CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Ella started with height.
Six foot eight or thereabout. A man that size was not a needle in a haystack.
A man that size was a fence post in a haystack.
You couldn’t hide it, couldn’t fake it, couldn’t make yourself shorter without major surgery.
It was the single most distinctive fact she had about her unsub, and she’d come in this morning certain it would do most of the work for her, because how many men of that height could possibly have passed through the Maryland and DC prison systems in the last decade with the kind of proximity the rest of it demanded?
The answer, it turned out, was complicated.
The problem was the data. State correctional systems did not, as a rule, record height with the precision she needed.
Intake measurements were done on arrival, usually by a corrections officer with a wall chart and varying degrees of attention, and the records had a known error range of two inches in either direction.
She could search for inmates recorded at six-eight and miss a man who’d been logged as six-six.
She could search for six-six and find a hundred men who were nothing like what she was looking for.
She ran the search both ways across Maryland’s Department of Public Safety database, the Virginia DOC, the DC jail system, and the federal BOP records for the facilities within a hundred miles.
She filtered for male, released within the last five years, and got a list of forty-three names.
She ran the forty-three names for two hours.
At the end of two hours, she had eliminated forty-two of them and the one she hadn’t eliminated was a man in a supervised care facility in Silver Spring who had suffered a stroke.
No luck.
The trouble was the assumption underneath the search, and she could feel it now.
She’d been hunting a tall man who’d been let out of jail, but a man could learn the machinery and never have been a prisoner at all.
He could have worked the place. He could have visited it.
He could be in none of these files. The system was a sieve, and she was trawling it for a fish that might have come in through the side.
She moved to staff. That was the harder search and the one she’d been saving, because corrections officers didn’t sit in a database you could filter by height.
There was no field for it. A guard’s record had his name and his service and his commendations and his disciplinary notes, and nowhere did it say how tall he was.
So she did it the slow way. She pulled personnel rosters and cross-referenced them against anything with a photograph, ID badges, training-course group shots, the staff pages some facilities kept on internal sites, and she looked for a big man.
It was crude, and it was slow, and after two hours of it she had three maybes, and she ran all three down, and all three were ordinary tall men, none of which resembled a Viking.
Dead end.
She got up. She walked the length of the corridor and back to make her legs remember they had a use. She needed five minutes in which the case was not in front of her so that when she went back to it the case would look different.
However, it didn’t look any different when she got back.
So, she went back to victim number one, Billy Hayes.
She didn’t know why she went back to Hayes.
The case had moved past him in some sense.
He was merely the thread that everyone had already pulled on.
But something Hale had said was still in her ear.
A man who learned from rope. And Billy Hayes, by Ella’s theory, had lived inside the same building as the man who had killed him, for the better part of four years.
She’d read Hayes’s file yesterday for the prison politics, for the snitching, for the long list of men who might have wanted him dead. She read it now for the man.
What was new, or new to her attention, were the finer details of Hayes’s four years in MCI Jessup.
Hayes had worked the laundry for his first eight months.
Then the kitchen, briefly, which had ended when he’d been involved in the incident that eventually produced the SIS cooperation.
Something had happened in the kitchen involving an inmate named Greer, whose name she noted and moved past, because a further check confirmed Greer had been dead for two years.
Then grounds, which was where the rope work lived, Ella presumed.
Then laundry again. Then a stint in the library.
He’d done a period on the sewing detail in the vocational wing, which he’d done alone according to the attendance log.
Understandable, Ella thought. She guessed not many inmates would be willing to sign up for something typically girly.
Then there was a ceramics class in there which lasted a few months.
He’d kept busy. Busy men lasted longer inside, and Hayes, by every account, had wanted to last.
She kept moving.
There was a flag in Hayes’s file which reached back to his time inside.
It was a police report. A woman named Mary Monroe had gone missing from Prince George’s County around three years back, and Billy Hayes had been named in the early pages as a person of interest, because he’d known her and because he’d been near where she was discovered.
Ella read it through. Hayes had been questioned twice and released both times.
The case had stayed open a while and then closed, because forensic evidence had come back and tied another man to the killing, and that man had gone to prison for it, and Billy Hayes had walked away from the one serious accusation of his life with his name eventually cleared.
Mary’s body had been found in pieces, and Councilwoman Darling had ordered the district to build a bench in her memory. The end.
Ella went back to the part that mattered, which was who’d want Billy Hayes dead now, and the answer the file kept giving was the same answer it had given on the first night.
Hayes had informed on so many men across four years that the staff couldn’t narrow it, and any one of them, released and aggrieved, was a candidate.
But that was the prison theory, and the prison theory had a hole in it the size of a man.
A vengeful ex-con who’d done time with Hayes would have stabbed him in a stairwell or run him over in a parking lot.
He would not have learned the Victorian long drop, dressed himself as a headsman and hanged Hayes in a public square with a gallows he’d modified for the purpose.
The method didn’t align with the prison theory.
Ella became aware, distantly, of the quality of her own attention changing. She’d stopped sitting back between entries. She was leaning in now, close to the screen, and scrolling faster than she could properly read.
There was a man out there the size of a doorway who had already killed twice and who, she was now certain, had a third already chosen. Mission-oriented killers like this didn’t stop between courses. They ramped up the intensity until their final blow-out.
None of this made sense.
What the hell was going on?