Page 30 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)

Ella was back in her office with murder on her mind. Not the kind she investigated, but the kind she wanted to commit, or at least as close to it as possible. Sinclair had just blown her theory to pieces, and all signs pointed to him being a scam artist in a tech mogul’s body, not a killer.

Ripley burst into the room and made a beeline for her chair. She threw a pen and it skimmed across her desk and hit the floor. ‘Talk about a waste of time. Sinclair’s not our man. He’s just an asshole.’

‘Definitely?’

‘Yeah. Morrison don’t use nameplates at all. None of the employees have ever seen a nameplate like that on Rankin’s desk. Sinclair just pulled that idea out of his ass. Who’d have thought that the serial killer collecting trade was full of scammers?’

‘I’m shocked.’ Ella leaned her head against the wall. ‘So Sinclair's virtual agent scraped the victim's name from news reports and just assumed he'd have a nameplate like every other office worker.’

‘That’s machines for you. All surface and no soul.’

'Can we charge him with something? Wire fraud? False advertising?'

‘Don’t worry about that. I told white collar crimes we had him in custody. They’ll nail him to the wall on fraud and commerce violations. Wish I’d have cracked his skull harder.’

Rage and frustration bubbled in Ella’s gut.

She'd been so sure about Sinclair. The timeline fit, the access fit, the tech knowledge fit.

His little murder museum had been the icing on the cake, but fate had thrown a wrench in the works, as it often did.

But now she was back to square one, and somewhere out there was a savant hacker who could apparently open any electronic door in the world.

Her memory wasn’t helping in the slightest, either.

She could recall every detail of every locked room murder case she'd ever read about, but none of them involved someone who could black out cameras and lure someone into a bank vault.

There was no comparison to anything historical here, and if the pattern held, the killer already had victim number three in their crosshairs.

Then Riggs burst through the door without knocking. The man was lit up from the inside, like he’d injected caffeine into his veins. ‘We got a dispatch call. A woman says her employee’s been locked in a room and he’s freezing to death.’

Ripley jumped out of her chair. ‘Locked how?’

‘Electronic door is jammed, keycards aren't working, thermostat's been hacked, sprinklers have turned on. Temp is zero degrees. We need to get there. Now.’

Ella felt like a cold wire had been threaded through her skeleton. Someone was trapped in a freezing room on countdown to death, just like Thomas Grayson had been.

This had to be their killer’s handiwork.

Then she did the quick math, and she didn’t like the odds.

Freezing temperatures. Cold water. Throw in air circulation and the victim would have hypothermia within ten minutes, and death shortly after.

‘Let’s go. Quick. We only have about 15 minutes.’

***

Ella mentally ran the numbers while Ripley tore the SUV through the streets of downtown Indianapolis. Rush hour had given way to night life, and the roads were much busier than Ella would have liked. The GPS said they were barely two miles away.

Hypothermia was a bastard. It stole your nervous system degree by degree until your body forgot how to keep you alive. Core temperature dropped two degrees per minute in freezing water. Confusion at 91 degrees. Cardiac arrest at 82.

‘Dark, how hard is it to open a door. You know what I mean?’ Ripley swerved around a corner and nearly took out a fire hydrant. ‘God, I hate driving through the city. Get out of the damn way.’

Ella ignored the fact her partner was telling an inanimate object to move. ‘If it’s one of those elevator doors, they can be nearly impossible to jimmy open. They’re seven feet, six inches of solid steel.’

‘Yeah, we’ll see. Come on, dammit.’

The GPS counted down the distance between them and the Blackglass building. A few cars behind them were Riggs and his team with the Enforcer – a four-hundred pound steel cylinder on a two-man carry. It was the physical override for any lock that technology human hands couldn't break.

‘There it is,’ Ripley gestured. ‘Blackglass.’

Blackglass Creations had wedged itself into a renovated warehouse at the alley's dead end.

Ella saw the monochrome logo on a polished black exterior, and there was a woman jumping up and down outside.

The building was part of a row. It was trapped between what looked to Ella like two empty buildings.

Ripley ditched just past the entrance and left the hazard lights on.

Doors flew open and they hit the pavement.

‘Police?’ the woman screamed in hysterics. ‘Are you the police?’

‘Yes. Show us. Quickly.’

She ran inside and led Ella and Ripley down a flight of stairs into what Ella assumed was the basement.

The woman had wedged the door open with a slab of metal.

They followed a freezing cold corridor down to a steel door.

The woman began hammering on it helplessly with her fists, then swiped her keycard on the panel beside it. The LED above the door flashed red.

‘See? It’s broke! Can you hear me, Noah? Help is coming.’

‘Calm down,’ Ripley breathed. She shouldered the door once, twice. It didn’t budge. ‘You’re right, Dark. It’s solid as hell. Put your hand on it.’

Ella did. It was like touching a snowball. She saw the thermometer next to the panel. Minus two degrees. Below freezing. Below survivable. ‘Oh… shi-,’

‘Guys,’ a voice screamed from the stairwell. ‘Stand back. Enforcer is coming in.’

Ella, Ripley, and this poor hysterical woman backed themselves against the wall while four officers muscled the battering ram down the stairs. Ripley tapped Ella on the shoulder. ‘Dark, stay here. I’m going to cut the mains to this place’

‘Alright. You know where it is?’

‘No, but I’ll find it.’

Ripley squeezed past the oncoming officers and made her way back upstairs. Riggs’s men – complete with battering ram – positioned themselves for impact.

‘It’s gonna get loud,’ Riggs said. ‘Ready? Three. Two. Go.’

The ram fired like a gunshot. Steel met steel. The door buckled but held.

‘Again! Three. Two…’

Another blast. Metal screamed. The door frame started to separate from the wall to reveal the mechanical guts of the locking mechanism.

The third impact sent pieces of twisted metal across the corridor.

The door tilted inward on broken hinges, but it was still electronically controlled. Still sealed shut.

‘Thompson, pry bar,’ Riggs called. ‘We need to force this slider open.’

The officer pulled the piece of equipment off his belt, jammed it in the small gap they'd made, and slowly, painfully began the extraction process. A gap began to grow in what felt like microscopic increments, but it was enough for a nimble person to fit through.

‘That’s enough,’ Ella called. She rushed up to the gap, and the air that seeped out felt like a breath from some frozen hell.

She climbed inside and suddenly struggled to breathe, because this was the kind of temperature that turned spit to ice before it left your mouth.

The air burned her lungs with every breath.

Water from the sprinklers soaked through her clothes in seconds, and she could feel the fabric starting to stiffen as it began to freeze.

She vaguely registered servers and hard drives and cables in her peripheral vision, but it was all covered with thin sheets of frost. Water everywhere too.

The sprinkler system had turned the room into a winter waterfall, and the sub-zero temperature had transformed it all into a glittering deathtrap.

And amongst the ice and electronics was a human shape.

He was huddled against the wall, as far from the air conditioning unit as he could get.

Ella crossed the treacherous floor in a graceless slide, then found purchase on patches of textured metal between ice sheets.

Noah – or who she assumed was Noah - had tried to make himself small.

He'd wedged himself into a corner, knees drawn up, arms wrapped around his legs.

His clothes were frozen rigid, his hair was a crown of ice. His glasses had frosted and cracked.

She pressed fingers to his carotid, knowing what she'd find but needing to try anyway.

Nothing. No pulse. Skin like marble.

The human body had limits, and Noah had passed them all.

They were too late.