Page 84 of Girl, Undone
A flash drive fell out.Ten terabytes according to the label stuck to its side.
No note.No explanation.Just the drive and nothing else.
She’d been wary about putting it in her laptop, but she knew, from the moment the drive fell out, that she’d inevitably check the contents.The drive took a moment to register, and then a folder opened, containing hundreds of video files organized by date and camera number.She clicked on one at random, and the image loaded: the interior of a Louisiana courtroom.The date in the bottom right corner read October 16 of last year.
Austin Creed's trial.
This was the raw footage.Agent Dever must have come through for her.
After some inspection, she found superimposed logos in the bottom corners of eleven different news stations across America.ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN, local affiliates she'd never heard of.All unedited.All complete.Hundreds of hours of video captured during that week when her life pivoted on its axis.Agent Dever had definitely done his homework here, because her napkin math tallied a total of 200 hours of footage.
She checked the time.It was just past nine in the morning because her flight from Wisconsin had been delayed.Luca had already left for work, so it was just her and this mountain of raw camera footage for the rest of the day.
Her working theory was that the killer – Creed’s accomplice – had to be there that day, because the same killer had stolen her cell phone and hairbrush.Whoever was carving up her friends had sat in that courtroom and watched Creed get sentenced to death.
She armed herself with caffeine and got to work.
***
Six hours later, she felt like someone had set her eyes on fire.
The coffee pot was empty.She'd chewed her nails down to nothing.Her back screamed from hunching over the laptop, but she couldn't stop.Wouldn't stop.
The footage was a labyrinth.Eleven different cameras meant eleven different perspectives, and none of them stayed in one place.The camera operators panned across the courtroom when testimony got dull.They zoomed in on Creed when he reacted to something.They captured the judge, the jury, and the lawyers pacing back and forth.
And sometimes, blessedly, they showed the gallery.The audience.The people who'd come to watch a monster get what he deserved.
Ella had a system now.She'd scrub through each video at double speed and pause whenever the camera swung toward the seats.Then she'd take a screenshot and study every face in the frame.She'd started a folder on her desktop, and it was filling up fast – grainy images of strangers caught mid-yawn or mid-whisper or staring dead-eyed at the proceedings.
Any one of them could be the killer.
She'd thought about running facial recognition software, but what would she compare the faces to?She didn't have a suspect.Didn't have a database of Creed's known associates because, as far as the FBI could tell, he didn't have any associates.The pen pal letters had been a dead end.They'd just been fake names and fake addresses designed to waste time and resources.
No.This had to be done the old-fashioned way.Eyes on screen.Face by face.Hour by hour.
Ella wasn't in most of the footage.The prosecution had kept their star witnesses away from the cameras before they testified, which was standard procedure to avoid tainting testimony or creating security risks.She'd been sequestered at the back of the room for most of the trial and only emerged when it was her turn to take the stand on that single day.
There was plenty of footage of that part though.Of her standing in the witness box as she walked the jury through Austin Creed's behavioral profile.She'd watched those clips a dozen times in the months since the trial.She couldn't avoid them really since they'd been replayed on every news channel in the country.
She'd become a minor celebrity for her designated fifteen minutes.People recognized her on the street.Reporters called her office.The attention died as quickly as it began though, thankfully.
But this unedited footage showed things the news hadn't bothered to air.The moments between dramatic testimony when nothing much happened, or when the lawyers shuffled papers and the judge called for breaks, and people in the gallery shifted in their seats or got up to stretch their legs.
That's what Ella needed.The in-between moments when someone might have slipped close enough to steal from her purse.
She rubbed her eyes and opened another file.Camera seven.Day three of the trial.The timestamp read 2:47 PM, which was right around when the prosecution had rested its case.
The courtroom was packed.Every seat filled.Standing room only in the back.People were hungry to see Creed go down.A serial killer with five confirmed victims was sure to draw a crowd.
Ella hit pause and zoomed in on a section of the gallery.Three rows back.A man in a black jacket and a woman in a blue sweater.Neither looked familiar.She took a screenshot and moved on.
The camera panned left.More faces.More strangers.An elderly couple holding hands.A young guy with a notebook.A woman with red hair tied back.
Three more screenshots.
Her folder was up to two hundred and thirty-seven images now.
Ella's head pounded.The light from the screen stabbed into her skull like an icepick.She should take a break, maybe eat something, or sleep.But she couldn't shake the feeling that the answer was right there, hidden in plain sight among the hundreds of faces that had filled that courtroom.She opened the next file.
