CHAPTER NINETEEN
Outside the interview room at the MPD precinct, Ella took the opportunity to remind Ripley that she wasn’t technically a federal agent anymore.
She was a consultant, and therefore it would be Ella who had to justify the bullet that had left Ripley’s gun an hour ago.
Her justification, which she’d given on the journey back from the History Museum with Francis Hale in the back seat, was that she didn’t have time to chase him down.
Ripley said, ‘As if Vernon would have the balls to take away my gun.’
‘He wouldn’t, nor should he. I’m just saying. That was a risky maneuver. A couple of years ago, you’d have crucified me for doing that.’
‘You have to earn your privileges,’ Ripley said. She turned toward the glass, the other side of which sat Francis Hale, a man big enough to make the chair he was sitting in look child-sized. ‘Why do you think he fled?’
‘I don’t know, but only guilty people run. And he lied about contacting Curtis Brennan.’
‘That’s three years in the slammer, at least.’
‘He didn’t ask what we wanted him for. Did you notice that? A man who’s hanged one person and beheaded another, you’d think he’d want to know how much we had before he decided to bolt. Hale didn’t ask. He just went. The only thing bugging me is the height.’
‘We’ll photograph him from every angle and compare it to the footage,’ Ripley said. ‘If that doesn’t work, we’ll put screws through his hands.’
The door at the end of the corridor opened and Hibbert came through it with a clear plastic property bag in one hand and a paper bag in the other. He saw them and raised the bag.
‘I’ve booked him in, possessions included.
Public lawyer is available if he wants it, but he hasn’t asked.
Everything he had on him’s in here. Wallet, keys, sixty dollars in cash and a phone, but the phone will have to go through the tech guys before we can touch it.
And before either of you ask, no, we didn’t find a black hood in his car. ’
‘Worth checking,’ Ripley said.
Ella took the bag, set it down on the small steel table outside the interview room and unsealed it. She reached in, took out his wallet and began leafing through. ‘Everything checks out?’
‘Nothing weird in there that I could see,’ said Hibbert.
The first window held a Maryland driver’s license in the name of Francis Hale, with a photograph that looked like Francis Hale and a Frederick address that matched the workshop.
Behind that was a punch-card for a coffee place in Old Town that had four punches out of ten on it.
Behind that, a credit card from a small federal credit union she didn’t recognize.
Behind that, a folded twenty-dollar bill.
She slid two fingers behind the credit card to lift it forward and a thin plastic card came up with it, half-tucked into the lining where it had been pushed deeper than the others.
It was green and white and across the top were the words ONTARIO HEALTH.
Below them, a red maple leaf the size of her thumbnail.
Below that, a photograph of a younger Francis Hale.
‘Hmmm,’ she said.
‘Anything good?’ Ripley asked.
‘Maybe,’ Ella said. ‘Let’s go and ask him.’
***
The interview room at the MPD precinct was built for ordinary men, and Francis Hale was not one. His bulk filled the chair, and his forearms covered half the table, and when Ella and Ripley sat down across from him, the table resembled a tray balanced across his lap.
Ella ran the formalities for the recording, the date and the time and the names of everyone present, and Hale listened to all of it with his eyes down and arms folded.
‘You haven’t asked for a lawyer,’ Ella said.
‘Do I need one?’
‘That’s your decision, not mine. You can stop this at any time and we’ll get you one. I want to make sure you understand that.’
‘I understand. What I don’t understand is why I’m here.’
‘Lying to federal agents – and then fleeing from us – tends to have consequences. Want to tell us why you did that?’
‘Lie? What did I lie about?’
Ella opened the folder she’d brought in and didn’t take anything out of it yet. The folder did a lot of work just by being present. ‘Curtis Brennan. You said you’d never talked to him.’
‘I haven’t!’
She opened the folder and removed the first printout, which was a copy of Hale’s emails to the second victim. She pushed it over to him and said, ‘This correspondence says otherwise.’
‘Oh, this. Yeah. You said talked. This isn’t talking. This is emailing.’
‘That’s a fine distinction for someone who sprinted across a museum to avoid making it.’
‘I know how it looks.’
