CHAPTER TWO
It had been a week since Austin Creed sat in a chair at the Central Detention Facility and told them the woman in the cell was not Lindsey Doyle.
The week had been mandatory recovery leave.
Ella had spent it at home, not recovering.
Today it was over. She got out of the shower and looked in the mirror.
The black eye had gone down to a yellow smudge.
The split in her lip had closed. A week of leave had done that much, at least. She looked at her hair, decided it was a ponytail day and pulled it back.
Luca was in the bedroom when she came through.
He had his work trousers on. His belt was half threaded and there was a shirt over one shoulder he hadn’t put on yet.
Luca with his shirt off and his trousers on was, under normal conditions, one of the small reliable pleasures of Ella’s morning. Today, that pleasure wasn’t there.
‘Ponytail,’ Luca said. He was watching her in the mirror. ‘That bad?’
‘It’s not a mood ring.’
‘It’s kind of a mood ring. You know, you could ask for another week off. Vernon won’t fire you.’
‘What good would that do, Hawkins?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I think you want to hear. That’s what men do.’
‘That’s only a bit true. But no, I need to speak with Vernon and Dever ASAP. There must have been some updates in the past week, but they’ve left me in the dark, as usual. What are your plans?’
‘Plans? Ell, most people in the Bureau, including me, do the same thing day in and day out. It’s only you field people that find themselves on the business end of knives and rifles every week.’
She thought of her old job in Intelligence, when the days were long but the years were short. ‘Fair point, but I still don’t know what your plans are, even after that spiel.’
‘Then you haven’t been paying attention.’ Luca applied gel to his hair, which Ella didn’t think was allowed because some of the chemicals in gel were flammable. It sounded absurd, but in the nineties, explosives sometimes set responders’ hair on fire. Ella had seen the training videos.
‘You’re still training with the DEA.’
‘Right. I’m actually coming round to the idea of working for them. The cartels and the DEA have a handshake agreement, you know? The chances of getting murdered by cartel members are practically zero.’
Ella liked to think that Luca had seen the clientele that came with fieldwork in the BAU and had done whatever he could to get away from it. She considered that a success.
‘You should absolutely stick with the DEA. Are we heading in together?’
‘Afraid not. I’m staying late tonight, so if you want to leave before eight o’clock, you’ll have to drive yourself.’
Ella noted it and began getting dressed.
Another week off would be futile. She had a mountain of paperwork to fill out when she got back to the office, and no amount of murderous twin sisters would change that.
She’d done what she could to track down the real Doyle while she’d been at home, but her resources here were limited, and Vernon had told her that if he saw her at the office he’d banish her to counter-terrorism for a week. Ella hadn’t risked it.
‘You know, Creed might be lying to you,’ Luca said, now fully dressed. ‘Call me na?ve, but I think a guy who killed five people wouldn’t have a problem lying to the cops.’
‘That’s what I’ve been thinking, but if Creed is lying it means he’s choosing his own life over Doyle’s. Creed is a selfish kid in a man’s body, so under no circumstances would he lie to save someone else.’
‘He’s been in prison for – what, two years? And in a supermax to boot. He’s at the bottom of the rung and he’s surrounded by lifers, gang bangers. He’s probably had more things up his ass than he can count. That would make any man want to die.’
‘I’m sure he’s getting stuffed six ways to Sunday, but it’s not in Creed’s disposition to accept death over whatever the other inmates are putting him through.’
‘Sure it is. If he accepts life imprisonment, they’d move him to D.C., right? That means he’d be going into a whole new prison system. He’d be fresh meat all over again. Anyway, I’ve gotta go. Some of us still like to put the effort in.’
Luca kissed her goodbye and made for the door. Ella hurried through her morning ritual, because when she got to HQ, she needed to have a serious talk with Dever and Vernon.
***
‘Miss Dark, would you like to be a guinea pig?’
Rick Vernon, also known around HQ as Slick Rick, rested his hand on a black case.
