Page 14 of Girl, Remembered

‘Yes it is. Can you help me or not?’

Amelia held her eye for a second, then looked at her keyboard. ‘No. I can’t.’

‘Please. I’m begging you. I’ll buy you anything.’

‘No. I can’t. You might as well ask me to give you a lift to the moon. I dug into Doyle’s file myself a few months ago, back when the Louisiana PD raided her home. Vernon made the request, and I found the same as you. Nothing from before 1996, and that got me curious, so I tried to find her school files.’

Ella’s heart was about to leap out of her chest. ‘And?’

‘And… they exist.’

‘They do?’

‘Yes, but I can’t get them. They do exist. That’s the maddening part. Hurricane Katrina drowned half the parish archives in ‘05, and after that, Louisiana spent a decade scanning whatever survived into a digital vault. That included birth registers, court files, everything back to the fifties. Sealed juvenile material went in with the rest. So somewhere on the state judiciary’s own network, there’s very likely a folder with Doyle’s real name on it. I’ve dug into a lot of shady histories, and I know a fake name when I see one. Doyle used to be someone else. I guarantee it.’

Ella had suspected as much. ‘So, get into the state judiciary’s network?’

Amelia laughed. Her kettle boiled and steam clogged up the window beside her. ‘Easy as that, huh? The Bureau has no pipe into that system. Everything I do runs through legal gateways like the NCIC, interstate compacts. All our systems require an official handshake at both ends. There is no handshake for a sealed juvenile vault, because no federal agency is supposed to be inside one without a court order. Reaching it means going around the front, and going around the front is an intrusion. I don’t do intrusions, Ella.’

‘Get out of here. You intrude all the time.’

Amelia lowered her head under one of her giant monitors. ‘Shush. I intrude for you, then you get me the paperwork afterward. But juvenile systems are a different story. I wouldn’t know where to find the back door to those things, never mind how to pick their locks.’

A brick wall emerged. Ella could work a physical wall, but a digital wall frustrated her no end. It was a string of ones and zeros sitting in a machine in Louisiana, deciding whether Ella Dark got to catch the woman who’d killed her friends, and the arrogance of that was enough to drive her mad. She refused to be at the mercy of arithmetic.

‘So we get the court order. The 1997 paperwork.’

‘Ha. You’re talking a Louisiana judge, a federal application, Vernon’s signature on top, two weeks minimum. And the moment that request lands, it becomes discoverable. If Doyle has ears anywhere near that courthouse, she’d know we were digging before we saw the first page. And before you ask me to improvise, every keystroke I make in this building is logged against my badge number. CJIS audits us quarterly. The first probe I aimed at a state judicial server would come back in a report with my name on it, and I’d be leaving this place with a box before the day was out.’

Ella looked at the photo of the pebble-dashed house and felt the morning drain out through her boots. The information she wanted sat on a server she could point to on a map but would never be permitted to touch, not without a mountain of paperwork, and she didn’t have time for that.

Maybe arithmetic would win after all.

‘Well, thanks anyway. Sorry for… invading your office.’

She was halfway out of the chair when Amelia caught her sleeve.

‘I said I couldn’t help you. I know somebody who might, though.’

‘Really? Who?’

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘Roady!’

Lee Rhodes, aka Roadrunner, was the largest gentleman in the Hoover Building, at least by width. He was also, by a lot of people’s accounts, the closest thing the Bureau had to a mad genius.

‘Is that Ella Dark? Down here? Is it 2017 already?’

Ella had violated the Intelligence Department this time. It was in the building’s basement, and there was no code for the door. Even if there was, Ella would surely know it, because she’d spent five years of her life down here, sitting next to the very guy in front of her. Roadrunner was perched in front of three gigantic screens, the middle one of which was showing a boxing match.

‘Roady. Word has it you can-’ Ella glanced around at her former colleagues, none of whom seemed to be fazed by her arrival. She could work with that.

‘I can what? You don’t want another favor, do you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

Roadrunner rolled his eyes and then elbowed his monitor. ‘Ells, I’m a little busy this morning.’