Girl, Sought (Ella Dark #24)

CHAPTER SEVEN

The walk to Chesapeake Public Library passed without incident. Ella kept one eye on the street and the other on Luca's profile, watching him dissect Eleanor Calloway’s credit card statements as he walked. Nose buried in paperwork, a crease forming between the eyes. The picture of focus, and God help her, it was attractive as hell.

If Luca noticed her glances, he didn't show it. Just kept flipping pages, chasing the details that would bring Eleanor's killer into focus. They were a team, even when they weren't, and right now, the work came first.

The library loomed like a hulking beast made of old brick. The kind of building that seemed designed to snuff out whimsy, to grind the human spirit down to a paste. Even the jaunty ‘READING IS DREAMING WITH OPEN EYES’ poster tacked to the front door looked faded, a relic of some bygone era when people still believed pretty lies.

‘When was the last time you came to a library?’ she asked.

'I'm always at the library. They're all this country has left.'

‘What? I’ve never seen you at the library.’

'And I've never seen you shave your legs, but I know you do it.'

‘Touche.’ Ella opened the door and stepped into a small foyer. There was an arrangement of books on a small table beside a Christmas tree.

‘If nothing else, we might find a copy of Profiling for Dummies here.’

'You joke, but that's a real book.' Ella lead the way into the main area. The librarian at the front desk looked like she'd been poured into the chair sometime during the previous administration and left to set. Her hair was an immobile helmet and the nameplate on her lanyard read 'DOLORES' in heavy bold letters that looked like they'd been carved with a chisel.

‘Can I help you?’ Her voice dragged the words out like they'd done something to offend her.

Ella flashed her badge, watching the woman's eyes narrow behind rhinestone cat-eye glasses. ‘ Agent Dark, FBI. This is Agent Hawkins. We need to speak to someone here about Eleanor Calloway.’

‘Ellie?’ Dolores' mouth pinched even tighter, which Ella wouldn't have believed possible without some kind of industrial vice. ‘Did you find her? It was me who reported…’

Ella swallowed that pill of bittersweet optimism that perhaps word of Eleanor’s death had already reached her colleagues. Given the look of vague hope on Dolores’ face, it hadn’t.

‘I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but Eleanor was found dead this morning.’

Dolores blinked once, slow, like a lizard contemplating a particularly juicy fly. ‘Wha… dead? No. That can’t be. She was…’

‘We know this is a shock,’ Luca offered, smooth as a river rock. ‘That's why we need your help. To understand what might have happened.’

Dolores covered her face with her hand then slowly rose out of her chair. She fumbled below her desk for something then planted it on the reception desk. It said RECEPTION UNMANNED – BACK SOON.

'No one knew Ellie better than me,' Dolores breathed. She scrubbed at phantom tears, but Ella knew they weren't far away. It sometimes took a few minutes for bodily responses to catch up to the brain.

‘Is there somewhere we can talk?’ The library was dead enough, but talking in public was always a risk regardless.

‘Yes. Follow me.’

Dolores left her desk and strode across the carpet towards a back room. Ella and Luca followed her in there. Once inside, Dolores collapsed into a chair and sobbed into her hands.

‘We really hate to be the ones to break the bad news,’ Ella said. Anything to soften the impending wave of grief that would gnaw at this woman for the foreseeable future.

‘It’s… how did she die? Can you tell me that?’

Ella and Luca exchanged a glance. Balancing truth and platitudes was a tough dance. You had to be as honest as possible without giving them anything for journalists to squeeze out later. Once news of Eleanor’s death reached the masses, this library would see more footfall than it had in years.

‘Eleanor was murdered,’ Ella said. ‘That’s all we can say.’

Every interviewee had a different response to the word murder. Some cried, some denied, some went into shock. Dolores’ response landed somewhere around the latter.

‘Ellie? Killed? Are you… serious?

‘Yes. I’m sorry. Eleanor seems like a wonderful person, and we need to learn everything we can about her. Can you help us?’

Dolores took a moment. She wiped her face with a forearm, sat back in her chair, and suppressed another wave of tears with her fingertips. Ella let her get it all out.

‘You’re serious? Ellie is… gone?’

Ella shook her head. She let the silence do the talking.

‘I don't know what I can tell you. Ellie was a good girl. Kept to herself, mostly. Not one for gossip.’

‘What did she do around here?’

‘Reference librarian. General assistant. Nothing fancy.’

‘Did she have any problems with anyone? Any arguments or confrontations?’

‘Ellie?’ Dolores made a sound halfway between a snort and a cough. ‘She barely spoke to anyone. Always had her nose in those dusty periodicals. I swear, that girl spent more time with dead authors than living people.’

