Page 83 of Girl, Remembered

She knew that voice. A southern drawl, badly concealed.

‘Hello, Austin Creed. What can I do for you?’

‘Ask not what you can do for me, but what I can do for you.’

‘You’ve done enough for me.’

‘Not quite. Rumor has it that my old friend is no longer with us. Such a shame. She took great care of me, you know?’

‘I do know.’

‘I’m sure. Anyway, there may be more.’

Ella swallowed hard. It didn’t take a detective to work out what he was referring to. ‘How many more?’

‘I couldn’t tell you, but I can tell you how to find them all before they commit the horrible things that Lindsey has convinced them to do.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll tell you, if you promise me something.’

‘That depends.’

Creed laughed. ‘I want you to promise me that, when it’s time, you’ll send me straight to the chamber. Don’t delay my execution. I know the deal was that if I gave information I’d be spared, but I don’t want that. Let me go. Do you promise?’

Ella said nothing for a moment. Every version of justice she’d ever believed in ran on the assumption that death was the thing men like Creed feared most. And here he was, asking her to collect it early. If she said yes, she wasn’t punishing him. She was granting him an exit he’d chosen for himself, on his own terms.

The paradox hung there. The only way to make Creed’s death mean anything as a punishment was to deny it to him. And the only way to deny it to him was to let him live.

‘I can’t promise that,’ Ella said. ‘It’s not my choice.’

‘Very well. Then I can’t-’

‘No. Okay. I’ll try. How about that? I’ll try and get you executed.’ Ella felt sick saying it. Creed had killed five – no, seven people, if she included his father and Doyle’s father.

‘I know you’re just saying that, but that’s what I wanted to hear. Very well. I’ll tell you what I know. What Lindsey told me.’

‘Please. Tell me.’ Ella scrambled for her own cell phone and found her recording app.

‘Have you ever heard of the pelican in her piety?’ Creed asked, like he was settling in to tell a bedtime story. ‘No, ‘course you haven’t. Yankee girl like you.’

‘No, I haven’t. What is it?’

‘Down home, in Louisiana, the pelican’s sacred, you see. It’s our state bird. You’ll see her carved into everything. Church doors, gateposts, Bibles. The story goes that when there’s no food to be found, a mother pelican will tear open her own breast and feed her babies on her own blood. She’ll keep them alive with what’s inside her.’

‘Okay.’

‘It’s probably not true. I’m no biologist, but it doesn’t matter. What matters that folks believe it. My grandmother had one carved into the porch rail, and she made every child in that house touch its breast on the way in the door. For luck, she said. For protection.’

‘I had one too. A little music box. Pelican on the lid, wings spread, a drop of red paint right where the wound oughta be.’

Pelican.

Ella stormed out of her makeshift office and sprinted toward the Doyle war room, which, if earlier this afternoon was anything to go by, still had all of the evidence laid out. Alarm spread on the faces of her colleagues as they watched the mad woman dash through the corridors. Any sudden movement in HQ was a cause for concern, but it was better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

She burst into the war room and scanned the evidence table. It was all there.

Including the pelican music box.