Page 3 of Girl, Remembered

Ripley came up on her shoulder, breathing hard. Her gun was out, but Ripley was pointing it at the ground now, because she'd clearly arrived at the same conclusion Ella had.

Vernon’s tinny voice came through the phone. ‘Ella? Mia? Are you there? What’s going on?’

‘We’re here,’ Ripley said.

‘Is she-’

‘Give us a minute, Rick.’

‘I don’t understand. The beacon says you’re standing on top of it. It says you’re within ten feet-’

‘She’s not here,’ Ella shouted.

Vernon went quiet. Ella stepped into the shelter, and that's when she smelled the oil. She looked under the bench, and there it was.

The Glock. Her Glock 19M. In pieces.

Slide. Barrel. Recoil spring. Frame. Magazine. The backstrap had been levered off the grip and laid at the end of the row with the wiring loom pulled out of it in a loop, and there in the middle of the loop sat the tracker, screaming its heart out to a satellite while the woman it was supposed to catch was nowhere in sight.

Ella considered herself fluent in the language of frustration. In just two years in this game, she'd slammed doors and punched walls and torn out enough hair to assemble a dark brown sheep. However, the disappointment that wracked her nervous system now was far from a slammed door. Lindsey Doyle had demolished the door, taken the splintered pieces and jammed them up the FBI's collective asshole without so much as sweating in the process.

Doyle had known nobody was coming until she was long gone.

Doyle had known about the tracker before Vernon loaded up the map on his laptop.

‘Mia, she knew. How did she know? Look.’

'I'm looking,' said Ripley. 'We need to rally the troops. Doyle was definitely here, so the cameras might give us an idea of which direction she was headed, or what car she was driving.'

Ella was too lost in her head. Her Glock 19M was a prototype of which only five existed. No other Glock or pistol in the world had a tracker inside it, and yet somehow, Lindsey Doyle – former prison officer and almost certainly not a secret FBI agent – was aware of its gimmick.

What the hell was going on?

CHAPTER ONE

The great discovery of Maxwell Tanner’s incarceration was that a jail was a fear factory, and he had been given a room on the factory floor.

From his bunk in a lone cell in Milwaukee County Jail, Tanner could listen to the place manufacture its product. In the cell opposite, a man was crying into a mattress; a sound the man probably believed was private. Two floors down, the drunk tank received its 2 AM delivery with a clang of doors. The building never slept. It circulated fear like it circulated stale air, and Tanner, who had devoted his professional life to the study of fear, often thought that if they had simply jailed him twenty years earlier, they’d have saved him the cost of his doctorate.

He’d only been here for six weeks. Pre-trial was the term, although exactly when his trial would surface was a mystery even his lawyer couldn’t answer. Six weeks since the bridge, since the lady agent had dunked his head in the lake and nearly put him out of his misery right there, and a cynic might say that his life would have had more meaning if he’d have died that night.

Tanner knew what the newspapers called him. The Scarecrow. He didn’t care for it. A scarecrow frightened things away, and he had done precisely the opposite: he had invited people in, sat them down in the church basement, poured coffee and listened while they handed him the architecture of their own terror. People guarded their bank cards and their front doors and then gave a stranger the one true key to themselves, gratis, week after week, because he deigned to call himself a therapist.

Fear was honest. That was its beauty. A man could lie about his politics, his marriage, his drinking. He could not lie about what stood at the foot of his bed at four in the morning. Tanner had only ever taken people to meet what already lived inside them. The courts saw it differently, and the courts would win, and he had made a certain peace with that.

Jail, though. Jail he had made his own. He’d learned quickly that two things traveled fast in here; infections and gossip. He could deal with the infections, but gossip was a different story, especially when the gossip turned out to be true.

Within two weeks, the men had begun coming to him at the dayroom tables. The Doc, they called him, which he preferred to the other name. They came with their night terrors and their court dates and their letters from women who had stopped writing, and Tanner did them the courtesy of listening.

The men left his table lighter, and he kept everything they gave him in the filing system behind his eyes. He didn’t intend to use any of it. Probably. The collecting itself was the pleasure. A retired watchmaker didn’t stop hearing ticks.

His cell was on the ninth floor, and it had a window.

That was the jail’s one act of mercy. A slot of glass a hand’s width across, too thick to break and too narrow to matter, but at night, with the cell dark and the pod quiet, it gave him a slice of Milwaukee. He could see the freeway if he squinted, and the lake in front of that, which was only a deeper flavor of black. He would stand at the glass for an hour some nights with his forehead against the cold of it. The correctional officers logged him as a model inmate. Compliant, they wrote. He’d seen the file at a hearing. The term almost made him laugh. Twenty-six years of clinical practice and it turned out his calling had been compliance all along.

He was at the window when the light rose into view.

A small light, red, with a green companion winking beside it. It came up from the street grid below like a bubble rising through oil and stopped level with the ninth floor about forty feet out. Tanner’s forehead was still against the glass. His breath fogged it up and he wiped it away with his sleeve.