Page 16 of Girl, Remembered

‘I understand. Thank you anyway, Roady. Enjoy your wedding anniversary.’

‘I’ll try. The wife’s in Denver ‘til Thursday, so it might have to be an anniversary over Zoom. Long distance. Just me, a laptop, and a very long night in front of the screen.’

He held her eye then nodded.

Ella glanced around the basement. The other analysts had their headphones on and their backs to her, lost in whatever the Bureau paid them to be lost in, and not one of them had looked up since she’d arrived. Nobody had heard a thing worth hearing. Nobody could swear to anything except that Ella Dark had come down, been refused a favor, and left.

At the door she turned and dipped her chin at him – thanks, and nothing that a duck could ever prove.

CHAPTER NINE

In the eyes of everyone who worked at or used the services offered by the Silver Spring Transit Center, Chief Andrew Hibbert of the MPD was public enemy number one.

The irony, if it could be termed such a thing, was that he was currently more hated than the person who’d killed the young woman lying at his feet.

Today, Hibbert’s phone had gone off while his toothbrush was still in his mouth, and it had gone off twice more on the drive to the precinct, and now he stood on the ground level of the Silver Spring Transit Center at 8:30AM.

She was young. That was the first and most defining thing about her. Mid-twenties at the outside. She lay on her back between a bench and the timetable board with one knee drawn up and one arm flung over her head; a pose a sleeping person might make.

Hibbert crouched. Nobody needed a medical examiner to count the wounds; a blind man could have read them with his fingertips. Hibbert put the number north of twenty. Chest, throat, hands, forearms. The forearms told a story of their own. The victim had gotten them up. Whoever had done this hadn’t landed the first one clean, or hadn’t cared to, and she had fought him for some portion of it. Seconds, most likely, though Hibbert knew from long experience that the math never comforted anyone. The blood had left her in a spray across the concrete and had already dried.

Overnight, then. The medical examiner would firm it up, but Hibbert had seen enough overnight blood to place this one somewhere in the small hours, when the buses were dead and the cameras – he’d already checked with the transit authority – pointed at everything except this bench.

Her belongings were amongst the wreckage. Her backpack was still hooked over one shoulder, half-crushed beneath her. A duffel bag, unzipped, sitting upright by the bench as though she’d set it down for a moment and meant to come back for it. Two plastic carrier bags. One had tipped over and spilled its cargo across the platform: a hairbrush, a phone charger wound around itself, a box of granola bars, a tablet. A whole life in luggage. She’d been going somewhere or leaving somewhere, and either way she’d sat down in his city with everything she owned and her restless ghost would remain in this city forever.

‘Sir? The ME’s ten minutes out.’

‘Tell them to bring more screens. And tell WMATA if one more of their supervisors ducks my tape, I’ll charge him.’

The officer went. Hibbert stayed crouched a moment longer, because there was one more detail, and he’d been circling it since he arrived. He made himself look at it again.

Her mouth was open. Lodged inside it, resting on her tongue, was a clump of hair.

Brown hair, a couple of inches of it, tied off with what looked like thread.

It couldn’t be the victim’s hair. Hers was darker, and still attached. Somebody had knelt over this dying or dead girl, in the dark, in a public bus station, and placed that there.

There was nothing frenzied about that part. The stabbing was rage from start to finish, wild and overpowered and sloppy, and then at the end the rage had ceased, and the perp had finished the arrangement by leaving a memento.

Hibbert stood up. The Transit Center around him was doing its best impression of the fall of Saigon. Silver Spring was the busiest bus interchange in the district. There were thirty-plus routes, three levels of concrete, tens of thousands of bodies funneling through it on a normal Thursday, plus the Metro station and the MARC platform hanging off its shoulder.

And Hibbert had been forced to shut the whole thing down. He’d made the call from his car and hadn’t hesitated, and he’d known exactly what it would buy him. Now he was getting it. Beyond the tape at the north ramp, the crowd was six deep and growing. Commuters in scrubs, commuters in suits. Every one of them had somewhere to be, and every one of them had a phone, and about half the phones were pointed his direction. Uniformed officers walked the line telling people about the shuttle buses on Colesville Road. Nobody wanted the shuttle buses on Colesville Road. A woman was shouting that she’d lose her job. A transit supervisor in a safety vest kept telling anyone who’d listen that this was unprecedented, unprecedented, as if the word were a form he could file to make it stop. Three news vans already. A fourth pulling in as he watched. The overhead shot from the traffic helicopter was probably running on every local station by now: white tent going up, blue lights, the great concrete lungs of the Transit Center standing empty on a weekday morning for the first time since it opened.

His phone buzzed. He looked at the screen – the Deputy Mayor’s office – and put it back in his pocket. That was a problem for later.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was also the matter of the other two bodies.

Hibbert had been on duty for thirty minutes. In those thirty minutes, three homicides had come through: a man shot to pieces outside a sports bar in Wheaton, a county worker strangled in a laundromat in Langley Park, and this poor girl. And then there was the fact that a bunch of his men had already been commandeered by the FBI to monitor exits out of the district.

Three bodies, with three jurisdictions elbowing each other — Montgomery County wanted the bar, Prince George’s had a claim on the laundromat, and this one sat squarely in the seam where everything defaulted to whoever screamed loudest. And all three, going by the preliminary times, killed inside the same ninety-minute window in the middle of the night.

On any given night the whole metro area might produce one murder, maybe two, and they’d be arguments that grew guns, drug beefs, domestics, crimes of passion. Sad and ordinary and solvable.

This however, was three strangers butchered in three different corners of the map, all killed in different ways.

Twenty-nine years he’d carried a badge in this region, twelve of them wearing brass, and he had never – not during the sniper autumn, not during the worst crack summers, never – caught three unrelated homicides before his coffee went cold.

He looked back down at the girl. Somebody’s daughter, moving her life from one place to another through the cheapest station in town. There was no sign she’d run. She’d been standing close to her killer, close enough for the first strike to land before her bags even hit the ground. She’d let him near her. He’d given her a reason to.