Page 37 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)

The stars were coming out early tonight, or perhaps it was just January playing its tricks. Calvin Roth sad cross-legged and watched the sky darken, just as he’d done on these winter nights with his dad when he was a kid.

All those stars, Cal. Don’t let anyone tell you something’s impossible.

At the time, Calvin had never equated the existence of stars with human limitations. The stars were just a beautiful accident of physics. The lesson came later, taught to him by a locked door and a coroner’s report that said Dennis Roth had died of natural causes.

A star was just light from an impossible distance. If that cosmic journey was possible, then no human system and no locked door could ever truly be impenetrable. Everything was reachable. You just had to be patient enough to cross the dark.

And patient he’d been. He was 29 now, 15 years removed from the day he got that call during chemistry class. Your father's dead. Heart attack. No, we don't know why the door was locked from the outside. These things happen.

These things happen.

Except they didn't. Not like that. Not with security footage that showed empty hallways and a door that had no business being locked.

Not with his dad's boss, Kevin Wolfe, suddenly getting promoted to fill the vacancy.

Not with his mother going quiet in that way that meant she knew something but would never say it.

That's what this had always been about. Not money or business or any of the official reasons people killed each other. Just old-fashioned jealousy dressed up in a suit and tie. Calvin’s mom had chosen Dennis over Kevin back in the day, and Kevin had nursed that rejection like a tumor for twenty years.

When the chance came to remove Dennis from the equation, he'd taken it.

Calvin had asked questions that nobody else seemed to care about. He'd asked until his throat was raw, asked until his mother started taking those little yellow pills, asked until the grief counselor at school told him he needed to process his anger in healthier ways.

So he'd stopped asking out loud and started asking in other ways.

The Elan building was still here. The same building his dad had died in, and Calvin had only ever seen the inside once.

He’d imagined the interior many times though, imagined his father’s last moments.

The realization that the door wouldn't open.

The panic setting in. The heart giving out because sometimes the body knows when it's trapped.

Everyone knew it was murder. You could see it in the detectives' eyes, the way they'd looked at each other when they thought no one was watching. But knowing and proving were different animals, and they'd chosen the easier path. Natural causes.

So Calvin was proving it for them.

Not right away. First came the years of learning, of understanding how systems worked and how they could be made to fail. How a door could lock itself. How cameras could lie.

Michael Rankin had been exhibit A. Rankin had reminded Calvin of his own dad, and that had been his biggest mistake.

When he’d seen that pentagram tattoo on Rankin’s social media, he couldn’t help but leave behind a middle finger to the poor cops saddled with investigating his death.

Rankin had been something of an experiment, but the task had been easier than expected.

Break into the building’s network, cause a distraction, lock the doors, distract the security guard.

Broken down, it was fairly straightforward.

Thomas Grayson had been refinement. Calvin had pushed the boundaries with that one, to see how far he could reach through fiber optics and wireless signals. The only issue with that was that Calvin had to be present to lock the vault door.

But the whole thing had been a real statement that said: look what I can do. Look what someone could have done.

Amanda Pierce. That one hadn't gone as planned. But maybe that was fitting. His father's death hadn't gone as planned either. Wrong person, but dead all the same.

And now, finally, Kevin Wolfe.

Calvin pulled out his phone – one of many, cycled and discarded like tissues – and opened the app he'd built specifically for this moment.

Kevin's calendar was an open book, and the Elan building was totally empty today.

Soon, Kevin Wolfe would get a notification that there was a critical server error; kind of emergency that would send a control freak like Kevin racing back to check on his kingdom.

The security company would get a cancellation notice – false alarm, disregard.

And so Kevin Wolfe would end up here – alone.

All too easy.

Calvin didn’t know the layout of this building like he knew the others, but he knew one part of the building very well indeed. That was where today’s finale was going to take place.

And before Kevin Wolfe finally got what was coming to him, there’d be a confession, and then he’d show Kevin what impossible really looked like.

Time to end this.

Time to prove what everyone had always known but been too cowardly to say.

Kevin Wolfe had killed his father.

And vengeance was coming.

He pulled up the app and pushed the button.