Page 20 of Girl, Empty
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?’
