Page 35 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)
Or might now belong to her serial killing son.
Was Dennis Roth murdered?
The question rattled around Ella's skull. A locked door from the outside. No signs of struggle. Security footage showing empty hallways. It was a magic trick without a magician and a crime scene without a crime. At least, that's what the investigators had decided.
But try explaining that to a fourteen-year-old boy.
Ella knew the psychology of it well. A kid that age didn’t understand nuance or bureaucratic indifference.
He wouldn’t be able to grasp why adults sometimes chose the easy answer over the right one.
All young Calvin Roth knew was that his father was dead, the door was locked, and nobody seemed to give a damn about the impossibility of it all.
So he'd lashed out. Not immediately, because Calvin was too young and perhaps even too smart for that. He'd let it fester for fifteen years, and took the time to learn everything he could about computers and locks and human nature. He learned how to make the impossible possible.
And now he was showing the world exactly what they'd missed.
Or maybe he was trying to prove something else entirely. Maybe each murder was Calvin's way of screaming: Look, this is how it could be done. This is how someone could have killed my father. Why didn't you look harder?
The radio droned on about traffic and weather but Ella wasn't listening.
Her mind was stuck on that newspaper photo – teenage Calvin with his thousand-yard stare, standing next to his broken mother.
How many nights had he lain awake, running through scenarios?
How many years had he spent teaching himself to hack systems that were supposed to be unhackable?
She should stop for coffee. Her eyelids felt like they'd been lined with sandpaper, and the adrenaline from finding Calvin's identity was starting to wear off. But stopping felt like an insult to the victims, especially as she was so close to finding something useful.
Something else that bothered her was that she’d never heard of the Dennis Roth case. Her brain was a filing cabinet of historical murders, and a locked-room death from 2010 should fit right in there.
Nothing. It must have been buried deep, dismissed so thoroughly that it never made it into the true crime canon. Just another middle-aged executive with a bad heart, and maybe that was the actual truth.
Only Calvin Roth apparently didn’t see it that way, and so had become something the world had never seen before: a serial killer who could apparently walk through walls.
The GPS chirped: Continue on I-74 East for sixty miles.
Ninety minutes to Calvin Roth’s door.
***
The city disappeared after an hour of driving, and its concrete tendrils gave way to a flat, icy landscape that offered the eye nothing to hold onto.
The GPS had then led Ella down a series of neglected highways and county roads until she reached Ashforth Lane; a long stretch of road that measured the distance between houses in acres, not feet.
There must have been half a mile between each property.
And here she was, parked out front of 346.
The house sat back from the road, and the place had surrendered to neglect many years ago.
Weeds had overtaken the driveway and the front lawn, and the canopy above door sagged so much that it reminded Ella of a dislocated arm.
A child's bicycle lay on its side, and the mere sight of it pierced her stomach.
Calvin would have been 29 now. If that was his bike, it had been waiting for him to come home for fifteen years.
She checked her phone before getting out. No signal. Not surprising this far into rural Indiana. If Calvin Roth was here, if this went sideways, backup would take forever to arrive, but it was a risk she had to take.
Time to head inside.
She stepped out of the car and approached the front door, then listened. With walls this thin, she’d be surprised if she couldn’t hear the floorboards creaking from outside. She knocked the door and waited.
Nobody answered.
Had she drove 80 miles for nothing?
No. She couldn’t come all this way without inspecting everything.
If this house had been abandoned, which she fully expected, then she wouldn’t be invading anyone’s private space.
She could even report it once she’d finished here so the town could reclaim ownership.
She tried the front door handle and found it locked, but she guessed it wouldn’t take too much effort to get inside.
A path in the overgrowth led around the side of the house. She pushed past the brittle arms of a dead rose and found herself in a garden that was in worse state than the front. A wooden deck was green with mold, and there at the top of steps was a back door – hanging ajar.
Nobody left a door open in this weather, which further confirmed that nobody lived here anymore. Either that, or the concept of inside versus outside stopped mattering to the occupant a long time ago. Ella rested her hand on her Glock as she approached the door.
‘FBI. Anyone home?’
Only the wind answered, and so Ella used her foot to pry the door open further.
The smell of damp assaulted her, and then she embraced it as she entered a kitchen.
