Page 8 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)

‘The Crossroads of America,’ Ripley said.

‘What?’

‘That’s what they call Indiana. I read it on the way here.’

Ripley never researched their destinations, and that fact alone was enough for Ella to conclude that something weird was going on with her. ‘Have you been here before?’

‘Once, but I never liked the Midwest. Too much corn.’

Ella looked up and down the street. She could barely hear herself think over the traffic. ‘Where are the police cars and news vans? Are we in the right spot?’

‘Looks like a corporate headquarters to me.’

Morrison & Associates occupied a sleek forty-story tower that reflected the overcast sky in its tinted windows, and given its grandeur, no one could have guessed someone had been stabbed to death on the top floor twelve hours ago. ‘Let’s see what’s going on.’

Ella led the way to the glass doors. She tried the handle to no avail, and then a uniformed cop on the other side opened up.

‘Sorry, ma’am. Building is locked down.’

She flashed her badge. ‘FBI. We’re expected.’

‘Oh, sorry. Step inside and I’ll fetch the chief.’

‘Please do.’ Ella stepped into a marble lobby that reminded her of one of those buildings in Saudi Arabia that was all surface and no substance.

By the look of it, the place had been evacuated.

A second later, a young cop in a black uniform emerged from a side door, kicking away a wet floor sign with Alpine Fresh written on the side.

‘FBI? I’m Detective Riggs, Indiana State PD.’ He extended a hand. ‘I’d say call me Jeremiah, but Riggs is easier.’

Ella matched his grip. ‘Thanks for meeting us. I’m Agent Ella Dark and this is Agent Mia Ripley. You’re in charge of this investigation?’

‘For my sins. I’ve only been here since this morning, but this damn thing is hurting my head already.’

Detective Riggs was a spit-and-polish city cop, Ella thought.

His black hair was trimmed to regulation length, and he had that smooth-as-butter jaw that only someone blessed with high cheekbones could pull off without looking like a child.

The man was a looker, but that beauty only made her miss Luca that little bit more.

‘We’ve seen the police report and the crime scene photos. Can you give us a run-through of exactly what happened?’

Riggs gestured around to nothing in particular. ‘So, the victim was discovered by the security guard here at about half past midnight. They were the only two people in the building.’

‘Apparently not,’ Ella said. ‘What prompted the security guard to go looking for Michael Rankin?’

‘Power outage. He said lights started flickering, security cameras started blacking out. That was just after midnight. Terrence – the security guard – said he checked it out, then went up to the top floor to see if Michael was alright. Then he found him dead.’

‘Is the security guard here?’ Ella asked.

‘He’s at the station. I can take you to see him after you’ve been here.’

‘Excellent. Do we have a security expert? Someone who knows this system inside out?’

Riggs jabbed his thumb into his chest. ‘You’re looking at him. Computer science PHD reporting for duty. I’ve spent the past eight hours getting to grips with this whole mess, and I’m pretty sure I know exactly how every single panel in this damn building works.’

Ella blinked. People could surprise you, she thought.

Here she'd been sizing up Riggs as another pretty-boy city cop, and he turned out he had a computer science doctorate.

The Bureau had taught her to read people quickly, but every now and then someone slipped past her initial assessment and reminded her that assumptions were just lazy thinking in disguise.

‘Computer science PhD? You don't look like any IT guy I've ever met.'

‘Mom wanted me to become a doctor so I compromised.’

Ella caught a glimpse of the kid he'd probably been before the badge. ‘Have you been through the security logs, cameras, everything?’

‘Everything. And according to every single entry and exit log I’ve been through, no one came into this building during the time frame when Rankin was killed. No one left either, except for the victim himself.'

‘Except for Rankin?’

Riggs pulled out a tablet and scrolled through what looked like a spreadsheet of timestamps.

'Rankin's keycard shows him leaving the building at 00:10. Security guard said he went to get his blood pressure medication from his car. Then the same keycard shows him re-entering at 00:15. That’s the last time he was seen alive. Then Terrence found his body fifteen minutes later, and the only logs were in Rankin’s name. ’

‘Could someone have piggybacked inside?’ Ripley asked.

‘No. The weights in the lift would have trigger the alarm, and Terrence said he didn’t see anyone else.’

