Page 72 of Girl, Entangled

But Ella looked at the bullet scars embedded into the rafters, three of them, raining a slow drift of dust into the light. She looked at her holster where he Glock should have been.

And she knew.

The drugs had taken her legs and her stomach and any clarity in her thoughts, but they had not put a woman in this room.

Lindsey Doyle had been here. Doyle had stood ten feet away with the gun she’d taken off Ella’s own hip, and Doyle had walked out through a wall while Ella was held off the ground by a giant’s arm.

Not a ghost. Not a fever. Real, and gone.

Ripley dispersed from a group of officers who were inspecting the very real human bones heaped near the wall. She came and sat next to Ella on the basement floor.

‘I expected the worst. I didn’t expect this.’

‘It’s pretty rough, even by our standards.’

‘You seen a doctor about those wounds yet?’

Ella touched her neck. ‘I had a once-over. Apparently I burst a blood vessel.’

‘Nice. And the poison?’

‘I’m fine poison-wise. I sicked it all up. They only injected me with a small dose.’

‘Sure. Ketamine’s a recreational drug in some places. You’ll be fine.’

‘Agreed,’ Ella said. ‘Any sightings of her?’

Ripley shook her head. ‘No, but Vernon’s got guys looking everywhere for her. He’s pulled cops from the MPD to cover more ground.’

‘Good. Once I’m done here, I’m going hunting for her too. Are you coming?’

‘Like hell you are, Dark. Recover. We know Doyle’s in the city or close enough. She can’t hide forever.’

‘No, but she can train more serial killers to do her bidding. Why did none of those guys – Borden, Winters, Tanner – mention they had a mentor? They should have mentioned it straight away to get diminished responsibility.’

‘They might still. They’re all still awaiting trial. Oh, and did you consider the possibility that Doyle might be lying?’

‘Of course.’

‘Consider it harder, because I think she was just messing with you.’

Ella wasn’t so sure. ‘But how did she know that I was the one who caught those killers? That’s not public knowledge.’

‘Dark, if there’s a serial case in America, there’s only two people it’s going to fall to. That’s me and you. Doyle was probably just playing the odds.’

‘Maybe. How’s the victim?’

Ripley glanced at the pool of blood about twenty feet away. ‘Which one?’

‘The innocent one.’

‘Well, I don’t know about innocent. Thomas Greaves wasn’t guilty, and Barton put him to death.’

‘We don’t actually know that Thomas Greaves wasn’t guilty, by the way. I’m not taking the word of a pathological imposter as gospel. We’ll probably never know the truth.’

Ripley said, ‘Nope, but I do know that this Simon Varro guy murdered three people and was planning on murdering at least one more. We took his hood off, by the way.’

It only now occurred to Ella that she hadn’t seen Simon Varro without his mask on, at least not in the flesh.