CHAPTER FOUR
Mia Ripley had witnessed the entire spectrum of murder methods.
She’d seen people killed by gunshot, stabbing, suffocation, poison, fire, water, blunt instruments and plain old gravity.
Killing was a craft like any other, with its skilled practitioners and its bunglers, and the bunglers always outnumbered the skilled.
But personal experience and academic research had taught her that nothing was harder to pull off than a hanging, but that was exactly what she was looking at it.
Chief Andrew Hibbert from the Metropolitan Police sidled up to her.
He was a lean man in his forties, a career cop, and had the dark features of a native Italian, including the slick black ponytail, even though he was pure East Coast. Ripley knew him well because she’d worked with him before.
He’d been the one to ask for the Bureau.
Ripley gave him credit for that. Plenty of chiefs would have sat on a thing like this for a day out of pride, and a day was a long time at a scene like this.
‘Took it all in yet?’ he asked.
Ripley hadn’t. Not only was she staring at a weedy, middle-aged man hanging by his neck, but she was in the Thornwood Renaissance Faire at Rock Creek Park.
The bunting still hung. The painted stalls still stood with their shutters up and their goods laid out.
A banner over a makeshift wooden gate promised JOUSTING AT NOON & DUSK in gold letters.
But the tape had gone up across every path, the gates were shut, and the only people inside the fence now were Ripley and members of the MPD.
‘Definitely not. Who called it in?’
‘The guy who works on the tomato toss over there.’ Hibbert pointed toward a stall beside a medieval pillory. Buckets of tomatoes sat below it. ‘He says he got here this morning and found this poor guy hanging here.’
‘Any idea who the victim is?’
‘Nope. We managed to pat him down, and he doesn’t have a cell phone or wallet on him. All we found was a hundred and fifty dollars in cash.’
‘So he was either buying drugs or hookers,’ Ripley said. ‘Or he robbed someone on the way here.’
‘All are plausible, but what I want to know is how a man ends up hanged, at a Renaissance faire of all places.’
Ripley looked around. She was standing amongst a mish-mash of time periods, from the Middle Ages to Tudor England. ‘It’s the perfect place to hang someone. Where else would you find a gallows already set up?’
‘I suppose. But why?’
‘Jury’s still out on that one. I need a closer look.’
‘Alright. Let’s go.’
Hibbert signaled to the guarding officers that he was getting up close.
They moved out of the way, and Hibbert led Ripley up the ramp to the gallows platform.
Ripley got as close as she could to the victim without running the risk of making contact with him, because all it took was a slight touch to make a hanging victim sway.
A body left hanging long enough would eventually finish the job the drop had started, so a sway could be the difference between a body in one piece or two.
‘Some guys told me this was a typical suicide, but I know it’s not. I just need someone to tell me I’m not overthinking things.’
The victim was wearing jeans, dirty trainers and a sleeveless jacket with a brown t-shirt underneath. His arms were on show, and Ripley caught sight of a few faded tattoos. He was below average height and had a shaved head. Ripley put his age at mid-forties.
‘No, this isn’t a suicide. Suicidal people kill themselves in private.
Some people throw themselves in front of trains, but that’s because it’s a convenient way to off yourself, not because of the public element.
If somebody wanted to hang themselves, they wouldn’t come all the way out here to do it. ’
‘That’s reassuring,’ Hibbert said.
‘No it’s not, because it means we have a murderer in the city.’ Ripley gently touched the rope, making sure not to cause any oscillation. ‘This rope. Was it already here?’
‘No. There was a rope here, but it wasn’t real rope. It was nylon, to endure the weather. This whole thing is just a prop. But the rope around our vic’s neck is real.’
Ripley thought about that. The killer brought his own rope. ‘He replaced it. And this gallows is fully functional?’
Hibbert gestured to the lever about four feet away. ‘Simple pulley system. Pull the lever, the bolt holding the trap door in place detaches. They usually drop bags of sand through it for the punters.’
‘Another tick in the suicide column. The victim couldn’t have pulled the lever himself.’
‘Fair point.’
‘So our killer removed the prop rope, put a real rope in place, then lured a victim here and hanged him, executioner-style. That needs a lot of prep work, and a lot of luck. What’s the ETA on forensics?’
‘Within the hour.’
‘Cameras? Witnesses?’
‘Cameras are pretty hard to find this deep into the park. There are some about two miles back near the road, but that’ll catch a million people coming and going.
I’ve got my guys talking to everyone who works here, and as of ten minutes ago, no one had any information, nor do they recognize the victim.
The fair was supposed to go on for two more days, but that’s not going to happen. ’
‘When the workers pack everything up, I want to be here to interview everyone.’
Hibbert laughed. ‘Everyone? This place has hundreds of workers. This is just the activities section, too. There are stalls, food stands, everything. This place is like a carnival.’
Ripley said nothing for a moment, because Hibbert was right.
This place had tons of workers, and she imagined plenty of them worked the fair circuit, which meant they could have driven in from three states over.
The second the bunting came down, they’d scatter back to wherever they’d come from.
By the weekend her suspect pool could be spread across a dozen jurisdictions, and she wouldn’t even have their real names.
She needed to be smart about who she talked to and quick about it. A blanket interview of the whole faire would take a week she didn’t have and would mostly catch people who knew nothing.
And besides, Ripley didn’t know the carnival world.
She didn’t know how a traveling fair was put together, who ran it and who answered to them, which trades were respectable and which were a cover, how these people moved and where they went when the season ended.
Hibbert had called it a carnival, and the word had stuck in her ear.
Ripley didn’t know carnies.
But she knew someone who did.