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

“You have spent the last twenty years feeling that you cheated death. That would make anyone bolder. But I also think that you feel guilty for surviving, like it’s your fault you were the girl who got away from TCK.” Ayaan squeezed Elle’s hand until she met her gaze again. “Elle, you deserve to live, okay? You have fought for your life, and you’ve earned it. Don’t let anyone make you feel otherwise, not even yourself.”

Tears welled up in Elle’s eyes. Unable to speak, she just nodded.

“I want you to feel like you can trust me. You can always come to me, and I think you know that, or you wouldn’t have texted me once you made the connection to Stevens. I’m only sorry I didn’t get it until you had already Mission-Impossibled your way into his basement.”

“So, you believe me now?” Elle whispered.

Standing, Ayaan retrieved her bag from the floor and brought it back over to Elle. She took out her laptop, opened it, and set it on Elle’s lap. “Sam got your text about what Duane told you. That Luisa and Douglas were dating, and Leo was stalking him, taking pictures. Once he got that, he was able to push a piece of evidence up the priority list for analysis: a flash drive found in Leo’s pocket when he was murdered. He wasn’t sure if it was connected to the murder, and it was password-protected, so Sam had been waiting for the techs to get into it. They finally did today.”

Elle looked at the screen, hoping her expression was casual enough not to give away that she already knew about the flash drive.

Ayaan continued: “Leo had two-hundred-fifty-six-bit encryption set up on the files, but the cyber team finally cracked the password and got access this morning.”

Ayaan double-clicked on the first file, and Elle dropped her water bottle. It landed with a thud on the floor.

“Oh, my God.”

There were scans on the screen of diary entries, written in Spanish with perfect handwriting.

“I assume you can read these?” Ayaan asked.

Elle nodded, staring at the screen. It felt wrong, reading someone’s diary, but she pulled the laptop closer anyway, skimming the entries as fast as she could.

Luisa had been infatuated with Douglas from the moment she saw him, that much was clear. They met when she worked part-time in the university’s salon, providing cheap cuts to poor college students and harried professors. He pursued her, called on her regularly, made her feel wise and insightful and unique. Then there were drinks after work, flirtatious jokes about her going home with him, which both thrilled and frightened her until she finally gave in weeks later. A darkness started to tinge her entries within days of their first night together. He started breaking her down, little digs and prods and twists of a knife that she came to miss whenever she tried to remove herself from the situation, like a runner longing for the ache of muscle after days without a run. She thought of leaving, but it was unbearable. And then her negative language stopped. Elle could almost see the exact moment she decided he was right about her, that she should be grateful for his advice, his instruction on how to live her life.

When she got to the last page, she looked up. “How . . . how did Leo get these?”

Ayaan shook her head. “I don’t know. The files were created three weeks ago. He must have found her diary somewhere, scanned it, and returned it before she realized it was gone.”

“Or maybe she stopped writing in it because he never returned it.” Elle scrolled down more, but there was nothing else in the document. “This diary wouldn’t make Leo think her boyfriend is TCK, though. What else did you find?”

“Blueprints of this house, showing there was no access to the basement from the inside. Which you’ve obviously discovered is wrong?”

Elle nodded and stood, leading Ayaan to the kitchen. The pantry door was already open for the forensics team, revealing the section of shelves that opened out into a narrow doorway. “I got in from the outside, through the vent, but the first responders were able to follow the sound of my voice when they came in.”

“Very clever,” Ayaan said, her voice bitter. She turned and scanned the kitchen for a moment before crossing to the electric kettle on the counter by the sink. The countertops were like the rest of the house: clear of clutter and debris. More hard work by Amanda and Natalie, no doubt. Ayaan opened the cabinet above the kettle and stepped back. Elle went to stand next to her, and her breath caught in her throat. Inside the white cabinet was a tin of Majestic Sterling tea.

“He got a picture of this too,” Ayaan said. “He must have broken in; that’s how he found the tea, and that’s how he knew there was no clear access to the basement.”

Elle shook her head. “He found all of this, just on a hunch.”

“That’s not all.” They went back to the living room, to the laptop. Ayaan’s fingers moved around on the track pad, and she typed a few things in before giving it back to Elle. “He also added this.”

It was a picture of the exterior of a house. It looked ancient, broken down, but it must have once been impressive. She had no idea what the house meant. Why would this be important to Leo? There was no address, and the file name wasn’t helpful. The only clue to its location was a dirty white 213 hanging on the gray siding.

“What’s this?”

Ayaan shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve tried doing reverse image searches, scouring Google Earth, but I haven’t found anything. As far as I can tell, Douglas didn’t own any other houses, and he doesn’t have any close living family. His mother died in childbirth with him, and he had two brothers that were killed in some freak accident when