Page 9 of Girl, Empty (Ella Dark #27)

The precinct office they'd been assigned wasn't the worst Ella had worked in, which qualified as a minor miracle.

Two desks that only wobbled slightly, windows that actually opened, and a whiteboard that someone had tried to clean but had only succeeded in creating smears.

She was happy to live here for the foreseeable future.

Ripley dropped her bag on the desk closest to the window and immediately began her ritual of territorial marking. Then she went over and tested the coffee machine. ‘So. Pentagram,’ she said.

‘Pentagram indeed.’

‘What do you make of that? And how did it get on there?’

Ella had thought of nothing else on the journey to the precinct. ‘I’m no tech expert, but is it possible someone accessed Rankin’s computer remotely?’

‘Can that happen?’

‘Why couldn’t it? Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, intranet, shared networks. There’s probably a hundred ways to do it. Riggs thinks so too.’

The coffee machine spat out something that Ripley seemed content with. ‘Or someone accessed it after Rankin died.’

‘You’re thinking Riggs. Or one of the other cops.’

‘Detective Cheekbones? I’m not thinking him at all.’

Ella lowered her voice. ‘Why not? He was alone with that computer. He has a PhD in computer science. He’s also pretty enough to make people stupid.’

‘He’d also be the dumbest criminal in history. If he wanted to get away with murder, he wouldn’t invite the FBI into his investigation. He could have just wrapped it up as a suicide or burglary gone wrong.’

‘Maybe that’s exactly the point. You know how many killers have sought us out because they want to prove they can beat us.’

‘You sound insane, you know that? Did you see the look on Riggs’s face when that pentagram popped up? He looked like he was going to throw up.’

‘Alright, so he’s a good actor.’

‘He’s a terrible actor. If anyone’s in on it, it’s that security guard. We need to speak to him as soon as he’s ready.’

Ella plugged in her laptop, considering.

The truth was that everyone was a suspect in an impossible murder.

When physics said no one could have done it, you had to assume everyone might have done it.

But as always, Ripley had a point. Guilty parties didn't typically invite federal scrutiny unless they were either incredibly stupid or incredibly confident. Riggs struck her as neither.

‘What about the pentagram itself? What’s it mean?’

‘Wiccan? Occult? Vampire? Satanic cult? Take your pick.’

‘Those types of killers are mostly myths,’ Ella said. ‘There’ve only been a handful of them in history, and absolutely zero satanic cult murders ever. You know this.’

‘Locked door mysteries are mostly myths too, but we’re dealing with one of those.’

As if summoned by his name, Detective Riggs popped his head around the door. ‘I’ve got the CCTV footage lined up for you, and a chain smoking security guard who’s ready to talk.’

‘Let’s do both at once,’ Ripley said. ‘He can talk us through the footage.’

‘Follow me,’ said Riggs.

***

The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department had a patio area, complete with potted plants and a stone dolphin in a bird bath that cycled water.

Ella was momentarily disoriented by this collision of domesticity and law enforcement, but then she turned her attention to the security guard hunched at the table.

‘Mr. West, these are the FBI agents I told you about,’ said Riggs. ‘Agents, this is Terrence West.’

Terrence gave them a nod. ‘Alright, ladies. I’ll tell you the whole story but it won’t be any different from the last two times I told it.’

Ella gestured to Riggs. ‘It might, because we’ve got something else this time.’

Riggs placed his laptop on the table in front of Terrence. ‘This is the security footage from the building. Can you talk us through it as it happens?’

Terrence abruptly pulled out a packet of cigarettes and slammed them down. ‘You want me to look at the dead body of a guy I’ve worked with for nine years? Again?’

The frustration and anger was good. Guilty people usually went straight to being helpful and cooperative, but the innocent ones had room for ordinary responses to horror.

‘There were no cameras in Michael’s office, so you won’t see his body,’ Ella said. ‘But sometimes the details can bring up something we might have missed earlier.’

‘Fine,’ Terrence said, ‘but I need a coffee before I do this. My throat is dry as a bone.’

‘Be right back,’ said Riggs as he disappeared back into the precinct. When the door shut behind him, Terrence gestured for Ella and Ripley to come closer.

‘I know what you’re thinking, but I had nothing to do with this,’ Terrence said.

‘We never said you did.’

‘You don’t have to say it. I know how it looks. Just me and Michael alone in that building, and I’m the only one with a keycard that accesses the whole place.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Yeah. I mean, it still logs me coming and going, but I have free reign. I must be a suspect.’

‘You are,’ Ripley said, ‘but there’s a big difference between suspicion and guilt.’

‘Good.’

‘Unless you have a reason to want Michael Rankin dead.’

‘No!’ Terrence snapped. ‘I liked the guy. It was just me and him most nights. I’d go as far as saying we were friends.’

‘Anyone else at Morrison & Associates have a grudge against him? Any enemies?’

‘Doubt it. Rankin might have been a top-floor suit, but he was one of the good ones. Always had time for the little guys. I know all the goss in that place, and no one had a bad word to say about him.’