He slid it across his gigantic desk with a squeak.
Terrance Dever, the man in charge of the Lindsey Doyle investigation, leaned against the wall behind Vernon’s desk with his arms folded.
His fuzzy brown hair reminded Ella of a wild bear, which made him look like he was Vernon’s mascot.
Ella eyeballed the case. She didn’t trust anything that came out of black cases on principle. It looked like the box she kept her screwdriver and accompanying heads in at home.
‘A guinea pig for what?’
Vernon gestured. ‘Open it up.’
‘It’s not going to explode, is it?’
‘Depends.’
Ella unhooked the clasps and opened up the case. Inside was a sleek, dark grey Glock 19M.
‘That’s a pistol.’
‘Yes, it is. Take a look.’
Ella lifted it out of its foam casing. It was much lighter than her 17M model.
The slide had been milled. Two oval ports had been cut behind the front sight so the barrel showed through.
The factory sights were gone, swapped for a low red-dot optic with tall irons standing up behind it.
The grip had been stippled by hand so the polymer melted into a rough texture.
‘Very nice,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a factory model. Why am I holding it?’
‘Because, Miss Dark, those guns will be standard issue for everyone in the Bureau. You’re holding one of five prototypes. You do more miles than anybody here, so I thought you’d get some use out of it.’
‘It’s a Glock 19,’ Ella said. ‘Ripley’s had one of these for over a year. They’re already standard issue.’
‘Not quite.’ Vernon let the not sit there. ‘What Ripley’s got is a 19M. What you’re holding is a 19M with something extra inside it.’
‘Oh?’
‘There’s a tracker in the frame,’ Vernon said.
‘And before you say it, no, it’s not one of those flimsy coin-sized things.
It’s not an AirTag. It’s built into the polymer, wired through the backstrap.
You can’t pop it out. You can’t switch it off.
Short of taking an angle grinder to the gun, it stays where it is. ’
Ella turned the pistol over again. Held it up to the window light. There was nothing to see. Whoever had done the work had done it well. ‘And it exists because?’
‘Because a few months ago, Agent Byford lost his gun in an airport in London. Someone found it days later and shut down Heathrow Airport for eight hours. We had to compensate the airport for delays, and that’s why you and everyone else here won’t have free champagne at Christmas.’
Dever shifted against the wall but didn’t say anything. Ella set the Glock back in its foam. She didn’t let go of it.
‘Lost guns,’ she said. ‘That’s the pitch.’
‘That’s the reason. You want it or not?’
Ella didn’t share Ripley’s disdain for Rick Vernon because he’d been nothing but nice to her since day one.
This move, however, felt like it had an ulterior motive.
Field agents already had trackers on their cell phones, although Ripley had somehow disabled hers without any repercussions.
Ella, however, didn’t have the sway that Ripley did.
Why did agents need two trackers on them?
Or maybe she was being paranoid and this genuinely was about lost guns.
‘I’ll take it. Thank you. Do I need to sign anything?’ She decided that a pistol upgrade wasn’t the worst thing in the world, tracker or no tracker.
‘Take it down to Davies in the armory. He’ll log the serial, run you through the optic, and put it on your card. Then go home.’
Ella thought she’d imagined the last part, but Vernon’s smug grin said otherwise. ‘Home? I’ve just spent a week at home.’
‘Then spend another week at home,’ Dever piped up. He stepped forward and fell in line with Vernon. ‘There’s no movement on the Doyle-Creed situation, and your pal Ripley is tied up with something else.’
‘Tied up with what?’ Ella asked.
‘Something else,’ Dever said again, which wasn’t an answer, and he clearly didn’t intend it to be one.
Ella looked from Dever to Vernon and back. ‘So that’s it. You upgrade my gun and send me home? I’ve got a mountain of forms to fill out for the past few cases. I can’t just go home.’
