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

by Blake Pierce

  Mia thought about opposing the decision, but it was for the best in the long run. Melissa didn’t have the natural instincts that a field agent needed, she realized. Textbooks couldn’t teach you everything. You needed a head on your shoulders to survive in this game. Everyone thought they had it, but it wasn’t until you came face to face with real hardships that you discovered whether you really did.

  “I’m sorry, Ripley,” Melissa said as she hauled her bag over her shoulder. The tears had dried now. “I’m just… in shock. Two hundred thousand dollars. I could have killed people.”

  There was no point kicking the girl when she was down, Mia thought.

  “No one got hurt. And two hundred grand isn’t going to bankrupt the Bureau.”

  “I guess we’re lucky.”

  Lucky, Mia thought. That wasn’t the word she’d use right now. “Take it as a lesson. Field work isn’t for you.”

  “I’m gutted. I really wanted to give this a shot.”

  “You gave it more than a shot,” Mia said. She saw the girl’s expression resume despair. “Sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  Melissa sulked her way to the door, head down, eyes on the ground. Mia knew they’d both remember this for the rest of their lives, and not for the right reasons. Melissa for nearly blowing up a gas station, Mia for making a string of bad decisions that led to the fact. How had she got so things right with Ella but completely missed the mark with Melissa?

  Thinking about it, maybe she was lucky after all.

  Mia grabbed the last item standing. Her phone. As she picked it up, she saw the notifications on the screen. Too many to count, but one name stood out to her. The name she’d seen on her phone every day for the past two weeks.

  “Speak of the devil and she’s sure to appear,” Mia said. Another missed call from her old partner.

  Melissa turned around. “Huh?”

  Mia hadn’t realized she’d spoken aloud. “Sorry. Nothing. Can you just wait downstairs? There’s one last thing I have to do here.”

  Melissa waited a second before responding, probably fearing that Mia’s task involved her misdemeanor somehow. “Umm, okay. See you down there.”

  Mia sat back down at her desk and scrolled through all of Ella’s messages and missed calls from the past few weeks. Too many to count. Mia sighed, opened up her messages screen, closed it again.

  No, it was time. She needed to do it.

  This had gone on long enough.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Ella found herself driving through Newark with no particular destination in sight. Dead ends were familiar territory to her now, but it didn’t stop them stinging just as hard every single time. Two days, two suspects, two releases. It didn’t get any easier.

  Maybe through subconscious familiarity, she found she was on the same street as her motel. Might as well get a coffee from her room, she thought. It wouldn’t be as nice as franchise outlet coffee, but it would be a lot cheaper. Every case, she doubted her ability to reach the finish line, but that was usually all she doubted. Now, her mounting problems were beginning to suffocate her, and for once, her detective skills were the least of her problems. All morning, she’d felt her phone continually vibrate, and she hadn’t dared check the messages because she knew what her reaction would be: anger.

  Was it her fault she didn’t like her relationship? Did she do something wrong to make Mark react this way to her? Would he be like this if she was different, maybe if she was tall, tanned, and blonde? Well, she wasn’t willing to find out, because next time she talked to him, she was giving him the truth: she didn’t want to be with him anymore.

  She parked her car and went into the motel. She’d get coffee from the room, she decided, plus she could get her phone charger. With the influx of messages, it must be close to dead. She checked her battery level and saw it was at eleven percent, but as she did, she noticed the barrage of notifications on her home screen. Seven messages from Mark, two missed calls, and one message from a name she never expected to see again.

  Mia Ripley had replied to her. Ella saw her name, felt the joy, and tapped into her message as she stood on the motel stairs.

  Then dread returned, pushing her further down into despair.

  Please stop trying to contact me.

  Right then, Ella could have curled up into a ball and slept forever. She felt like she’d lost her place in the world, like she was fighting a stream of constant, growing, never-ending battles that she didn’t want or need in her life.

  First there was this unsub. Someone out there, someone who she could have already walked past on the street, was systematically killing off people in the coin collecting trade. Every time a new body showed up, the blood was on her hands. It was her responsibility to stop this maniac, and even with three crime scenes, three dead bodies and a solid link between them all, her case was still directionless at the moment.

  Then there was Mark, the man who’d shown such promise upon their first meeting only to morph into an insecure, jealous monster at the mere mention of another man’s name. It wasn’t normal. Her ex-boyfriends didn’t do that. Her friends’ boyfriends didn’t do that. No man or woman should do that. It was what the young folk called toxic behavior according to her late-night Googling.

  Now Mia, the woman who gave her this job in the first place, an opportunity few people would ever get, despised her. Ella deserved some backlash from her actions. Of that, she was more than happy to admit. She wished no ill will towards Mia for acting the way she did. More so than anything else, Ella hated herself for being so short-sighted throughout the whole ordeal.

  She pulled out her keycard and opened her motel door. The coffee sachets looked tempting, but the bed looked better. She wanted to collapse on it, sleep for a few days and wake up to a solved case. No more death, no more bodies, no more coins. Just the bliss and stress-free living that she suddenly craved. Maybe it was time to go back to Intelligence and stay there, resume her life of minimal responsibilities and maybe get her kicks through rock climbing and martial arts tournaments.

