CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The evidence room at the MPD sat in the basement behind a steel door with a window of wired glass.
The clerk who ran it was a heavyset man named Okafor who’d apparently been doing the job long enough that he no longer pretended to be glad of company.
Ella signed the sheet, gave him the case number, and waited at the counter while he went back into the rows and came out with a long cardboard box that he set down on the counter.
‘Rope,’ he said, reading the label as though she might have forgotten what she’d come for. ‘You’re taking it out of the room?’
‘Just upstairs. I’ll have it back within the hour.’
‘You’ll sign for it going and coming.’ Okafor turned the box so the printed chain-of-custody form faced her, and Ella signed where it told her to sign, and then she lifted the lid.
The rope lay coiled inside on a sheet of butcher paper, bagged in clear plastic.
The loop at one end had gone slightly out of shape from being handled and photographed and weighed and swabbed.
It was new rope, or had been a few days ago.
She was no rope expert, but she could tell it was three-strand, and the fibres were still bright where the lab’s cuts had exposed the inside of it.
The knot at the working end was ugly, and she’d looked at it a dozen times in the photographs without it telling her anything, because she didn’t know what she was looking at. However, the man upstairs might.
‘He cleared yet?’ Okafor asked. ‘The big one. I heard you ran him down at a museum.’
‘He’s cleared. There’s a visa question hanging over him, but that’s somebody else’s headache, not ours.’ Ella fitted the lid back on the box. ‘He didn’t do ours.’
‘Pity. Easy when they’re that size. You can see them coming.’
That was the trouble, she thought, going back up the stairs with the box held flat in both arms. The one they were after, you couldn’t see coming at all. He came up a residential street with no cameras and left the same way, and the only picture they had of him was the one he’d chosen to give them.
She found Francis Hale where she’d left him. Somebody had brought him a coffee in a paper cup and he hadn’t touched it. He looked up when she came in, and there was a wariness in him that hadn’t been there an hour ago.
‘You’re free to leave, Mr Hale,’ Ella said. She set the box on the table but didn’t open it. ‘The motel checks out, top to bottom. Eleven hours on camera. As far as the Brennan case is concerned, you were never in it. I’m sorry for the museum, and I’m sorry for the cuffs.’
‘It’s fine. And the other thing?’
‘Mr Hale, the FBI is looking for a murderer. What I am not investigating today is visa compliance. Whether you do something about your immigration status is between you and your conscience. My recommendation would be to talk to a lawyer as soon as you get out of here.’
He took a breath that went all the way down and came out shaking at the end of it. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. Not yet. Before you go, I want to show you something, and I want your honest read on it, the same as you’d give a customer.
’ She took the lid off the box. ‘You don’t have to.
You’re free to walk out of here right now and I wouldn’t blame you.
But you know this world better than anyone I’m going to find today, and I’d be a fool not to ask while you’re sitting there. ’
‘Umm, okay. What is it?’
She lifted the bagged rope out and laid it on the table with the knotted end toward him. Hale leaned back from it the way he’d leaned back from the photograph, then made himself lean in again.
‘I’m not sure if you know, but we’re not just investigating one homicide. We’re investigating two, and this rope was used in the first one. I can’t tell you the details of what was done with it, because you don’t want them and you don’t need them. What I want to know is the craft of it.’
Hale looked at it in puzzlement. ‘Can I touch?’
‘No.’
He looked at it for a long time. Long enough that Ella could only stand back and let the looking happen. Finally, Hale said, ‘Someone was hanged with this?’
‘Yes. From a gallows.’
‘Oh. Not the guy that was killed in Rock Creek Park?’
‘You heard about it, then.’
‘I heard something, but the details weren’t concrete.’
‘Well, that detail was.’
‘Oh, wow. Well, there’s something interesting here, because this knot is pretty good, as far as knots go. But there’s one problem.’
Ella’s ears pricked up. This was what she needed. The discrepancies. ‘Go on.’
‘Your man fancies himself an executioner? Well, he needs to try harder, because this isn’t a hangman’s knot.’
Ella went still. ‘Come again?’
‘It’s not a hangman’s knot. A proper hangman’s noose is a fixed loop.
The knot is there to stop the loop closing further than it needs to.
The whole point of it, mechanically, is that it doesn’t tighten after the drop.
The loop holds its shape, the weight transfers through the coil to the knot, and the force of the drop is directed laterally into the neck at the site of the knot.
The knot is placed just under the jaw to provide the lateral force that fractures the cervical vertebrae.
This isn’t that. This is something different. ’
Ella looked at the rope again, and now that he’d said it she couldn’t unsee it.
She’d taken the knot at face value because the photographs had told her this was a hanging and the pathologist had told her it was correct.
A fat ugly knot at the end of a noose was a hangman’s knot, because what else would it be?
‘Then what is this?’
Hale looked at the rope again. ‘It’s a running bowline over a fixed hang point.
The loop is adjustable. It would tighten under load rather than hold a fixed diameter.
If this man dropped through a trapdoor with this around his neck, the loop would have closed as the weight came on it.
The lateral force would have been reduced.
Whether he died from fracture or from constriction would depend on the drop height and the weight. ’
‘The drop height was calculated. We know that from the pathologist.’
‘Then a longer drop, with the right calculation, might have compensated for the loss of lateral force. But it’s not what you’d choose if you’d done your homework on the Marwood method.
’ He sat back. ‘It works. It gets the job done. But it isn’t the knot a man uses if he’s read the primary sources on judicial hanging.
If he’d read the sources, he’d have tied the proper noose. Does that make sense?’
‘Kind of,’ said Ella.’
‘Basically, it’s a knot somebody who’s worked with ropes before ties without thinking, because it’s the one their hands already know. Muscle memory. It’s in the fingers.’
‘So let me make sure I’ve got this right,’ she said slowly.
‘A man researches the long drop. He gets the drop distance right. He gets the knot placement right, under the left ear, where the books say. He does the maths on the body weight. He gets everything right that you’d get from study, from reading, from learning the theory. ’
‘Pretty much.’
‘And then, at the actual moment, when it comes to the one thing his hands have to do on their own, he doesn’t tie the knot the books would have taught him. He ties the knot his hands already know.’
‘That’s what I’m looking at. The brain learned one thing and the hands had already learned another, and when it came to it, the hands won.
In this game, the hands know more than the body.
’ Hale showed his palms, which were burned and scarred to hell.
‘Whoever your man is, he studied the death. But he didn’t study the rope.
He already knew the rope. From somewhere else. From before.’
Ella bagged it back up with hands that wanted to move faster than she let them, and signed the box, and thanked Francis Hale, and meant it more than he probably understood.
‘For what it’s worth, you might have just helped me find a serial killer.’
‘No problem,’ Hale said. ‘Anything to help the famous Agent Dark.’
Once out of the interrogation room, Ella rushed to find Ripley, because she was now certain of something she’d been meditating on since last night.
This killer, whoever he was, had spent a lot of time in prison.