‘I don’t think you do, Mr. Hale, because someone killed Curtis Brennan last night.’ Ella took out the next picture from the folder. It was Curtis Brennan in the chair. The wide shot. The cream office, the three monitors fanned with dried spray, the body ending where a body should not end.
Hale’s face did not do what a guilty man’s face did when shown a photograph of a body he had personally produced.
It did not flatten. It did not perform shock.
It did not over-react and it did not under-react.
Hale’s face went through the linear progression that a face went through when it was looking at the thing it had been afraid was going to be there.
Hale looked away as soon as he registered what the picture was, then covered his eyes with his hand, the way a child might when playing hide and seek.
‘I don’t need to see that. I don’t want to see that. ’
Ripley, beside her, did the small inward movement she did when an interview was going to bend. ‘You don’t seem all too surprised about this man’s death,’ she said.
Hale sighed, removed his hand and glanced upward, presumably to avoid his peripherals catching the graphic imagery in front of him. ‘Yeah. I know he’s dead, alright? I doubt there’s a person in D.C. that hasn’t heard about it. I lied, because I thought…’
‘You thought what, Mr. Hale?’
‘I know what this looks like, Agent Dark. I know exactly what it looks like. It looks like me. I’m freakishly tall, just like the guy in the video.’
‘Agreed.’ Ella did him the courtesy of turning the photograph face down. ‘So if you’re innocent, why did you run from us at the first opportunity?’
‘Because I knew who you were.’
Ella and Ripley swapped a look. Ella said, ‘What? We’re the FBI. We told you that.’
‘Not that. I mean you. Agent Dark. You caught Tobias Campbell, the Keymaster, the Alchemist. I’ve followed you ever since they did that Lifetime show about the Mimicker.
That’s what I do. I read about cases instead of having friends.
And when a guy I’d argued with has just been murdered with a method I happen to be the world’s biggest bore about, I know how it looks.
Especially when the woman walking towards me is the one who, as far as I can tell, has never got the wrong person. ’
Ella didn’t have anything to say to that, so she looked at Ripley, who was grinning despite all of it. The two of them knew the same thing Hale didn’t: that Ella had sat across this same kind of table from a long line of innocent people and believed every one of them guilty for an hour or two.
‘If only you knew the truth,’ Ella said.
‘Honestly. One of my pals works in the Intelligence department or whatever it is over there. He gives me the scoop.’ Hale frantically waved his hands as though this was the detail that crossed the line. ‘Nothing confidential, of course. Just the overview.’
Ella asked, ‘Who’s your pal?’
‘Lee Rhodes.’
A single, quiet of course went round inside her head and didn’t come out. ‘Roadrunner? The Human Spreadsheet.’
‘Yeah. You know him?’
‘A little bit. I sat next to him for seven years. Mr. Hale, can you confirm where you were the past two nights?’
‘At a Best Western on West Patrick Street, in Frederick. Room two-eleven. I checked in Saturday afternoon and I haven’t been home since.’
Ripley asked, ‘Why weren’t you at home?’
‘Because a pipe broke in the apartment above my workshop last Friday morning and put my ceiling on my floor. The landlord is paying for the hotel. There’s a receipt.
There’s CCTV. There’s a woman at the front desk who calls me Frankie.
The hotel is ten miles from here. You can check the cameras at the hotel exit.
You can check the cameras at the parking lot. ’
Hale stopped for a breath.
‘I am not your man, Agent Dark. I am a man who said something he shouldn’t have said to a stranger online once.’
Ella thought back to what else she had on this man. Not much. Except an Ontario Health card. ‘Is that all? Because I might be doing myself a disservice here, but I don’t think I’m scary enough to run from on sight.’
‘Fine. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m Canadian, and I live here illegally.
I came here eleven years ago from Thunder Bay.
I saw you, I recognized you, and I saw myself going straight back to Canada or straight to a prison cell.
I’d lose my business and everything I love.
So I ran like a coward. That’s the whole truth and no, Roady doesn’t know I’m here illegally either. ’
Ella closed the folder.
A dead end was a dead end, and both her and Ripley knew the look of one when it sat down in front of them with its hands flat on the table.
They were in the same position they were at six that morning, minus a man.