Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

She looked at the time on her computer. Five hours ago, she’d been singing and eating cake with her family. Four hours ago, she’d gone to get what could have been the biggest lead on the TCK case to come out in twenty years. Or maybe it was nothing; maybe the tea was a red herring, or Leo had been making it up to get her to come to his house. Maybe he had plans to hurt her, and whoever killed him first had done her a favor.

It had only been a month since she started her season on the Countdown Killer, but already the levels of online harassment she dealt with had reached new heights. Instead of just the mindless trolls in her mentions—who loved to offer stupid takes on every picture she posted of her sound setup or the mass of multicolored sticky notes around her desk—now there was outright aggression. Vicious emails mocking her for daring to think she could solve a case this big that no one, including some of the best detectives in the world, had been able to. Warnings to not bring back the decades of hurt the TCK murders had caused. Twitter DMs so sexually violent they made her skin crawl; those she reported instantly.

If Leo was one of those, maybe he had a different plan altogether. Maybe he was going to set her up with a false tip that she’d go chasing, in order to discredit her. She did a quick search through the threatening emails she’d filed just in case, but none of them contained variations of Leo’s name. It was a small relief, but it didn’t really mean anything.

Elle took another drink of wine. None of the family members had responded. It was after midnight, and her eyes prickled with exhaustion, but her brain was too wired for sleep. Scrolling through Leo’s friend list, she found the name she was after.

Duane Grove’s profile was relatively locked down, but there were a few posts and status updates he’d made public. The latest photo was a cross-post from Instagram dated two weeks ago: him in a backwards baseball cap and sunglasses, throwing the peace sign at the lens like a tool. She considered sending him a message, but it would have been a waste of time. If he was on the run from police, there was no way he’d be checking social media; if he wasn’t, he was probably in a jail cell by now anyway.

A box popped up on her screen—a video call coming in from Tina.

Tina Nguyen was a former fan-turned-producer of Justice Delayed who lived in Chicago. She was also a crack online researcher and had helped Elle track down a lot of records that other organizations had assured her were permanently lost.

When Elle answered the call, Tina was sitting in her usual spot: surrounded by other monitors, her face bathed in a bluish white glow. “How’s it going, Elle?” she asked, typing as she spoke. “You seen all the reactions to today’s episode? Molly won’t stop texting me every time we pass another ten thousand downloads.”

“I haven’t had a chance.”

Tina glanced at the camera, her black irises reflecting the screen. Something in Elle’s expression made her sit back in her wheelchair, take her hands off the keyboard. “What’s wrong?”

Elle hid her face by taking another drink of wine. “What makes you think something is wrong?”

“Come on, don’t do that pretend shit with me.”

“Fine.”

Tina listened with her arms folded over her Paramore T-shirt as Elle told her about Leo’s email, their phone call, finding him dead. She finished with a rundown of all the research she’d done into Leo’s background so far. “I guess now I’m just wondering if it’ll be a waste of time to keep trying to figure out the tip he was going to give me, if the tip even existed in the first place. Odds are, the guy I saw at the crime scene is the one who shot him. They supposedly ran a chop shop together, and from his profile, Duane seems like an asshole. There’s every chance Leo had no idea what he was talking about and I should just keep going with our scheduled episodes as they are.”

After Elle stopped talking, Tina stared to the right of the camera lens for a moment, tapping her finger against her lip. “What if you’re wrong, though?”

“Then Leo really did have something, and it’s probably on the flash drive that was in his pocket.”

“Which you can’t tell them you know about without getting in trouble. And you’ll probably never hear what they find, because there’s no reason for the police to give it to you.”

“Right.”

“Hmm.” After a moment, Tina looked straight down the lens. “What if you’re wrong about the business partner, though?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if he really was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the killer got away before you both got there? What if Leo was killed because someone knew he was about to give you key information about TCK?”

The thought had risen to the surface of Elle’s mind a hundred times in the past several hours, but each time she had shoved it back down again. If Leo was killed because of the information, that was both the most terrifying and the most exciting thing that had ever happened since Justice Delayed started. It meant what he had was legitimate, and it also meant that she owed it to him to find his killer.

“Elle, cut it out. I can see you blaming yourself right through this screen.”

“I’m not!”

“You are, and it’s not your fault. No matter who killed Leo, it was their decision to do it—not yours.”

Elle nodded, looking down at the tattoo on her right wrist—a semicolon. On Sash’s suggestion, Elle had gotten it done two years ago, right around the time she gave up on getting pregnant and sank into a deep depression. It