Page 17 of Girl, Unseen

‘The Mustang guy? You find him?’

'Yes, we did.'

‘Alive?’

‘Very much not.’ Ella watched a pigeon strut past her feet. Nature's undertakers, always first on scene. ‘Sixty feet down a hole in a quarry.’

A pause. A rustle in the background. Edis was never far from his paperwork. ‘Accident?’

‘That's what NYPD thinks. Guy falls into a hole, tough luck all round.’ She cracked her neck. The morning's tension had settled there like concrete. ‘But they're wrong.’

‘How so?’

‘Murdered.’

Another pause. ‘You sound sure about that.’

‘Because Marcus Thornton didn't just stumble into that quarry. Someone led him there.’ Ella watched a delivery truck double-park. The driver leaped out and started unloading boxes with machine-gun efficiency.

‘Hell of a claim to make, Dark. Walk me through it.’

Ella took a breath. Organized her thoughts. ‘Marcus gets an email with photos of a geological anomaly. Rock types that shouldn't exist together, carved with symbols that look ancient but aren't. The sender knew exactly what buttons to push. Marcus was a limestone expert.’

‘So he went looking,’ Edis said.

‘On a Saturday afternoon. Drove up an abandoned road that isn't even on GPS. Parked up, found exactly what the photos promised – impossible rocks with impossible symbols. Then fell into a hole that looks like it was cut by a laser.’

‘People fall, Dark.’

‘Not like this.’ She stopped pacing. ‘The hole was perfectly circular, three feet across, right at the spot where someone would have stood to inspect the rocks. And those symbols. They weren’t random graffiti.’

‘Could be industrial remains. Old mining equipment leaves marks.’

‘These weren't industrial.’ Ella closed her eyes, remembering the way those symbols had seemed to writhe under her flashlight beam. ‘They were a message. You trust me, right?’

'Come on Ella. You've already used my goodwill against me once.'

‘That was yesterday.’

Edis sighed. ‘So, you’ve got a single body?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did any part of this cross state lines?’

‘No.’

‘Then it’s not a federal crime. We have no cause to get involved. As if we haven’t got enough to worry about over here.’

‘Marcus was a professor at a major university. And this has the makings of something bigger.’ Ella watched a business crowd flow past, wrapped in wool coats and invisible bubbles of indifference. ‘Someone went to a lot of trouble to get him into that quarry. The email, the photos, those symbols – it was all staged. Like a theater set waiting for its star.’

‘You're reaching, Dark.’

‘Maybe, but I’ve seen plenty of crazy stuff carved into walls. I recognize that kind of crazy a mile off. Someone wanted Marcus dead, and I need to find out why.’

The silence stretched between them. In the background, Ella heard the familiar thunk of Edis kicking his trash can. He only did that when he was thinking hard.

‘You really want this case?’ he asked finally.

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