Page 1 of Girl, Entangled

PROLOGUE

It was three in the morning, and the first serial killer Ella Dark had ever caught was sitting opposite her in five feet of steel.

Ankle chains. Waist chain. Handcuffs. The set ran a closed loop from his wrists down to his ankles, and a second loop secured him to a steel ring bolted into the floor of the Gulfstream. Two U.S. Marshals stood at either end of the cabin. A third sat by the door. Two were across the aisle with batons and what Ella was sure was a cattle prod. Bullets didn’t do well in enclosed places like this, so if Austin Creed dared try anything, he’d be on the receiving end of a zapping.

Some would call it overkill for a frail man in his forties, but Vernon had insisted, the Bureau had insisted, the Marshal Service had insisted, and somewhere in the layered insistences they had ended up with the manpower for a mobile prison.

Austin Creed, despite all of this, didn’t seem to mind.

He was watching her. He had been watching her for the better part of thirty minutes. His head was shaved smooth and his skin had turned ghostly pale due to the lack of sunlight. The orange jumpsuit was loose on him. He had lost weight. A lot of it. Death row had not agreed with the body, even if the man inside it appeared to be holding up fine.

Ripley was somewhere behind her, two rows back. Terrance Dever was there too. They’d trusted Ella to sit near Creed because, if he was going to talk to anyone, it would be her.

‘I said it earlier and I’ll say it again,’ Creed said. ‘You’ve been in the wars.’

He was no doubt referencing her split lip, which had been a result of her fight with a perpetrator in Louisiana about six hours ago.

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Busy catching the bad guys, Ella? You mean I wasn’t the only one?’

‘The bad guys have a habit of catching themselves. And no, you’re not the only one, and you know that.’

‘Like I told you, Ella, we don’t exactly get the newspapers in Camp F. I don’t know who you are or what you’ve been up to.’

‘Sure,’ Ella said. It wasn’t the first time Austin Creed had claimed not to know anything about her, and the jury was still out on whether or not he was telling the truth. They definitely did have access to information on the inside, but how much was a matter of how much the people in charge liked you.

‘Can I call you Ella? Are we friends now? On a first-name basis?’

‘We’ve never been anything else, Austin. You could say we’re friends for life.’

He liked that. He didn’t smile, but the line under his eyes pulled. He looked like a man enjoying a private dinner. ‘Could be a very short life, or so I hear.’

‘Yes, it could.’

Creed smiled. ‘So, remind me.’

Ella looked around to see who was eavesdropping. Judging by the amount of ears angled towards them, the answer was apparently everyone.

‘Remind you of what?’

‘Remind me why I’m–’ Creed glanced out of the window, despite it being pitch black outside – ‘somewhere over Tennessee, instead of in my comfortable cell back home.’

‘I’m sure the marshals told you everything.’

‘It all happened very quickly, and the altitude is making my head spin.’

Ella conceded he had a point. Creed was given the details and ushered onto a plane within an hour in the middle of the night.

‘There’s a woman in custody in D.C. She was arrested at my apartment sixteen days ago. We believe she’s Lindsey Doyle, the former corrections officer at your prison. We can’t confirm it forensically. You’re going to be put in a room with her. You’re going to tell us if she’s Lindsey Doyle or not.’

‘Interesting,’ Creed said.

‘Why’s that?’

Creed stretched his neck to look at Ripley and Dever down the aisle. Both had been dead quiet, but Ella knew they were listening to every word.

‘Well… does this woman look like Officer Doyle?’