Girl, Vanished (An Ella Dark FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 5)

by Blake Pierce

  “Christ,” she said, averting her eyes for a moment. “This is atrocious. This poor man.” The victim must have been in his sixties or older, on the slightly larger side too. He lay sprawled on the couch, two glimmering coins concealing his eyes, three wounds decorating his body. She turned to Byford, who was consuming the scene with a look of unease.

  “You okay, Nigel?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s just unbelievable. The things we can do. This doesn’t even look like something from this world.”

  Ella was a little surprised at his display of emotion. Maybe he was human after all. “What do we know so far?” She directed her question to the sheriff.

  “This is Barry Windham, 62 years old, lives alone. He worked as an electrician until last year.”

  Banker, antique dealer, electrician. When it came to the world of coins, one of those things was not like the others.

  “Who called it in?” asked Byford.

  “The next door neighbor. She heard a scream around one am, then she heard some banging. That’s when she called us. We got here pretty quickly but didn’t catch sight of anyone. We patrolled the area all night too. Nothing.”

  “A disturbance. That didn’t happen with the others,” Ella said. Up by the sofa, a technician knelt down and took some close-up photos of Barry’s wounds. When she left, she signaled to the agents that the scene was theirs.

  Ella moved closer to the body and started at the familiar part – the neck. All of the victims, including this one, had deep lacerations to the neck. But here, something was different. The other cuts had been precise, intended, almost surgically accurate. But the deep cut across Barry Windham’s neck was anything but. Fragments of bone and muscle tissue were visible, and if death was the goal, there was no need for this to be the case. In contrast to the precision shown with the other victims, Barry Windham’s death blow was chaotic and uncontrolled.

  “A lot more stabbing went on,” Sheriff Hunter said.

  Ella continued down the body, coming to the next wound near the heart. Not quite through the heart, maybe an inch away. She suddenly remembered what Daniel Garcia had said about Santerian sacrifices and panicked a little, wondering for a second if she hadn’t made another grave mistake. She looked at the coins in the eyes, finding these ones were both facing tails.

  She took a moment to consider it. These were the facts. She couldn’t change them, but the other victims didn’t follow suit. If Ripley was here, she would tell Ella exactly that. Mold the theories to fit the facts, not the other way around. With that in mind, she erased the word Santeria from her head and focused on the dead body in front of her.

  Next in line was a puncture to the victim’s stomach. About two inches wide, meaning the blade had penetrated the flesh and then been dragged down. This wasn’t an indication of a planned attack. Again, it was untidy, almost desperate.

  “These two got into a fight, but our unsub managed to subdue him.”

  “This blood spatter runs from the couch to the wall,” Byford added. “At some point, they battled over here, then our killer moved him back to the couch.”

  “I think so. We know our killer strikes people when they’re sleeping, so maybe Barry managed to catch him before the killer attacked.”

  “Either that or he cut him off at the pass.” Byford inspected the blood stains against the wall. “The spatter is lighter here, so he most likely stabbed him here first. Either they got into an altercation, or Barry was waiting for him when he turned this corner.”

  Ella eyed the victim from top to bottom again. “No, look. This blanket is wrapped around Barry”s ankle. That suggests he jumped up from this spot in a hurry.”

  Byford came over and inspected the victim. “True. Good observation.”

  Ella had seen all of the wounds she needed to. There was only one other thing left to check. “Sheriff, can you call a forensics agent back?”

  “Sure,” he disappeared around the corner, returning a few seconds later with the same forensics technician who’d taken the pictures. Sheriff Hunter pointed at Ella and the technician came over.

  “Some questions?” the woman asked. Ella could see behind her mask she was of Asian descent but couldn’t tell anymore.

  “Would it be possible to remove these coins? We’d like to check something.”

  The technician nodded then knelt down in front of the couch. With her gloved hands, she enlarged the area around the eye with one hand and removed the coin with the other. She placed it inside a small plastic bag and passed it to Ella. Byford and Hunter both glanced closely at it too.

  It was a gold coin this time, with Asian characters around the edges and a swirling dragon on the face. On the other side, a bald man’s face. This time, there were no English markings whatsoever.

  “What’s that, Japanese again?” Hunter asked.

  “No, I don’t recognize these symbols at all. This isn’t Kanji. It might be Korean or…”

  “It’s Chinese,” the technician said. “That’s President Kai-shek on the face.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Ella said. “Can you read these symbols?” She passed the coin to her.

  “I can indeed.” The technician took it and held the bag to her eye-level. “Hope and prosperity under Kai-shek’s rule. Shen-Si Province. 1964.”

  The atmosphere changed when the date hit the air. The rush came surging back and Ella had to stop herself from clenching her fist in elation. “What was that year? 1964?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” the technician pointed to a small inscription at the bottom edge of the coin. “It’s written a little different on coins to save space. Usually, it would be seven characters long, but they’ve just used the individual numerals here, so it’s only four. Does that help?”

  Ella didn’t need any more confirmation. The coins at every crime scene were from 1964. It couldn’t be a coincidence. “Yes. Thank you so much.”

  The technician checked the second coin on the body. “This one’s the same. Exactly the same coin. Is there anything else you need?”

