Page 28 of Girl, Remembered

Therefore, Ella didn’t have much choice left.

‘No, it’s not Lindsey Doyle. It’s her sister. Her twin sister.’

‘Sister. That’s odd. She never mentioned a sister.’

‘Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought.’

For a second nothing moved on his face at all, and then the smile arrived, slow, and it wasn’t aimed at Ella. ‘No. Maybe I didn’t. Now I’m wondering what else she didn’t mention.’

Ella felt she’d chiseled a crack in the foundation of Winters and Doyle’s relationship. All she had to do was jab her tool in further and prize that thing open. ‘How about you tell me what she did mention? Did she say where she was staying in D.C.?’

Winters stared up at the ceiling, still wearing the smile from earlier. It looked almost like a weight had been lifted off, which was strange to think. ‘No. She never said specifically, but…’

‘But?’

‘No. It’s nothing.’

‘Gabriel, anything you say could be useful. Lindsey Doyle is out there right now, and has killed three people today, at least by proxy.’

‘By proxy, you say? As in, she got other people to do it for her?’

Ella nodded, then let Winters process the implication. He wasn’t the only disciple, and Ella had to assume that she led each disciple to think they were the one and only.

‘How disappointing.’

‘Isn’t it just?’

‘In that case, I’ll tell you something. I don’t know where Doyle hides out in this city, but she video called me multiple times from wherever she was staying at the time, which was about six months ago. She was always outdoors, and there was always a pond in the background. It was in a circle shape, about fifty feet in either direction at a guess. There were trees surrounding it on either side. Redwoods. That’s all I know.’

A pond.

Circular, fifty feet across, with redwoods on the bank. Ella turned it over and came up with nothing but the size of the problem. There were a thousand ponds in this city, and probably a hundred of them ringed with trees. Redwoods didn’t grow wild in D.C., which meant somebody had planted them, which meant it was private land.

‘Anything else? Any street noise, any signage, anything on the video call at all?’

‘No. That’s everything I’ve got.’

Ella stood. ‘Thank you. I’ll make sure the DA knows you cooperated. No chamber.’

Winters didn’t look up. ‘Funny thing. I never thought I’d be scared of dying. Twenty-five years in a box will strip that out of a man, or so I believed. Then this morning happened, and I found out I was wrong.’

Ella stopped at the door. She already knew.

‘You saw a drone outside your jail.’

He nodded, once, then breathed a sigh. ‘She called it the Purification Protocol. The spinning drone means death.’

Ella left Winters there and let the warden lock up behind her. Doyle had sent that same red light to Milwaukee and to Orleans Parish, and both men had done exactly what she’d asked of them.

She’d sent it to Winters too, and Winters was still breathing, still shackled to a table, still talking.

Doyle had tried to burn every one of her men down with her, and she hadn’t planned for one of them turning on her before the fire reached him.

The ball was in Ella’s court now. She just had to work out where to bounce it.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The war room used to be a file room, back before Doyle turned into a two-front problem. Ripley had commandeered it in a single morning: hauled out the old boxes, dragged in a folding table, and taped three whiteboards to a wall built for shelving. Now the table held everything. Before getting here, Ella had asked Amelia to dig into the Grey Room forum, and this time, she’d obliged her.