Page 61 of Girl, Empty
Amanda swiped her card, kicked at the door, hammered her fist on the temperature gauge.Nothing.A cold fist of panic gripped her, spreading from her gut to her scalp in a blink.Her hands went stupid and she dropped the keycard.
Ping.
The sound came from the thermostat.It was the electronic chirp you heard when you pressed the up or down arrow.But Amanda wasn't touching anything.
She turned to look at the display.
27 degrees.
26.
25.
Someone was turning it down.
Someone was freezing Noah to death.
‘Noah!Try the manual release!The red handle!’
He was banging furiously on the door now.Probably kicking it, shouldering it.‘I’ve tried it.It’s not working.Call the cops.Call someone.I need to get out of-’
Then it came.A sound that reminded Amanda of when she watered her plants – but the hose head broke off and watered violently gushed out.Noah screamed from the other side, but Amanda couldn’t hear anything but the sound of pouring water.
More pings.More cold.The temperature dropped to 14, and the panic nearly made Amanda collapse.
‘I’m calling the cops!Hold on!’she cried.
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
Ella was back in her office with murder on her mind.Not the kind she investigated, but the kind she wanted to commit, or at least as close to it as possible.Sinclair had just blown her theory to pieces, and all signs pointed to him being a scam artist in a tech mogul’s body, not a killer.
Ripley burst into the room and made a beeline for her chair.She threw a pen and it skimmed across her desk and hit the floor.‘Talk about a waste of time.Sinclair’s not our man.He’s just an asshole.’
‘Definitely?’
‘Yeah.Morrison don’t use nameplates at all.None of the employees have ever seen a nameplate like that on Rankin’s desk.Sinclair just pulled that idea out of his ass.Who’d have thought that the serial killer collecting trade was full of scammers?’
‘I’m shocked.’Ella leaned her head against the wall.‘So Sinclair's virtual agent scraped the victim's name from news reports and just assumed he'd have a nameplate like every other office worker.’
‘That’s machines for you.All surface and no soul.’
'Can we charge him with something?Wire fraud?False advertising?'
‘Don’t worry about that.I told white collar crimes we had him in custody.They’ll nail him to the wall on fraud and commerce violations.Wish I’d have cracked his skull harder.’
Rage and frustration bubbled in Ella’s gut.She'd been so sure about Sinclair.The timeline fit, the access fit, the tech knowledge fit.His little murder museum had been the icing on the cake, but fate had thrown a wrench in the works, as it often did.But now she was back to square one, and somewhere out there was a savant hacker who could apparently open any electronic door in the world.
Her memory wasn’t helping in the slightest, either.She could recall every detail of every locked room murder case she'd ever read about, but none of them involved someone who could black out cameras and lure someone into a bank vault.There was no comparison to anything historical here, and if the pattern held, the killer already had victim number three in their crosshairs.
Then Riggs burst through the door without knocking.The man was lit up from the inside, like he’d injected caffeine into his veins.‘We got a dispatch call.A woman says her employee’s been locked in a room and he’s freezing to death.’
Ripley jumped out of her chair.‘Locked how?’
‘Electronic door is jammed, keycards aren't working, thermostat's been hacked, sprinklers have turned on.Temp is zero degrees.We need to get there.Now.’
Ella felt like a cold wire had been threaded through her skeleton.Someone was trapped in a freezing room on countdown to death, just like Thomas Grayson had been.
This had to be their killer’s handiwork.
