Page 5

Ella watched the ancient clock tower across from the Hoover Building tick toward nine AM. Edis had taken her watch and phone last night, along with her dignity. Her only concept of time came from that dead church's clock, which, for all she knew, might have been as reliable as using the sun's position in a town that never saw sunlight.

Eight minutes gone. Thank God for small mercies - like the private bathroom attached to this conference room. At least she'd been spared the final indignity of having to beg her jailers for bathroom breaks. Without the bathroom, she might have added another charge to her rap sheet: pissing on federal property. Although maybe that's what this place deserved after everything they'd put her through.

D.C. sprawled below her, indifferent to her predicament. From seven floors up, the city looked like a model train set - tiny cars following preset paths, ant-sized people scurrying between buildings. All of them free. None of them locked in glass boxes while their lives were dissected by former friends.

Nine minutes. One minute until she walked. Her muscles tensed in preparation for the confrontation to come, because she doubted she’d make it seven floors down without someone trying to stop her or give their unsolicited opinion about something she didn’t have space to care about anymore. She'd walk out of here with her head high, dignity intact.

Then the door creaked open again. Ella didn’t even turn around. ‘Arrived with one minute to spare,’ she said.

‘One minute early.’ A voice that didn’t belong to Edis sliced through the air. ‘Right on time.’

The words bypassed Ella's ears and hit her spine. Static shot through her system, because Ella filed that voice alongside gunfights and panic attacks and countless moments when she’d teetered on the edge of death. And even so, five months of silence hadn't dulled its ability to flip switches in her brain that she'd thought were permanently off .

Ella turned. The motion felt underwater-slow, like her body was fighting against the laws of physics. Edis stood in the doorway – but he wasn’t alone.

Time hiccupped. Ella's hand found the window ledge before gravity could introduce her face to the carpet.

Because standing there like a ghost made flesh was Mia Ripley.

Laptop under one arm, bag slung over the other. Hooded she might be, but Ella could recognize that outline, that voice, that presence from the grave.

What the hell was going on?

Ella’s mind split into parallel tracks. One wanted to run over to Ripley, tell her how much she’d missed her, make sure that her old partner standing here wasn’t a hallucination. The other track wanted to tell Ripley to leave this place and never look back – again.

‘Mia? You’re…’ Too many words fought for proclamation. ‘Alive.’

Ripley surged forward, pulled a laptop from under her arm and laid it on the desk. She pulled her hood down. ‘If I’m dead, you’ve been dead for years.’

Five goddamn months of nothing, and now here Ripley stood. Unannounced and uninvited, sauntering in like no time had passed at all. Ripley's cream hoodie and faded jeans screamed civilian, and her usually captive ponytail had become a waterfall of flowing red locks. It was a look that said I garden now instead of I hunt killers . Dimly, Ella registered Edis hovering behind Ripley, but he might as well have been a cardboard cutout for all the attention she paid him.

‘This isn’t… you can’t be here.’

‘And yet I am. I expected a warmer reception, honestly.’

‘Sorry, I mean… what are you doing here? You’re retired. You shouldn’t be here.’

Ripley’s razor-sharp eyes hadn’t lost their edge, and Ella guessed they weren’t here to offer comfort. They were here to dissect and analyze and profile. Edis had brought back the one person who knew all her secrets and all the little cracks in her perfect profiler facade. This was his masterstroke.

‘I’m here to help you, Dark.’ She turned to the director. ‘Shut the door, Will.’

He complied. Mia wasted no time opening her laptop and jabbing the power button. Five months away hadn’t dulled her technological impatience, but it had given her a healthy glow she didn’t have before. Ella was still struggling to process everything.

‘Mia… are you… back?’

‘Like hell am I back. I’m doing this then I’m going home.’ She looked her old partner up and down. ‘Jesus, Dark, you lost weight?’

Ella inspected her hips. ‘I don’t know. You’re looking pretty good, though.’

