CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ella knew, before she opened the first tab, that Billy Hayes and Curtis Brennan would never have stood in the same room, but two men didn’t need to share a room to share an enemy, and so she spent her morning investigating the overlap anyway.
So they hadn’t met in a cell, which had been her best hope. She moved to the next-best one.
The Watchlist’s platform generated captions for every upload, and the captions were searchable, which meant nine hundred videos of Curtis Brennan’s opinions could be strip-mined in minutes rather than weeks.
She searched for Billy Hayes and got nothing.
She searched for Hayes on its own and got a congressman from Ohio.
She tried the Laurel robbery, the sentencing date, even MCI Jessup itself, and the archive gave her back nothing she could use.
It made sense once she gave it some thought.
Brennan trafficked in high-profile cases with a specific angle, and that angle was that justice hadn’t been delivered.
In Hayes’s case, justice was served because he was given a reasonable prison sentence, not to mention that a man waving an unfired pistol at a gas station cashier wasn’t content.
Brennan had never said Billy Hayes’s name in his life, and yet here they both were, butchered by the same hand thirty hours apart.
What the archive did give her was Brennan himself, and two hours of him was quite the education.
The Watchlist had a position and the position never moved: punishment in this country had gone soft, criminals knew it, and the only language the violent understood was violence returned.
Brennan wanted the death penalty restored in the District.
He wanted parole boards abolished. In one video he proposed, with no visible irony, that sentences should be served in full plus ten percent, the ten percent being interest owed to society.
His book – which Ripley had swiped from his office – ran along the same rails for three hundred pages.
It was clear that his audience loved him for it, given his numbers, and Ella could see why, because Brennan was funny and fluent and spoke with conviction.
The financials landed in Ella’s lap at 10AM, and Hibbert’s warrants had been thorough.
Hayes’s account was a short story of benefit payments and cash withdrawals, a phone top-up here and a liquor store there, and nothing over fifty dollars since his release.
Brennan’s ran to eleven pages of camera equipment, software subscriptions, restaurants in Georgetown, a florist twice a month.
She put the statements side by side and went looking for a shared merchant, a shared gym, a shared anything, and there was no point of contact anywhere in the paper.
Even their geography refused to cooperate.
Anacostia and Brightwood sat at opposite ends of the city with the whole of Washington between them, and neither man’s records ever placed him within five miles of the other.
The phones were the last door. Hayes’s handset had walked out of Rock Creek Park in his killer’s pocket, but the carrier records hadn’t, and Brennan’s phone had been sitting on his desk in an evidence bag since dawn.
She had both call logs run against each other. No common numbers. No common towers.
Ella sat back and looked at her legal pad, at two columns that described two complete strangers, and accepted what the morning had been telling her for hours.
The overlap she was hunting didn’t exist in any record, most likely because it didn’t exist. It lived in the killer’s head.
One man had broken the law for thirty years and one man made his money demanding that those lawbreakers suffer.
Externally, a third man had looked at both of them and decided they both needed to be executed.
The door opened and Ripley came through it with her jacket still on.
‘Anything worth reporting?’
‘I’ve got proof that Billy Hayes and Curtis Brennan never met, or as close to proof as I can get. The headline is that this criminal and this criminal-hater had nothing in common.’
‘Shocker. Anyway, stop staring, because we’re moving.
Brennan has a girlfriend. Kate Millward.
She lives in Petworth. Hibbert’s already spoken to her, and apparently she’s holding it together better than anyone expected, which usually means she’s about to stop.
Either way, she’ll talk to us before she stops, and we want to be the ones in the room when she does. ’
Ella closed the laptop. Ripley was still two steps ahead, thankfully. ‘Let’s go. Hopefully, Curtis was a different man when the camera was off.’