Page 36 of Girl, Remembered

Vernon seemed to take that on board. ‘Understood. What else do we know here? Have you inspected the scene?’

‘No,’ Ripley said. ‘But there won’t be anything here we can use. We already know everything we need to know about Doyle.’

Ella wanted to disagree, but history told her she’d be naïve to think that Doyle had left behind anything she didn’t plan to. In defiance of her own judgment, she crossed the store and crouched down beside Darrell’s body. Before she began collecting forensic evidence, she took a moment to pay a silent tribute to this fallen comrade, as distant a comrade as he might be.

She then attuned herself to the area of conflict and let her senses wander. The smell of mass blood loss differed depending on the environment, as did the unwelcome taste.

However, blood was the same color in every environment, every human being, and every language. Oxygen levels could adjust it a little, but it always sat between cherry red and dark maroon.

And yet, the bloody footprint just a few feet from Darrell Saunders’s dead body had a speck of cyan in it too.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Roadrunner had put off Ella’s task for an hour, mostly out of fear. He’d been worried that he’d fall prey to his own temperament, which was to dive deep into a subject and not come up for air until he’d excavated every piece of information he could, no matter how small.

That was seven hours ago. He’d spent the last six doing exactly that.

He’d taken measures to ensure nobody would interrupt him, which was probably overkill, because no analysts down here were insane enough to challenge Roadrunner on anything. He’d been the unofficial supervisor for years, until last year, when he became the official supervisor. Kate had been holding down the fort until the floor cleared at five, and now three night shifters had taken their positions. They’d all waved at Roady on their way in and seen he was deep in something. He’d returned the acknowledgements with a nod, and that would be enough to secure his privacy for the rest of the night.

For this, he wasn’t using any Bureau hardware – or software, for that matter. He was using his personal laptop, which had never once connected to a Bureau network, a Bureau router, a Bureau anything. Tonight it was routing out through four hops before it touched daylight – a residential proxy in Ohio, a commercial VPN registered to a shell in Cyprus, a second VPN layered on top of that one just to be sure, and finally a Tor circuit for the last leg into anything that mattered. If anyone ever pulled the logs on the Louisiana State Judicial Records vault tonight, they’d find three countries and a dead end, and none of it would mention the FBI’s name.

He’d spent the first three hours just finding the door.

The Louisiana judiciary’s digitized archive didn’t sit on the open internet, not in any form Google would ever index, but every system built by a government contractor in the last fifteen years had the same disease: somebody, somewhere, had reused a login. He’d found it in a leaked credential dump from an unrelated breach two years back, a records clerk in St. Tammany Parish who’d used the same password on a scanning vendor’s portal that she’d used on the actual archive, and the portal had never bothered rotating its keys. From there it was a matter of finding which subdomain talked to which database, mapping the API calls the portal made when a clerk pulled a file, and replaying those calls by hand with the right headers spoofed, patient enough not to trip whatever intrusion detection they’d bolted on as an afterthought.

Eventually, Roadrunner had broken in.

Juvenile records didn’t have names attached the way adult ones did. They had case numbers, sealed under statute, cross-referenced to a birth registry that lived in a separate, older system nobody had bothered migrating properly. It had taken another hour to build the bridge between the two, matching a date of birth he already had – the one on Doyle’s fabricated Louisiana State Penitentiary paperwork – against birth registry entries in St. Tammany Parish, filtering for female, filtering for the handful that had a juvenile case number attached and nothing after it.

And it wasn’t Lindsey Doyle.

It was Lindsey, but the name on the birth record wasn’t Doyle. The name on the school enrollment wasn’t Doyle. This strange woman had existed under a different name for the first twelve years of her life and then stopped existing at all.

He kept reading.

The case file behind that name took another twenty minutes to fully render. There was bad OCR on half of it. The scans had been done cheap and fast by some contractor racing a state deadline, so whole pages had reduced to grey static where the original document had been water-damaged before it ever went in front of a camera. Roadrunner worked through it anyway, cross-referencing the readable fragments against a second file: a Child Protective Services log that had been swept into the same digitization project by accident, filed under a case number that matched.

Roadrunner scrolled and scrolled until a pain flared up in his chest. It suddenly felt like a wasp’s nest had taken up residence behind his ribs.

‘What the hell?’ he asked himself.

He’d read a lot of ugly files in this job. He’d told himself that nothing on a screen could actually touch him anymore.

It wasn’t true here.

A caseworker’s name showed up eleven times. A judge’s name showed up once, on an order that should never have been necessary for a girl that age. There was a line about school attendance that didn’t square with anything a normal childhood should produce, and another line, further down, that made him reread it twice to be sure he wasn’t inventing what it said.

The young girls had been forced to dig their own graves.

Roadrunner wasn’t the cursing type, but the four-letter words involuntarily fell from his lips in a whisper.

And then, amidst the names of judges and careworkers and other legal officials, another name emerged.

If not for the other names – Smith and Brown and King and Wilson – being so generic, the name might have remained camouflaged amongst its nondescript brethren.

It was at that point that Roadrunner made a silent promise to stop drinking so many energy drinks, because his heart felt like it was seconds away from exploding.

This wasn’t right.