CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Ella was back in her office, staring at the papers that Hibbert had handed over. It wasn’t clear to her why Greaves’s former legal counsel needed to know why they’d disturbed his remains, because it wasn’t like they could demand a retrial and get him un-executed.
Fine. There were rules for that, and the rules existed for good reasons.
Unfortunately, those rules were going to take up several hours she didn’t have.
She could hand it off to someone else, but she didn’t know any of the officers here well enough to just stick an admin task in front of them.
Ripley was still at the cemetery, probably to ensure they didn’t run into any more legal troubles as a result of digging up the dead.
She worked through the stack anyway. Most of it was procedure.
It was every attorney who had touched it from arrest through execution.
Six names. Three prosecuting, two for the defense, one assigned for appeals.
Ella found their email addresses and drafted some quick copy-and-paste messages to each one informing them of the missing corpse.
Two of the defense team had been senior partners at a firm in Bethesda, it seems. One prosecutor had moved up to a US Attorney’s office in Houston. One had retired.
Then Ella came to the last name on the list.
‘Reuben Hoy,’ she said. ‘Let’s find you.’
Ella searched for his email address online but couldn’t find any practicing lawyer with that name in the District.
She tried Hoy’s firm next. The address on the paperwork belonged to a practice that she discovered had dissolved two years ago.
The few hits she got were archived listings and a defunct website caught in a search index.
She ran Reuben Hoy’s name through the Maryland bar, and the bar told her his license had gone inactive.
Then, she went back to the papers and found a cell phone number for Mr. Hoy, but the line didn’t even connect. Dead number.
‘Hmmm. That’s odd.’
Reuben Hoy. Where had she heard that name?
‘Hoy, Hoy, Hoy.’
It landed at the back of her head and she waited for the answer to surface.
She’d seen it written down.
‘Aha,’ she said as it hit her.
Brennan’s podcast.
Ella opened up the transcript for Brennan’s episode on Thomas Greaves and searched for Reuben Hoy.
31 matches.
‘Got you.’
She read the passage.
Defense was Reuben Hoy out of Silver Spring.
Hoy did something at sentencing I’ve never seen before or since.
He took the stand himself as a character witness for his own client.
How do I know? I was at that sentencing because it was a local case for me.
But yeah, Hoy talked for thirty minutes about what a kind man Greaves was.
In the end, the judge had to ask him to wrap it up.
This guy was talking about Greaves being a nice guy while Mary Monroe’s family were twenty feet away.
Ella turned to her keyboard and started pulling.
She had Hoy’s bar number from the case file, which sped things up.
The Maryland bar listed him as INACTIVE – VOLUNTARILY WITHDRAWN as of November 2023, four months after Greaves’s execution.
The District of Columbia bar said the same.
PACER had no filings under his name after February of that year.
The Virginia bar had never heard of him.
She went into the federal system instead.
Greaves had been a federal case and Hoy had been counsel of record in a federal court, and counsel of record stayed in the case file with their contact information whether they liked it or not.
The CJA appointment paperwork was there, the voucher submissions, the appearance forms, and the address on the most recent of them was newer than the bar’s by eight months.
Not Rockville. Not the dissolved firm. A house, in Takoma Park, two miles from where she was sitting.
Reuben Hoy had disappeared from the law world, but he hadn’t disappeared from the real world.
Ella doubted Reuben Hoy was her unsub, because if Reuben Hoy was six-foot-eight and therefore genetically identical to Thomas Greaves as she was sure her unsub was, then Brennan would have mentioned it on his podcast since he saw Reuben Hoy in the flesh.
Still, she needed to speak to this man, because he might have known Thomas Greaves better than anyone.