Page 23 of Girl, Empty
‘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.’