  “No.” Ella glanced between Byford and Sheriff. “You guys?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Feel free to take them for testing,” Ella said. She stood up and headed away from the scene, coming to a conservatory door leading out into the garden. The glass panel reached from floor to ceiling. If this unsub came in through the rear, he’d have been able to see his target sleeping.

  “Sheriff, do we know how the perp got inside?” she asked. Sheriff Hunter joined her at the window.

  “Nope. That’s something you might be able to help with. When we got here, every door was locked.”

  “Every door. We had to use the enforcer on the front to get in, and even that was bolted from the inside.”

  From what Ella gleaned from cop talk over the years, the enforcer was a battering ram. “So he locked the doors on the way out.”

  “Could be,” the sheriff said. “He could have lifted a key.”

  “He could have, but why? He didn’t at the other scenes, he just left the doors open. And it’s not like this is a murder of convenience. Our unsub wants people to find these dead bodies.”

  The sheriff took his mask off and threw it on a side table. “Prolong the process, maybe. I dunno. You’re the behavioral expert.”

  Yes, she was, and she had to find out how this unsub gained access. She went back out the front of the house and looked at it with a criminal eye. Locked front door, no breach-able windows. The only other possible route was through the garden. She moved to the outside gate, a relatively low iron gate that could be easily bested. She unhooked the latch and made her way round the side of the house. There, she found herself on the other side of the large glass pane. Locked again, and the windows here didn’t open anywhere near enough for a grown man to fit through.

  Ella took a few steps back, surveyed the building, and entertained the idea that this unsub might have climbed up the drainpipe to an upstairs window. Her eyes followed
the pipe along the foundations of the roof, watching it snake round to the left and then miraculously disappear.

  “Huh?” she said aloud. She moved around to the left, and there, sitting in a very narrow gap between the house and the fence was a set of steps. Ella approached them and found they descended down to the bottom level.

  She followed them down, moving a trash can out of the way and coming to a large red door. It wasn’t quite sitting flush in its frame. Someone had recently opened it, she realized

  One tug of the handle opened the contents within. Ella moved into a small basement, tripping over a pile of power tools upon arrival. The morning light illuminated it all, and it wasn’t the discarded chairs or the old motor engine that drew her attention first; it was the sacks.

  “Oh my God,” she said, and suddenly, this case looked a lot different than it did before. “Byford, Hunter. Get down here,” she shouted. “You’re going to want to see this.”

  She had everything she needed. This was it. This was how she was going to catch him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ella rushed back to the precinct with a head full of ghosts, vague ideas with the potential to fully manifest with enough energy. What she’d found in the basement had completely changed her course. Up until now, the jigsaw pieces had all been scattered to the wind, but this morning she uncovered the force that pulled them together.

  They’d found coins. Thousands upon thousands of them. Barry Windham must have been a coin collector once upon a time but had since given up the hobby for whatever reason. Could this killer be targeting people in the coin collector trade? If so, how did the first two victims fit into it? That’s what she was going to find out.

  In her office, she loaded up her desk with paperwork. For this, she needed physical copies, not words on a screen. Holding something in her hand helped make everything more authentic. Byford followed in after her.

  “So, nothing to do with religion or sacrifice,” he said with a note of pretension. Ella was happy to admit when she was wrong, a trait a lot of people needed to adopt in her profession, she thought.

  “Nothing at all. I went down a wrong path and I’m sorry.”

  “I could have told you that yesterday. Oh well,” he said.

  Ella wasn’t about to get into another argument with the man. Sometimes, he seemed like he had the potential to be a great partner. Other times, he made a great advertisement for working solo.

  “You did, and I’m sorry I didn’t listen. But we’ve got a ton of evidence that backs this theory up, so how about we dive in and crack it open?”

  Byford rested his hands on the table. “I’m with you on this one. The coin link is clear with this victim. Not so much with the others, but maybe that’s because we haven’t looked hard enough. And this 1964 link could be what helps us find this culprit.”

  The 1964 link was undeniable, but Ella still didn’t know what it symbolized. These men were all different ages, so it wasn’t their birth years. It couldn’t be the unsub’s year of birth either, since that would make him almost 60 years old. A 60-year-old, no matter how healthy or athletic, couldn’t pull off the necessary guile to carry out these attacks. It was rare, almost unheard of, for a serial killer to begin their killing career so late in life.

  She thought of the first two victims, a former bank manager and antiques dealer. How could she dig into their lives? If they had a link to the world of coin collecting, she needed to find it. The first victim, Alan Yates, began as a bank manager and then retired in his fifties to focus on charity work. She sifted through her papers looking for everything she had on Alan Yates, scanned it, and found no link to the coin world. Opposite her, Byford buried his head in the new reports.

  Ella sat down and pulled her laptop closer. She had to go virtual to find something on him. She searched online for ALAN YATES NEWARK DELAWARE and came up with over 3 million results, way too many to sift through. She added the word philanthropy and narrowed it down significantly. She began scrolling through the results.

