Page 1 of Girl, Remembered

PROLOGUE

Ella hit the door without knocking and Ripley came in behind her, and Vernon popped out of his chair like a man who’d been goosed.

‘Jesus Christ.’ He had a hand flat on his chest. ‘You don’t – you do not ambush federal supervisors at midnight. If Adams was in here, you’d have been shot.’

‘Shut up, Rick.’ Ripley shut the door behind her. ‘Trace Ella’s gun.’

‘Trace her-’ He looked between them, and the color came back into his face and a frown arrived with it. ‘Why would I trace her gun?’

‘Because I lost it,’ Ella said.

‘You lost it. After all that stuff you gave me the other day about lost guns not being-’

‘I was wrong! Just trace it!’

Vernon stayed standing with one hand still on his chest, and Ella watched him decide whether this was the night to ask the forty questions he was entitled to ask. How do you lose a service weapon? Where? To whom? What in God’s name happened in that basement that I’m going to read about at six tomorrow morning? She could see all of it queuing up behind his teeth.

‘Doyle has it,’ Ripley said.

‘What? You’re kidding?’

‘No we’re not! Stop wasting time and trace the bastard thing!’

Vernon went back to his computer and hammered the keyboard like a man possessed. ‘It’s a closed system,’ he said, half to himself, pulling up a login, then another behind it. ‘Pilot program. Six units in the field. Nobody’s ever had to actually-’ A map bloomed across his monitor, grey streets and the dark wandering line of the river. ‘There. That’s the beacon. Give it a second to fix.’

Ella came around the desk. Ripley came with her, and the two of them crowded in at Vernon’s shoulder, and somewhere under the dread Ella registered a strange small thing: in all her years at the Bureau she had never once stood on this side of the Director’s desk, never seen the room from the chair that ran it.

The map was a road map of the D.C. Metro and the country around it. The lines of the roads came up first, then the names of the towns. Then a single pinpoint, a small blue circle, that pulsed twice and held.

The circle was not in Beltsville.

The circle was on the I-95, north of the Beltway.

Ella’s hand closed on the back of Vernon’s chair.

‘There it is,’ Vernon said. ‘That’s your weapon. Ten, eleven miles out. That’s not far at all, that’s-’

The point moved.

It slid a fraction along a grey line, stopped, slid again, and the three of them watched it go. A small blue dot tracked south through the sleeping city at the speed of a car that knew exactly where it was going.

Lindsey Doyle was on the move.

And for the first time in nine months, Ella Dark knew precisely where she was.

‘Rick, track her,’ Ella shouted as she hurtled toward the door. ‘I’ll call you from the car. Mia, come on. We might just catch this bitch tonight.’

***

They took Ripley’s Explorer because it was parked nose-out at the curb. Ella drove. Ripley rode shotgun with the phone flat on her thigh and Vernon on speaker, and the Baltimore–Washington Parkway came at them out of the dark at ninety miles an hour.

‘Still on 95,’ Vernon said. ‘Southbound. Fifty-five.’

‘She’s keeping to the speed limit,’ Ripley shouted. ‘Condescending bitch.’

It was indeed a giant middle finger that a woman who’d committed homicide and coached multiple other people to commit homicides was obeying the small laws. But it gave Ella a chance to catch up, and she had no intention of letting this woman roam free any longer.

‘Because she doesn’t want a state trooper flagging her down.’