  It wasn’t until she sat on the bed and organized her thoughts that she remembered the note. The note sitting on her nightstand, possibly sent to her by the country’s most sadistic serial killer. She tried not to look at it, but her peripheral vision betrayed her intentions. Through some bizarre mechanism of her cognitive system, the note looked longer, wider in her fringe vision. She gave up, deciding to embrace the dread, turned around and looked at it.

  The note looked longer because there was another next to it.

  Ella begged it to be a product of her stress. Or one was the letter, one was the envelope. She edged closer to the nightstand, finding two envelopes sitting side by side.

  Her stomach tied in knots, and she had to swallow hard to keep the bile from rising to her throat. How did this get here? Had the maid moved it? Had someone been in her room? How the hell was this possible? Just as she reached out to grab it, a gentle knock at the door rose the hairs on her neck. Ella was off the bed and holding her pistol in the weaver stance in a single movement. She edged closer to the door, peered through the spyhole and saw a familiar face standing on the other side. She lowered her weapon and opened the door.

  “Nigel?” she asked. “Is everything alright? I was just getting a coffee.”

  Nigel held her stare for a few seconds, the most he’d done in the past two days. “No, you weren’t,” he said.

  “Huh? I was. I swear.”

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  This all seemed incredibly uncharacteristic of him. What was going on here? She looked back at her room, quickly scanning to make sure it was presentable. “Okay, but why?”

  Byford walked past her and took a seat at the dressing table. “Shut the door, please.”

  Ella did as he asked, slowly walked back to the room and perched herself on the end of the bed. “Nigel, what’s going on? I’m worried.”

  “Don’t be. In fact, that’s part of the problem. I
might be new to this job, but I know a struggling agent when I see one. Ella, you’re having a hard time, aren’t you?”

  Ella became flustered; her face turned red. She didn’t know whether to go for brutal honesty or modest insincerity. She was more taken aback by the sudden change in Byford’s demeanor.

  “Yes, I am. Is it obvious?”

  “Not to most people, but I’ve been trained to spot distress. You exhibit all the classic signs. Do you want to tell me what’s wrong and I’ll see if I can help? Working serial cases is hard enough, and even harder with a stressed partner.”

  “You want the short version? Everything is going wrong. Work, relationships, this case, everything. It’s all come at once, like some grief tsunami.”

  Byford leaned forward in the chair. “And the long version?”

  Ella laughed. “That would take a long time.”

  “You’d be surprised how minuscule your problems are in the grand scheme of things. Relationships, let’s start there. Problems with your husband, boyfriend, girlfriend?”

  “Boyfriend.” There was that word again. “We’ve only been seeing each other two weeks, but basically, he doesn’t trust me. When I told him I was partnered with a man, he flipped.”

  “Wow, it’s been a long time since I’ve been the other guy. I’m guessing from that statement he hasn’t seen my face?” Byford laughed. It was the first time Ella had seen anything but a straight expression on his face.

  “He might have. I don’t know. It’s Mark Balzano.”

  “Mark is your boyfriend? I know him. A fine agent, but not great boyfriend material. Do you love him?”

  “No. Not even close.” Ella surprised herself with how easy it was to declare such a thing.

  “Then you know what you have to do. And if he’s borderline abusive, you need to do it soon.”

  “Break it off,” Ella said.

  “Yup. When people show you who they really are, believe them. Now, this case, what’s the issue?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? We’re nowhere close to the finish line.”

  “So? We’ll keep working until it is. It’s as easy as that. Just because you’ve solved cases in a week, doesn’t mean they’ll all go that route. It took us ten years to track down Bin Laden.”

  Usually, Ella hated condensing solutions down to a single sentence, but in this case, it seemed to work. Byford was right. All they could really do was carry on.

  “True. I mean, it’s obvious, but you’re right.”

  “Sometimes you just need someone else to say the words. Now, what else about work is getting you down? I’ve been with the FBI for fifteen years, so I’ve seen it all. Been there, done that.”

  Here came the tricky part. Ella didn’t know whether she really wanted to drag Byford into this world of troubles. Besides, Mia wouldn’t be too pleased if Ella went round telling people about their falling out.

  “Me and my ex-partner. FBI partner. I went behind her back and did something I shouldn’t have. That’s why I’m with you and not her.”

  “Do you want to talk about what you did?”

  “I visited someone she didn’t want me to, and I didn’t tell her. She found out through the other person, then everything went to hell.”

  Byford looked unimpressed. “Big deal. And this was Agent Ripley?”

  “It was.”

  “Well, I can’t speak for her, but it sounds like you’re both being overdramatic here. You probably shouldn’t have done that, but at the same time, she should really give you a chance to apologize. Has she done that?”

  “No. She hasn’t.”

  “Then she’s being unfair. This isn’t all on you. You made a mistake. Shit happens.”

  Ella welcomed the suggestion that she wasn’t the bad guy in this scenario. She wasn’t perfect, but neither was the other person involved. “Thank you for the encouragement. But Mia breaking it off with me felt like the ultimate failure, like I’d let her down. It was the one thing I didn’t want to do, but I got tangled up in this web and things just got worse and worse. You know?”

