Page 10 of Girl, Entangled

And Ella knew exactly what Lindsey Doyle looked like. That was the strange, sour heart of it. She knew the dirty-blonde hair and the narrow face, because Ella had seen Doyle in the flesh twice, and a near-perfect copy of it all was currently sitting in a cell twenty miles away. An identical twin. Ella had a photograph of the suspect any time she wanted one, but it didn’t help.

What else?

Lindsey Doyle had a burning hatred for Ella Dark because she believed that Ella Dark was the one responsible for putting Austin Creed on death row. The truth wasn’t so black and white, but that didn’t matter to someone who could kill three people and sew their lips shut with strands of Ella’s hair, as Doyle had done. To Doyle, Ella was Austin Creed’s captor, judge, jury and executioner, and in Doyle’s mind, that meant Ella had to be punished.

Doyle was also a master of disguise. Whenever she decided to show herself, she wouldn’t be wearing her real face.

Ella closed her document and opened up the Bureau database. She pulled up what she could and within twenty minutes she had her nose against the limits of it. There were no details on Doyle before Ella had discovered her name two months ago, and everything on Creed she already knew. At HQ, Ella would have access to ViCAP, written reports, hard copies, terminals that talked to all other databases in the country. She didn’t have that from home.

She tried a few angles regardless. She searched the name and turned up a wedding in Baton Rouge from 2009 that might have been the same woman and might have been a stranger. That was the extent of it.

Ella sighed, shut the laptop and went to the window. Her legs needed somewhere to go, and the window was the furthest that the apartment allowed. Below, the parking lot sat under a clean spring sky, and four rows back, nose-out for a fast exit the way they were taught, was a grey Ford with two people in the front. One drank from a travel mug. The other held a phone to their ear.

Her babysitters. Vernon had promised she wouldn’t see them. Vernon was wrong about the small things as reliably as he was right about the large ones.

Ella shut the blinds. The apartment descended into darkness. Ella sat down and worked out what to do next.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mia Ripley had witnessed the entire spectrum of murder methods. She’d seen people killed by gunshot, stabbing, suffocation, poison, fire, water, blunt instruments and plain old gravity. Killing was a craft like any other, with its skilled practitioners and its bunglers, and the bunglers always outnumbered the skilled.

But personal experience and academic research had taught her that nothing was harder to pull off than a hanging, but that was exactly what she was looking at it.

Chief Andrew Hibbert from the Metropolitan Police sidled up to her. He was a lean man in his forties, a career cop, and had the dark features of a native Italian, including the slick black ponytail, even though he was pure East Coast. Ripley knew him well because she’d worked with him before. He’d been the one to ask for the Bureau. Ripley gave him credit for that. Plenty of chiefs would have sat on a thing like this for a day out of pride, and a day was a long time at a scene like this.

‘Took it all in yet?’ he asked.

Ripley hadn’t. Not only was she staring at a weedy, middle-aged man hanging by his neck, but she was in the Thornwood Renaissance Faire at Rock Creek Park. The bunting still hung. The painted stalls still stood with their shutters up and their goods laid out. A banner over a makeshift wooden gate promised JOUSTING AT NOON & DUSK in gold letters. But the tape had gone up across every path, the gates were shut, and the only people inside the fence now were Ripley and members of the MPD.

‘Definitely not. Who called it in?’

‘The guy who works on the tomato toss over there.’ Hibbert pointed toward a stall beside a medieval pillory. Buckets of tomatoes sat below it. ‘He says he got here this morning and found this poor guy hanging here.’

‘Any idea who the victim is?’

‘Nope. We managed to pat him down, and he doesn’t have a cell phone or wallet on him. All we found was a hundred and fifty dollars in cash.’

‘So he was either buying drugs or hookers,’ Ripley said. ‘Or he robbed someone on the way here.’

‘All are plausible, but what I want to know is how a man ends up hanged, at a Renaissance faire of all places.’

Ripley looked around. She was standing amongst a mish-mash of time periods, from the Middle Ages to Tudor England. ‘It’s the perfect place to hang someone. Where else would you find a gallows already set up?’

‘I suppose. But why?’

‘Jury’s still out on that one. I need a closer look.’

‘Alright. Let’s go.’

Hibbert signaled to the guarding officers that he was getting up close. They moved out of the way, and Hibbert led Ripley up the ramp to the gallows platform. Ripley got as close as she could to the victim without running the risk of making contact with him, because all it took was a slight touch to make a hanging victim sway. A body left hanging long enough would eventually finish the job the drop had started, so a sway could be the difference between a body in one piece or two.

‘Some guys told me this was a typical suicide, but I know it’s not. I just need someone to tell me I’m not overthinking things.’

The victim was wearing jeans, dirty trainers and a sleeveless jacket with a brown t-shirt underneath. His arms were on show, and Ripley caught sight of a few faded tattoos. He was below average height and had a shaved head. Ripley put his age at mid-forties.

‘No, this isn’t a suicide. Suicidal people kill themselves in private. Some people throw themselves in front of trains, but that’s because it’s a convenient way to off yourself, not because of the public element. If somebody wanted to hang themselves, they wouldn’t come all the way out here to do it.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ Hibbert said.