CHAPTER SEVEN
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was on E Street SW, and it was the most modern coroner’s office in the country.
Ella had been here twice before and both times she’d thought the same thing: for a building that handled every violent death in the District, it was awfully polite about advertising the fact.
She and Ripley stood on the sidewalk out front.
The afternoon had gone cool and the light had started to slant.
She’d told Ripley everything Ronnie Cobb had said, and then they’d escorted him to the MPD precinct to give an official statement.
Ronnie hadn’t seen anything else other than a well-built murderer and a wheelchair.
He didn’t see the victim, at least not in life.
‘And how much of his story do you believe, Dark?’ asked Ripley.
‘That’s the question.’
‘It is the question. Because what you’ve got there is a tipsy witness who slept rough on the scene, ran from the murder, hid for the better part of seven hours, neglected to tell the police that and then handed you a description out of a Hammer film the second you put any pressure on him.’
‘I know.’
‘A six-eight executioner in a black hood. With a wheelchair.’
‘I know, Mia, but look at the positives. There can’t be many guys in this city that size.’
‘And if it’s lies, we’ll have wasted our time looking at every tall guy in the city. Come on. Let’s see what the doctor’s found.’
Ella followed Ripley into the building. The lobby was wide and cold. They came to the desk where the receptionist sat behind a curve of glass under a row of fluorescent tubes that did nobody any favors.
Ripley said, ‘Agents Ripley and Dark with the FBI. We’re here to see Doctor Massri.’
The woman glanced at the badges and tapped two keys. ‘End of the corridor. Last door on the right.’
A buzzer went somewhere above the door behind her and Ella pushed through it.
The corridor on the other side ran long and white under the same flat lighting, and the temperature dropped a degree with every door they passed.
They came to room AUTOPSY 4, and below it the sign said NO ENTRY WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION.
Ripley knocked twice, and the door opened at once.
‘Hello, my friends. Would you like to see the strangest thing I’ve seen in years?’
Doctor Massri was a doctor by every metric, including his bedside manner, which was to say he had none.
He was Lebanese, or possibly Syrian. Ella had never asked and Massri had never volunteered.
He was in his sixties, with a grey beard and a pair of black glasses that sat halfway down a nose that looked like it had been broken once and never healed properly. Ella had worked with him once before.
‘Yes, we would,’ Ripley said.
‘Come in.’ He gestured for them to enter in lieu of a handshake, then shut the door behind them.
The room’s tiled floor sloped to a central drain.
There were two stainless steel tables in the center.
One was empty and rinsed clean, and the other bore what they’d come for.
The victim’s body was under a white sheet drawn up to the collarbone.
The head and the neck were visible. His face was turned slightly toward the door, as if he had been waiting for someone to come in.
The eyes were closed, decently, presumably by the good doctor.
Massri said, ‘I have good news and bad news. Which one would you like first?’
‘Good,’ said Ripley. She found a box of latex gloves, pulled out a pair and handed them to Ella.
‘The good news is that we have a name for this man. Chief Hibbert called me an hour ago after matching his face to a former inmate at MCI Jessup. I have since confirmed it from my end. My identification unit lifted his prints when he came in this morning and ran them through the federal database, and they came back to the same name Hibbert gave me.’
Ella asked, ‘Who is he, doc?’
‘Billy Hayes, forty-six years old. He was released from jail four months ago after serving five years in jail.’
Ripley looked over at Ella and gave her the nod. She’d been right. The victim was an ex-convict. The troublesome part of that fact was that there was probably no shortage of people who’d want to kill an ex-convict.
‘Thanks, doctor. What else did you find?’
Massri unveiled the body – who Ella now knew as Billy Hayes. ‘Where would you like to start?’
‘Cause of death,’ Ripley said.
‘Cause of death.’ Massri nodded, as if this were the answer he’d hoped for. ‘Then come closer, please. Both of you. The two of you can see what most of my colleagues will never see in their lives.’
Ella stepped up to the head of the table and pulled on the gloves Ripley had handed her.
The neck of the corpse was exposed to the collarbone, and Massri reached down and very gently rotated Billy Hayes’s head a few degrees to give them the full line of it.
The skin beneath the rope mark had gone the colour of an old plum.
‘He was hanged,’ Massri said. ‘But more importantly, he was hanged correctly. This is the strangest thing I am going to tell you today, so take notes.’
Ella turned on her mental voice recorder. This was all going in the bank.
