Page 57 of Girl, Undone
Dylan’s face, already colorless from his wounds, turned a shade paler.‘What?You’re kidding?’
‘I wish.’
‘But how do you know your guy is using Scarecrow?’
‘Because he has intimate knowledge of these victims’ phobias.He’s spending one-on-one time with these people.Once he knows their phobia, he brings them to life in an isolated space.’
Dylan removed the bloody cloth from his nose.‘Right.In that case, the users are most likely communicating with one of the therapists on here.Since we only cover Wisconsin and Illinois, a lot of users transition to real life therapy sessions with counsellors they click with.’
‘Is there any way for users to interact with each other?’
‘No.Users can only message therapists and vice versa.We nixed the user communication feature because it created too many problems.Unlicensed therapists coming in, offering free advice and so forth.They can communicate with each other on the forums, but everything there is public.’
‘We checked the forums.The victims hadn’t posted anything.’
‘Then it has to be one of the therapists,’ he said.‘By the way, we try not to use the termphobiamuch anymore.It’s kinda eighties.’
Ella didn’t have time for lectures of any kind.‘If I give you the users’ names, can you recall their conversations?See who they were in contact with?’
Dylan dabbed at his nose again.The blood flow had all but stopped.'No.Scarecrow is third-party encrypted.That means…'
‘I know what it means,’ Ella jumped in.She didn’t have time for another tech lesson.‘How long would it take you to get these conversations?Can’t you call the encryption company and get them now?’
Dylan chuckled a humorless laugh.‘Detective, it’s not even seven AM.The company doesn’t start work for another two hours, and even then, it’s not that simple.’
Ella rubbed her forehead in irritation.‘But you can get them, right?Once they're open?’
‘I can request the data.But it's a complicated process.We're talking about breaking through layers of encryption designed to protect privacy.It's not just a key we can turn.It's more like...unraveling a web, but making sure the web doesn't collapse at the same time.If that makes sense.’
Ella sighed.She missed the days when you could just steal someone’s cell phone and look through it without anyone batting an eyelid.‘It doesn’t, but okay, whatcanyou get me?What about a list of therapists that work through the app?Ones within fifteen miles of Cedarburg?I looked myself but I couldn’t see where they were based.’
Dylan's hands paused on the keyboard as a thoughtful expression crossing his face.'Yeah, I guess I can do that.I'll have to export the information from the database, but if you give me half an hour, I can have it.'
The tech expert resumed his assault on his keyboard.Ella, meanwhile, exhaled a slow breath.She felt a tinge of relief amidst the storm of uncertainty.It wasn't the complete breakthrough she'd hoped for, but it was progress.
And if her instincts were right, in half an hour, the killer’s name would be in black and white in front of her.
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
A single click announced the arrival of a new email to Ella’s laptop.The sender was Dylan Hartley, who was sitting miles away in the company of two officers at his home in Richfield.The officers had double-checked his CCTV footage from the times of the murders, confirmed there was no digital tampering, and thus judged Dylan Hartley to be an innocent man.
Ella had made the journey back to the Cedarburg precinct and awaited Dylan’s list, because it had taken a lot longer than the half-hour he’d claimed.It was already well into the late afternoon because getting a tech specialist out to Richfield had been unnecessarily complicated.She couldn’t call Amelia at HQ because she needed someone to inspect Dylan’s computers in the flesh, and the journey from D.C.to Wisconsin would have taken time Ella didn’t have.Ripley was in another room, on a video call with some other members of the UCVU.They’d reopened a cold case that Ripley had worked on years ago, and it was up to her to brief them, much to Ella’s annoyance.
But now, Ella had what she needed.
She opened the email and found it – a list of every therapist within fifteen miles of Cedarburg that had a presence on the Scarecrow app.
Sixty-two names.
‘That’s a lot of therapists,’ Ella said to herself, but when she did the napkin math, she realized it was a reasonable number.This list covered the entire city of Cedarburgandfifteen miles in each direction outside of it.That was around a hundred square kilometers in total.
But more importantly, somewhere on the list was a wolf among the sheep.
The noise of the precinct faded to a blur as Ella immersed herself in the sixty-two-line list, seeing if any of the names jumped out at her.She took it carefully, one by one, because pulling on the wrong thread could unravel her investigation, and the last thing she wanted to do was waste more time.It was just after four-thirty in the afternoon, and by now her killer could already be a hundred miles away.Worse still, he could already have his sights set on a fourth victim, and if he kept up the same pattern as he had done for the past three days, Ella had about six hours before that fateful phone call came ripping.
She took each name one by one, but the first ten mocked her with their ordinariness.John Wright, Stephen Booth, Jack Hill – the kind of names she’d expect to find on a database of lawyers.She thought about checking each one on the police database as their names cropped up, but scrutinizing the histories of sixty-two people would take more time than she had.
Ella blinked away the exhaustion that was quickly catching her up and took in the whole list at a single glance.The names blurred into a single stream of letters and syllables, and she began to fall prey to the drowsiness.She’d caught a few hours of sleep in her car earlier, but now she was reaching that typical afternoon crash.The caffeine, once her steadfast ally in battles against fatigue, now failed to muster even the slightest surge of energy.
