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“It’ll do,” said Ripley.
Ella said, “Gary. Tell us about him. Why was he here? What was he like as a person?” The victim had already told her his side of the story, that he was staying there because his house burned down. But she wanted to know if Dennis’s version matched up.
“Me and Gary go way back. Thirty, forty years now. He ran into a string of bad luck recently. His house burned to the ground, then he lost his job.”
Ripley asked, “Which was?”
“Maintenance man for some local churches. The fire is what set him off. He went off the rails after that, and I hate to say it, but Gary’s home was… prone to being burned to the ground. As weird as that sounds.”
“Come again?”
Dennis breathed a heavy sigh and said, “Gary was a collector. A hoarder. His house was stacked from floor to ceiling with crap. Mostly newspapers and boxes. Throw in a guy who smokes like a chimney and you’ve got a recipe for an inferno. I hate to blame him for that, but… come on.”
Ella was reminded of an old saying of her aunt’s. If you don’t want to get trampled by elephants, don’t hang around with elephants. “A hoarder? So when his house burned down, he lost everything he loved too.”
Dennis nodded. “Yup. To most people it was just trash, but Gary was a special breed. I mean, he was always kinda kooky. When we were teenagers he used to try and contact aliens through his radio. But recently he completely lost the plot.”
“Oh jeez,” Ella said as she pinched the bridge of her nose, already sensing the turn this was about to take. “Conspiracy theorist.”
“Something like that,” Dennis said. “He thought people were after him. I believetargetedwas the term he used, as though anyone would care what a small-town maintenance guy was up to.”
Ella knew the conspiracy mind very well. She found it fascinatingly pathetic. “Some nameless, faceless group, right?” she asked.
“Yup. It was alwaystheyandthem. Never any solid names. He claimedtheyburned his house down, but it doesn’t take a genius to put two and two together.”
Dennis had a good point. Smoking plus piles of flammable paper only ended one way. “That could have been why he lashed out at me.” Ella directed the comment to her partner. “He thought I was one of them.”
“Never underestimate the fragility of a gullible mind,” Ripley said. “Dennis, did Gary have any evidence that someone was after him? I mean, I think conspiracy theorists are dummies like anyone else but the fact remains that someonedidkill him. I just want to work out if this was a targeted attack or whether something else drew this murderer here.”
Dennis paused to ponder the question. “Nothing that I ever saw. It was all vague comments like he saw someone watching him from across the street. But in the past two weeks, me and Gary barely spoke. He became stir crazy, bitter, resentful, lots of crap about God abandoning him.”
Ella’s imagination suddenly alighted, an indistinct spark that seemed to pair up with some of the other musings whirring around that overworked machine she called a brain. A new avenue suddenly formed, opening a flurry of options that had otherwise taken a backseat to more probable answers. But in light of Dennis’s comments, she went with the flow, molding together small fragments that may have been a part of the same puzzle.
“Gary was a religious man?” she asked.
“Once upon a time. Didn’t seem to mention it much anymore, though. He was more concerned with his so-called followers.”
It made sense Gary might adopt a conspiracy outlook, Ella thought. After losing his house, possessions and job, Gary might have struggled to accept the reality that, in the grand scheme of life, he wasn’t as important as he thought he was. He was as disposable as anyone else, so he would have made great mental leaps to somehow rationalize this cold reality. In his head, he wasn’t simply an insignificant guy who happened to be down on his luck, he was so prominent that an underground group were attempted to sabotage his life.
And as Ripley had said earlier, Gary Weathers made a perfect victim. Or at least, he would have if the killer hadn’t used his death to send a middle finger to her and Ripley.
Ella scratched her head. Things didn’t match up. The killer must have known Gary was hiding out here, but who else did Gary have in his life? He seemed like a lone ranger, but if he was willing to tell Ella – a total stranger – about his living situation, who else might he have told?
“Cameras,” Ripley said. “You have them in here?”
“Yes. Five in total. One outside, two on each floor.”
“We’ll need to see if they caught anything.”
Dennis slowly turned around and hovered his palm over his mouse. “I…uh… can. But I really don’t want to see this.”
“Then look away,” said Ripley. “He came between what, midnight and eight a.m.?”
Ella cast her mind back to the previous night. Just before she’d fallen asleep, she remembered hearing footsteps outside her door. That must have been their unsub, stalking from the shadows. “Between two and three a.m.,” Ella said. “I heard someone in the corridor about then.”
Ripley nodded. “Check it,” she instructed Dennis.
The motel owner did, rewinding footage from the outdoor camera to two a.m.. It showed an empty street and a single car. Then he zipped through the footage at triple speed until a lone figure manifested from the darkness. The low quality of the camera only caught him in pixelated fragments, moving robotically with each frame like a character from an ancient video game. This time, he was dressed in a blue jacket zipped tightly up to his neck, a mask over his mouth, a loose hood hanging from his skull. He looked to be about five-nine, stocky, long arms like a gorilla. The sight of the man stirred a maelstrom of intense feelings - a boiling sea of anger, revulsion, and nausea. This son of a bitch had been within grabbing distance. Ella put the thought to one aside, promising herself she’d catch this monster and throw him in jail for the rest of his life.