‘When a layperson hangs themselves at home,’ Massri said, ‘they die from strangulation. The rope obstructs the carotid arteries and the airway; the brain is starved of oxygen, and over several minutes the person dies. It is, despite popular belief, not a fast death and not a clean one. We see this every week. It is what most of these cases look like.’
Ella knew this, but she suspected Massri was about to get into the weeds, of which she was likely unfamiliar.
‘Then there’s the other side of the coin.
If a person falls too far, their head fully detaches.
But then there’s a middle ground. If you look at Billy Hayes here, the tongue is in the mouth where it belongs.
The eyes are clear. There is no petechial hemorrhaging in the conjunctiva, none on the eyelids and none on the face. ’
‘So, no asphyxiation,’ Ella said.
Massri lifted the head a fraction, supporting the base of the skull with the flat of his palm.
‘Internally, the picture is unambiguous. The second and third cervical vertebrae have separated cleanly. The spinal cord at that level has been severed. There is bruising and tearing of the surrounding soft tissues consistent with a sudden distractive force. That means that the head was pulled sharply away from the body by a known weight falling a known distance. The medical term is hangman’s fracture.
The historical term, if you prefer, is the long drop. ’
‘The long drop,’ Ella repeated. She knew it well. It was devised by a British hangman in the 1800s as a more humane way to execute criminals than strangulation.
‘Yes indeed. Used in Europe centuries ago. The executioner would calculate the body weight and the length of rope required to deliver sufficient force at the bottom of the fall to fracture the upper cervical spine. You position the knot – here, behind the left ear, the submental position – so that on the drop, the head whips backwards and to the side. When done correctly, the cord is severed instantly. Billy Hayes was hanged by someone who had done the maths. The drop was correct for his weight. The knot was correctly placed. The rope was the correct diameter and the correct material. I would estimate the fall at six feet, perhaps a little more. Any shorter and he would have strangled. Any longer and he’d have been split in two. ’
Ella took that information and rolled it around her head. She had a giant unsub who seemed to obsessively embrace the role of an executioner, or perhaps a hangman from the nineteenth century. He’d dressed for the part and done the part properly.
‘Our unsub is more organized than we thought,’ Ripley said.
‘More than organized,’ Massri continued, and that was when Ella realized he wasn’t finished.
‘There’s more?’
‘There is more. I said I had bad news, didn’t I?
This is the bad news.’ He moved to the other side of the table and indicated, with one gloved finger, a small dark mark on the left side of Billy Hayes’s neck.
Ella had to step closer to see it. A pinpoint puncture, the surrounding skin slightly bruised, no bigger than a sesame seed.
Ripley leaned down. ‘An injection site?’
‘Exactly that. Subcutaneous to intramuscular, judging by the depth. I sent bloods to the toxicology lab as soon as he came in, and I asked them, very politely, to put my case at the front of the queue. They did. The result came back forty minutes ago.’
‘What was in him?’ Ella asked.
‘Ketamine. A substantial dose. Enough to put a man of his size into what we call a dissociative state within a minute of injection. Awake, technically. Breathing. Heart going. But not present, in any useful sense of the word. The body is there but the man is not in it.’
Ella was already running it. Billy Hayes had been lured to Rock Creek Park.
The killer had likely blitzed him and put a needle into his neck.
Within sixty seconds, Hayes had been a passenger in his own body.
He could be lifted. He could be wheeled.
He could be propped in a chair and pushed up a ramp and have a noose dropped over his head, and wouldn’t have been able to do anything about any of it.
‘He was awake for it,’ she said.
‘Certainly. Aware enough to register what was happening. Not aware enough to resist it. Whether Billy Hayes felt the drop, I cannot tell you. Whether he understood the drop was coming – that, I’m afraid, is more likely than not.’
Ella asked, ‘How hard is it to get your hands on ketamine, doctor?’
‘Too easy. It’s up there with marijuana as one of the most accessible drugs. Recreational users don’t tend to take in the dosage that ended up in Mr. Hayes, though.’
Ella looked down at the small dark mark on Billy Hayes’s neck and thought of all the things their killer had needed to know to put it there.
The drug. The dose. The victim’s weight.
The drop. The knot. The hour the park went quiet.
The route in past the cameras. He had taught himself an old trade, item by item, and last night he had practiced it on a man.
Practiced.
And what concerned Ella was the fact that most people didn’t practice something just once.