  Byford adjusted his chair then sat forward again. “Oh, I do know. Remember the other day, you asked me why I left counterterrorism?”

  Ella recalled their conversation in the back of the cab. “I do.”

  “Here’s the story. You might feel better afterwards. So, there I am, about three years ago, I wake up to a phone call in the middle of the night from the director. He wants me in England immediately. A religious fanatic with an assault rifle has taken twenty-four hostages in a grocery store. Been there for two days already and the British police didn’t have the skillset they needed. So I jump on a plane, and the entire ride there I’m trying to figure this guy out. What does he want? How can I talk him down? This whole scene was nothing new to me, so I was pretty confident I could talk the hostages out of there.”

  Ella listened closely. Finally, she was getting a glimpse of the person, not just the career.

  “I get there and I’m talking on the phone to the gunman. I give him what he wants, which is status. He wanted to be mentioned in the same leagues as the major terrorists, so I tell him he’s got the whole country paralyzed with fear. I tell him that if he comes out now, he won’t spend his life in jail, but he will if any lives are lost. We come to a deal, and that deal was I meet him at the door, and he gives me his weapon.”

  Ella put herself in the situation. She wouldn’t know what to do for the best. She couldn’t imagine playing such a crucial role in the lives of so many.

  “So I’ve got about a thousand people watching. The cops, the press, even the Prime Minister of England. I go to the door, open it up and that’s when I see this terrorist just standing there, laughing. I realize right then and there that it’s all over. That’s the moment my whole being shatters and never mends. My career is over, my mind is broken, and there’s a good chance my life is too.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “I watched the target gun down everybody in that store right in front of me. I’ll never forget the terror on their faces when they realized what was about to happen. Paralyzing fear, acceptance of death. The gunman unloaded on the hostages and as fast as I was, I wasn’t any match for burst fire from a Beretta 93R. Seven people died before I managed to stop him. Blood washed down the aisles, body parts rained on me. I still see the massacre to this day whenever I go to sleep. I know I’ll never escape it.”

  “Holy s… that was you?” Ella said, her jaw hanging low. She remembered the case very well but had no idea Byford was involved. Byford was manipulated by a terrorist to watch mass slaughter. There were no words in the English language to comfort him. “Sorry. That’s just…”

  “Unforgivable,” he said, “I know. I’ll never forgive myself for it. It eats me up, day after day. I took a year off. Had to go through extensive counseling, but I learned to live with it. Harness the contempt I hold for myself and use it to make the world a better place for others. Sorry I had to get so dark, but I hope that puts your own problems into perspective. You talked to someone your partner didn’t like. The grown woman will get over it, alright? Now how about we get a coffee, get back to work and stop this son of a bitch before he kills anyone else, yes?”

  She suddenly felt like kind of a jerk for judging Byford so readily. The man had been through a war, lived to tell the tale and dealt with the trauma like a soldier. He didn’t cower or retreat into a hidey-hole for the rest of his life. He took responsibility, Ella realized. That was what she had to do.

  “Hell yes,” Ella said, rising to her feet. “Let’s do this thing. That was a brutal story, but you’ve helped me put things in perspective. Thank you for coming.”

  “Any time, partner. I’ll let you sort yourself out. Meet you downstairs when you’re done.” Byford jumped out of his chair and left the room. Ella took a moment to herself, processing the past ten minutes in silence. She went to the bathroom mirror, threw some water on her face then checked her reflection. Not great, but t
here were more important things to worry about than how she looked. Back in the bedroom, she saw the letters again, realizing now that she hadn’t even read the second letter.

  She grabbed it, pulled it out of the envelope and saw the same ink, same handwriting.

  I’LL SEE YOU SOON.

  This time, it didn’t scare her. It didn’t faze her at all. She grabbed the other letter, crumpled them both up and threw them in the trash.

  “Yes, you will see me soon, you piece of shit,” she said as she walked out the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Across their office table, Byford looked different now, like he had something substantial behind that corporate exterior. Ella had arrived at the precinct with new determination to break this case open, so her first point of call was research. Something in her copious notes would give them a direction to explore; she and Byford just had to find it.

  “Where to start?” asked Byford. “You got us this far, so consider me your servant.”

  “Please, don’t say that. We’re equal. You’ve played your part too. Have any new reports come in that we can take a look at?”

  Byford organized his paperwork. He pulled out two new sheets. “These came in while you were gone. The sheriff got an expert in to appraise all of the coins. Here’s what he found.” He pushed the papers over to Ella’s side of the desk. She read them through.

  “So, nothing particularly rare here then. Middle-of-the-road value too.”

  “Yeah. Have you noticed that they increase in value with every crime scene? The Kennedy nickels are pretty much worthless, the yens are worth about twenty dollars each, and the Chinese coins are about fifty.”

  Ella saw the same pattern. “Interesting. It suggests our killer is evolving. Or that he’s targeting his victims in terms of importance.” The next section of the report stated that the coins could have come from a countless number of sources, so tracking them back through previous owners would be impossible.