Ella and Ripley exchanged a look. As bittersweet as it was, she hoped that wasn’t true, because a random victim made for a much more difficult investigation. If someone had a tangible reason to kill Rankin, then such things would have a mental trail. ‘Talk us through what happened, please.’

‘It started with the lights. They were flickering off and on, so I went and checked the electrical system in the maintenance closet right behind my station. Everything was normal, so nothing had tripped, I know that much.’

Ella made a mental note. The killer hadn’t tripped the lights by hand. ‘How long were you in there?’

‘Two minutes max.’

‘Got it. And then?’

‘I got back to my station and checked the cameras. I have a grid which shows every feed at once, right? And one of them was just static.’

‘Just one?’ Ella asked.

‘Just one, which isn’t crazy. Sometimes cameras go offline or malfunction or whatever, so I figured that whatever had made the lights flicker had disrupted the cameras too.

’ Terrence lit what must have been his twentieth cigarette judging by the butts in front of him.

‘The camera was on the corridor of the top floor, so I tried calling Rankin to see if the power was still on up there. But the phone line was dead, so I headed up to his office. Didn’t need to knock on the door because it was wide open. Went in and... found him.’

Terrence inhaled a quarter of the cigarette in one breath. Detective Riggs returned with a Styrofoam up and set it in front of the security guard. ‘One coffee. Are you ready to see the footage now?’

Ella had more questions than her tongue knew what to do with. Were the flickering lights a distraction so that the killer could get in? Or that he could get out? If the killer was still in the building when Terrence checked on the victim, how did the killer escape?

‘Play it,’ Ella said.

Riggs angled the laptop so they could all see. The screen filled with a greyscale, twenty-four-square grid of lives playing out in real time. Or what had been real time sixteen hours ago. The timestamp in the corner read 23:59.

Nearly all of the grids were still images. The only movement was in square A1 in the top left. It showed the lobby, and Terrence was visible behind his station, but then exited stage left. His shiny head appeared in another square that showed an outdoor section.

‘You left the desk unmanned?’ Ripley asked.

‘Yeah. Just for like two minutes, though. I can’t be there every second.’

‘Here, watch,’ Riggs said.

At 00:02, while Terrence was still outside, the lobby camera went black. Not static or interference. Black like someone had thrown a cloth over the lens. Terrence leaned forward.

‘What the hell? Why’s A1 gone black?’

A1 suddenly came back to life and showed the empty lobby in full again, but as it did, A3 – the camera in the elevator went dark. Ella watched in amazement for around thirty seconds, then A3 switched back on, but B3 – the camera in the mantrap – went dark.

Terrence looked back at the agents with a new kind of horror. ‘I’ve never seen this happen before. I swear it.’

One by one, the darkness continued its pattern. One camera would go black, then would switch back on as the next one in the sequence went dark. It began at the lobby, went through the elevator, into the mantrap, then up camera C5 the fortieth floor.

The exact route Michael Rankin took.

‘It’s tracking movement,’ Ella said. ‘Following someone through the building.’

‘Yeah. Every time one of those cameras goes black, it’s because the killer is right in front of it.’ Ripley turned to Riggs. ‘How is that possible?’

‘I… don’t know. But that’s not all. Watch.’

The timestamp in the corner read 00:05. They waited, Ella with her heart at the pit of her stomach, because they were near the minute of Michael Rankin’s death. At 00:08, A3 showed Rankin entering the elevator. The camera grid followed his descent down, into the lobby, outside.

‘That was when I saw him,’ Terrence said. ‘We chatted.’

The process repeated when Rankin returned. Lobby to elevator to mantrap to top floor. All this time, the camera to the top floor remained blacked out.

Minutes ticked by again, but then at 00:22, the top floor camera turned to static.

Ripley said, ‘What’s the difference between static and blacked out?’

‘Static means it’s broken. It means there’s no feed to the host,’ replied Riggs. He tapped the screen. ‘Our perp somehow blacked out the cameras, but broke this one.’

‘Why?’

Ella didn’t answer, and not just because she didn’t have one.

It was because this killer was unlike anything history had to offer.

This unsub had somehow bended technology to their will, and in the age where technology was overwhelmingly the tool that caught killers, it meant the odds of catching this perp weren’t in her favor.

At 00:24, the A1 camera feed began to glow and darken.

‘This is what I was telling you about,’ Terrence said. ‘The lights were going crazy, so I went to check on the electrical system.’

Sure enough, the feed showed Terrence leaving his station. And then, as she expected, A1 went dark again for a few seconds before coming back to life. At 00:26, Terrence came back into shot.

‘That’s the end of it. Then I checked the cameras and saw C5 was just static.’

The feed confirmed to Ella what Terrence had said, and she had no doubt that he was telling the truth in all of this. The man was not a killer.

Ripley tapped Ella on the shoulder. ‘Dark, I’m confused as hell. Can you make any sense of this?’

She replayed the events in a linear sequence, and as improbable as it was, she couldn’t deny the evidence in front of her. Michael Rankin’s killer had disabled the security protocols in the building, and blanked out each camera that he passed by one by one.

And after the deed was done, he’d somehow drawn a pentagram on the victim’s computer.

‘No,’ she admitted. ‘This doesn’t make sense.’