Page 48 of Girl, Entangled

Over the next year, he’d found ways to be in the same place at the same time every week, just so he could spend time with the fellow giant.

From there, their friendship grew. The big man had talked at him, and while he hadn’t understood every word, he remembered every word. He could still recite the conversations now, years later, in the order they had happened.

But before long, the other giant was taken from him.

That time in his life felt aeons ago, but he hadn’t forgotten the silent promise he’d made to his new friend.

The list had been four names long when he had started.

It was one name long now. He had written the four in the back of the notebook his mother had given him for his tenth birthday; the same notebook with the names from school in the front, and he had crossed three of the four through with a single ruled line each, as the man in chains had taught him.

The fourth name was still there.

After the fourth there would be no more. He and the thing on the wall could go somewhere quiet and stop. That would be enough.

Then he went to the bench, and picked up the phone, and dialed the only number he ever dialed, to tell his new mentor it was almost finished.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Ella woke because somebody was saying her name, and for a moment she did not know which somebody, or which room, or which case was the reason for her sudden memory loss.

‘Dark. Get up.’

The side of her face was stuck to a sheet of paper. She came up off the desk and the paper came with her, then peeled away from her cheek and hung there a second before it dropped back down.

‘Hello.’

‘Yes, hello,’ Ripley said. ‘Do you sleep better in police stations or something?’

Details of yesterday returned: the burned victim and the strange revelation about all of this having to do with the murder of a woman named Mary Monroe, and then her descent into the life and trials of a dead man named Thomas Greaves.

And what a journey it had been.

The thought woke her up. Ella erased the sleep from her eyes with a violent scrub and said, ‘Mia, listen, I found something last night.’

‘I bet you did. Thanks for leaving me at the crime scene, by the way. Hibbert was kind enough to drop me home.’

‘Sorry. A spark hit me. Do you remember that-’

‘Jennifer Darling,’ Ripley interrupted as she dropped a stack of papers on the desk. ‘That’s her name.’

Ella quickly glanced over them. They were from the Medical Examiner’s Office, but it wasn’t a full autopsy report. ‘What’s this? A preliminary?’

‘No, it’s confirmation of the victim’s identity. Massri was kind enough to spend the night with our burned woman, and dentals gave him a name, which was Jennifer Darling. I ran it and found someone by that name working at the District of Columbia Council. Her car is in the lot at their offices, and has been since yesterday morning.’

‘Yes!’ Ella said. The name tunneled through her ear canal and surged from the depths of her memory to the forefront. She’d heard the name in the past few days. The catch was the same catch Mary Monroe’s name had snagged on at the bench.

‘That’s an awfully cheerful thing to say,’ Ripley said.

‘Darling. Darling. Darling. I know it. I’ve read it.’ Ella ransacked last night’s paperwork until she had Billy Hayes’s file again. She had been working backward through it for hours last night, paging from the most recent disciplinaries through the middle years and into the original intake, and somewhere in the back third her eyes had stopped holding the words on the page.

She scrolled past the cover. Past the intake photograph. Past the transfer memo. Past the flag with the Mary Monroe summary on it. Past the line that had walked her into a cold sweat last night. There were attachments behind the summary, two of them, paper-clipped to a yellowed sleeve of newspaper photocopies the records office at Jessup had kept on any inmate connected to a high-profile case. She had glanced at the sleeve last night and turned past it because the clippings had looked like background. Background was what she wanted now.

The first sheet was a press cutting, scanned and a little crooked, with the masthead of a Maryland paper across the top. A photograph she could barely make out in the grey of the scan, a woman at a lectern, hands flat to either side of it.

The headline ran above her. DARLING: ‘NO SOFT JUSTICE FOR MONSTERS.’

Ella read it through.