Page 34 of Girl, Remembered

Ella had torn the page out of Varro’s notebook and brought it with her. Now, she and Ripley were heading back to HQ.

‘How do we know that?’

‘Gabriel Winters said the same thing. He said that whenever he and Doyle video chatted, he could see a pond with trees in the background. This is the same scene.’

‘And what if Doyle has multiple hideouts? Or what if she knew Winters and Varro would rat, so abandoned her usual haunt?’

‘What if my aunt had balls? She’d be my uncle.’

Ripley pulled up to a set of traffic lights. She shot Ella a look. ‘Is that a British saying?’

‘I don’t know. My point is that there’s no reason to believe Doyle would ditch this location if she’s been using it for so long. We know she’s been coming to and from D.C. for months now.’

‘Alright, but where is it? I know every pond in this damn city. Is it Lake Frank? Cherry Hill? Riverbend? Dumbarton?’

‘It’s not any of them. Doyle wouldn’t video call her disciples in a public area. It has to be a private pond, right?’

The lights changed and Ripley pushed off into the traffic. ‘A private pond, sure. That narrows it down to about a thousand.’

‘You think?’

‘This is D.C. Every fifth person here is Oprah rich. Foxhall, Kalorama, parts of Chevy Chase. Potomac’s even worse. You get up toward Great Falls and there’s estates out there with their own lake, never mind a pond. Half of Georgetown backs onto the canal, and some of those places have their own private inlet dug off it that might as well be a pond if you’re only looking at it through a phone screen.’

‘But how would Doyle get into a house like that? We’ve seen her actual house. She doesn’t have money.’

Ripley said, ‘It might not be a house. It might be an empty building. We need to either check every pond in the city or run that drawing through image detection software, but I’m not holding my breath on that one. Like I said, a thousand locations will flag up.’

‘I can ask Amelia to run it.’

‘Isn’t she working on that Grey Room thing?’

‘Yeah, but image search only takes a minute. It might take an hour to come back, though.’

Ripley’s center console lit up before Ella could answer. VERNON, the screen said, and Ripley hit the button on the wheel.

‘Rick. What is it?’

Vernon’s voice boomed through. ‘How far are you from Warrenton?’

‘Depends how fast I drive. Why?’

‘Get there. There’s a gun supply store off Route 29.’

Ella jumped in. ‘Genesis. It’s by my old apartment. The owner was a cop from Virginia PD. I knew him.’

‘Don’t say his name was Darrell Saunders,’ Vernon said.

That was exactly what his name was, and Ella didn’t need to ask anymore to know what had happened.

She suddenly felt foolish, holding a drawing of a pond, while yet another life had been taken because she hadn’t been quick enough.

***

Darrell Saunders was floating on a river of blood, with two holes through his shirt right near his heart. The blood had gone into the carpet tile far enough that nobody was ever getting that deep red out again.

Ella stood over him with her hand pressed flat against her own sternum, and knew that the dead body in front of her had her name written all over it. She’d known this man. Darrell had been a cop at Virginia PD. He’d retired the year Ella had started, but she’d talked to him enough in that year to still consider him a friend ten years later. The day Darrell had left, he’d said: good luck in this game, kid. Don’t let them make you mean.

Detective Jim Strickland, the unfortunate soul who’d responded to this scene, avoided the bloody footprints on his journey toward her. He put his arm around her shoulder. Strickland had been Ella’s mentor back in her police days too, and to this day, she considered him one of the most important people in her life. They’d worked together for the first time in years just a month ago, and Ella hadn’t planned on seeing him again so soon.