CHAPTER SIX
The Metropolitan Police Department’s headquarters sat on Indiana Avenue, a little under two miles from the Hoover Building, and close enough that Ella walked past it weekly.
Today she’d driven. Two MPD officers had followed her out of her own parking lot and across the city, and Ella thought it particularly absurd that a law enforcement officer was being escorted to a police station by police.
Once there, they’d told Ella they’d return to their stations outside her apartment.
Ella and Ripley were in a side office on the first floor.
It was a single room with one window and a spider plant that was desperately waiting for rejuvenation via spring.
Ella set her laptop on the desk, plugged it in, waited for it to find the building’s network and then waited longer while it failed to.
After some jigging around, she got it working.
The man who Ella suspected was Chief Andrew Hibbert came through the door, both hands full. He was younger than Ella pictured from Ripley’s admittedly vague description, or maybe he was just better preserved. The black ponytail was exactly as advertised.
‘Agent Dark. Mia’s told me good things about you.’
‘Then she must be lying.’ Ella extended her hand. ‘Good to meet you.’
‘Likewise. Here, I come bearing gifts.’ Hibbert set the contents of his hands on the table. ‘Crime scene photos. Glossy eights, just in case you prefer paper.’
‘Thank you. I do prefer paper.’
Ripley butted in, ‘Andy, Dark noticed something on the vic’s arms. He’s got prison tattoos.’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘Show him, Dark.’
Ella found the relevant photos in Hibbert’s pile.
She pointed to the clock and the dice formation.
‘A clock with no hands. It means doing time. The dice is symbolic of prison too. The four dots around the outside are the walls and the dot in the middle is the prisoner. This guy has to be in the system somewhere.’
‘Nice catch. I’ll run his face through the database. If there’s no match, the pathologist can match his prints. Speaking of which, the doctor works quick, but quick is still two hours.’
‘Great. What’s the latest on the faire?’ asked Ripley.
‘We cancelled it. It was meant to run two more days, but we can’t risk that.
The press are already trying to sneak in.
The whole faire is travelling to Maryland on Thursday, but we’ve demanded everyone stay back.
The problem is that we don’t know if we have everyone or not.
The workers are contractors, not employees, so some could have slunk off already.
We’ve given them permission to dismantle everything – except the area around the gallows, of course – but that’s all. ’
‘Then we don’t have an hour or two,’ Ella said. ‘Mia. We need to start interviewing, and I need to see the scene in its natural habitat.’
‘I’m all set up here, so ready when you are.’
Two cases now, both holding her at once. She’d give the hanged man until the faire packed up and the carnies scattered. After that, Doyle.
But for the next few hours, the dead man got all of her.
***
By two o’clock, Ella had spoken to thirty-five people and not one of them had so much as twitched.
A guilty conscious could rarely disguise itself fully. There was always a tell, no matter how slight, but Ella hadn’t caught a single one from a single person. All she found were faire workers concerned that they might be next to find themselves dead, and they were right to be concerned.
Ella had done a full circle of available bodies.
She’d started near the gallows – now covered with a tent, for both privacy and so that press helicopters would see nothing but a roof – and worked clockwise.
Ripley had gone in the other direction. Now Ella was back to where she started, but with much less faire in her peripherals.
Stalls had closed, bunting had been taken down, and a particularly regal statue of a knight on horseback was in the process of being dismantled by three women.
That was another thing about this faire.
Ella had brought an assumption to Rock Creek Park, and that assumption was men.
This historical-cosplay hybrid event seemed to be, on paper, built to accommodate what Ella guessed was the mostly-male fantasy of being a medieval warrior, but she’d been wrong.
This faire was overrun with women, which helped, because she doubted a woman had the brute strength to pull off a murder like this.
It had been a woman who operated the gallows prop, and as well as being in her sixties and frail enough for a cough to blow her over, she also had a doorbell camera that would probably confirm her innocence when Ella found time to check it.
She scanned for anyone she’d missed, and then saw the tomato toss. Ripley had said the guy who ran that stall had been the one to notify the police, but the stall had been empty on Ella’s first round.
It wasn’t empty now.
A young, pale man was now dismantling the wooden stocks. He was lean, but not gym-lean. This was a lack of body fat from missing meals, not from cardio. Judging by the black bags underneath his eyes, he hadn’t slept, or hadn’t slept well, or hadn’t slept sober.
Ella crossed the path with her hands out of her pockets and her ID already showing.
‘Excuse me. Can I talk to you for a minute?’
He looked up from the upright of the stocks he was unscrewing and paused with his screwdriver in hand. ‘Sorry. I already told the cops everything.’
She showed her badge. ‘I’m not a cop. I’m FBI. What’s your name?’
‘Ronnie Cobb.’
‘Ronnie, you run this –’ Ella checked the stall name again, because it sounded oddly sexual and needed to be sure she didn’t fumble it – ‘tomato toss. Is that right?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘What’s a tomato toss?’
Ronnie dislodged a large wooden panel and placed it down. ‘What it sounds like. An actor sticks his head through this hole, then kids throw tomatoes at him.’
Ella thought as much, and the confirmation didn’t make it sound any less absurd. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why do you do that?’
‘The public used to throw feces and eggs and garbage at criminals. Can’t do that anymore, so we use tomatoes.’
‘Doesn’t it hurt?’
‘Not really.’ Ronnie passed her a tomato from his overflowing basket. ‘They’re soft. And we put slits in them, so they explode easier.’