  “Wow, looks like Alan Yates was quite the donor.” She found mentions of schools, hospitals, and charities on the first page of results alone. LOCAL BENEFACTOR GIFTS PPE TO HOSPITAL was the result she first dug into. The article had a picture of Alan Yates, shaking the hand of a woman in nurse scrubs. She scanned for anything useful in the article but found nothing.

  She continued on down the page. The next result detailed Alan’s donation to a local charity for underprivileged children. Books, toys, games, clothes, electronics. The guy was a real hero, Ella thought. The fact such a generous man could be taken so cruelly filled her with a dreadful awareness of her own mortality.

  “Found anything?” Byford asked.

  “Alan Yates gave away a small fortune but I’m not finding a link to the coin collecting world.”

  “Maybe try collector pages or see if there are communities in the area.”

  Ella didn’t think it would be much use. “If Alan was a collector, we’d have found coins in his house. The sheriff said he searched that place high and low and found nothing. Same with Jimmy Loveridge.”

  “I guess,” Byford shrugged, offering nothing more. Ella wished he’d be a little more enthusiastic at times.

  She scoured five more articles, finding more of the same. Alan seemed to make notable donations on a regular basis, like he was eager to give away his entire fortune. As a last resort, she flipped to the images section and mostly found the pictures she’d already seen in the articles. She scrolled through. Alan smiling in a group of children, Alan shaking hands with the mayor, Alan at an awards ceremony.

  The images decreased in quality as she reached the bottom of the page. By now, she was finding things completely unrelated to the task at hand. She fell back in the chair and let the white glow of the screen engulf her vision, then she fell into a daydream as thoughts of the strange note back in her motel room returned. The recent discovery of Barry Windham’s collecting habit had made her all but forget about the note, but when the chaos died down, Tobias Campbell was still there haunting her reflections. He was two thousand miles away, but right next to her at the same time.

  For a fleeting moment, she wondered if the best possible solution to all this was to visit Maine Correctional one last time, sneak in a Glock .22 and put a bullet in his Campbell’s heart. The fantasy quickly became all-consuming, and it wasn’t until a minute later that she realized she was staring at a very familiar image on her computer screen.

  Ella gripped the table edge and shook away any thoughts of Tobias. When she was back in the present, she became aware of the fact that the last image on her search results featured that of a small child, glowing blonde hair, beaming smile like he’d just drank an ocean of chocolate milk. The image quality was low, like it had been pulled from a decades-old news piece, and the child in question bore no resemblance to any child she’d seen in her lifetime.

  But what caught her attention was the object in his hand.

  “Nigel,” she said. “Here.”

  Byford rushed up from his chair and joined her on the other side of the table. Ella enlarged the image, finding it was barely three-hundred by three-hundred pixels.

  “Oh, lord. That’s…,” he squinted his eyes. “The Japanese yen coin. The one they found at the Yates scene.”

  Ella’s first thought that this was some massive accident on her part and that she’d altered her search results during her mind-drift. She checked everything again. No, she hadn’t. The results still said ALAN YATES NEWARK PHILANTHROPY. She clicked into the corresponding article and the page loaded a completely white slate.

  “It’s a dead link,” Byford said.

  Ella slammed her palm against the table. “Shit. There’s gotta be a way in.”

  She copied the link location, pasted it in the URL bar and got the same blank page. She tried a different browser with the same result.

  “Give it up, it’s not going to work.”

  Ella remembered Mia saying somethi
ng about technology the last time the Internet let them down. She couldn’t remember the exact line, but it was something like stop demanding so much from technology and start demanding it from yourself. Ella interpreted it to mean that if you wanted results, technological or not, you had to apply yourself.

  “The page must be cached somewhere,” she said. On the blank white page, she dug into the HTML code through the browser’s command console. Her heart began to pound when she saw five text files, two image files and a bunch of extensions she didn’t recognize. There was something here.

  She extracted the first text file to a Notepad document and found it was the first paragraph of the dead article. “Yes!” she called. “We got it.”

  19th March, 2002. A local investment banker and benefactor put smiles on a lot of faces this week after showing up unannounced to a local school armed with sacks full of goodies for the children to enjoy. Alan Yates surprised the schoolchildren at Wood Green’s School For Disadvantaged Children with cases of toys, board games, creative tools, and Nintendo devices.

  “I’m not seeing anything about coins,” Byford said. Ella wished he’d be a little more patient. Ella extracted the next paragraph.

  But one particular stack of items from Mr. Yates’s stash was the biggest hit among the children: his bags of old coins. “Sometimes we get the odd foreign coin in the stashes at the bank.” Mr. Yates went on to say. “We don’t have much use for them, so I take them out and save them. I know Pogs are all the rage these days, so I thought the kids would have more use for them than me!”

  “Got you!” Ella said. She clenched her fists and hammered them on the table in exhilaration. “I knew it! Alan used to gift coins to kids. That’s gotta be part of this whole thing.”

  Byford took a step back, rubbed his chin forcefully. “It’s interesting to say the least, but how?”

  Ella realized now that Byford was one of those people who was quick to offer problems but rarely solutions. “I don’t know, but it’s a starting point. Now, if we can establish that Jimmy Loveridge had some link to this world, we’ve got a solid connection we can explore.”