Page 38 of Girl, Remembered

‘Not really. We’re checking every camera within two miles of the store, but it turns out Warrenton’s not exactly wired up like Times Square. We’ve got some hits on the make and model of Doyle’s car, but she’s taken the plates off.’

‘And she’s not going to risk hitting any major areas with no plates. I guarantee she’ll ditch the car and burn it before the night is out.’

Ripley asked, ‘Hotline? Forensics? Anything on the drones outside the jails?’

‘Hotline’s been lit up like Christmas since this morning, but very few tips are from around here. We had one woman convinced she saw Doyle in Saskatchewan. Forensics are still sweeping the gun store, and drone reports say that both models were off-the-shelf quadcopters. There was no remote ID broadcasting on either of them, which means either they were never registered or somebody stripped the firmware to kill the signal. No serials visible on the housing either time. Techs say the control link hops frequencies fast enough that even a receiver sitting right under it wouldn’t hold a lock long enough to triangulate anything.’

It was, Ella thought, a remarkably efficient way of saying every door is shut.

‘But I’m not going home until we’ve got something. I’ll stay here until Thanksgiving if we have to.’

Ella couldn’t confidently say that she’d known Rick Vernon long, or even known him at all. People contained multitudes, and only a small sample of those multitudes manifested in a work environment, especially for a man who was essentially a politician. But even so, Ella had never seen Vernon so driven.

Maybe it was optics. A press pool camped outside the building, a director who needed to be seen caring before somebody above him asked why he wasn’t. Maybe some staffer had already told him how all of this would look if Doyle killed a dozen more people and he hadn’t been there on the front lines. A man who could feel a shitstorm forming over his own head tended to move a lot faster than a man who couldn’t.

Or maybe this case had really gotten under his skin. At some point in the past 24 hours, maybe Rick Vernon had stopped treating this like another numbered casefile and started treating it like a woman who was killing the loved ones of his top agent.

Vernon set the laptop on the desk, opened it up and tapped the keyboard until the screen emerged from its slumber. He clicked around until a media player loaded up. ‘Here. Footage from the gun store.’

Grey, grainy footage materialized. Ella could see Darrell Saunders standing and rummaging through cabinets behind the counter when he turned and smiled toward the entrance. There was no audio, so Ella could only assume he’d been alerted by the sound of the bell.

Then a new person entered the shot, and Ella didn’t recognize them. It was clearly a woman, albeit one wearing an oversized cardigan and reading glasses. Her face was contoured differently, but there was no denying the walk. Within three seconds, Ella could confirm it was Doyle.

‘She’s dolled herself up,’ Ripley said. ‘The absolute shamelessness of this bitch.’

A conversation between the two took place, followed by Doyle spilling out a few rounds of ammunition on the counter.

‘No prizes for guessing where those bullets came from,’ Vernon said.

They were Ella’s bullets, from her short-lived Glock 19M.

After two minutes of back and forth, Darrell left the counter area and removed what looked to Ella like a Smith & Wesson Shield Plus from a nearby cabinet and handed it to Doyle. While Darrell’s back was turned, Doyle loaded up the firearm.

When Darrell turned around, he had, by Ella’s count, about two seconds to accept his fate.

From her Glock 19M to a bench in a metro station and into Darrell Saunders’s heart.

Ella wanted to put her hand through the screen. She wanted five minutes alone in a room with this woman and no rules about what happened in it.

She made herself watch the rest instead of looking away.

Doyle moved around the counter, unbothered by the corpse at her feet and the fact she’d committed homicide in broad daylight. She pulled what looked like three Sigs off the rack and fed them into her pockets.

She stepped once, carelessly, into the spreading pool under Darrell’s body, and then the spillage followed her in the form of footprints.

Her next step, half a stride further on, was the one with the cyan in it.

Ella leaned in until her nose was almost on the screen.

But then her phone buzzed in her pocket before she could think any further.

She checked it quickly.

A text from Roadrunner.

Meet me at Freedom Plaza ASAP. Leave your phone at HQ. Tell no one.

CHAPTER TWENTY