Page 21 of Girl, Haunted

Ella's fingers twitched. Instinct was screaming at her like a drill sergeant. This little monkey was hiding something, and she'd bet her badge on it.

Time for some amateur surgery.

She squeezed the thing until something cracked, then chipped away chunks of broken plastic until the monkey had no back half. Wires. Circuit boards. Servos. The monkey's mechanical entrails lay bare, but Ella wasn't interested in the how. She was hunting for the why.

‘Uh, Ell?’ Luca’s voice cut through her concentration. ‘Want to tell us why you’re ripping up Curious George over there?’

She didn't answer. Her fingers probed deeper, pushing past the electronic viscera until – there. Her hand closed around something small and rectangular, lodged in the monkey's chest cavity like a pacemaker.

‘Bingo,’ Ella breathed. She held up her prize.

A camera, no bigger than a matchbox, with a USB drive jutting out of its side.

Redmond marched over squinted at the device like he'd never seen one before. ‘The hell is that?’

‘That,’ Ella said, ‘is what our dear Mr. Van Allen was hiding. And I’m guessing there’s one in every animatronic in this place. You catch those flashing red eyes in that pumpkin head and clown face? Proximity sensors. Guess Van Allen wasn’t as camera-shy as we thought.’

Redmond's bushy eyebrows knitted together, forming a caterpillar of confusion across his forehead. ‘That can't be right. Jeremy swore up and down there weren't no cameras in here.’

‘Well, Jeremy's either a liar or as blind as a bat in sunglasses,’ Ella shot back. She turned the camera over in her hand, studying it like a jeweler appraising a particularly shifty diamond. ‘Question is, what did this bad boy catch?’

Understanding dawned on Luca's face. ‘You think…?’

'Yes, I do think.' Ella suppressed a grin. 'If these things have been running since Saturday night, then…'

‘We’ve got Van Allen’s murder on video,’ Luca finished.

Ella clenched her fist in triumph. All they needed was a face, then once they got the word out to locals, it would only take a few hours for someone to recognize him. God bless small-town curiosity.

‘Excellent work,’ Redmond said. ‘Let’s just hope our guy didn’t know about these cameras. If he was a worker here, then…’

‘Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity,’ Ella said. ‘We need to get the cameras from every room, just in case.’

‘On it,’ said Luca.

Adrenaline surged through her like a shot of pure lightning. She could almost taste the swift resolution, the satisfaction of figuring this unsub out before he had a chance to strike again.

She needed to round these cameras up, extract their footage and maybe she’d be back in D.C. before the morning.

Bu then a niggling doubt wormed in, because when had anything ever been that easy?

CHAPTER EIGHT

An hour later, Ella arrived at the Yamhill precinct armed with six USB drives, all taken from hidden cameras masquerading animatronics throughout the Screamatorium. One drive for each room, and if fortune was in her favor, one of them might have caught a glimpse of their unsub.

The Yamhill precinct was a testament to small-town charm gone horribly awry. The place had all the ambiance of a prison corridor, complete with fluorescent lights that were too bright and a pervasive smell of unwashed carpet. But it was the view that really sold the backwater chic aesthetic.

Just beyond the window, a billboard proudly proclaimed ‘JESUS SAVES’ in letters so big, Ella was pretty sure they could be seen from space. To its right, an equally massive ad for the ‘Kitty Kat Klub’ promised a very different kind of salvation. The cognitive dissonance was enough to give Ella a migraine.

But she didn't have time for existential crises. Not when she had a killer to catch and a lead that was hotter than the sun. She fired up her laptop and gave it a few slaps to speed the damn thing up.

‘You sure we don't need a tech expert for this?’ Luca asked.

‘Good luck with that,’ Redmond said. The man was already pacing the room. ‘No such thing around here. Unless you count Billy at the Radio Shack, and trust me, you don't want him anywhere near evidence.'

‘It’s a USB drive, guys. Not exactly firewalls for the Pentagon.’

‘Just saying.’

---