Page 37 of Girl, Remembered

Or maybe it was exactly right?

Roadrunner took a screenshot. Ella would need to see the raw thing, not his retelling of it. He reached for his phone.

She needed to see this now, and she needed to be alone when she did.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

In the absence of a lead from the Genesis Gun Supply scene, Ella and Ripley had returned to the war room at HQ. They’d argued over the relevance of a speck of cyan the whole way back, with Ripley adamant that it could have come from anywhere inside the store. Ella had conceded defeat, because testing that one speck of whatever the hell it was would take time they didn’t have anyway.

Within ten seconds of being in the war room, Ella’s phone rang.

‘Amelia.’ Ella looked out of the window and saw dusk. ‘You’re still at work.’

‘Whose fault is that?’

‘Mine.’

‘Correct. But guess what? I found this Grey Room site. Found the profile, found the username. She called herself the Alligator with an underscore between the words.’

Ella held out hope. ‘Great work. Please say you found something that points to a location.’

‘No. That’s the good news exhausted. The bad news is that her IP is untraceable, and the platform runs message encryption client-side, so the server only ever holds ciphertext. I can see who talked to who and when, I just can’t read most of what they said, because I don’t have the keys and neither does the company that hosts it, not without a warrant, and that’ll take six weeks.’

And the hope shattered. ‘Crap.’

‘Yeah, but what I can tell you is that Doyle’s account made contact with exactly one other profile the whole time it existed. One thread, one recipient, going back the better part of two years. A user named Kabuki1972.’

Kabuki, Ella thought. Gabriel Winters had worn a kabuki mask during his kills. It was him. ‘And she didn’t communicate with anybody else?’

‘Nope. Sorry. That was her only activity. Oh, and I ran the pond drawing through image recognition, narrowed it down to results from the Mid-Atlantic.’

‘And?’

‘Seven thousand matches.’

That was the end of it. ‘Thank you, Amelia. Go home.’

‘I will. Have you heard from Roady? I’ve been trying to get him all afternoon.’

‘Nope. Have you been down to see him?’

‘Yeah, I tried five minutes ago. He wasn’t there.’

‘He might have gone home. He said it was his wedding anniversary.’ Maybe Roadrunner had hit the same wall Amelia had, she thought. Or he might have been working off-site.

‘Funny way to spend it, but that’s all I got. I’ll let you know if I catch anything else.’

‘Appreciated. Speak soon.’

Ella hung up. Ripley was back at the case archive table. ‘I can smell the lack of new information from here.’

‘Grey Room is a bust. Pond location is a bust.’

Vernon came in without knocking, which by itself told Ella something. Six weeks ago he’d have hovered in the doorway before intruding on anything that involved Ripley. He had his laptop under his arm.

‘I’ve got the CCTV from the store, and it’s exactly what we expected. Doyle came in, disguised, then she made conversation with the owner, then shot him dead. She was in and out in five minutes. Before she left, she took a few Sigs with her.’

‘I need to see it,’ Ella said. ‘Is there anything we can use?’