CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
It was after midnight, but Ella didn’t stop until she’d reached the precinct, stormed her office and had Billy Hayes’s prison file in front of her.
The flag was where she had left it, two pages from the back of the document. It was at an old missing-persons report stapled into a photocopy of a Prince George’s County case summary. She read it again standing up.
RECOVERY: Partial remains recovered from open ground, Marston Hollow, Washington DC. Remains recovered from multiple sites within single location. Burial shallow. Recovery effected over three days with cadaver-dog assistance. ID confirmed via dental.
Ella read it twice.
Marston Hollow.
The field she had stood in four hours ago.
The remains had crossed the state line, Maryland to the District, and that single line of geography was the whole reason the file existed in this form.
A body that crossed a state line stopped being Prince George’s County’s problem and started being the Bureau’s.
She kept going.
PERSON OF INTEREST (initial): Hayes, William Anthony. Subject acquainted with victim (nature of relationship undetermined). Subject placed in vicinity of recovery site by witness statement. Interviewed 2x, released w/o charge both occasions. No forensic linkage established.
So Hayes had been pulled in, looked at, and let go. The next entry told her why.
SUBSEQUENT: Forensic recovery (DNA, recovered implement) linked alternate suspect. Charge filed. See cross-ref.
CONVICTED: Greaves, Thomas Edward. Charged federal (interstate). Convicted on all counts. Sentence: death. Transferred FCI Terre Haute pending. Case closed.
Ella stopped on the name.
Greaves. She had heard that name today, and not in this file. She had heard it when she was standing on a platform on the top tier of MCI Jessup with a prison officer beside her, looking at letters gouged into a cell door across from Hayes’s.
Dead man walking.
Greaves had been the other man they’d kept in that dead-end corridor. What had the prison officer said?
‘Oh, that was the other guy we had in here. Greaves. The guys here used to call him the Greave Digger. Staff and prisoners alike. He’s gone now.
Lethal injection, actually. He killed a woman, carved her up and buried her body parts in graves all over some field, hence the nickname.
He ended up going to Terre Haute. A week later he got the needle. ’
Ella stepped back from the laptop.
What did it all mean?
The remains of a woman named Mary Monroe were found in a field – the same field where someone else had just burned to death. Billy Hayes was suspected of her murder, but then forensic evidence linked a man named Thomas Greaves. Thomas Greaves was then put to death.
But what did this have to do with the murders happening right now? They were a little over three years removed from the incident with Mary Monroe.
Thomas Greaves.
Ella paced the room with paperwork in hand.
All of the details of the past few days fizzled in her head.
It stung her temples for a moment, because she knew there was information hiding in there that could be useful.
As she began to linearly run through every event, she jumped ahead to something her brain had flagged earlier that day.
She threw the paperwork down, then replaced it for a printout.
The comments from Curtis Brennan’s livestream, posted at the very moment his head was becoming independent from his body.
JimmyTwoFingers: Curtis going to investigate, RIP Curtis.
Redshoes: He heard the killer.
MaryB_87: Where did you go??
tommyg: Rock Creek Park and the dead man.
RonaldR: MPD is not underfunded, they’re mismanaged.
Redshoes: Killer is probably watching this stream!
JimmyTwoFingers: Curt, you look terrified.
PigCake: The headphones are off. Business is about to pick up.
Ella’s mouth went dry.
There it was.
tommyg.
Two appearances. The first asking Curtis Brennan where he streamed from, or perhaps confirming the location he was streaming from. The second steering the conversation back to the dead man at Rock Creek Park.
Tommy G.
Thomas G.
Ella had been right.
An obsessive couldn’t watch an amateur get it wrong in front of a million people and say nothing.
Or do nothing.
In this case, he certainly hadn’t done nothing. He was in the stream, talking to the man he was about to execute.
Ella turned her head.
A static executioner stared at her from inside its painted world, one that was identical to the executioner she’d seen on Brennan’s livestream.
The picture she’d picked up from the gift shop at MCI Jessup. Ella had almost forgotten about it.
Two initials graced its bottom right-hand corner.
T.G.
Thomas Greaves.
A man who’d been executed by lethal injection about three years ago.
But someone out there wasn’t content with that fact, and now they’d summoned his ghost for one last revenge mission.