‘Yeah, well, getting away from this place will do that to you. Edis tells me you’ve found yourself in some trouble.’

'Apparently, I murdered my roommate and my landlord.' Ella shot Edis a look of steel. 'If you can believe it.'

‘I know. Edis has told me everything, and I’m here to throw you a life jacket.’

Relief reared its head, even though Ella shouldn’t need a former, now-retired partner to bail her out. But then relief accelerated towards dread, because if Ripley had something that could exonerate Ella, it suggested Ripley was on the periphery of this bizarre game too.

‘What do you have?’

Ripley’s laptop came to life. She clicked, opened up a folder and found an MP4 file. The screen filled with a grainy feed of a vast driveway. One that Ella had visited countless times. Edis appeared beside her.

Mia said, ‘This is outside my house two nights ago.’

Ella clocked the timestamp in the bottom corner. One AM, Monday night, rolling into Tuesday morning. There were rows of flowerbeds flanking either side of the driveway and two cars between them.

‘What exactly are we looking at?’ The question came out with a surplus of venom. Her brain felt waterlogged, struggling to process Ripley's sudden resurrection while simultaneously trying to focus on whatever horror show was about to unfold on screen.

‘Just wait.’ Ripley's shoulder brushed against hers. How many times had they stood like this, heads bent together over evidence, piecing together the fractured brains of killers? The familiarity of it made her want to scream or cry or put her fist through the nearest wall.

Movement on the screen. A figure emerged from the darkness, dressed in black. Average height, maybe five-five or five-six. They moved with an uncertain energy, like someone trying to convince themselves they belonged there. They weren’t the calculated movements of a practiced killer, but the hesitant steps of someone possibly learning to become one.

The figure lingered near Ripley's flower beds. Their posture was a mirror of Ella's own build. The slight forward tilt of the shoulders, that distinctive way of distributing weight on the balls of the feet rather than the heels. They were the kind of details only someone who'd studied her closely would know to replicate.

The figure stood there for what felt like forever, radiating indecision. Then they reached Ripley's door and paused on the threshold.

For a moment, Ella thought the figure might turn back and melt away into the night from whence it came. But then, with a jerky motion, it bent and placed something on the welcome mat.

Then, without ceremony or flair, the figure turned and retreated. It moved faster now, and within seconds it had vanished back into the shadows, leaving only the innocuous little parcel as proof it had ever been there at all.

Ripley stopped the playback. Ella's brain shuffled through the implications like a deck of marked cards. The build, the height, that peculiar way of holding themselves. Was it all designed to lead back to her?

Ella turned to Mia. ‘What did he leave on your doorstep?’

‘Not what. Who.’

‘Huh?’

Ripley reached into her purse, pulled out a plastic bag, and Ella's heart plummeted through the floor. There, nestled in sterile plastic, was a matted hank of hair. Thin, brittle, uncharacteristically frizzy.

‘This figure arrived, scoped the place out, then left this gift behind. My house is a fortress, so even the dumbest criminal wouldn’t waste their time trying to get in.’ Mia turned to Ella. ‘Dark. I’m guessing this wasn’t you.’

Ella checked the timestamp again, then did the quick math. This figure appeared on Mia’s driveway two nights ago, when Ella was a hundred miles away from D.C.

'No. I was in a motel in Virginia. Luca was there. People saw me. There'll be CCTV. Check the motel registry, credit statements, vehicle GPS. The figure looks like me, but I promise you it's not.'

Ripley held the plastic bag to Ella’s head. ‘Look at that. It’s a color match. Someone left me a ball of your hair, Dark. ’

Ella took it out of her hands and inspected it. If this killer was trying to frame her, why would they do this? To send a message? Maybe to frame Ripley instead? The questions piled up, each one amplifying the headache that had taken up residence between her eyes.

Edis exhaled so hard his tie would have fluttered if he'd been wearing one. Something in his face shifted, like ice breaking up in spring. ‘It’s a start, but it won’t completely absolve Ella in the police’s eyes. Mia, you have any idea who this person on the footage might be?’

