Page 55 of Girl, Remembered

‘Mia, get your laptop.’

Ripley gestured. ‘It’s over there. Why?’

‘Load up your tracking software. We need to make a call.’

Vernon, who until now had been on a call of his own, stepped closer. ‘What’s going on? I only just got back from the gun store scene.’

Ella began to spill the words before her brain could catch up. ‘I have Doyle’s number. I’ve had it this whole time. Tracy said Lindsey’s been waiting for me. Now I know how to contact her.’

Ripley gave Ella a confused stare. She looked at Vernon, who paralleled the expression. ‘What? Doyle’s cell number?’

‘Yes. Well, no. Not her cell number. My cell number. Lindsey stole my phone last year. All I need to do is call myself.’

‘Dark, you might want to check that elephant memory of yours still works. We tracked the hell out of that phone for months. We called it constantly, every day. It never rang, and if she ever turned it on, we’d have got a hit.’

‘All Doyle had to do was steal the SIM card out of it. And we haven’t been tracing it for ages. We assumed she stole all my info and then ditched it, but what if we were wrong?’

Vernon said, ‘Then what are you waiting for? Call it. But how would it help us?’

‘I don’t know, but Doyle has a plan. If Tracy says she’s been waiting for me, then she wants contact with me.’

Ripley, having apparently conceded that it was worth a shot, grabbed her laptop from the far table. She found a USB cable in her case and passed it to Ella. ‘Go.’

Ella attached the phone. Ripley navigated to the software, and then three windows popped up on the screen.

The first was a map, black almost end to end. Second: a subscriber record. The third window was just a cursor, the word STANDBY, and a button reading INITIATE TRAP that Ripley hovered over. She said, ‘Rick, if this isn’t turns out not to be a waste of time, we need exigent circumstance paperwork after the fact, or none of it holds up in a courtroom.’

‘Done. Ella, make the call.’

Ella tapped the digits to her old cell from memory. When she did, her own name flashed up. ‘Mia. Say when.’

Ripley didn’t look away from the screen. ‘When.’

Dever, still by the door, hadn’t said a word since the car. Ella had almost forgotten he was there until she caught him watching the screen over Vernon’s shoulder

Ella hit CALL.

And unlike the last time she tried this, it didn’t go straight to voicemail.

***

Lindsey Doyle had been using this place as her hideout every time she came to D.C., and she liked to think that she knew it better than the man who owned it.

Although, to call it her hideout was inaccurate, because she was outdoors - and always had been.

She doubted that that little detail had aided her freedom throughout all of this, but it was certainly an advantage should the FBI descend on this place. The first rule of being a fugitive was to stay in open space. You couldn’t run very far when there was a wall in every direction, so Doyle – other than on a few choice occasions – had kept herself out in the open.

But even though she’d been living outdoors, she’d still been concealed from the world beyond her sphere. There was a huge building between her and the rest of society – not that there was much society to speak of around here. She heard the occasional passer-by, the occasional rumbling engine, but social interaction seemed to be a luxury in this slice of paradise. That was also why the particular building doubling as her shield was no longer in use, because the only people who came here were the people who knew it existed in the first place.

And in her short time here, she’d discovered a few interesting things about the building she was camping out behind.

There were no cameras on the outside, to her fortune.

But there was an alarm on the inside.

During a flash flood last month, Doyle had – in a moment of foolishness – tried to prize her way inside the building to escape the cold. The front doors were locked up tight, but the guy who’d been renovating this place had left one of the windows open to air out the fumes. Doyle had attempted to climb in, but then the flickering red sensor in the corner of the room had started blinking.

Doyle recognized it as a silent alarm.