Girl, Entangled (Ella Dark #33)

PROLOGUE

It was three in the morning, and the first serial killer Ella Dark had ever caught was sitting opposite her in five feet of steel.

Ankle chains. Waist chain. Handcuffs. The set ran a closed loop from his wrists down to his ankles, and a second loop secured him to a steel ring bolted into the floor of the Gulfstream.

Two U.S. Marshals stood at either end of the cabin.

A third sat by the door. Two were across the aisle with batons and what Ella was sure was a cattle prod.

Bullets didn’t do well in enclosed places like this, so if Austin Creed dared try anything, he’d be on the receiving end of a zapping.

Some would call it overkill for a frail man in his forties, but Vernon had insisted, the Bureau had insisted, the Marshal Service had insisted, and somewhere in the layered insistences they had ended up with the manpower for a mobile prison.

Austin Creed, despite all of this, didn’t seem to mind.

He was watching her. He had been watching her for the better part of thirty minutes.

His head was shaved smooth and his skin had turned ghostly pale due to the lack of sunlight.

The orange jumpsuit was loose on him. He had lost weight.

A lot of it. Death row had not agreed with the body, even if the man inside it appeared to be holding up fine.

Ripley was somewhere behind her, two rows back. Terrance Dever was there too. They’d trusted Ella to sit near Creed because, if he was going to talk to anyone, it would be her.

‘I said it earlier and I’ll say it again,’ Creed said. ‘You’ve been in the wars.’

He was no doubt referencing her split lip, which had been a result of her fight with a perpetrator in Louisiana about six hours ago.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Busy catching the bad guys, Ella? You mean I wasn’t the only one?’

‘The bad guys have a habit of catching themselves. And no, you’re not the only one, and you know that.’

‘Like I told you, Ella, we don’t exactly get the newspapers in Camp F. I don’t know who you are or what you’ve been up to.’

‘Sure,’ Ella said. It wasn’t the first time Austin Creed had claimed not to know anything about her, and the jury was still out on whether or not he was telling the truth.

They definitely did have access to information on the inside, but how much was a matter of how much the people in charge liked you.

‘Can I call you Ella? Are we friends now? On a first-name basis?’

‘We’ve never been anything else, Austin. You could say we’re friends for life.’

He liked that. He didn’t smile, but the line under his eyes pulled. He looked like a man enjoying a private dinner. ‘Could be a very short life, or so I hear.’

‘Yes, it could.’

Creed smiled. ‘So, remind me.’

Ella looked around to see who was eavesdropping. Judging by the amount of ears angled towards them, the answer was apparently everyone.

‘Remind you of what?’

‘Remind me why I’m–’ Creed glanced out of the window, despite it being pitch black outside – ‘somewhere over Tennessee, instead of in my comfortable cell back home.’

‘I’m sure the marshals told you everything.’

‘It all happened very quickly, and the altitude is making my head spin.’

Ella conceded he had a point. Creed was given the details and ushered onto a plane within an hour in the middle of the night.

‘There’s a woman in custody in D.C. She was arrested at my apartment sixteen days ago. We believe she’s Lindsey Doyle, the former corrections officer at your prison. We can’t confirm it forensically. You’re going to be put in a room with her. You’re going to tell us if she’s Lindsey Doyle or not.’

‘Interesting,’ Creed said.

‘Why’s that?’

Creed stretched his neck to look at Ripley and Dever down the aisle. Both had been dead quiet, but Ella knew they were listening to every word.

‘Well… does this woman look like Officer Doyle?’

‘Yes, she does.’

‘Does she talk like Officer Doyle?’

‘We don’t know. She hasn’t said anything.’

Creed bit his lip. ‘So, if she looks like Officer Doyle, what’s the problem?’

Ella wasn’t going to give anything away. Ella didn’t know anything about Creed and Doyle’s relationship, or whether one existed at all, or whether the relationship existed purely in Lindsey Doyle’s imagination. She also didn’t know if Creed was aware she had a twin sister.

‘There’s no problem. We need someone to confirm it’s her, and who better than the person who spent so much time with her.’

‘Okay, and if I confirm it’s her – then what?’

‘Then maybe that life of yours won’t be so short after all.’

Creed seemed to like that. ‘I see. I assume I’ll still spend the rest of my life in jail.’

‘Yes.’

‘But maybe with somewhere that has a library.’

Ella said, ‘Jury’s out on the library, but I’ll tell you what the prison won’t have and that’s a death chamber.’

He thought about that. His chains clinked.

