Page 84 of Girl, Empty
She tried again.Click.Click.Click.
Nothing.
What the hell was wrong?Had it jammed?
‘Son of a bitch,’ she screamed, then started running.Calvin already had Kevin halfway over the edge now, andthe older man's legs were kicking frantically as gravity tried to claim its prize.
‘This is for my father, you bastard!This is for years of-’
Ella grabbed him, pulled him off of Kevin, and he swung and connected an elbow with Ella's nose.She flew back, shielded her face, and felt her palms fill with blood.The adrenaline coursed fast and violent, but before she could retaliate, Calvin was screaming again.He began staggering in drunken circles, and one of his arms dangled uselessly while the other clawed at something in his back.Something had incapacitated him, and when Calvin Roth fell to his knees with his back to her, Ella could see that it was a brown pencil.
Blood spilled and pooled under his knees.Meanwhile, Kevin had scrambled away from the ledge and was now leaning against what looked like a garage.Where he pulled that pencil from, Ella had no idea, but that was a question for later.
‘Sorry, Calvin,’ she said.‘But you spent too long looking down at your feet.You should have looked up, to the stars.’
Calvin looked like he was about to cry.Maybe he was.Ella dug deep and found a note of sympathy for this poor boy, but then she thought of Michael, Thomas and Noah – three people who did nothing wrong but had been sacrificed at the altar of a broken kid’s delusions.Three families ruined, all because Calvin Roth wanted an answer that didn’t exist.
He tried to stand, but then he met Ella's fist.Her knuckles met cartilage, and Calvin Roth collapsed face-down on the roof of the same building where his father had died fifteen years before.She reached down, pulled the pencil out of his back, and threw it on the ground.She rolled him over.
Calvin spat blood involuntarily.There was some internal damage, but the kid would survive.’
‘Am I going to die?’he breathed.
‘No.I promised your mom I’d take care of you.’
Ella found her handcuffs and snapped them on Calvin Roth’s wrists.
There were no electronic locks here.You couldn’t hack handcuffs, and that was good enough for Ella.
Game over.
CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
There was a killer in handcuffs and two mysteries solved in one day.All Ella had to sacrifice for this was a potentially-broken nose, and in the grand scheme of things, that felt like a fair trade.
Now she was sitting against a garage that was on top of a roof, and under other circumstances, that would have been the most surreal thing about this environment.Yet, there was a savant-hacker-turned-serial-killer in the back of a cruiser down the ground, three bodies that had been found in the most impossible locations, and to top it all off, a bloody pencil rolling around at her feet.
Ripley detached herself from a crowd of uniforms and made a beeline for her.She took a seat on the cold floor.‘Who builds a garage on a roof?’
‘The Japanese,’ Ella said.
‘Is that so?’
‘Yeah.They have vertical graveyards, don’t you know.’
Ripley nodded toward the edge of the roof.‘I heard you nearly had something similar.’
‘Yeah.I gotta give it to Kevin.He fought Calvin off real good.What kept you so long?’
‘Sorry I missed the fun.We were checking the rest of the building just in case anyone else was in here.How’d you know he was gonna be on the roof?’
‘Look up at the stars.’
Ripley did.‘What about them?’
‘Never mind.Is Calvin talking?’
‘Not yet, but he will.He was hiding in this here garage before he ambushed Kevin, and there was a bunch of his stuff in there.Laptop, a couple of cells, lead pipe with Kevin’s blood on it.We’ve got enough evidence to put him behind bars for life.I’m just wondering how the hell he got up here.’
