CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Digging up a federal inmate turned out to be the easy part. Getting permission to do it took the rest of the morning and most of Ella’s patience.
She’d thought, in the first flush of it at the precinct, that a name and a theory and a string of bodies would be enough to put a shovel in the ground by lunchtime.
It was not. Thomas Greaves had been a federal prisoner, executed under a federal sentence, and the body had come back to Maryland for burial in an unclaimed plot in the cemetery next to MCI Jessup, which meant the question of who actually owned the grave had three different answers depending on who Ella asked, and she had to ask all of them.
Thomas Greaves’s wasn’t where Ella had assumed it would be.
She had been ready for a federal cemetery in Indiana, a thirteen-hour round trip and a separate jurisdiction.
But the arrangement was on file and the arrangement was unusual.
Greaves had filed a personal request with the federal chaplain at Terre Haute four months before his execution.
He had asked, if he had to die in Indiana, that his body be returned to Maryland for burial, on the grounds that Maryland had been the only place in the world he had ever felt at home.
Furthermore, MCI Jessup didn’t bury its own.
It didn’t have the room or the remit. What it had was a standing arrangement with Greenmount Field, a county-run public cemetery on the far side of the road from the facility, where the state interred the unclaimed dead, prisoners among them.
Greaves had gone in there because no family had claimed the body out of Terre Haute, and the unclaimed went to the county, and so the county put them in Greenmount.
That changed the legal picture, and it changed it in Ella’s favour.
A public cemetery was a state matter under state law, and Maryland did not let someone open a grave because an FBI agent had a feeling, but it did not wrap the thing in a layer of federal property authorization either.
There was no prison fence to get past and no Bureau of Prisons regional office to spend an hour on hold to.
There was a cemetery, run by the county, open to anyone who walked through the gate, and a body in the ground that belonged, in the end, to nobody.
She started with Vernon. Legally, she didn’t need to, but if the FBI Director had found out that one of his agents was violating graves without his knowledge, it wouldn’t do her any favors.
After a hurried rush back to HQ and an unprofessional interruption to his meeting, Vernon had listened to Ella ramble for a minute and then told her he wasn’t going to be the one to authorize digging up a dead man on the strength of an empty visitor log and a painting from a gift shop.
Ella then told him she had three bodies in three days and a buried journal that might name the fourth.
Vernon had then, somewhat reluctantly, supported her exhumation idea.
Vernon then spent two minutes on the speakerphone with a friend at the EDVA US Attorney’s Office, who told him what he should have known on his own.
The body wasn’t on federal soil. The body wasn’t even on prison soil.
The grave was in a county-run cemetery on the Howard County side of the road, and the door he needed was a state circuit court judge in Ellicott City.
Which meant the exhumation came down to one road, and that road was a court order.
Ella spent forty minutes on the phone to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Baltimore, who told her that a disinterment in the state required either the consent of the next of kin or an order of the court, and Thomas Greaves had no next of kin, which she’d been counting on, because no next of kin meant nobody to consent and nobody to object and the court as the only door left.
The court order meant an affidavit. Vernon’s assistant wrote it while Ella read it over her shoulder, and then her and Vernon signed it, and it was the strangest document she’d put her name to in years.
She had to lay out probable cause for opening a grave the way she’d lay out probable cause for a search warrant, because it was, effectively, a search warrant for a coffin.
She set out the three homicides. She set out the link through Thomas Greaves, the federal case, the campaign, the field.
She set out the prison’s account of Greaves being buried with his property, the journal, and she stated that she had reason to believe those items contained evidence material to an ongoing investigation into three murders and the prevention of a fourth.
The prevention of a fourth was the line that mattered. She knew it when she wrote it. A judge would weigh the disturbance of a grave against a great many things, and the only one of those things that moved fast was a life not yet taken.
The application went to a state circuit court judge in Howard County, and Ella had braced for a fight and didn’t get one.
The judge read it, asked two questions through his clerk, the first about next of kin and the second about whether the county had been given notice, and signed it inside the hour.
The county was the only other body Ella had to satisfy, the office that ran Greenmount on the state’s behalf, and they were so unused to anyone wanting anything from that half-acre that the clerk who took her call had to go and find someone who knew the procedure.
And the someone, when found, was simply relieved that Ella had the court order in hand and asked her only to copy the office on the paperwork and let their groundsman be present.
By the time it was all stacked up, she had a state court order, a county notification, a forensic anthropologist driving down from the medical examiner’s office, a four-person disinterment crew the ME’s office contracted for exactly this, a groundsman with a key, and a window of daylight that was already half gone.
But four hours after the idea first came to her, Ella was ready to dig up the past.