Page 79 of Girl, Remembered

How many more did she have? Who else out there had worshipped at her altar and was planning on beginning a murder spree of their own?

Impossible to know.

But she’d find out.

‘Miss, you’re up,’ a medic called from the back of the ambulance.

‘Dark, go. I’ll call you tomorrow. Or today.’

‘You going home?’

‘Gotta grab some things from the office, then I’m going to pass out in bed.’ She turned to Edis. ‘Will, you need a hand?’

Edis climbed to his feet. ‘I’m good. Nothing a whisky won’t fix.’

Ripley shoved the bottle into his hands. ‘Rum was all you had.’

‘Of course.’ Edis took it. Ella climbed into the ambulance. The night was over, and tomorrow she’d put this whole thing down on paper.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

It was two in the morning, and Ripley had returned to the evidence room at HQ to pick up her things. The past twenty-four hours had been a whirlwind, and now she could finally breathe easily. Ripley had been beside Ella throughout this whole Doyle case, and she’d never seen the poor girl so eaten up by anything.

Now it was over, and they could both move on.

‘You just can’t keep away, can you?’

The door was open, and Rick Vernon filled the space. The injury he’d suffered earlier tonight had split his bottom lip in two.

‘Neither can you.’

‘Just making the most of what time I’ve got left.’

‘Rick, you don’t really believe that, do you?’

Vernon shrugged. ‘You’ve been here how long? Thirty years?’

‘Thirty-four years.’

‘So you know this world better than I do. The whole Mid-Atlantic’s been on lockdown. Every news station in the world is talking about today’s four murders. I’ve got a meeting with the Attorney General in the morning. Some journalist will FOIA the details of tonight and it’ll be headlines for weeks. How do you think that ends?’

‘It ends with the world knowing that we took down four killers – one of which was a known fugitive – in one day. Thirty-four years and I’ve never seen that done before.’

‘If only. Be honest, you know how this works. You build a hundred bridges and they won’t call you a bridge builder. You fuc-’

‘Yeah, I know the saying, Rick. So you’ll get your ass handed to you. So what? Take the spanking and move on. You might get fired, you might not.’

‘You make it sound so simple.’

‘It is. I’ve seen five directors come and go, and they all got spanked to oblivion one way or another. Public humiliation is par for the course.’

‘Certainly, and then there’s the situation with Dever. He has to go, and I’ll have to explain why. That means another round of how did this happen on your watch? The senate will have me over a barrel. How did we not know that the man in charge of the task force had a personal connection to the woman he was hunting? He was their goddamn legal guardians, for God’s sake.’

Ripley couldn’t deny that it looked bad for Vernon. Dever, on the other hand, was completely screwed. She’d be surprised if he wasn’t banned from government jobs for the rest of his life.

‘You didn’t know. It’s Dever’s responsibility to speak up,’ said Ripley. It wasn’t strictly true. It was Vernon’s job to vet every member of staff he assigned to a high-profile position, but since Ripley had seen Vernon actually put the effort in today, her old hatred of him had lessened, so she couldn’t bring herself to outright tell him that there was a good chance he was up shit creek.

‘Either way, I’m not holding out much hope for a job by Monday, so I’ll just say: thanks for working with us on this. If you weren’t there tonight, I don’t know what we’d have done.’