‘No, but I’ll find out, because here’s the thing.’ Ripley tapped a knuckle on the screen. ‘I don’t live in that house anymore. I gave it to my son and his family, which means this figure – whoever it was – came within spitting distance of my grandson, and anyone who puts my grandson in danger is getting their arms ripped off.’

Despite the circumstances, Ella couldn’t help but smile. Ripley’s eviscerate-first, ask-questions-later approach had been a core component of their relationship, and for the past five months, Ella had felt naked without it.

But then, still scrutinizing the hair, she noticed something.

‘Mia, you said this was a color match.’

‘Looks like it to me.’

‘No, look closer.’ Ella held the bag up to the light. ‘Look at the roots of these strands. They’re light brown. My natural color. But I dyed my hair last month.’

Ripley inspected Ella’s scalp, like the world’s most reluctant hairdresser. ‘So you did. You just colored the roots?’

‘Yeah. Which means…’

‘Whoever is doing this has access to old strands of your hair.’ Ripley plucked a lone hair from Ella’s head. She flinched at the pain. It was funny how the little things hurt more than major wounds these days.

‘Thanks for the warning,’ Ella said.

Ripley held one of Ella’s strands next to the batch inside the bag. ‘Interesting. That explains something I was wondering about. Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’

‘I’m struggling to see anything right now, Mia.’

‘Then I don’t want to make sweeping statements since I’ve only been on the case for five minutes, but let me enlighten you. Your hair is naturally straight. The hair in this little batch isn’t. Why might that be?’

Frustration rose in Ella’s gut. ‘Mia, now’s not the time for one of your teaching moments. Just tell me what you’re thinking.’

‘Well, hair’s a funny thing. It changes when it's separated from its natural oils. Gets brittle. Starts curling in ways it never would naturally. Especially when it's been sitting in one place for months, gathering dust and grease and God knows what else. See how it's matted here? This hair’s been sitting somewhere, collecting dust, getting tangled. The cuticles start to raise when that happens. Like tiny scales lifting up along each strand. That's why it looks frizzy and unnatural.’

Ella leaned closer, studying the brittle, lifeless strands. ‘You sure?’

‘Thirty years in this game, you learn a lot about hair samples, but that’s not the interesting part. ‘Look at how these strands are clustered together. See how they're all roughly the same length, how they're tangled at one end but relatively clean at the other?’

‘Yeah. You mean…?’ Ella trailed off as understanding began to dawn. ‘This killer didn’t pluck these hairs off my head.’

‘No. This killer has your hairbrush, Dark. And they've had it long enough for the hair to degrade like this.’

Hairbrushes. How many did she own? The paddle brush she kept by her bathroom sink. The purple round brush that lived in her travel bag. The emergency mini-brush perpetually lost somewhere in the depths of her purse. The wooden detangler Luca had bought her that she'd left - where? Her desk at HQ? Her locker? Her perfect memory was suddenly fuzzy around this mundane detail. When was the last time she'd noticed one missing? Had she ever?

It was the curse of her professional life. Able to recall every detail of every crime scene she'd ever walked through, yet utterly blind to the migration patterns of her own everyday possessions.

The implications hit her like a slap. Someone had been in her space, rifling through her belongings, harvesting pieces of her for tools in a game of death. How long had this person been planning this, to get close enough to steal her hair without her noticing? And why go to such lengths to frame her, only to leave evidence pointing away from her guilt?

Before she could voice any of the questions cartwheeling through her brain, Edis cleared his throat. Ella startled; she'd almost forgotten he was there.

‘Mia. A word in my office?’

‘Now?’ Ripley arched an eyebrow .

‘Now.’ His tone left no room for argument. ‘Agent Dark, stay put. We won't be long.’

Ella watched them leave, and she was left with her thoughts and a bag of her own dead hair for company. She could only wonder how many more revelations would emerge from this day that had already lasted several lifetimes.