Page 2 of Girl, Remembered

Ella put the pedal down another quarter inch. Her pulse was in her thumbs where they gripped the wheel, and every expansion joint in the Parkway found the bruising on her ribs and rang it. She welcomed it. The pain kept her in the car. Without it she was still in Simon Varro’s basement with a needle’s worth of ketamine in her blood, and she couldn’t afford to be in that basement right now. She needed to be here, doing eleven miles at ninety, closing in on Lindsey Doyle.

It had been nine months of hell. Nine months of a woman who existed merely in the wreckages she left behind, and now that woman was a blue circle on a screen in the Hoover Building, and the distance between them shrank every time Vernon opened his mouth.

‘Ten miles,’ Vernon said. ‘Nine and a half.’

Her mouth had gone dry about five miles back. She worked her tongue off the roof of it and swallowed and there was nothing to swallow. Under the bandage her brow itched with sweat. Her body was prepping itself, but it didn’t know for what. Confrontation – or disappointment.

‘She’s slowing,’ Vernon said. ‘She’s off. Off the interstate. Hold on. Greenbelt. She’s turned into the Metro lot.’ Keys clicked at his end. ‘She’s stopped. The beacon’s fixed. Doyle’s not moving.’

‘Swapping cars?’ asked Ripley.

‘Or ditching the gun.’

‘She’d be a fool to do that. Her prints would be all over it.’

‘Her prints don’t matter,’ Ella snapped. ‘We know her name, her face, her address, her Goddamn shoe size. It doesn’t mean we’re any closer to catching her.’

Ripley looked at her across the dark of the car and didn’t argue, which was rare. Every hair stood up off the old scars on Ella’s arms, because she was all but certain that Doyle wasn’t as oblivious to her circumstances as Ella wanted to believe.

Vernon came through the phone. ‘How far away are you?’

‘Five miles. Any movement?’

‘No. Put your foot down.’

Ella tried but she couldn’t put it down any further. They pushed on until the Parkway lights began to strobe through the cabin and the wheel developed a fine shiver under her palms that was either the front alignment or her own hands. She didn’t check the speedometer. The speedometer was Ripley’s problem. Ripley had one hand braced on the dash and the phone clamped in the other, and to her credit she said nothing, even when Ella threaded between a box truck and the concrete divider with barely enough room to fit a coat of paint on either side.

The exit came up: GREENBELT. Ella braked so late that the seatbelt bit into the burst vessel in her neck, and then they were on the ramp with the tires howling and her heart smashing like a bass pedal. She could hear her own breathing over the engine and nothing could slow it down. She always told new recruits at the Bureau to breathe like they’d already won, but her body was here ignoring every word of her own advice.

‘Left,’ Ripley said. ‘The lot’s on the left.’

The gate arm stood ahead of them, striped and stupid and lit by its own little lamp, and Ella had one wild moment of deciding whether to stop for it or take it off at the root. Fate made the decision for her and opened up when it sensed her car on a crash course for it. Ella felt Ripley wince beside her as she scraped the side of the gate, and then they were in the Greenbelt metro lot. It was several acres of white lines under whiter lights, with around thirty parked cars nose-in against the fence.

Ella scrutinized every car, hunting for a silhouette behind glass, an exhaust plume, brake lights, anything warm. Her legs were already prepping, already flooding for a sprint.

‘Where?’ Ella shouted down the phone. ‘Rick, give me the fix.’

‘Bus loop at the south end. The beacon hasn’t moved in five minutes.’

Five minutes was a lifetime. Five minutes was a car swap and four miles in any direction of the compass. Ella took the Explorer across the empty rows diagonally, straight over the painted islands and the glass shelter at the bus loop appeared up in the headlights with nobody in it.

Nobody in it.

Vernon’s voice came through the line. ‘What’s going on? Is she there?’

‘Can’t get there. I’m going on foot.’

Ella ditched the car and jumped out with Ripley not far behind. Even the slightest movement tore at her injuries but she had the rest of her life to recover from them. She only had a small window of opportunity to catch Doyle.

If Doyle was here, Ella thought, then she was armed and Ella wasn’t. Ella knew that and yet it changed nothing. Nine months of hell had come down to thirty yards of asphalt and she’d have crossed it even if the ground was on fire.

‘FBI! Doyle! Come out!’

Her shout came back off the fence and the shuttered kiosk.

Nothing.

Somewhere out on the Parkway a truck went through the gears, dropping away south, and Ella listened to it go and hated it. She hated every vehicle in D.C. that wasn’t the one she wanted.