CHAPTER ELEVEN
They drove back across the state line, and by the time they reached the precinct it was gone ten.
The lights in the briefing room were down to half, the duty sergeant was eating something out of a foil tray at the front desk, and the only sound coming from the third floor was the building’s heating clearing its throat.
Ella was twenty dollars down, and all she had to show for it was an amateur painting.
Ella carried the painting up to the side office and leaned it against the wall under the window.
Ripley organized her case notes into a respectable pile, which was her sign that she was done for the day.
They’d talked it out in the car already, and between them they’d come back with nothing except Ella’s new piece of prison art.
Ripley had been walked round to two officers who’d worked Hayes’s unit before the move, and both had told her the same thing the other one had: Billy Hayes was the nicest armed robber they’d ever locked up.
The man had apparently been the most lovable criminal in the history of the Maryland penal system; friendly to new arrivals, generous with his commissary, the only man on the wing who could remember the staff’s wives’ names.
He had also, separately and without contradiction, grassed up so many of his fellow inmates that none of the staff could confidently narrow down the list of men who’d want him dead.
Word had eventually got out that Hayes was the snitch, the whole block had hated him for a stretch, they’d moved him to the cell at the end of the world and guarded him around the clock, and that was that.
‘We’re not cracking it tonight,’ Ripley said. ‘The correspondence and the visitor logs have got my name on them. They’ll keep ‘til morning. The faire’s not moving before Thursday. Hayes is on a slab, and he’ll be on the same slab tomorrow. Go home. Sleep. We’ll meet back here at nine.’
Ella was inclined to agree. ‘Fair enough. Back here at nine.’
‘Are you staying at your place?’
‘Why wouldn’t I stay at my place? Because of Doyle?’
‘Yeah.’
‘There are cops in my parking lot,’ Ella said. ‘And I’m not hiding from that bitch. If she wants to come at me, so be it.’
‘Makes sense. My spare room is available if you need it.’
‘Appreciated, but I’m good.’
Ella decided to leave her belongings behind.
She’d be back here in less than twelve hours anyway.
Ella killed the lights. The office went dark, and her laptop, paperwork, and painting went along with it.
At least Luca would be home. She held on to that as she stepped out into the corridor; the one good thing waiting at the other end of the drive, and let it pull her toward the stairs.
***
The two officers were still in the grey Ford in the parking lot when Ella pulled in just before eleven. A different pair of officers sat in the front, and the new pair tracked her car all the way to her bay and watched her get out. Ella raised a hand. One of them raised one back.
Inside her apartment, Ella searched for Luca and found him asleep.
She briefly transposed her own sleeping habits onto him and was concerned about waking him up, but then remembered he could sleep through a tsunami.
Ella moved to the window and parted the blinds.
Beyond the grey Ford, the parking lot ran down to the access road, and beyond the access road the city went on without her, lights at every floor of every block she could see.
Lindsey Doyle was inside one of those windows.
Or she was on a bus going past one of them.
Or she was in another city tonight altogether, and Ella’s apartment block was the last place in the world she happened to be.
Ella did not know which, and that not-knowing was the whole of the problem.
She’d spent two years inside Austin Creed’s head and could have walked anyone through a day of his thinking in order.
She had spent six months now on the woman who had loved him from the other side of a cell door, and she still couldn’t say much about her other than what she looked like.
And somewhere else in the same city, or the next one along, was a giant man roleplaying as a hangman.
Two killers.
One Ella.
She could not have said how. She had no evidence.
Doyle had come out of one prison and Billy Hayes had been put in the ground because of another prison, and that was the only connection between them. It was merely a coincidence of buildings.
But Ella couldn’t stop feeling that she was looking at the same thing from two sides.