Dishes sat in the sink, with a few drink glasses next to them that had gone cloudy.
There was a calendar on the wall that showed March 2015, with the sixth circled in blue pen.
Nearly ten years ago.
Through the archway, Ella stumbled upon a living room.
Brown everywhere; furniture, display cases, shelves, lamps.
If this place had been alive ten years ago, the décor certainly didn’t reflect that fact.
Whoever lived here checked out long before 2015, as did their taste in upholstery.
Dust lined the surface of the usual suspects, but there were patches of dustless areas on the floor and sofa too.
Someone had been here in the past ten years, and Ella prayed that it was her savant serial killer.
If he’d come back here once, there was a chance he’d come back here again.
Ella’s next stop was into a drab hallway and then upstairs.
Each step creaked to the point she thought they might give way, but she made it to the top in one piece.
Up here was a short landing area boasting four closed doors.
It was here where the intimacy of invasion gnawed at her conscience, because downstairs was for show, upstairs was for privacy.
With a gentle push she entered the first room, half expecting to find someone waiting for her.
But there were no living souls in this master bedroom.
Just a rumpled bed of faded white bedsheets, chests of drawers and an oval mirror.
Ella left the place as she found it and moved to door number two.
Here was a spare room dominated by collapsing cardboard boxes.
What was in them, Ella didn’t have the heart to look.
She moved to the third door, and could already smell that this was the bathroom from the landing.
Inside, it was tiled pink, and rust had collected on the sink, toilet and bath screen.
Some hotel shampoo bottles lined the shelf, and they were the kind they gave out at care facilities.
Perhaps Susan had been cared for at home prior to moving to a care facility full-time.
The door at the end of the hall drew Ella forward. Even before she pushed it open, she knew this would be different. The knob turned easily enough, and beyond the threshold, she found herself in a teenage boy's bedroom.
Walls were a dark blue. The bed was made perfectly. A beige computer tower sat next to three dusty monitors. There was a small entertainment unit sporting a small TV, PlayStation 4, and some handheld consoles. In one compartment sat piles of textbooks and magazines.
And on the far wall, above the bed, Ella saw a row of framed trophies.
Newspaper clippings.
LOCAL WHIZ KID, 10, SWEEPS STATE CODING COMPETITION.
CALVIN ROTH, 11, BUILDS WORKING PC FROM SCRAP PARTS.
THE NEXT BILL GATES? GRAYSTONE’S OWN PRODIGY SHINES.
LOCAL STUDENT WINS NATIONAL SCIENCE FAIR.
The photos showed a slight, awkward boy holding trophies almost as tall as he was.
He had a mop of brown hair lumped on his skull, a gaunt face, and the build of a kid who hadn't yet discovered the joys of junk food.
Pinned beside the pictures was a framed quote; Look up at the stars, not down at your feet.
This was him. Computer savant. Child prodigy. Murderer of three people. This was the room where the ghost in the machine had grown up, and at some point in the past ten years had vanished, only to surface now and extract his vengeance on a world he tried to process through computers.
But where was he?
‘Have you come to take me back?’
White hot adrenaline exploded into Ella’s system. The voice was thin and dry, like someone had trod on a pile of dead leaves. Ella spun and raised her Glock.
An old woman stood in the doorway. She was dressed in a thick brown robe and slippers, and her white hair was a tangled mess.
‘Who are you?’ Ella asked.
‘I’m Susan. Are you from the home?’
‘No. I’m from the police.’
‘Don’t take me back,’ the woman cried. ‘They said they’d send the police if I left again.’
Ella holstered her weapon. ‘You’re Susan Roth?’
‘Yes. I just wanted to see my house. Can I just stay here for a little while?’
‘Ma’am, I’m not from the care home, and I’m not here to take you back there. I need to talk about your son, Calvin.’
‘Oh yes. Smart boy. Way smarter than I ever was. He doesn’t live here anymore.’
Susan was certainly suffering with some kind of ailment, but Ella wasn’t one for armchair diagnoses. She seemed to have one foot in the real world, one in that terrible hallucinatory realm that comes with cognitive decline. ‘Do you know where your son is?’
‘I haven’t seen Calvin in a long time. He moved away. Would you like something to eat?’