‘Take it with you,’ Dever said. ‘And maybe take two plain clothes with you. To sit outside your apartment.’
Now she clocked the ulterior motive. She sat back and folded her arms. ‘I see. You want me as Doyle bait.’
Dever had the courtesy to look mildly embarrassed. ‘Ella, you know as well as we do – better than we do, in fact – that the real Lindsey Doyle will come for you soon. Why chase her when he can lure her?’
Ella pushed the Glock away from her, because if Dever insinuated that she was killer bait again she might shoot him.
She’d done all of the work for the Doyle case while Dever and Vernon sat on their asses, and it seemed that the best idea they’d come up with while she was at home was to use Ella as a human mousetrap.
But were they wrong?
Doyle would come. She’d come for Ella, like she’d come for her friends. But Ella wasn’t just going to sit around and wait for a killer to show up on her doorstep, because she could be waiting for years, and what if Doyle struck when Ella wasn’t at home? No amount of waiting cops would change that.
‘That means you think the woman in custody really is Tracy Doyle.’
Vernon said, ‘We requested the files from Creed’s prison. Lindsey Doyle was attacked by an inmate last year. She broke up a fight in the canteen and ended up with a sharpened toothbrush in her left forearm.’
‘And the woman in the cell had no such mark?’
‘No. We had a doctor inspect her. No scars.’
‘So Creed was telling the truth. What’s going to happen to him now?’
Dever scratched his neck and retreated to the window. ‘Things are still being decided.’
‘That’s a very passive way of saying you don’t know what to do with him. Let me guess: you’re thinking about reducing his sentence to life imprisonment because he told the truth.’
Dever looked at Vernon, then back at Ella. ‘Yes. How would you feel about that?’
Seven months ago, Ella had been in the room – with Lindsey Doyle beside her – when Ella had helped secure Creed his upcoming death sentence.
The verdict had induced a carousel of questions, and the fact it induced any questions at all meant Ella wasn’t sure the verdict was the right one.
The problem with a death sentence was that no living soul knew just how much of a punishment death really was.
‘I think Creed should live out his days in jail, but it’s not my choice to make. Has he gone back to Louisiana?’
‘No,’ Dever said. ‘We transferred him to Mount Olive for the time being. He’s safe there.’
‘Good,’ Ella said. Mount Olive was a correctional facility in Fayette County, three hundred miles from D.C. ‘So, back to the topic at hand, you want me on house arrest? Is that right?’
‘Miss Dark, if someone gave me the chance to spend a week at home, I’d jump at the chance. We’ll have two cops from the MPD sit in your parking lot. Come back in next Monday, see how the land lies, and we’ll go from there. How’s that sound?’
Ella thought it over. The honest answer was that nothing was waiting for her at the office that couldn’t follow her home.
The paperwork was digital. The Doyle situation, for all its weight, currently amounted to two people sitting in two cells, and neither of them needed Ella in the building to keep sitting there.
The offer was fine, but what bothered her was the framing.
It was house arrest presented to her as though it was a treat.
She now had week of being a stationary target with two MPD officers eating gas-station sandwiches in her parking lot, all of them waiting on a woman who might not come for a year.
‘I’ll take the week,’ she said. ‘But understand something. I’m not putting myself under glass. If I want to buy groceries, I’ll buy groceries.’ Ella tried to think of another common situation where she might need to leave the house but none came. She realized it made her look slightly pitiful.
Vernon and Dever exchanged a look. Whatever silent conversation took place, it landed on Vernon’s side.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘And feel free to take your new firearm. I don’t suppose you’ll get much use out of it, but it’s yours nonetheless.’
‘Thank you.’ Ella collected her things. ‘Keep me updated if anything happens?’
Dever said, ‘You got it. We’ll have MPD officers outside your place within the hour.’
She nodded her thanks and left the office. She guessed she was headed home, apparently to wait for Lindsey Doyle to just show up at her door.
Ella had no intention of letting it play out that way.