Page 19 of Girl, Remembered

Ella inspected Ripley’s microsignals. There was a slight downward tilt of the lips and a little tension in the throat. She’d spread out her fingers on one hand but not the other.

‘Four of hearts,’ Ella said.

A grin spread across Ripley’s face. It was the first smile Ella had seen on her in a while.

‘Great. I’ve seen you do that about twenty times and I still don’t know how you do it. I should, really.’

‘If you knew the secret, you’d be very disappointed.’

‘Is every card in that deck all the four of hearts?’

‘No, but the top card is.’ Ella pulled off the top card and flung it on the table to show Ripley’s chosen card. ‘I just controlled it and looked at it while I was shuffling. It’s called a peek, and it’s so stupid people can’t believe it. Can we talk about Doyle again now?’

Ripley made a fist and tapped it on the table. ‘Dammit. Yes, I am disappointed.’

‘Told you.’

‘But Doyle. You want to know how she trains killers? If you ask me, that’s the easy part. She just found desperate men who were already two-thirds of the way to becoming killers anyway. Doyle just told them what they wanted to hear and gave them a little push in that direction.’

Ella had run the profile and arrived at a similar conclusion, although such a conclusion sounded too simplistic. Perhaps Luca was right and Ella had put this woman on a pedestal. Strip away the glitz and maybe all that remained was a stalker who hung around with damaged men. But still, hearing the same thing from Ripley’s mouth helped.

‘You think?’

‘Look at the people who came before her. Charles Manson was a crazy dwarf obsessed with the Beatles. He wasn’t a mastermind, and he still got people to do his bidding. Jim Jones was a drunk asshole and he convinced parents to poison their own kids. And who was that other cult guy? The UFO idiot?’

‘Marshall Applewhite. Heaven’s Gate.’

‘Yeah, him. He had all the charisma of a brick and look at what he pulled off. Thirty-odd people poisoned, all because he convinced them a comet was coming to wipe out the earth. Stop thinking Doyle is smart. You ever heard the old saying, about always hanging about with ugly people?’

‘No?’

‘If you hang out with ugly people, you look better by comparison. Do that enough and people start to think you’re attractive. Doyle isn’t some superhuman manipulator. She’s just standing next to people more reckless than she is, so by comparison she looks like a mastermind. There’s one more thing too. The nasty thing you don’t want to think about it. But you should, because it’s probably how she closed the deal on more than one of them.’

Ella’s ears pricked up. She hadn’t arrived at any nasty thing in her own ruminations. ‘What nasty thing?’

‘Think about it. What’s Doyle got that Manson, Jones, Applewhite, and Koresh haven’t? Don’t make me give you a clue.’

‘Give me a clue.’

‘She’s a woman.’

The mere mention of gender was enough for Ella to make the leap. She almost felt stupid for not making the connection until now. ‘Ugh. You don’t think she…?’

‘I do think she did that. Find me a woman in history who’s manipulated a man without that.’

It was enough to make Ella want to vomit. The thought of Doyle and these men – mentor and murderer – being intimate chipped away at the last few pieces of faith she still had in humanity.

‘Gross.’

‘We know Doyle met these men in prison too, or at least through the prison system. Men in prison would try and have sex with a rattlesnake if it showed them some attention. Doyle knows that, having worked in a prison for a decade, so she knew exactly what buttons to push.’

As much as Ella tried to forbid the images from violating her mind’s eye, the grim sights invaded regardless. She managed to banish them before any specifics arrived, because Ripley’s phone drew her concentration elsewhere. If the past three days were anything to go by, any incoming phone calls were a cause for concern.

‘One second.’ Ripley excused herself, stood up and glanced briefly at the name on her screen before answering. Half of a conversation drifted in Ella’s direction, but the ratio of conversation favored the caller, and so Ella was left to read Ripley’s face contortion.

What followed were two universal signs of processing bad news: a pinch between the eyeballs, a sigh cast upward.

Something was wrong.