Page 33 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)

Midnight have come and gone, and Ella’s office was now a makeshift surveillance hub.

Terrence West had come through for her, as had Mark Miller and Amanda Pierce. They’d all isolated the necessary security footage and sent it over in files that took over an hour to download.

Game on.

The math was simple. One woman, one old man, one young man. Janice had described Zane as late twenties with buzzed hair and fidgety mannerisms. Process of elimination would do the rest.

The footage began at 8AM, so Ella fast-forwarded until most of the worker bees cleared out. There wasn’t really much to look at, just indistinct suits hurrying past the camera, the occasional loiterers in the lobby. The only constant was Terrence sat behind his security desk.

At 8PM, the targets arrived.

Alpine Cleaning Crew.

The camera angle caught them from above, making identification difficult, but she could make out basic details. Three people in matching Alpine uniforms: forest green polos with the mountain logo on the breast pocket. They pushed a cart loaded with supplies through the lobby.

The first figure was clearly a woman. Short, stocky build, gray hair pulled back in a bun. That had to be Maria. The second was an older man with a pronounced stoop to his shoulders and what looked like a bad hip from the way he favored his left side. Edwin Park.

Which left the third.

Ella paused the footage and studied him – or at least what she could see of him.

Younger, definitely. Taller than both his companions but somehow smaller in presence.

Buzzed hair, just as Janice had described.

Military short or maybe he was trying to hide male pattern baldness.

Dark clothing beneath the Alpine uniform.

Average height, average build. It was a textbook unremarkable appearance that no one would look twice at.

She clicked through frame by frame, waiting for a better angle. The timestamp jumped to 8:03 PM. The crew had reached the elevator bank. Maria swiped her keycard while Edwin leaned against the wall. The young one – Corvidale – stood apart from them, hands shoved in his pockets.

Then he looked up.

Just for a second, maybe two, he glanced directly at the camera.

The image was grainy and compressed, but Ella could make out the basics.

White male, narrow face, high forehead. Thin lips, straight nose.

No visible scars or distinguishing marks.

His eyes were deep-set, and the grainy footage made it hard to determine their color.

Could be brown, could be hazel. The buzzed hair was dark, black or dark brown.

Clean-shaven. No glasses. Age difficult to pinpoint exactly, but the lack of visible lines around the eyes and mouth suggested mid-to-late twenties.

He was as ordinary looking as it got, and if you asked 20 people to describe him to a sketch artist, you’d get 20 different results.

Was this him? Was she looking at a serial killer?

One grainy screenshot wouldn’t cut it. This was just one face from one camera on one night. She needed more angles, better resolution, and confirmation that the same man had appeared at First National and Blackglass, too. Ten terabytes times three.

It was going to be a long night, but somewhere in those thousands of hours of mundane footage was the face of a killer. And once she had it, that's when the real hunt could begin.

***

People spent their lives staring at screens six inches from their faces, so much so that they'd forgotten how to look up.

Tonight had been a perfect example. Amanda Pierce had been screaming outside that building for fifteen minutes until the cops showed up, and none of them–not her nor the police – thought to check the rooftop.

Tonight had gone well, but the only problem was Amanda herself.

She wasn't supposed to survive. The notification he'd sent to her phone should have lured her into that server room and trapped her there, but unlike the other buildings, he had to work remotely for this one. His only view was via the CCTV camera in that corridor, because he couldn’t risk being in there himself. Not to mention that he’d heard enough stories about terrorists blowing themselves up with their own explosives, so he could only imagine how much the press would make fun of the terrorist who froze himself to death.

The press. That was another issue entirely.

Now he sat at his monitors and browsed the news, and he’d fully expected those vultures to jump on this story.

It was as seductive as a story could be, but all coverage had been disappointingly shallow.

CNN had given it a brief mention on the banner that ran across the bottom of the screen, Fox had given it about 20 seconds, news articles positioned it alongside celebrity gossip and high school football scandals.

Local news were doing better, but they were all missing the point entirely, not to mention they were framing it as a serial killing spree.

Of course, the term serial killer drew eyeballs. It got people to sit up and pay attention, much more than an honest report about fundamental flaws in America’s infrastructure would. Fear sold. Technical analysis didn’t.

Amanda Pierce’s death was yet to hit the news, but no doubt it would by morning.

Three murders would certainly qualify this is as a serial case, and that would just cement the unwanted title even further.

To classify these murders as serial killing was doing them a disservice, like calling a brain surgeon a butcher.

Jeffery Dahmer couldn’t hack a bank vault.

Gacy couldn’t move his fat ass through an accounting firm without a single camera picking him up.

No other predator on earth had done this before, and the media were treating it like some garden-variety hacking and slashing. The disrespect was insulting.

Though maybe there was a reason for the media's reluctance to embrace the locked room angle.

They hadn't done it years ago, either.

They’d buried that story too. Heart attack, they'd said. Natural causes in unnatural circumstances. Case closed. Life goes on.

But life hadn’t gone on. Not for him.

Some stories were too complex for sound bites, he guessed. They were too challenging for audiences who wanted simple narratives about good and evil. The truth required nuance, but nuance didn't generate clicks.

He went back to the final target on his board. Four targets, two down, one unattainable, one left to go. Amanda Pierce being alive admittedly threw a wrench in the works, because she’d actually seen him in the flesh. If she could connect the dots, maybe someone with a brain could track him down.

Which is why this had to end tomorrow night. One final target. The person who set this whole mess in motion all those years ago.

And this one was too special to do remotely. This time, he needed a front row seat.