Ella chewed on that. Twenty-minute window. Empty building except for two men. One ends up dead in a room nobody else entered. Physics said impossible. The body said otherwise.

'Want to see his route? I've been tracing his steps all morning. '

‘Please.’

Riggs led them to the elevator. ‘I’m having to use the security guard’s keycard to get in and out, and I’ve disabled some of the security measures via the main hub. And before you ask, it took my entire tech team and the CEO to do it. It’s not something you can just do at the flick of a switch.’

There went Ella’s next theory. Someone – possibly the security guard – just disabling the security measures before killing Rankin. Riggs was right. This case was definitely the headache type.

Riggs swiped his card at the panel. They stepped inside and the elevator hummed upward. ‘First checkpoint is at floor twenty. This thing weighs you.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Look.’ The elevator stopped and they stepped out into a cubicle. ‘Weight sensors in the floor. If you're carrying an extra person or even a heavy bag that's not in your profile, it won't open.’

‘That’s pretty offensive,’ Ripley said. ‘What if it’s your time of the month? Or you’re pregnant?’

‘Not many of those in the building. Forensic accounting is a man’s world, from what I gather.’

‘What next?’ asked Ella.

Riggs swiped a card at the next panel. ‘Fingerprint scanner.’

The cubicle opened up to a second elevator which took them to the top floor, which then opened into another small compartment.

'And here's the last line of defense. Retinal scanner,' Riggs said as he swiped his card again.

'Usually, you'd have to stare at the red dot, and it scans your retinal pattern.

Can't fake it, can't force someone to use it if they're unconscious.

The eye has to be focused. Rankin logged in here at 00:18. '

Ripley said, ‘This is a ridiculous level of security. It’s not like the nuclear codes are in here.’

‘There was a major theft a few years ago. Cost this place hundreds of millions, apparently, so they went full belt and braces. Anyway, Rankin’s office is up here.’

Riggs led them to the last office on the left. He scanned the panel outside the door with his keycard and it opened up, which seemed anticlimactic after the fortress they'd just navigated.

Ella stepped into Michael Rankin’s final moments. The office was an effort in luxury for sure, with a giant mahogany desk, meeting table and floor-to-ceiling windows with a bird’s eye view over Indianapolis. The body was gone but its ghost remained in the blood stains over near the window.

‘Gloves on, ladies,’ Riggs said. ‘Coroner has been, but I’m still waiting on the forensics team.’

‘The place hasn’t been swept? I thought life moved fast in the city?’

‘It does, but traffic moves slow. Likewise, I still haven’t had chance to inform the family.’

‘Are you kidding?’ Ripley’s voice had raised a few decibels. ‘It’s been over twelve hours since he died. His wife and daughter don’t know?’

Riggs had the decency to look sheepish. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you feds might have special instructions for that, you know? Or maybe you’d want to deliver the news yourself so you could do that profiling stuff. Rule them out as suspects.’

Ella gloved up and began mapping out the room.

From what she could see, their theories had been right.

The place might be big, but you couldn’t hide in here for very long.

Likewise, the windows were intact and un-openable.

A closer look at the blood spatter confirmed that Michael Rankin had been stabbed and killed where he stood.

She dropped to her knees and began inspecting the floor like there might be a trap door to Narnia here. No such luck.

‘Any vents in here?’ she asked.

‘Sealed system. The vents are the size of mail slots. You’d be lucky to get a hamster through.’

‘Maintenance shafts, access panels?’

On the other side of the room, Ripley was checking the panels in the walls. ‘When was this place built?’

‘2007,’ said Riggs.

‘Post 9/11. Buildings like this don’t do hollow spaces.’

Ella joined Ripley in checking the wall paneling. It was solid, expensive, and disappointingly legitimate. She rapped her knuckles against different sections in the vain hope that there might be a secret passage.

‘Mia, I feel really stupid doing this.’

‘You’re telling me. We’re wasting our time.’

Ella stepped back and found herself beside Michael Rankin’s three-monitor setup. His cell phone was still on the desk beside his mouse.

'So let's get this straight. Someone managed to waltz past, what, six layers of security? A security guard, an elevator, a biometric scanner, another elevator, a retinal scanner and a security panel. Then stab the victim and leave without a trace?'

