CHAPTER FIVE
‘Caller, you’re on the air. What’s your name?’
‘Ella.’
‘Ella, remember, we need the name of the artists and the songs. Are you ready to play Test Your Metal?’
‘I’m ready, Dave.’
Ella couldn’t resist calling in. DC101 ran a game where they mashed five songs together in a two-second snippet. Ella was convinced she knew all of them, unlike the previous four callers.
‘You’re our last player, so if you get it wrong, we’ll give you the answers at the end. Here’s the clip one more time.’
The two-second snippet played down the phone. Two recognizable riffs, two recognizable guitar melodies, one keyboard melody. Ella was sure she had this one in the bag.
‘If you win, it’s a thousand dollars in your bank account within the hour. Ella, what you got?’
‘Paranoid by Black Sabbath.’
‘Correct.’
‘Master of Puppets by Metallica.’
‘Two for two.’
‘Strangers In The Night by Saxon.’
‘She’s on a roll! Two more, Ella.’
‘Rainbow in the Dark by Dio.’
‘Yes!’ Dave said. ‘And the last one?’
‘Out In The Fields by Gary Moore.’
Dave went quiet. Ella wondered what she’d spend the money on. Probably her electricity bill.
‘I’m sorry, Ella, the last one is incorrect.’
She nearly jumped off the sofa. ‘What? No way. I know that melody anywhere.’
‘It’s similar, I’ll give you that, but for you and all the listeners, the final one was Iron Maiden, The Evil That Men Do. I’m sorry, Ella, it pains me to say this, but you’re going away empty-handed.’
Ella tapped her forehead with her fist. Dammit to hell. Of course it was The Evil That Men Do. She had the song on her car playlist, for God’s sake. Still, a good loser accepted their defeat with dignity and humility.
‘Thanks for having me, Dave. Have a great day.’
She’d already been disconnected. She turned the volume up on the radio channel to hear Dave give his sympathies to her and then, as if her crippling defeat had summoned a support buddy, someone knocked at her door.
Two MPD officers were sitting in her parking lot for exactly this reason, and a visitor getting past them without a call-up first was either expected or a problem.
Or maybe it was one of the officers wanting to borrow something.
Ella looked through the peephole.
It wasn’t an officer, or one of the neighbors, or an unexpected Luca.
She opened the door, and there stood her partner.
‘Ripley?’
Her partner regarded Ella, no doubt judging her casual outfit. She’d opted for a t-shirt and sweatpants.
‘Morning, Dark. What’s with the cops downstairs?’
‘You saw them, huh.’
‘They interrogated me at the door.’
‘And they still let you up?’
‘More fool them. Do you have a minute?’
Ella shrugged. ‘I got nothing but minutes. Come on in.’
***
At the kitchen table, Ella explained why there were MPD officers in her parking lot. Ripley explained that she’d just been at a Renaissance faire in Rock Creek Park where a man had been hanged. Throughout the exchange, Ella was still annoyed about the Iron Maiden thing.
She asked, ‘And this was definitely a murder-hanging?’
Ripley looked at her like she’d asked the dumbest question ever. ‘You think I don’t know the difference between a murder and a suicide?’
‘Fair point. Pictures?’
‘Loads of them.’ Ripley unlocked her phone and slid it across the table. Ella took it and began scrolling.
First came the close-ups of the victim. He was middle-aged with no hair.
His physique was skinny-fat and he had arms full of amateur tattoos.
Next was a close-up of the rope. It was new, clean and thick enough to comfortably hold a grown man’s body weight.
Next came the gallows, and while Ella was no expert, it looked identical to a traditional gallows platform.
There was a beam to wrap the rope around, a lever and a trap door.
Curiosity got the better of her. ‘What do you know so far?’
‘Not a lot. No ID on the vic yet. No phone or wallet or keys. No car nearby. All he had on him was a bunch of cash.’
‘Drug deal gone south?’
Ripley asked, ‘How many drug dealers do you know who hang people in public? And he must be a hell of an opportunistic killer to utilize a nearby gallows.’
‘True. So the vic was lured there. Do you know if it was the hanging that killed him or if he was dead before that?’
‘Don’t know, but I’ll know at some point today.’
Ella set the phone down but kept it within reach.
She felt the case taking hold of her, and she resented it.
Not the murder itself, because there’d always be a murder somewhere, but she resented how easily the case had dug its claws in.
A hanged man at a Renaissance faire, no ID, no phone, a fold of cash and a rope that had been bought for the occasion.
The questions had already started lining up in her head, in order, the way they always did, and she hadn’t invited a single one of them in.
She didn’t want this because she had a killer of her own to track down. Lindsey Doyle was out there somewhere. That was the case that mattered.
And here she was, looking at another woman’s case, feeling her pulse pick up at a man executed on the gallows.
‘You know how hard it is to hang someone against their will?’ she asked.
Ripley said, ‘Yes, I do. Hoisting someone up requires great strength. If it’s strangulation and not decapitation, the legs usually find relief somewhere.’
Death by hanging was technically decapitation.
The head was severed from the body to induce instant death.
Suicide by hanging usually resulted in strangulation, because most victims didn’t drop far enough to cause decapitation, and so the knot around their throat did the rest. Ella only knew one serial killer in history who’d hanged their victims. That was Tobias Campbell, and he’d talked his victims into performing the deed rather than doing the physical work himself.
Thinking about it, the similarities to that old foe – the only foe she’d ever shot dead – was the main, albeit subconscious, factor arousing her interest in Ripley’s case.
But she didn’t want to invite herself on board. Doing so would feel like a betrayal to earlier commitment to either spend the week working the Doyle case or calling radio game shows.
‘Mia,’ she said.
‘Yes, I know what you’re thinking, and yes, I could use your help.
I’ve got hundreds of faire workers to look into and I can’t do it all myself.
The MPD guys won’t know what to look for, because whoever did this isn’t a normal murderer.
Not to mention I’m on a pretty strict timescale.
The faire workers will disperse in a few days, if they haven’t already. ’
Ella thought about it. Helping Ripley meant breaking the only two promises she’d made herself this morning, and she’d made them in good faith. But how many times had Ripley come to her aid in the past? She’d lost count of how many, and such efforts deserved reciprocation.
‘Alright, I’ll help you out. It might help me kickstart my thought process for this Doyle crap. Why are you on this case, anyway?’
‘The chief at the MPD called me. I told Vernon.’
‘Simple as that,’ Ella said.
‘Simple as that. Vernon knows better than to say no. So, what do you think? Want to help me get started, or do you want to sit around in sweatpants all day?’
‘Alright, you win. I’ll help.’
Ella grabbed Ripley’s phone. The screen had locked, but Ella put Ripley’s passcode in. The woman hadn’t changed it since Ella met her.
She went back to the victim and his limp, flaccid corpse. She pinched the screen and zoomed in, because now that she’d committed to finding this man’s killer, her subconscious thrust something to the front of the queue.
The victim’s tattoos.
‘Ready to get started? There are a hundred interviews to get through.’
‘Wait.’
A crude, amateur scrawling on the victim’s arm had seized her. It was a clock with no hands on it.
‘What are you looking at?’ Ripley asked.
And on the victim’s hand were five barely-distinguishable dots, arranged like a five on a dice. Four dots outside, one on the inside.
That confirmed it.
‘I think I know a better place to start.’ Ella pointed to the victim’s ink. ‘We might be looking for a vigilante.’