Page 13 of Girl, Remembered

Luca looked up at her, confused. She caught a whiff of his cologne on the upswing and had never been so grateful for it.

‘Think of what? Rallying the troops?’

‘No. Amelia. I need to see Amelia. Are you coming?’

CHAPTER SEVEN

Luca wasn’t coming. He had his own workload to worry about. So Ella went alone, but not before she stopped at the fourth-floor locker room and gave herself four minutes.

The Bureau gym had showers, a wall of grey lockers and a vending machine that sold toothbrushes for three dollars. Ella made the use of all of them. There was no time to dry her hair, so she raked it back and let it soak into her collar. In the mirror she checked the scar above her eyebrow – courtesy of last night – decided it could survive another day, and left.

The tech department lived on the fourth floor, behind a door with a keypad that Ella knew the code to. Ella walked in at 8:20AM and heads rose over monitors one after another down the length of the room, like targets on a range popping up in sequence. Word traveled in this building. Everyone at those desks had heard about the Doyle situation, and now here came the star of the story with wet hair and a face full of stitches, dripping on their nice carpet.

Ella ignored all of them and made a beeline for the desk in the far corner.

Amelia Brady was twenty-nine, blonde, and the only person in the Hoover Building who kept an electric kettle at her workstation in open defiance of the fire marshal. She was from Shropshire, England, wherever that was, and even after four years in D.C., her accent had refused to surrender a single vowel. Taped to Amelia’s monitor was a photograph of two damp-looking parents outside a cottage, and beside her keyboard sat a mug that read WORLD’S TALLEST DWARF. Ella had sent this woman perhaps a hundred requests over seven years, and Amelia had never once missed a deadline or attached a complaint. Half of Ella’s career had been built in this corner, by this kid, invisibly.

Amelia caught her eye. ‘Ella. Why are you in here? And why are you wet?’

‘I washed. Amelia, I need you.’

‘You need something.’ Amelia gestured to the empty seat beside her. ‘Sit down before you fall down. Do you want a brew?’

‘A brew?’

‘Tea.’

‘No. Thank you. Tea doesn’t touch the sides, caffeine-wise.’ Ella glanced around and saw a bunch of eyeballs locked on her. She leaned in and whispered, ‘Am I not allowed in here or something?’

‘No. This office is kind of important. How did you know the door code?’

‘Ripley told me.’

Three or four tech analysts groaned in unison, then went back to their monitors. Ella caught Amelia rolling her eyes.

‘It’s our fault for not changing it. What do you want?’

‘Lindsey Doyle. Have you heard about the case?’

‘Who hasn’t? Her name’s on every news site in the country.’

‘I need to know about her. Specifically her childhood.’

Amelia raised an eyebrow. ‘What, you think I went to school with her?’

‘No. I think you have the skills to get into the systems that have those details. I’ve tried myself but I can’t find anything before age 12.’

Amelia switched her kettle on, sat back and folded her arms. ‘Why?’

‘Because I’m certain there’s something in there that’ll shed light on who she is and where I might find her.’

Ella had put the pieces together when Luca had mentioned the word stalker. Nobody was born a stalker. Every fixation in the literature was symbolic of the offender going back to something, usually something that happened to them before they were fourteen. They lost a person, or a person was taken, or they had a person who was the whole world and then that person broke their hearts. And then twenty, thirty years later they found someone who resembled the original and they tried the whole thing again, but this time they intended to control the ending.

‘I’m no profiler, Ella, but why does her childhood matter?’

‘Because it might help me predict her endgame. Terminal stalkers don’t improvise their finale. They restage. The last act always maps back onto the original trigger. We see it in serial killers all the time. They go back to the beginning. They love symmetry. They think it’s poetic.’

‘That’s stupid,’ said Amelia.