‘He had to take the same route back too. And then there’s the security cameras. Total blackout during that window.’

‘We need to see those recordings.’

‘They’re on a flash drive at the precinct. I’ll show you them when we get there.’

Ella tried to think. Impossible murders needed to stay in Sherlock Holmes stories where they belonged. She closed her eyes and rifled through her mental filing cabinet of bizarre cases from history.

The Hinterkaifeck murders in Germany, 1922. An entire family killed on their farm, no tracks in the snow leading away. But that was before modern forensics, and the killer had likely hidden in the attic for days. Not applicable here, not with these security measures.

The Bain family murders in New Zealand. Locked house, complicated timeline. But again, once you looked closely, the physics worked. Someone was lying, evidence was missed, but the killer had walked through doors like a normal human being.

She thought of the Setagaya family murders in Tokyo. The killer spent hours in the house after the murders, ate their food, used their computer. But he'd gotten in through a window. A regular window that opened. Nothing like these forty-story sealed units.

‘You're doing that thing,’ Ripley said.

‘What thing?’

‘You know what thing.’

‘I’m trying to find a historical case where the killer genuinely couldn’t have gotten in or out.’

‘And?’

‘And I’m coming up empty, so history says our killer walked in and out of here, just without being seen.’ Ella spun and saw Rankin’s cell phone again. ‘Rankin’s wife isn’t wondering why her husband didn’t come home last night, by the way?’

‘No. Terrence said it’s not unusual for him to work days at a time.’

As if summoned by her words, the phone's screen suddenly blazed to life. A notification slid down from the top: REMINDER: SWIMMING COMP - 6 PM - Westside Aquatic Center.

Ella’s stomach performed a sickening roll, because the notification banner revealed a graveyard of unanswered communications beneath. Sarah, two missed calls. Sarah, three new messages. Mom, one missed call.

She had to look away. She thought she’d have learned to compartmentalize by now, but these little reminders of a pre-tragedy life slipped past her armor every time.

‘What was Rankin working on, by the way?’ Ripley asked.

‘Numbers that don’t make sense to me. I took a quick look at his computer earlier.’

Ella asked, ‘Can I take a look at them? Just to see if anything stands out?’

‘Maybe. I don’t want to alter his screen too much, just in case there’s something useful on there. I want to get the whole contents of this machine transposed to a hard drive at the precinct, but getting clearance for that is going to take months.’

Riggs moved around to the other side of the massive desk and gently nudged the mouse. Three monitors flickered to life. The screens were arranged in a perfect arc, each one massive enough to display what looked like entire financial universes.

‘He had this window open when I checked earlier,’ Riggs said as he clicked on a taskbar icon. ‘I’m no expert, but I think it was an audit or some-’

The window opened, and Riggs stopped mid-sentence.

‘Everything okay?’

The detective’s face creased into confusion. ‘What the…? Um. This isn’t right.’

The window expanded, and Ella found herself staring at what looked like digital television static. Thousands of tiny colored squares, or pixels, arranged in random patterns across the screen. Red dots scattered among blue ones, green mixed with yellow. It created a mosaic that hurt to look at.

‘What’s that mess?’ she asked.

‘This isn’t what was here before. I saw columns of numbers, dates, company names, all that crap. It was some financial tracking system, not... whatever this is.'

Ripley asked, ‘Has it crashed?’

‘No, it’s still alive. Shit, did I screw something up?’ Riggs’s tone carried the strain of a man questioning his own competence. ‘God, what did I do? The tech team is going to crucify me. This is evidence, this is…’

Riggs continued clicking, scrolling, and then Ella spotted something odd. Something about the way the pixels clustered. Her pulse kicked into high gear as adrenaline flooded her veins. ‘Riggs, can you zoom out?’

‘Zoom out? What?’

‘Yeah. So we can see the whole screen in one.’

'Maybe. Let me see,' Riggs stuttered. He found a magnifying glass with plus and minus signs in the corner and clicked on it with a shaking hand. The pixels became smaller, tighter, and the random scatter began to coalesce into form.

Into shape.

Ella’s heart nearly beat out of her chest,

Because spread across the screen, rendered in millions of tiny pixels, was a pentagram.

And it had somehow replaced Michael Rankin's financial data in the hours since his death.