Page 63 of Girl, Undone
No.The call was in full flow.The timer told her that she'd been on the line for ten, eleven, or twelve seconds.
‘Derek?Are you there?’
She listened intently, hoping for a sound, a word, anything that might break the silence.
But the line offered no secrets.Ella strained her ears for any recognizable sounds from the other side, and there amidst the static was something so faint she almost missed it.
A low, distant murmur, like an engine idling.
The sound was elusive, woven into the static like a ghostly whisper, barely discernible yet unmistakably there.
An engine could mean a car, a location, a direction.It was a tangible thread in this web of shadows.Her heart quickened at the thought.Was Derek on the move?Or was he stationary, waiting, watching?
She held the phone closer as she tried to isolate the sound, to pull it from the ether and give it shape.The engine's hum throbbed through the line, but in the grand scheme of things, it meant nothing.She needed something to work with, and she couldn’t work with a muffled sound that might or might not be a car engine.
Ella went to shout down the line again, but then stopped.
Brute force could shake the fortress, but only intelligence could infiltrate it.
She needed to be smart, make the most of the opportunity in her hands.
Ella switched the phone to loudspeaker, opened up her call-tracking software, and waited for it to connect to the current line.
It could pinpoint a caller’s location, but it needed to be connected for a minimum of three minutes.
Two minutes to go.
She glanced at the call timer - the seconds were accumulating, but not fast enough.She needed to keep the line open, to maintain this tenuous connection.
‘Stay on the line, God damn it,’ she muttered under her breath.‘Just a little longer.’
Ella hurried out of the cemetery to her car, jumped inside, and placed the phone on the dashboard with the timer still ticking away.She had to ask herself the obvious question – was this a purposeful call or an accidental dial?Could Derek have nudged the phone by accident and returned her missed call without knowing?
Or was this something else?
She kept the key in the ignition but didn’t start the engine.She needed to stay quiet, because if this call was a stroke of fortune, she couldn’t risk calling attention to it.Patience was her ally now, and the soft hum of the vehicle's idle engine could disrupt the faint connection she had established, the only connection to Derek's whereabouts.
One minute and twenty seconds to go.
She held firm.The call timer counted down the moments until she could leap into action.Her fingers itched to turn the key, to ignite the engine and tear through the streets in pursuit, but she remembered what Ripley always told her: being a cop is one percent action, ninety-nine percent watching and waiting.
One minute to go.
‘Come on,’ Ella whispered.
The pressure coiled around her like a snake as the seconds dispersed.The marker on the map on her screen began to zip between cell towers.It jumped from a place called West Mirth to somewhere called North Bypass Creek.As the seconds dwindled down, the marker's movements grew erratic and zipped around Cedarburg in a seemingly random pattern.
Thirty seconds to go.
Ella's fingers twitched near the ignition.She didn’t know these roads, so Derek Graham had the advantage.
Twenty.
Fifteen.
‘Hold on, you son of a bitch,’ she muttered.‘Come on.’
Ten.
