Girl, Sought (Ella Dark #24)

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

The business card sat between them on the desk. Gabriel Thorne - Senior Acquisitions Specialist - Curated Value Group.

Ella had heard Luca’s story on the journey home, but now she needed to hear it again in the sanctity of the office. Maybe here, in an official hub of law enforcement, she could find an angle on this that didn’t end up with her and Luca sitting in front of the director.

‘Talk me through it. One more time.’

Luca was perched on the edge of her desk in that casual way that said he knew he'd done something technically illegal but was reluctant to apologize for it.

‘I already told you twice.’

‘So tell me three times.’

‘Fine. The bathroom break wasn't exactly a cover story. Four cups of coffee will do that to you. But I knew Vanessa wasn’t going to comply, so I took matters into my own hands.’

‘You took a risk.’

‘I took a leak. On the way back, I checked the other two offices on the row. One had nothing in. The other.’ He pulled out his phone and swiped through photos. ‘That's when I saw these.’

Masks. Seven of them in a neat row.

But it wasn’t enough to make a connection.

‘Hawkins, these masks look nothing like the one our killer wore.’

‘So? How do we know he doesn’t just have a mask fetish? Maybe he has a huge collection of different styles?’

‘Because our killer wears these masks for a reason. He doesn’t just stockpile them. And he knows that we’d see that footage from Finch’s breeding room, so you think he’s dumb enough to broadcast his mask fetish to the cops?’

‘That’s assuming that we made the connection between the killer and the appraisal firm. Our unsub thinks he’s way smarter than us, remember?’

Ella began to pace the room. ‘Alright, what happened after you saw the masks?’

‘I slipped inside, took some photos, found a locked drawer with a bunch of trinkets in. Watches, jewelry, ornaments, that kind of thing.’

She knew her unsub was a collector, but she wasn’t sure if his collecting habits extended beyond the single prize pieces that he stole from each scene. He might have taken trinkets from his victims, but one of the problems with dead bodies was that, unless it was a limb, you never knew what was missing.

‘How many trinkets?’

‘I don’t know. Twenty? Fifty?’

‘Well, what is it? Twenty or fifty? Because that’s a big jump.’

Luca asked, ‘Why does it matter?’

‘Because if this Gabriel Thorne person has been collecting trophies from victims going back years, then there’s a big difference between twenty and fifty victims. Fifty would put him as the third most prolific serial killer in America. Is that likely?’

Luca pulled up the pictures on his phone. ‘Here, look. I’m counting nearly thirty trinkets right there, and that’s just the top layer.’

Ella took it, inspected it, handed it back to him. ‘Wait a minute. If this drawer was locked, how’d you get in?’

‘Guitar string. Aggressive locksmithing.’

‘Did you at least lock it when you left?’

Luca bit his lip. His silence spoke volumes.

‘Fantastic. So not only did you break into a private office, you left evidence that someone had been through their stuff.’ She fought the urge to throw something. Preferably at his head. ‘What happened to being careful?’

‘In my defense, I was kind of in a hurry. Heard footsteps.’

‘That's not a defense, that's an aggravating factor. If this Thorne guy realizes someone went through his stuff-’

‘Then what? He files a police report? Calls the FBI to complain someone broke into his office full of murder trophies?’

'That's not the point, and you know it.' The headache building behind her eyes threatened to go nuclear. 'If he realizes law enforcement is onto him, he might accelerate his timeline. Kill again before we can stop him.'

'Hey, we got a lead, didn't we?' Luca gestured at the business card. 'Senior Acquisitions Specialist with a wall full of masks and a drawer full of suspicious jewelry. That's not exactly nothing. You said Vanessa said only three people have access to every client's records. If Thorne has an office on-site, chances are he's one of them, right?'

Ella put aside her warring emotions. The logic was sound even if the methods weren't exactly by the book. She turned to her laptop and pulled up the police database.

'Alright, Hawkins, I hope you're right. For both our sakes.'

She typed in the name: THORNE, GAbrIEL.

Gabriel Thorne's file loaded with disappointing speed. 39 years old. No current address listed. No vehicle registration. But there was a string of misdemeanors beginning in his early twenties and stopping five years ago.

Ella wanted to be angry. Part of her - the agent who considered herself one of the top in the Bureau - needed Luca to learn that breaking rules had consequences. But if she did that, she’d be a veritable hypocrite. How many times had she taught him to dance on that razor's edge between procedure and necessity? She'd molded him in her image, shaped his investigative instincts with her own brand of creative interpretation of FBI protocols, and now she wanted to condemn him for following her playbook?

Maybe that's what really stung. It was like watching her younger self, before experience had taught her which rules could bend and which would snap back and cut you.

And not only that, but the profiler inside of her couldn’t deny the pattern unfolding on her screen.

‘Look at this.’ Ella jabbed her finger at Thorne's rap sheet, torn between professional excitement and wanting to strangle Luca for being right. ‘2012: caught lifting baseball cards from a hobby shop. 2013: swiped some Depression glass from an antique store. 2014: tried to boost a collection of rare coins. It's like watching someone work their way through Collecting 101.’

‘How does someone with multiple theft charges end up handling million-dollar collections?’ Luca asked.

‘Maybe the same way killers get jobs at funeral homes. Put yourself where the things you want are. Make taking them look legitimate.’

‘When was his last offense?’

‘2019. He got busted burgling a house. Son of a bitch.’ She rubbed her temples. ‘Do you know what pisses me off about all this?’

‘That my criminal behavior might have paid off?’

‘That, and the fact that this fits the profile too damn well.’ She pulled up one of the old mugshots. Young Thorne stared back with eyes that had seen too much or maybe not enough. ‘A collector of collectors would start small. Learn the trade from the inside out. Figure out how the whole ecosystem works before he started hunting in it.’

‘And maybe 2019 was when Vanessa hired him. He didn’t need to break the law because he had legit access to collections from that point. And maybe now, stealing isn’t enough for him. He’s had to up his game.’

Ella wanted to argue, wanted to pick holes in the theory just to teach Luca a lesson about proper procedure. But the evidence kept stacking up. The masks in that office. The drawer full of personal effects. The access to client information. The criminal record that read like a collector's origin story. It all fit a little too neatly.

‘Okay, now the million dollar question. Where do we find this guy? There’s no current address listed, and we can’t just sit outside his office waiting for him. What if he’s already got his next victim in his sights?’

‘Easy,’ Luca said. He picked up Gabriel Thorne’s business card and held it like a winning lottery ticket. ‘We’ve got his cell number right here.’