CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Pork was the closest thing Ella had for a comparison. To date, she’d never been near a body that had been completely immolated, but tonight was a night for new territory.
Ella, Ripley and Hibbert stood fifty feet from the wreckage.
A halogen mast was up on the south side, which brought every detail into a hard white field even under the night sky.
Ella could see piles of burned rubble at the base of a tree, about a foot in depth.
Amongst it was the blackened outline of a human being, as well as large foreign objects that looked like steel pipes.
The tree itself was charred, but not completely ruined.
Two MPD forensics in white suits were down on hands and knees outside the ring.
‘He burned someone at the stake,’ Ella said.
She wanted to be sick, partly because of the smell, but mostly out of sympathy for how this poor victim had met their end.
If this charred body at the base of the tree had been anything like Curtis Brennan in life, then they were guilty of nothing more than advocating for harsher justice for criminals.
Perhaps a controversial topic for some, but certainly not worthy of being incinerated.
Ripley said, ‘Jesus wept. Another execution method, straight out of medieval times.’
‘I haven’t been up close yet, but the fire marshal said he found some weird stuff in the wreckage. He left it in situ for us. What I’m wondering is how the hell he pulled this off, especially without someone seeing.’
‘Who called it in?’ Ripley asked.
‘Some guy on a bike going down the path over the way. He saw the flames.’
‘So they must have gotten pretty high.’
‘High-ish, but there’s a spot from just near the tree with a direct line of sight to the path.
At the right angle, you could see the flames at any height.
The flames just singed the leaves, so most of the fire stood at about ten feet.
The fire marshal told me that the water from the body helped keep the flames in check.
But if we’d have left it five more minutes, this whole field could have been scorched. ’
Ella did the math, the physics. ‘So he used an accelerant to get the fire started. That’s the only way he could have achieved the necessary heat to melt a body in the time he had.’
‘Kerosene, apparently,’ Hibbert said.
‘Call me uneducated, but I don’t think they used kerosene in medieval times,’ said Ripley.
Ella said, ‘No, they didn’t, which means the medieval approach isn’t as important to him as we thought. That’s just roleplay until it becomes inconvenient.’
‘That goes against everything we know about a ritualistic offender,’ Ripley said. ‘It’s almost like he’s roleplaying being a serial killer, not just a medieval executioner.’
Ella went back to the start. Billy Hayes was hanged by a man in an executioner outfit, almost with every detail perfected, only the knot he tied wasn’t quite right.
Curtis Brennan was decapitated by a man in an executioner outfit, and only when she applied the not-ritualistic filter to the crime did she realize something she’d missed earlier.
Curtis Brennan’s head was still missing.
Why would an executioner take a memento? That didn’t track.
And now this.
‘No,’ Ella said. ‘The other way around.’
‘Huh?’
‘He was roleplaying, but he’s since evolved into a fully-fledged serial killer.
The incorrect knot, the missing head and using kerosene to accelerate flames.
He’s been putting his personal mark on these crimes without us realizing, be them accidental or not on his part.
It’s kind of like he’s two different people. ’
Two different people.
Ella applied that idea to the murders so far, but it didn’t quite fit. Before she could dwell further, a forensic officer came over. He removed his mask and took in a lungful of air.
‘It’s all yours. We’ll need to come back and take more swabs once the smoke has died down, but we’ve documented and photographed everything.
We’ve liaised with the fire service to get ladders up to the tree branches too, and we’re going to wait for the coroner to come in to advise them on how to load the body without impairing it. ’
‘What’d you find in there?’ Ripley asked.
‘A lot,’ he said. ‘Some of it makes sense and some of it doesn’t.’
‘Start with what makes sense,’ Ella said.
‘Female, by what’s left of the pelvis. Adult.
Carbonized down to the bone in places. Facial recognition isn’t going to happen.
We’ll have to go dental or DNA. Clothing’s gone.
There’s melted synthetic fused to the torso where a jacket or a coat went up, but nothing we can cut a label out of.
Same with the shoes. There’s a phone in the lap that’s a lump of slag now, though the lab might pull something off the chip if they’re lucky.
There’s a handbag, or what’s left of one.
Clasp survived, bit of the frame, a set of keys melted into the bottom of it.
We bagged a couple of coins that came through more or less whole.
You can sometimes get a partial off a coin but I wouldn’t bank on it. ’
Ella was already mapping the wreckage. None of it surprised her. A woman had been brought here, set on fire, and what survived was what survived. ‘And what doesn’t make sense?’ she asked.
‘Two things. The wood, first. So the bulk of it’s sticks and split logs, dry stuff, like what you might get bagged from a garage forecourt for a wood burner.
There’s pale board mixed in, and the fire marshal thinks pallet timber from the nail pattern.
Underneath all of it there’s a bed of leaf litter and dry grass that he’s fairly sure was raked in as kindling.
The culprit didn’t grab stuff from around the tree.
The treeline back there is mostly elm and we’re looking at pine. ’
‘Got it. And the second thing?’
‘Rope and steel,’ the forensic tech said.
Ella waited.
‘The rope wouldn’t be strange if it wasn’t fused to the body. There are three or four turns of it across the chest and the waist. The doc’ll map it properly, but I think you can put two and two together there.’
‘The victim was restrained,’ Ella said.
‘That’s up to you guys to decide, but then there’s the really odd find, which was steel.’
‘Steel?’ asked Ripley. ‘What kind of steel?’
‘We’ve got a steel frame in there. It was a little bent up but it was a frame. Aluminum-and-steel composite, by the look of the segments we’ve recovered. Some of it’s tubular. Some of it’s flat strap. Bearings in the middle of each. And rubber slag where rubber shouldn’t be.’
Ella looked back at the pyre. The pipes she’d registered from fifty feet away were not pipes. They were the bones of a wheelchair. If nothing else, it confirmed this was the same man who’d pushed Billy Hayes through Rock Creek Park.
‘Would you be able to pull any DNA off the steel components?’
‘Unlikely. Fire’s the ultimate countermeasure. I’ll be over in my van until the coroner arrives.’
The tech headed back across the grass toward the van, peeling his gloves as he walked.
Ella, Ripley and Hibert then moved toward the wreckage.
Given their hesitant footsteps, it was clear none of them wanted to get too close.
There was nothing for them to find except a giant pile of burned rubble and body parts, or at least nothing that the technician hadn’t already mentioned.
At twenty feet, she could see the shapes inside the char.
At ten she could see the body properly. At five, the smell of burned flesh engulfed her senses.
From what Ella could make out, the unsub had tipped the wheelchair over so that the poor victim was face down in the flames.
Ella doubted the victim would be able to move, so her initial positioning would most likely be her last positioning.
‘This is messed up,’ said Hibbert. ‘In my twenty years, I’ve never seen anything like this, and we don’t even know who it is.’
This victim had a name. The fire had taken their face and her clothes and her fingerprints, but it had not taken the fact they existed until maybe an hour ago.
People would wake up tomorrow not yet knowing.
Somewhere a phone would ring unanswered.
Somewhere a chair at a table would stay empty, and the person who set that table would not understand why for another day, or two, until the FBI knocked on their door.
Hibbert continued, ‘How long until we can get an ID, do you think?’
‘Dental can take days, and that’s if the vic’s records are on file,’ said Ripley. ‘It’s a waiting game. Dark, you want to get home? I can wait until the coroner gets here. Same goes for you, chief.’
‘If you could supervise, that would be great. I’m gonna have a press shitstorm to deal with tomorrow, so I’ll need to get ready. You coming, Ella?’
‘No. I’ll stay,’ she said. ‘I need to think.’