Page 63 of Girl, Fractured

Or, Ella thought with a sickening lurch, the kind you place into the empty eye sockets of the dead.

CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

I killed him.But it’s not what you think.

Sitting across from Josiah Nicholls now, Ripley’s first thought was that she was sharing airspace with the man who killed her mentor.She’d promised Ella she wouldn’t hurt him, and now she was weighing up the consequences of upsetting her partner.

‘Keep talking,’ Ripley said calmly.

‘Frank isn’t who you think he is.’

Ripley took two deep breaths.This son of a bitch wasn’t making it easy to stay professional.‘Frank was exactly who I thought he was.He was an old friend of mine.’

‘At the FBI?’

‘I’ll ask the questions.Why did you kill him?’

‘Because he was a failure.’

Frank had his flaws, God knew, but a failure?That wasn’t a word anyone got to pin on him, least of all this amateur killer sitting opposite her.She wanted to reach across the table and slam his face into the cold metal until he choked on that word.

‘You better start explaining yourself.’

‘In 2002, someone was killing sex workers in hotel rooms in Kissimmee.And after every kill, they left a black candle burning at the scene.’

Ripley cast her mind back 22 years.A vague memory surfaced.‘The Black Candle Murders.’

‘Yes.And one of the victims was Cassie Nicholls.’

The pieces rearranged themselves and formed a new picture.Josiah Nicholls might be a young kid who’d lied his way into a cold case group with a fake name, but he was also nursing a very real 22-year-old wound.

‘One of the victims was your mom.’

‘Yes.Cassie Nicholls left behind a 7-year-old boy.That was me.And guess who was assigned to the case?’

‘The FBI,’ said Ripley.She looked at Josiah Nicholls for the first time – really looked at him – and saw past the swollen lip and the cheap coffee shop uniform he still wore.She saw the young boy hiding inside the twenty-nine-year-old man.

‘Correct.The FBI.In particular, Frank Sullivan.It took me years to find that information.Do you know how hard it is to get details about FBI investigations?’

‘Yes.’

‘So, I researched Frank Sullivan.I found out where he lived, so I uprooted and moved a hundred miles west just to be near him, just to ask him some questions about the case.’

‘And?’

‘And what do you think?’Josiah spat the words out.His voice raised an octave.‘Frank couldn’t remember.He’d forgotten practicallyeverythingabout the case because hey, who cares about sex workers, right?Screw those whores.They’re disposable fodder for perverts, nothing more.But you know whatwasstrange?’

‘What?’

‘Frank could magically remembereverythingabout that woman with the stone eyes.Funny, huh?He remembered the floral pattern on her sofa, the exact sequence of albums stacked next to her record player.He remembered the barometric pressure on the day her body was found, the name of the rookie patrolman who contaminated the secondary entry point, the exact shade of lipstick Jennifer Marlowe wore in her high school graduation photo.But you know what he remembered about my mom?’

Ripley nodded for him to continue.

‘That she was too attractive to be a sex worker.That was it.Like he was trying to say that it was my mom’s fault for having to work the streets.Like her death was her own fault.Never mind that she was a single mom doing everything she could to keep me alive.’

Ripley felt the weight of those dual narratives.One preserved in crystalline detail, the other discarded like yesterday’s news.She understood the bitter calculus of it.Some victims captured the imagination and haunted investigators for decades.Others were reduced to numbers the moment you left the room.

And as much as she respected Frank, she couldn’t deny that Josiah Nicholls’ resentment was justified.

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