Page 68 of Girl, Empty
Ella went through her notes and found the contact numbers for three people she’d met in the past few days; Terrance West, Mark Miller and Amanda Pierce.She dialed the first number and prayed that the security guard from Morrison wasn’t an early sleeper.
He answered on the third ring.‘Hello?’
‘Hi, Mr.West.It’s Agent Dark with the State PD.We met yesterday.’
‘Ah, yeah.Is everything okay?’
‘That depends.I need your help.’
‘My help, huh?I’m back on night watch already.No rest, even when your friend turns up dead, so I’m not sure how much I can help right now.’
‘No, that’s perfect,’ Ella said.‘I need you to access your CCTV archive.Can you help?’
It was a long shot for sure, but long shots sometimes scored the most impressive goals.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Midnight have come and gone, and Ella’s office was now a makeshift surveillance hub.
Terrence West had come through for her, as had Mark Miller and Amanda Pierce.They’d all isolated the necessary security footage and sent it over in files that took over an hour to download.
Now Ella was looking at six weeks of unedited security footage – March through mid-April – compressed into ten terabytes of almost entirely mundane goings on in the corridors of Morrison & Associates.For the rest of the night until the sun rose, it was Ella’s job to find Zane Corvidale’s face in what amounted to almost fifty-thousand hours of footage from 40 different cameras across three buildings.
Game on.
She started with the first date in Janice’s logbook – March 14, and loaded up the lobby camera.The footage was raw and unedited.She had 24 files for each day, each one for a different camera, so if she wanted to switch between cameras, she had to open a new file then navigate to the same time.It was going to be a long process.According to Janice's notes, the Morrison job had run from 8 PM to 2 AM across five consecutive nights.Three cleaners: Maria Jansen, Edwin Park, and Zane Corvidale.
The math was simple.One woman, one old man, one young man.Janice had described Zane as late twenties with buzzed hair and fidgety mannerisms.Process of elimination would do the rest.
The footage began at 8AM, so Ella fast-forwarded until most of the worker bees cleared out.There wasn’t really much to look at, just indistinct suits hurrying past the camera, the occasional loiterers in the lobby.The only constant was Terrence sat behind his security desk.
At 8PM, the targets arrived.
Alpine Cleaning Crew.
The camera angle caught them from above, making identification difficult, but she could make out basic details.Three people in matching Alpine uniforms: forest green polos with the mountain logo on the breast pocket.They pushed a cart loaded with supplies through the lobby.
The first figure was clearly a woman.Short, stocky build, gray hair pulled back in a bun.That had to be Maria.The second was an older man with a pronounced stoop to his shoulders and what looked like a bad hip from the way he favored his left side.Edwin Park.
Which left the third.
Ella paused the footage and studied him – or at least what she could see of him.
Younger, definitely.Taller than both his companions but somehow smaller in presence.Buzzed hair, just as Janice had described.Military short or maybe he was trying to hide male pattern baldness.Dark clothing beneath the Alpine uniform.Average height, average build.It was a textbook unremarkable appearance that no one would look twice at.
She clicked through frame by frame, waiting for a better angle.The timestamp jumped to 8:03 PM.The crew had reached the elevator bank.Maria swiped her keycard while Edwin leaned against the wall.The young one – Corvidale – stood apart from them, hands shoved in his pockets.
Then he looked up.
Just for a second, maybe two, he glanced directly at the camera.
The image was grainy and compressed, but Ella could make out the basics.
White male, narrow face, high forehead.Thin lips, straight nose.No visible scars or distinguishing marks.His eyes were deep-set, and the grainy footage made it hard to determine their color.Could be brown, could be hazel.The buzzed hair was dark, black or dark brown.Clean-shaven.No glasses.Age difficult to pinpoint exactly, but the lack of visible lines around the eyes and mouth suggested mid-to-late twenties.He was as ordinary looking as it got, and if you asked 20 people to describe him to a sketch artist, you’d get 20 different results.
Was this him?Was she looking at a serial killer?
One grainy screenshot wouldn’t cut it.This was just one face from one camera on one night.She needed more angles, better resolution, and confirmation that the same man had appeared at First National and Blackglass, too.Ten terabytes times three.
