Page 11 of Girl, Remembered

One office remained. From his breast pocket he drew the small envelope and shook the lock of hair into his palm.

The culling and the shearing were one duty; a wolf left ruin, but a shepherd left wool, so that Heaven would know whose hand had passed through the flock. He laid it on the man’s chest, how a pastor would lay a Bible.

‘Numbered,’ Nathaniel said. ‘Every one.’

CHAPTER SIX

There was a camping bed in the side office off the sixth-floor briefing room at HQ, and by Bureau legend it had been there since Hoover, and was even the spot where he’d sleep during late nights. After sleeping there, Ella had it on good authority the camping bed remembered him.

Before crashing to sleep about 5AM, Ella had spent the night mining her laptop for information on Lindsey Doyle, and not for the first time. This must have been the tenth time she’d attempted such a task, but she continued to try in the useless hope that she might discover something new.

She hadn’t.

Lindsey Doyle was forty-four years old. Her last registered address was a three-bed house in Slidell, Louisiana, which had been vacated four months ago. She’d spent eleven years as a corrections officer at Louisiana State Penitentiary and boasted an exemplary record with two commendations. Before that, she’d done four years at a juvenile facility outside Baton Rouge. Before that, a GED earned at nineteen. Before that, a middle school enrollment record in St. Tammany Parish at age twelve.

Before that, nothing.

Ella had run her through every database a federal badge could open and a few it technically couldn’t. Doyle had no birth certificate in Louisiana or any neighboring state. No hospital record. No pediatric immunizations, no elementary school, no church baptism, no father’s name, no mother’s name. It was possible that Doyle’s middle school paperwork could reveal her parents’ names, but such information about minors was off limits, even to the FBI. All in all, Ella had the paper equivalent of a magician showing both sides of his hand.

Lindsey Doyle had walked into the world at twelve years old, fully formed. Ella had known this for a while, but had never stopped to think about it. Thinking about it had sent her into unconsciousness on the rigid old camping bed, and she’d dreamed of a blue dot moving through a dark city, always eleven miles ahead.

The door woke her.

‘Ell, have you heard?’ the new arrival said.

‘Heard what?’

Luca Hawkins, already suited and cologned, sat on the floor beside her. ‘They’ve built these buildings. Two or three floors high, full of beds. They’re called hotels.’

‘That was the second option. Are you okay?’

‘Never better. I’ve been living in a hotel room for five days now. It’s got air conditioning, so I’m laughing. I’ve forgotten what you look like though, and your messages are getting shorter by the day.’

Because of Ella, Luca had been exiled from his own apartment for the second time in a year, and what had she sent him yesterday? She scrolled her memory and winced. Busy. Keep safe. Talk tomorrow. Five words, to the man who’d recently disarmed her potential killer with a coffee machine. Doyle didn’t even need to hurt the people Ella loved anymore. She’d engineered things so that Ella did it for her, one neglected message at a time.

She grabbed him and pulled him down far enough to kiss him properly. ‘I’m sorry. Two days ago I was chasing a seven-foot monster, and that’s leaked into the Doyle case. You were right about what you said, by the way.’

‘What was that?’

‘That the two cases were related. Doyle has been mentoring people she found through the prison system. The past four, five cases me and Ripley have worked on – all Doyle’s handiwork.’

Luca scrunched his face up. ‘Ell, I don’t mean to sound accusatory, but that sounds insane.’

‘Because it is insane.’

‘Yeah, but think about the logistics of that for a second. This woman claims to be training serial killers, but how would she know you and Ripley would be the ones investigating it? How could she be sure it wasn’t just left to the local police?’

That thought had been circling since last night, but Ella hadn’t yet found the time to commit to it. ‘I don’t know what I don’t know.’

‘What?’

‘I mean, I only know of four Doyle disciples. Their names came out of her own mouth. But how many others might there be? There could be one in every state. Providing the crime is ultra-violent or serial in nature, it would have fallen on mine and Ripley’s desks. Statistically, some of them are going to be designated to us.’

‘Right. What about that kid who got abducted? Timothy something.’

‘Timothy Thatcher. Doyle didn’t mention him, and neither he nor his abductor had links to the prison system. I’ve got him on suicide watch just in case, but I doubt he’s one of them. Which suggests it’s not every case me and Ripley worked recently that have links to Doyle.’

‘Just most of them.’