Page 12 of Girl, Remembered

‘At least four of them.’

Luca checked his watch. ‘Well, it’s 8AM. Will you be… sleeping here for the foreseeable? On the Hoover Mattress?’

‘I have to. I can’t risk visiting you in case Doyle is watching. We can’t go home in case she’s watching that too. This building is the safest place, because even Doyle isn’t crazy enough to invade a room full of 300 FBI agents.’

‘You sure about that?’ Luca asked.

‘No,’ Ella admitted. Despite this woman being the author of her pain, she knew very little about her other than her name. ‘But I’m banking on it. You could stay here too, if you wanted.’

Luca placed his hand on Ella’s knee. He released a sigh from the depths. ‘Ell, I want to sleep next to you, but I don’t want to do it on J. Edgar Hoover’s old mattress. The man has been dead for fifty years.’

‘I think it’s just a myth.’

‘Yeah, but my point is that I don’t love this job enough to sleep here. I want to go home and be normal. Don’t you?’

Ella did want to be normal. She wanted the stupid things. She wanted to fall asleep on a couch during a film she’d claimed to be desperate to watch, and to wake up with a blanket over her. The scarcity of such things over the past two years had taught her the small things had value.

‘Of course I do.’

‘But?’

‘But… I can’t be normal when there’s someone like this on the loose.’

Luca laughed, then stopped himself. ‘Ell, listen to yourself. Someone like this.’

‘What?’

‘You’re talking about her like she’s Dracula.’

Having conceded the comment, Ella asked, ‘You think? The woman has trained serial killers, and killed three of my friends with her own hands. And tried to kill both you and Mia.’

‘Several people have tried to kill me. I’ve lost count of the people who’ve tried to kill Mia, and I’ve only known her a year. My point is that Doyle isn’t Keyser Söze. She’s a normal woman, who bleeds and shits just like everybody else. You’re the first person to say we shouldn’t romanticize killers, and here you are, sleeping in what I’m sure was once a stationary cupboard because you’ve got a stalker.’

Stalker.

The word took hold.

Ella had spent months categorizing Doyle under headings that didn’t exist. Mentor of killers. Architect. Puppeteer. She’d been building a new taxonomy for a new kind of offender, and all the while there had been a plain old category sitting on the shelf with a literature Ella could recite in her sleep. Doyle wasn’t a new species. She was a mere stalker, just one with unusual reach.

And terminal-stage stalkers were knowable.

They closed distance. Every rejected letter, every failed intermediary tightened the orbit, because the fixation demanded proximity. They turned up at workplaces. They parked on streets. They stood in crowds at funerals and trials, close enough to touch the person who owned their entire inner life.

As Doyle had.

‘Her whole world is me,’ Ella said.

‘That’s what I’ve been-’

‘No.’ Ella shot upright and endured the sudden pain in her ribs. ‘A stalker’s territory isn’t a city. It’s a person. Her map of D.C. isn’t streets, it’s me.’

‘I know. You taught me that.’

‘My apartment, my routes, my building, every place that’s ever been important to me. That’s where she is. That’s the only place she can be, because anywhere else, there’s nothing to look at. We’ve been searching her world. She doesn’t have one. She lives in mine.’

‘Well, maybe it’s time we rallied the troops. Me, you, Ripley, Vernon, Dever, Byford, Strickland, Amelia. Why don’t we-’

Any exhaustion was blasted away at the name. Ella jumped to her feet. ‘Hawkins! Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?’