One Marshal at the door read the movement and stepped half a pace closer, then stepped back when it was clear Creed was only laughing, internally, probably at the notion that he’d screwed up his life so much that his best case scenario was to spend that life in jail.

‘So, if I want my execution pardoned, all I have to say is that the woman is Officer Doyle. Am I hearing this correctly?’

Ella was aware of the complications. If Creed had half a brain in that misshapen head of his, he’d say whatever the FBI wanted to hear to get him out of a death sentence.

‘Yes. You’re hearing that correctly.’

He looked at her long enough that she felt her own pulse in the split in her lip.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘That is something to think about.’

***

At six A.M., Ella came off the steps behind Ripley.

Two Marshals walked Creed down between them at a pace that wasn’t fast and wasn’t slow and conveyed by length of stride alone that they would shoot him if he ran.

He shuffled down, because the ankle chains didn’t permit anything else.

When he reached the bottom of the ramp, Creed looked at the sky like he hadn’t seen it before.

Loading Creed into the van reminded Ella of a Formula 1 pitstop. He was in there before Ella had a chance to blink. Creed’s profile then disappeared behind the tinted windows, along with a driver and three Marshals. Two unmarked cruisers were either side of it.

‘Well,’ Ripley said. She had come up alongside Ella without making any noise about it.

‘I didn’t get as much out of him as I’d hoped.’

‘Dark, you didn’t really think he was going to spill his guts, did you? You know better than that.’

‘I suppose.’

Behind them, on the steps of the Gulfstream, Dever was on the phone. He had put on a fresh suit somewhere between Louisiana and the cabin overhead bin, and at seven in the morning on a runway it already looked slept-in. He had a hand cupped over the mouthpiece.

‘CDF. This is Dever, FBI. Yeah. Yeah, I know. No, I want her in the interview room in ten minutes. Microphone on. Cameras inside the room. Keep them running the whole time. Got it?’

Ripley nudged Ella and gestured to Dever. ‘Someone’s eager to put an end to this.’

‘Aren’t we all?’

Dever continued, ‘And no contact. No notifications to counsel until I clear it. I don’t care what the standing protocol is. If Stockley gets a phone call before we’re in the building, I’ll know where the call came from. All clear?’

Stockley was Creed’s lawyer, if memory served Ella correctly. He’d been the one to break the news that they couldn’t confirm whether or not the woman sitting in that cell was who they thought it was.

‘Good,’ Dever said. He hung up. He came down the steps.

He looked at Ella, and at Ripley, and at the waiting van with a serial killer inside.

‘Doyle will be waiting in the interview room when we get there. Dark, Ripley – keep your eyes peeled. If you see any sign of familiarity between them, make a note, because we can use it in court.’

‘Trust us, Terrance,’ said Ripley. ‘What cars are we in?’

‘Ripley, take the car with the officers. Dark, you’re with me. Let’s move before the commuters clog up the roads.’

Terrance Dever was less of an idiot this morning than he had sometimes been.

It was amazing what the prospect of results could do to a person.

Everyone dispersed. Ella took her spot in the cruiser with Dever beside her.

The van with Creed in it started rolling across the runway towards the track that led out into civilization.

***

The D.C. Central Detention Facility was an eight-mile drive from Reagan International.

They got to the observation room at six-thirty, and Ella saw Lindsey Doyle – or her sister – already sitting inside in the interview room.

Her dirty blonde hair was a straggly nest atop her head, and her brief time in the CDF had already begun shaping her into the archetypical emaciated female prisoner.

Ella, Ripley and Dever watched her through the one-way glass.

‘Ready?’ Dever asked.

It felt like days since Ella had slept, but even so, she was still wide awake despite her reflection in the glass adding fifteen years via fatigue. Ripley, however, looked as fresh as ever.

‘Ready,’ Ripley said. ‘Dark?’

‘Yeah. Bring him in.’

Dever motioned to two officers across the way, who then unlocked a door and brought Austin Creed through.

Stripped of the Louisiana sun and the death row backdrop, Creed could have been anyone.

In this confined environment, no one would have guessed he was the infamous Mimicker who had five bodies to his name.

He looked oddly at ease, and that induced the opposite response in Ella.

Dever said, ‘Mr. Creed, you know what we want from you.’

‘Not really,’ Creed said.

‘Go in and talk. Pretend like we’re not here. The officers will escort you in and restrain you to-’

‘No,’ Ella interrupted. ‘Take the chains off. No restraints.’

Dever and the officers glanced over at her. ‘No restraints?’

‘Yes. Trust me.’

He took a second, then leaned in. ‘Is that a good idea?’