Page 29 of Girl, Remembered

Two evidence boards stood propped against a whiteboard that still had the ghost of somebody’s org chart bleeding through the eraser marks. Ripley had strung red thread between photographs, as people did in films, and Ella had told her once that nobody in the actual Bureau did that, and Ripley had told her to shut up and hand her the drawing pin.

The music box was at the far end of the table with its lid closed and a pelican frozen on top of it. Ripley had carried it back from Creed’s farmhouse in a plastic evidence bag and never let it go since. It didn’t play. Ripley had wound the key until her thumb blistered the night they found it, and got nothing but a dry click from somewhere inside the mechanism.

Next to it: a manila folder marked JULIANNE COOPER, and beside that one marked JENNA BRADBURY. Ella had read both files enough times that she could recite the ME’s notes from memory, and she’d have given ten years of her life not to be able to. Two women, both close to Ella, both of them stitched through the lips after death with strands of hair that had come out of Ella’s own head, pulled from a brush Doyle lifted out of her bag at Austin Creed’s trial in a courtroom in Louisiana, on the day Ella secured a death sentence for the first serial killer she’d ever caught. Doyle had been sitting one seat over. Ella remembered the woman’s face now with the clarity of hindsight, though at the time she’d registered nothing beyond a stranger crying at the verdict, as half the gallery had. When the jury foreman read guilty on all counts, the woman had turned and hugged her.

Thank you, she’d said.

Ella still didn’t know if the tears had been real.

By the time Julianne and Jenna turned up dead, the Bureau had regarded her the way they’d regard anyone whose physical evidence appeared at a crime scene with no explanation. Ella had then spent two days as a person of interest in her own investigation before anyone believed the theft of a hairbrush was a more plausible answer than a federal agent turning killer.

Then Ben.

Ben Carter had moved to California after they broke up, and he’d texted Ella to tell her about it. Ella was just happy he was fine, and that he’d finally escaped Ella’s fatal orbit.

Then he was shot dead.

Doyle had used Ella’s phone to find his location, stalk him and kill him dead in the streets. She’d then found an old photo of the two of them buried in her messages, and had it printed onto a funeral tribute card that later showed up folded inside evidence bag number four. Ella had identified the picture herself. She remembered exactly which beach it had been taken on, and she’d wished, not for the first time today, that her memory came with an off switch.

A box arrived at Ripley’s front door not long after. No return address, no note. Ripley had opened it standing on her own porch in McLean, expecting a delivery she’d forgotten about, and instead found human hair packed into the bottom of it.

After this came Abingdon. Ella’s childhood home, a house she hadn’t lived in for twenty years and never visited, and a box sent there too, this one delivered to the current owner. Julianne Cooper’s credit card. A necklace with a silver letter J that had belonged to Jenna Bradbury. Ben’s wallet.

Three lives, reduced to three objects, left on the porch of the house Ella had grown up in, as if to say: I know where you started too.

Frustration climbed the back of her throat. By now, frustration was an old friend who never learned to knock. She had spent longer chasing this woman than she had spent on some entire relationships. She’d read every file and scrutinized every piece of evidence on this table so many times that devouring them again produced nothing new. None of it pointed anywhere. It only pointed backward, at what Doyle had already done, and Ella already knew what Doyle had already done. She needed the thing that told her where Doyle was standing right now.

Then came the twin.

Tracy Doyle. The FBI had known she had a sister, but nobody had known the sister was identical, and nobody had thought to ask Lindsey Doyle for a DNA sample before booking her. Why would they, when the woman in the cell had a face that matched every photo on file? It had taken Austin Creed himself, flown halfway across the country in restraints, to walk into a room and tell them the woman sitting in front of him had no scar on her left forearm.

Lindsey’s scar, which was the result of a canteen fight broken up with a sharpened toothbrush, documented in her personnel file at Louisiana State. And the only reason Tracy was now in custody was because Luca was smart enough to smash her with a coffee machine.

After Ben had died, there’d been a gap. Weeks of nothing, weeks where Ella had assumed, hoped, that whatever this was had burned itself out. During that gap, she now knew, Doyle hadn’t stopped. She’d just changed method. She’d stopped killing people herself and started making other people do it for her.

Four men. Ella had caught all four of them herself, one after another, and only in the last one had she learned they’d shared a maker.

Maxwell Tanner. The Scarecrow, deceased as of this morning. Edgar Borden, the Figurine Killer, equally deceased. Winters, the Whisperer, Ella’s new best friend.

And there was still Simon Varro, the giant executioner who Dever had since confirmed was in a hospital bed recovering from the injuries Ella gave him last night.

Some men want a mother, some men want a God, Doyle had told her in Varro’s basement last night.

Ella believed the claim and distrusted it in equal measure. Ripley thought Doyle might have been playing the odds by claiming credit for men the Bureau was always going to eventually put on Ella and Ripley’s desk regardless. It cost Doyle nothing to say she’d built these monsters. Ella wanted to believe that too. She kept turning it over and finding she couldn’t quite make herself, because she knew for certain that she’d assisted Simon Varro, and if Gabriel Winters was being honest, him too.

Ella stood in the middle of the room and looked at all of it laid out end to end.

She felt nauseous, because none of it told her where Lindsey Doyle would be sleeping tonight.

A pond. Fifty feet wide. Trees behind it.

Ella circled back to the first piece of evidence in line. Inside the plastic bag were the very hairs that had been removed from the lips of Jenna Bradbury – her old roommate. The sight made her own lips itch. Beside it was a close-up photograph of the scene itself, taken in Ella’s old apartment, no less.

Stitching.

Sewing.

Sewing.