nose.
‘I’m this close to knocking you out, and if you don’t tell us how a dead guy’s nameplate ended up in your house, I’m going to do exactly that.’
Sinclair backed away. ‘Okay, okay. You saw it all, right? The kind of stuff I have?’
‘Damn right we did. All that crap. A shoe from the Atlanta Child Murders? My mentor consulted on that. He said it was the worst case he ever worked. It kept him up at night, right into his eighties.’
‘I know it’s bad. It’s just my…’
‘Just your what, Alex, because from where I’m standing-’
‘The nameplate. Think about it. I don’t want to say it.’
‘Because you don’t have an excuse, is that why?’
The argument faded to white noise, because Ella had fallen down a mental rabbit hole.
She thought back to some of the things she’d seen in Sinclair’s trophy room.
Ancient knives that should have been in a history museum.
Tons of artwork. Hundreds of letters from infamous murderers.
Aileen Wuornos’s gleaming white tooth. Relics that went back almost a hundred years in some cases.
All of that stuff combined would equal hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And if Sinclair’s company wasn’t making much money, then one possible conclusion rose above all of the others.
‘It’s not a nameplate!’ Sinclair cried. ‘Well it is, but it’s not what you think! It’s-,’
‘Fake,’ Ella jumped in. ‘All of it. Everything in that room, including Rankin’s nameplate. They’re… fugazi.’
Sinclair shrank like a punctured doll. All of the panic and sweaty terror whooshed out of him. He breathed a sigh like he’d been holding his breath for a week. ‘Yes. Thank you. All of those items are forgeries.’
Ripley pulled back. ‘What?’
‘I craft them myself. That’s how I make most of my money. Inauthentic true crime collectibles. You can’t tell anyone, because if word gets out… I don’t know what will happen. Some of my stuff has sold for a lot, and if they find out, I’ll…’
‘Word is definitely getting out,’ Ella said. She wasn’t sure if selling fake murderabilia was worse than selling the real thing, but she didn’t have the mental capacity for such an unnecessary internal debate right now. Both were equally scummy. ‘It’s illegal.’
‘Is it? It was just an idea I had, and then it took off, and then it overtook the money I was making in tech, and it just…’ Sinclair was spitting it all out, like he’d been confess this awful secret for years. ‘It was easy.’
Ripley said, ‘Shut up. The nameplate. That’s fake too?’
‘Yes. I have a virtual agent that runs a script for me. It took me years to make it. It scours news stories online and finds items that I can forge. Yesterday morning, it mentioned the murder of Michael Rankin, but I didn’t know it was the Morrison guy.’
‘And you made this nameplate? In a day?’
Sinclair nodded frantically. ‘It’s just a push of a button. I approve what the virtual agent finds, then it sends it straight to a 3D printer. I actually made ten of them. They’re in my garage.’
The adrenaline crash must have hit Ripley hard, because she crumpled into the chair beside Ella and planted her palms on the table. Silence descended, and it reminded Ella of the silence that follows a huge explosion when everyone is waiting to see what was left standing.
She stared a hole through Sinclair. She’d wanted this greasy little asshole to be her killer so bad she could taste it.
This pathetic, weaselly con artist with his ridiculous hair and fake murder museum.
He was supposed to be her guy. Case closed, drinks all round, another sick freak off the streets.
It hadn’t gone that way, and if professional courtesy permitted her to scream, she would have.
Ten nameplates. If he really had ten identical nameplates sitting in his garage, then he hadn’t taken any of them off Rankin’s desk. You couldn’t 3D print a perfect replica.
Ripley rubbed her temples. 'So you're telling us you just happened to make a fake nameplate of a murder victim the day after he died?'
'The virtual agent works fast. It's designed to capitalize on breaking news while the story's still hot. True crime collectors pay premium prices for items connected to current cases.'
Ella's mind was already working, trying to salvage something from this mess. Sinclair could still be lying. Killers lied all the time. Maybe he'd made the extras after the fact, to cover his tracks. ‘Did Rankin even have a nameplate in his office? I didn’t see one.’
‘Me either,’ Ripley said.
‘I don’t think Alexander here cares about historical accuracy. Aileen Wuornos was a meth addict. Her teeth certainly weren’t gleaming white.’
‘Weren’t they? I’m not really a true crime buff. Just…’
‘A scumbag who’ll sell his pride for a buck,’ Ripley said. There was a knock at the door, Ella turned and saw Riggs peer his head. He didn’t say anything. He just waved his hand across his throat. The gesture said; cut it loose.
Sinclair wasn’t their guy.