‘What about outside of work?’ Ella pressed. ‘Did she ever mention any friends, any hobbies?’

‘If she did, she didn’t mention them.’ Dolores scrubbed her face again. Her breathing had picked up the pace. ‘She had a husband, Thomas, but he died some years back. Medical condition, I think.’

‘Did Eleanor ever move on? See anyone new?’

‘No. Not that I know of, anyway. She spent most of her time with those creepy dolls.’ A shudder rippled through Dolores like a wave through a waterbed.

‘Those dolls,’ Ella said. ‘What do you know about them?’

‘She was always going on about them. Antique this, porcelain that. Like I said, more interested in things than people. I just know she spent a fortune on those things. Always going to estate sales, auctions, things like that.’

Ella exchanged a glance with Luca. So even Eleanor's coworkers had been privy to her collection. How many others had she let into that sanctum? Their killer could be anyone.

‘Did she ever have visitors?’ Luca asked. ‘Anyone drop by to see her, even if they didn't stay long?’

Dolores leaned back, and the chair groaned a warning. 'Uh, I don't know. People visit here all the time. The library's a community place.'

Ella could see the gears turning in Dolores’ head. There was something there.

‘Please, miss. It doesn’t matter how small a detail it is. if you remember anything, any suspicious faces, we need to know.’

‘There was a man,’ Dolores spat. ‘Maybe a month ago. Never seen him before. He waited for Ellie to get off work, walked out with her. Didn't like the look of him, to be honest. Too smooth, if you know what I mean.’

Ella’s heart rate picked up speed. ‘Can you describe him?’

'Average height, brown hair. Expensive suit, cheap shoes. The kind of fella who thinks he's too clever by half.' Dolores narrowed her eyes like she could see the mystery man through sheer force of disdain. 'Watched him get into a blue sedan. One of those Japanese numbers. Took off like a cat with its tail on fire.'

Luca asked, ‘Did you catch the plate by any chance?’

‘Do I look like I spend my time catching plates?’ Dolores snapped.

‘Of course not,’ Ella soothed. ‘Just trying to cover all our bases.’

‘Anything else you can tell us about him?’ Luca jumped in before Dolores could wind up for another salvo. ‘Any identifying marks, tattoos, scars?’

‘Hands.’ The word cracked like a whip. ‘He had weird hands. Smooth on the palms but flakey on the fingertips. Like he’d been picking his skin.’ She shook her head, setting her hair helmet wobbling. ‘I remember thinking, 'what's a guy like that want with a mousy thing like Ellie?’

Ella's blood chilled in her veins, cold as the porcelain gaze of the dolls in Eleanor's dead room. A man with flakey hands. Showing up out of the blue, wearing a veneer of sophistication as thin as his cheap shoes.

It didn't take a profiler to guess where this was headed. Or rather, where it had already been.

‘Anything else you can tell us about her? Doesn’t matter how insignificant.’

‘I… can’t really think of anything. You know, how you think you know someone. Guess I didn’t know Ellie half as well as I thought I did.’

The woman was right. You could see someone every day and still not remember what color their eyes were.

‘Thank you, Dolores. You've been very helpful. We’ll need to send someone over to check your CCTV, see if we can see this mysterious man that Eleanor met up with.’

‘You do that.’

‘Anyone else here we could speak to?’

‘Not really. The other two librarians are newbies. It’s only me and Ellie that have been here for years.’

‘Got it. If you think of anything else, please give us a call.’ The card trembled between her fingers as she handed it over, the adrenaline starting to spike. This was it. Their first solid lead. Maybe their only lead, if the state of Eleanor's records was anything to go by.

Luca fell into step beside her as they left the library, pushed out into the late afternoon gray. Rain had been and gone, but the air tasted of an impending storm.

‘Expensive suit, cheap shoes,’ Luca mused. ‘Sounds like somebody's trying awful hard to be something he's not.’

‘Trying and failing. What kind of collector wears a designer suit with Payless specials?’

‘Maybe someone who’s not a collector at all. Someone posing as a boyfriend, maybe. You thinking what I’m thinking?’

‘I’m thinking a lot of things. Is this a jilted lover? A jealous collector? Someone who purposely got close to Eleanor to steal one of her dolls? Maybe to sell it on?’

‘Come on, Ell. There’s no financial motivation here. If there was, he’d have raided that whole collection.’

The image of Eleanor Calloway, surrounded by her precious dolls, refused to budge. It clung to her like a bloodstain that wouldn’t vanish with a thousand washes. Their killer was out there, wearing his human mask, blending into the backdrop of everyday life.

But now at least she had a thread to pull.

'True. But that gives me an idea. Come on, let's go back to the precinct.'