If laypeople knew the secrets behind most magic tricks, they’d be sorely disappointed. This was no different, Ella thought. ‘You were the one who called the cops this morning, right?’
Ronnie was about to begin working on the next screw, but then thought better of it. He grudgingly put his screwdriver down. Ella read the gesture as suspicious.
‘Yes, I called the cops. Like I said, I told them everything.’
With the main panel of the pillory out of the way, Ella could see behind the scenes, as basic as those scenes were. There were more buckets of tomatoes, a cooler.
And a sleeping bag.
That didn’t make sense.
‘What time did you get here this morning?’
‘Seven. Ish.’
‘Seven-ish?’
‘Yeah.’ Ronnie put his hands in his pockets. ‘Then I called the cops. That’s all I got.’
She gazed at the sleeping bag again. Ronnie followed her line of sight, then looked back at her, then back at the sleeping bag again like he was hoping it might have moved. His mouth went through a small series of shapes before he settled on one.
‘It’s not what it looks like.’
‘I haven’t said what it looks like.’
‘No, but.’ He scratched his cheek and left marks. ‘Look. Right. Okay. The organizers don’t like it, but…’
‘But?’
He fidgeted with his screwdriver again. ‘But… I sleep here sometimes. Saves the motel. That’s all. That’s not a crime, is it?’
‘Not for anything I’d be concerned with,’ Ella said, ‘but if you slept here, then you were here all night. You said you arrived at seven in the morning.’
Ronnie skimmed for eavesdroppers. There weren’t any.
His pale face suddenly went the same color as his wooden pillory as he placed his screwdriver back down.
Ella tried to picture this man as a mock-executioner, and while he didn’t quite fit her admittedly narrow psychological profile of the unsub, she couldn’t rule anything out completely.
‘Alright, I was here all night, but I know what you’re thinking and I didn’t kill anyone. I promise.’
Ronnie Cobb had patchy stubble, bitten nails and he was squirming to do something with his hands.
Ronnie Cobb could not sit still inside his own skin.
His eyes went to her, to the gallows tent, to the path, to the sleeping bag, and back to her, and the rotation never broke.
Her unsub had brought his own rope, lured his victim to a public location and pulled off the most difficult method of homicide in the book.
Organized killers had a self-awareness about them.
They had a place for every thought and a place for every body, and you could sit across from one for an hour and watch nothing happen on the surface at all.
‘You possibly saw this killer, and you still said nothing?’
‘You gotta believe me. I’ve had trouble with the law in the past. I don’t need any more eyes on me. You know how it is.’
Ella was already certain that Ronnie Cobb, tomato-toss stall owner, could not be her killer. She’d been wrong about people before and she’d be wrong about people again. But she’d back this one with her own money.
‘I believe you, Ronnie, but you need to tell me everything you know.’
Ronnie wet his lips and started. ‘I was here, like I said. Eleven, give or take. I’d had a few bottles and I was nearly off.
Then I heard noise down by the gate. I thought it was kids.
They wreck our sites sometimes. They come in, steal stuff, piss in our buckets.
So I heard the noise and I thought, right, here we go, here come the little bastards. ’
‘What did you do?’
‘I ran. I’m not a fighter, miss. I’m 120 pounds soaking wet.
I assumed they’d be in a group, and they might assault me.
I grabbed the bag, and I went out the back, round the long way, and headed north for the treeline.
I was going to wait them out in the woods and come back when they’d disappeared. ’
‘So what stopped you?’
‘I looked back.’ Ronnie’s hand went to his mouth and dropped again. ‘I was halfway across the open ground, by the jousting rail, and I looked back over my shoulder to see how many of them there were. And I saw the gate.’
‘Go on.’
‘A man was coming through it. Pushing another man. In a wheelchair.’
Ella’s pulse spiked. Wheelchair. That explained how the killer got the victim here. Ella nodded for him to keep going but he didn’t. ‘That’s what stopped you? A man being pushed in a wheelchair?’
‘No.’ Ronnie shook his head, hard, as though clearing water out of an ear. ‘No, the chair was just the chair. It was the man doing the pushing.’
‘What about him?’
‘He was massive. Properly. Six-eight, easy. I’m not saying that because it was dark and I was scared, I’m saying that because there’s a height marker on the east post, where kids stand for the photos, and his head was over it.
The marker’s at six-six. He was over it.
And he wasn’t lanky-tall either. He was wide, like one of those guys off World’s Strongest Man.
Shoulders out to here.’ Ronnie held his palms a foot off each of his own and they trembled there.
‘Arms like my legs. I’ve never seen a man that size in real life. ’
Ella placed the description into her mental profile. She didn’t like the sound of it. ‘That’s what scared you off?’
‘No, miss.’ Ronnie looked at her properly now and his pupils were dilated. ‘That wasn’t even the scary bit.’
‘Then what was?’
‘He was dressed up like one of them old executioners. Black hood pulled down over his head, with the eye holes cut in it. Long dark top, sleeves rolled up. Like he’d come straight off the page of a history book.
I thought I was dreaming it. I thought I’d had a bad bottle or something.
I thought it was a stall worker here or something, someone playing the part of a hangman, and if he was a worker, I didn’t want him to know I was camping out here.
So I slept about a mile away, barely. I came back this morning, hoping it was all a dream. Then I saw… the thing.’
Ella remained stoic while her pulse climbed up her throat.
If Ronnie’s version of events weren’t some alcohol induced fever dream – and she believed they weren’t – then she was looking for a giant executioner built like a wall, and that wasn’t like any killer she’d hunted before.