CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It took her twenty minutes to find it, and it had been sitting in plain sight the whole time.
She’d been searching the Watchlist archive for the wrong name all along. She’d run Billy Hayes and got a congressman, run the Laurel robbery and got nothing, and never once typed in the name she hadn’t known to look for until last night.
She typed it now. Greaves. The platform’s auto-captions chewed on it for a second and gave her back a single result, one video out of nine hundred, and Ella opened it and watched the first thirty seconds and knew she had the last corner of the thing.
The title slate read THE GREAVES CASE: WHY WE STILL NEED THE NEEDLE.
Ripley returned to the office with coffees. She’d left twenty minutes ago when Ella was rambling names Ripley wasn’t familiar with.
‘Got it,’ Ella said. ‘Brennan. He did an episode on Greaves.’
‘Dark,’ she said. ‘I’m going to need you to walk me through the whole thing now. Because what the hell. I’ve been three steps behind you since you woke up drooling on evidence.’
Ella stood up, because she thought better on her feet. And because her back hadn’t forgiven her for being hunched over a desk all night. She began walking it out.
‘About three years ago, a woman called Mary Monroe goes missing from Prince George’s County, Maryland.
Thirty-three, reported by her sister when she doesn’t show for a family event.
Two weeks later they start recovering her, and they recover her in pieces, buried shallow across a single field.
Except the field isn’t in Maryland. It’s across the line, in the District. Marston Hollow.’
‘The field from last night.’
‘The field from last night. So she goes missing in one state and turns up dismembered in another, and the second that line gets crossed it stops being a county murder and becomes a federal case. Ours, in theory, though it was years before my time. Do you remember it?’
‘I can’t say I do, but back then I wouldn’t have worked an isolated homicide no matter how violent. We were still the BAU back then, not whatever Vernon calls us now.’
‘Right. So, the first man they look at is Billy Hayes. Hayes knew her, the file won’t say how, and he was placed near the recovery site by a witness. They bring him in twice. They let him go twice. No forensics on him.’
‘Okay.’
‘And then they find Greaves. Forensic recovery, the file says. DNA and a recovered implement, tied to Thomas Greaves. They charge him, and here’s where Jennifer Darling walks in.
She’s a first-term councilwoman, and she takes this case, and she builds a career on it.
Mary Monroe becomes her cause. And the thing she fights for, the thing she stands at a lectern and demands, is that Greaves be charged federally instead of left to the state, because Maryland’s got no death penalty and the District’s got no death penalty, but the federal government does.
’ Ella stopped. ‘She wanted him executed. There was no legal road to a needle for him until somebody made one, and she made it. She got him charged federal, he got convicted, he got the death sentence, and a week after he reached Terre Haute they put him down.’
Ripley blew out a breath. ‘And the field gets a bench. End of story.’
‘The field gets a bench. Darling reseeds it, keeps it as open ground, unveils a plaque to Mary Monroe under the oak. The campaign that made her career, sewn up with a nice memorial.’ Ella sat on the edge of the desk.
‘So now look at the three of them. Hayes, the suspect they let walk. Darling, the woman who made sure the real one died. Brennan, the loudmouth who held the whole thing up four years later as the model of justice done right. They don’t connect.
There’s no thread between Billy Hayes and a councilwoman and an internet shock-jock and I’ve spent two days proving there isn’t.
They connect to one thing. Greaves. Every single one of them had a hand in either catching him, killing him, or celebrating it. ’
‘Somebody’s working through the list, in order, in the old ways.
Hanging, beheading, burning. He’s not avenging Mary Monroe.
He’s avenging Thomas Greaves. He thinks Greaves was wronged.
He thinks the people who put him on that table were the real criminals, and he’s executing them the way the state executed his man.
The execution isn’t a costume. It’s the whole point.
He’s giving them back exactly what they gave Greaves. ’
‘Except Greaves is dead,’ Ripley said.
‘Yes, he is, unless he slipped out of the death chamber somehow.’
‘There’s no back door out of the death chamber, Dark. Not in Terre Haute, anyway. I’ve seen it. We could always dig up his corpse just to check.’
‘Yeah right. All of this just means it’s not Thomas Greaves, or his ghost. It’s someone who looks – bizarrely – just like him. At least in terms of height and build. Greaves was six-eight according to his record.’
Ripley asked, ‘Has Greaves got any brothers? Half-brothers? Maybe his dad?’
‘No siblings. Both of his parents have passed.’
‘So we need to talk to someone who knew Greaves in real life. What about the officers at MCI Jessup?’
Ella thought back to two days ago, when she’d seen the door to Thomas Greaves’s cell. One of the other prisoners had scrawled DEAD MAN WALKING on it. Ella was only now realizing that Billy Hayes and Thomas Greaves – suspect and guilty party in the same crime – were ten feet apart from each other.
