Page 72 of Girl, Empty
‘She got an address listed.’
Ella saw two addresses in her history, and the first one brought that bubbling frustration back to the surface.Windmere Nursing Home For Dementia Sufferers.
‘Ugh, she’s in a care home.’
Ripley sighed and backed herself against the wall.‘For God’s sake.And if she’s got dementia, chances are she’s not going to help us much.’
‘Nope.’
‘What about her previous address?’
’346 Ashforth Lane, Greystone, IN.Where’s that?’
Ripley checked on her cell.‘God, it’s like 80 miles away.And what are the odds Calvin Roth still lives there?’
‘Wouldn’t there be a record?You can’t own a home without some kind of documentation.’
‘Are thereanyrecords with this guy?But I don’t know.It’s a long journey, but… wait a second.’Ripley was still scrolling.‘I just searched the address online.That place hasn’t changed hands since the eighties.’
Ella’s mind whirred.Something about this seemed odd.‘Maybe they abandoned it when Susan got put in a nursing home.’
‘But even so, ownership would go to her son, and the official docs would say that.’
‘Then I gotta go there,’ Ella said.‘Do we have showers here?’
‘Every cop shop has showers.’
‘Give me ten, then I’ll be ready.Are you coming?’
‘We can’t both go, Dark.It’s 80 miles away.It’ll be late afternoon by the time you get back, and we can’t both be gone that long.I’ve still got to help process the official stuff from last night, and what if something major happens while you’re out of the city?’
‘You’re right.Then I’m going alone.Search for anything relating to Calvin Roth if you get five minutes, and I’ll keep you updated from the road.’
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
The highway stretched ahead and Ella pushed the speedometer past 75.Susan Roth's last known address was plugged into the GPS – a three-bedroom house in Greystone that might or might not still belong to a woman who'd lost her husband in an impossible room fifteen years ago.
Or might now belong to her serial killing son.
Was Dennis Roth murdered?
The question rattled around Ella's skull.A locked door from the outside.No signs of struggle.Security footage showing empty hallways.It was a magic trick without a magician and a crime scene without a crime.At least, that's what the investigators had decided.
But try explaining that to a fourteen-year-old boy.
Ella knew the psychology of it well.A kid that age didn’t understand nuance or bureaucratic indifference.He wouldn’t be able to grasp why adults sometimes chose the easy answer over the right one.All young Calvin Roth knew was that his father was dead, the door was locked, and nobody seemed to give a damn about the impossibility of it all.
So he'd lashed out.Not immediately, because Calvin was too young and perhaps even too smart for that.He'd let it fester for fifteen years, and took the time to learn everything he could about computers and locks and human nature.He learned how to make the impossible possible.
And now he was showing the world exactly what they'd missed.
Or maybe he was trying to prove something else entirely.Maybe each murder was Calvin's way of screaming:Look, this is how it could be done.This is how someone could have killed my father.Why didn't you look harder?
The radio droned on about traffic and weather but Ella wasn't listening.Her mind was stuck on that newspaper photo – teenage Calvin with his thousand-yard stare, standing next to his broken mother.How many nights had he lain awake, running through scenarios?How many years had he spent teaching himself to hack systems that were supposed to be unhackable?
She should stop for coffee.Her eyelids felt like they'd been lined with sandpaper, and the adrenaline from finding Calvin's identity was starting to wear off.But stopping felt like an insult to the victims, especially as she was so close to finding something useful.
Something else that bothered her was that she’d never heard of the Dennis Roth case.Her brain was a filing cabinet of historical murders, and a locked-room death from 2010 should fit right in there.
