Page 17 of Girl, Remembered

‘Chief.’ Sergeant Okafor came up the ramp at a jog, which for Okafor meant something. Fifteen years in, built like a filing cabinet, the calmest man Hibbert had. He had his notebook out.

‘Tell me.’

‘Been on with Montgomery County and PG overnight desks, cross-checking the other two scenes like you asked.’ Okafor flipped a page. ‘Wheaton first. Dean Coyle, forty-two, ran the End Zone bar. Shot at close range locking up, sometime after three. Eleven casings. Whoever did it emptied the gun and then some. The shooter stood there and kept working the trigger on a dead man.’

‘Robbery?’

‘Nope. The wallet’s on the body and night’s takings still in the safe. Keys to the bar are in the victim’s pocket. But that’s not the thing.’ Okafor looked up. ‘County found hair at the scene. A clump of it, few inches, tied with thread, laid on the vic’s chest. Brown. Doesn’t match the victim, who’s mostly bald anyway.’

Three unrelated homicides.

Hibbert had told himself, driving over, that the word doing the load-bearing work in that sentence was unrelated.

‘Langley Park,’ Okafor went on. ‘The laundromat. The victim’s name is Humphries, fifty-four, county roads department, strangled, probably garroted judging by the imprint on his throat. And on his chest-’ Okafor ditched the notebook and found his cell. He showed Hibbert a picture.

It was a small brown coil of hair, bound with thread, laid on a dead man’s fleece.

‘The primary out there flagged it an hour ago,’ Okafor said. ‘Then the Wheaton primary heard and matched it. Then I heard…’ He tipped his head at the ground behind Hibbert.

Hibbert turned and said, ‘In her mouth.’

Three scenes. Three killers. No human could move from Wheaton to Langley Park to Silver Spring and carry out three separate hands-on murders in that window, not without a helicopter or a teleportation device. Three methods – a gun, a ligature, a knife. Nothing in common in how it was done, everything in common in one strange detail.

Three unconnected men had thought to leave that same strange detail on the same grey morning, which meant it wasn’t three men’s idea. It was one idea, handed to three men.

‘Chief, what the hell is going on?’ asked Okafor.

Nobody, especially at Hibbert’s level, should be above admitting defeat. Law enforcement attracted egotists, but it was the humble ones who got results.

‘I don’t know, but I know someone who might.’

Hibbert had only said goodbye to the woman a few hours ago. She’d think he was desperate, or useless, but Hibbert could live with that.

He needed to call Mia Ripley.

CHAPTER TEN

‘I still don’t understand how,’ Ella said.

She and Ripley were in the first-floor canteen. It was mostly empty at this hour, and quiet enough to talk. Ella was trying to wash away the exhaustion with sweet, black coffee, and she was fiddling with a deck of cards she’d found in her locker. Dever and Vernon had also pulled nearly-all-night shifts, and had spent the past ten minutes updating Ella on the current situation. The updates were minimal.

‘How what?’

In the few hours between finding Doyle’s discarded gun and now, Ripley had found time to go home, sleep, and return looking like she’d managed a full eight hours. By Ella’s math she’d gotten four hours at most, but Ripley had the ability to defy every reasonable expectation of a woman her age, out of what Ella assumed was pure rebellion.

‘How a woman like Doyle can manipulate people to commit serial murder and then eventually kill themselves. That’s not an easy thing to do.’

‘Are they safe?’ Ripley asked. ‘Doyle’s other men?’

‘Yes. Gabriel Winters and Simon Varro are both on suicide watch. They’re bringing Winters here, to D.C. I need to speak to him. If we can find out how these guys communicated with Doyle, we might be able to track her that way.’

‘Where’s Dever going to hold Winters? If he puts him in the same jail as Tracy, I’ll slap the stupid out of him.’

‘No. Not the D.C. Jail. Winters is going to the Correctional Treatment Facility.’

‘Good idea. Put a guy who killed a bunch of women in a jail full of women.’

The Correctional Treatment Facility was mostly used to house female criminals and juveniles, but it was one of two secure places in the district the Bureau could use to hold federal inmates when needed.