Ella was already reaching for the phone. The number for the shift desk at MCI Jessup had stayed in her recent dial. The line picked up on the third ring.
‘Good morning, MCI Jessup.’
‘Hi, it’s Agent Ella Dark with the FBI. I need to speak to Roy Kowalczyk, please. I was with him two nights ago. He should remember me.’
‘Hold the line, please.’
Ella held.
‘What did you say that for?’ Ripley asked.
‘Say what?’
‘That you were with him two nights ago. It makes you sound like his mistress.’
Someone picked up. ‘Maryland DPSCS, Jessup. Kowalczyk speaking.’
‘Roy, it’s Agent Dark. We spoke about Billy Hayes.’
‘Agent Dark. Twice in a week. I’ve been promoted. What can I do for you?’
‘Sorry to do this to you so early. I need to talk to you about Thomas Greaves.’
There was a pause down the line. ‘Ah yes. Greaves. Old Greave Digger, as we called him. Didn’t I mention him to you?’
‘Yes, but I need more. As much as you can remember.’
‘Why? He can’t be a suspect in your investigation. He’s dead. I saw his body.’
‘No. He’s not a suspect, but someone close to him might be.’
‘Okay, well, everybody who worked here when he was here remembers him. You don’t forget a man that size. We had to special-order a bed.’
‘What was he like?’
‘Quiet, mostly. He didn’t really get involved. He was the only death row inmate here, so we had to keep a close eye on him. Most inmates steered clear of him though, because of his size, even the big ones.’
Ella turned the call to loudspeaker. ‘Did he have visitors? Or anyone in the prison he bonded with?’
‘I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, and I’ll be honest with you, the records won’t help either. He was here on a federal housing contract, not as one of ours, and the visitor logs from that far back, for a contract inmate, they didn’t all transfer when he went to Terre Haute.’
‘Dammit. Is there another way we could find out who visited him? CCTV footage?’
Roy laughed. ‘You’re kidding if you think we still have footage from that far back. But actually, now that I think about it…’
‘What? What is it?’
‘Nothing. It’s just…’
‘Roy, please,’ Ella said. ‘We need every piece of information on Thomas Greaves, no matter how minor, and if you-’
‘His notebook,’ said Roy.
‘What about his notebook?’
‘Greaves used to write and draw a lot. That was all he did. He took a couple of classes, but he had to do them alone because of his notoriety. But I remember checking his cell one night – we have to check the high-profile inmates’ property occasionally – and I saw in his notebook he’d written everything down.
Like, everything that happened in his entire time in the slammer.
I think it was his way of coping with it all. ’
‘Including visitor logs?’
‘Yeah. I remember reading a passage he’d written about seeing a psychiatrist, so I can only assume he logged every visitor he had, which definitely wasn’t zero.’
Ella was slowly assembling the jigsaw, and she could already see the grim, inevitable result. ‘And where’s that notebook now?’
‘So, it’s kind of weird, but Greaves had no family left that wanted him.
Nobody claimed the body after his execution, and here’s a thing you might not know: When nobody claims a man, his property goes in with him.
Whatever he had in his cell that wasn’t contraband, they box it and it goes in the coffin. ’
Ella looked at her partner, who was shaking her head. Ripley said, ‘Roy, you said earlier you’d seen Thomas Greaves’s body after he died. How is that possible, if he was executed in Indiana?’
‘Terre Haute sent his body back to us. He might have been a murdering scumbag, but apparently everyone’s equal in death or some garbage, so we had to do the respectful thing.’
‘Which was?’
‘Bury him closer to home.’
Ella’s heart was in the pit of her stomach. ‘How close to home?’
‘So close that I could spit on his grave from here. He’s buried in the cemetery next door.’
Ripley leaned in and said, ‘Roy, can I put you on hold for a second?’
‘Sure. Don’t keep me too long, though.’
‘No, no, no,’ Ripley said as she pushed the mute button. ‘Don’t think about it, Dark. How stupid would we look if it’s a waste of time?’
‘You got any better ideas?’ asked Ella.
‘No, but that doesn’t mean we have to indulge the craziest shit we can think of. Do you know how long it takes?’
‘I’ve got it done in one day before, and Mia, we can’t afford not to do this. We’ve got a giant executing people like it’s medieval times, and we’re supposed to sit on our asses and just wait for another body to drop?’
Ripley backed up to the window, then raised her hands in surrender. ‘Fine, but you’re telling him, not me.’
Ella pushed the button to unmute the call. ‘Roy, you still there?’
‘Yup, but not for long. Is that everything you need?’
‘Uh… not quite. I need one more thing.’
‘Make it quick.’
‘Thomas Greaves. We need to dig him up.’