CHAPTER THREE
The paperwork was the first to go. She’d sat down with it at half nine, braced for a full day of it, and the forms had folded in just over an hour.
She’d logged every discharged bullet and every step in her previous two investigations all from memory, and even uploaded her medical reports and pictures of her injuries.
She filled the boxes, signed where the boxes told her to sign, uploaded the lot through the Bureau portal and watched the little wheel spin and then stop.
Done.
It was a strange feeling. Ella didn’t mind being home. She minded being kept home. If not for the context, she’d be happy to be here, but context was the whole of it. She made coffee and sat down at her kitchen table. She stared at her laptop home screen.
Now what?
Lindsey Doyle. Start there. Start with what was actually known. Make a list. Making lists often put things into perspective.
Ella began typing.
Lindsey Doyle was a former corrections officer at Louisiana State Penitentiary.
Angola. She’d worked Camp F, the same unit that housed Austin Creed, which meant she’d had hours, days, years of legitimate proximity to the serial killer known as the Mimicker.
Somewhere in those hours, the proximity had blossomed into an emotional connection.
A connection which Creed might not have returned.
She had a scar on her left forearm. Sharpened toothbrush, a canteen fight, fourteen stitches. It was in the file now. It would not be on the woman in the CDF cell, and it had not been on her, and that single absent inch of scar tissue was the reason Ella was sitting at her kitchen table now.
And Ella knew exactly what Lindsey Doyle looked like.
That was the strange, sour heart of it. She knew the dirty-blonde hair and the narrow face, because Ella had seen Doyle in the flesh twice, and a near-perfect copy of it all was currently sitting in a cell twenty miles away.
An identical twin. Ella had a photograph of the suspect any time she wanted one, but it didn’t help.
What else?
Lindsey Doyle had a burning hatred for Ella Dark because she believed that Ella Dark was the one responsible for putting Austin Creed on death row.
The truth wasn’t so black and white, but that didn’t matter to someone who could kill three people and sew their lips shut with strands of Ella’s hair, as Doyle had done.
To Doyle, Ella was Austin Creed’s captor, judge, jury and executioner, and in Doyle’s mind, that meant Ella had to be punished.
Doyle was also a master of disguise. Whenever she decided to show herself, she wouldn’t be wearing her real face.
Ella closed her document and opened up the Bureau database.
She pulled up what she could and within twenty minutes she had her nose against the limits of it.
There were no details on Doyle before Ella had discovered her name two months ago, and everything on Creed she already knew.
At HQ, Ella would have access to ViCAP, written reports, hard copies, terminals that talked to all other databases in the country. She didn’t have that from home.
She tried a few angles regardless. She searched the name and turned up a wedding in Baton Rouge from 2009 that might have been the same woman and might have been a stranger. That was the extent of it.
Ella sighed, shut the laptop and went to the window.
Her legs needed somewhere to go, and the window was the furthest that the apartment allowed.
Below, the parking lot sat under a clean spring sky, and four rows back, nose-out for a fast exit the way they were taught, was a grey Ford with two people in the front.
One drank from a travel mug. The other held a phone to their ear.
Her babysitters. Vernon had promised she wouldn’t see them. Vernon was wrong about the small things as reliably as he was right about the large ones.
Ella shut the blinds. The apartment descended into darkness. Ella sat down and worked out what to do next.