CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The morgue van had its back doors open and its interior light on, and from a hundred feet that yellow square was the brightest thing in the field now that the brigade had killed the halogen down to standby.
Ella leaned forward on a bench at the edge of the treeline and watched Ripley work the loading.
It was a slow process, and it had to be. Ella could see the shape of it even at this distance: the coroner’s two people in their suits and Ripley a step behind them with her hands in her coat. The three of them were gathered around the chair as the body came out of it.
A burned body did not lift like a sleeping one. It came apart easily, and so Ripley and her new friends didn’t rush it, so what should have taken two minutes took fifteen.
Three victims now.
Ella ran them in order.
Billy Hayes had been a snitch and an ex-armed-robber, and they’d hanged him at a Renaissance faire on a gallows built for tomato-toss audiences. The killer had drugged him with ketamine and wheeled him in a chair to his own platform.
Curtis Brennan, loud-mouthed advocate for the death penalty, had been decapitated in the studio where he’d advocated. Drugged with ketamine, live on his own stream, in his own chair.
Now a victim – a woman by the technician’s analysis – wheeled to her own pyre and immolated.
Ella had already spent the morning proving that Hayes and Brennan had never stood in the same room. The connection did not live in the victims. It lived in the man who chose them, and that was the only place it had ever lived.
All of these murders required planning. The pyre tonight had been finished before the victim arrived, which meant hours of preparation in a public field.
He had snuck into Curtis Brennan’s house without issue.
The gallows at Rock Creek had been modified; the prop rope swapped for a real rope, and that was not the behavior of a man who improvised.
He had taught himself the long drop out of primary sources and got the maths right.
But the knot had been slightly off. The knot a pair of hands tied on their own from some older habit, and that split was the center of him.
Studied in the head, practised in the hands, and the two halves did not match.
Two different people. She had said it at the pyre and it had not fit, and it still did not fit, but it would not leave her alone either. The execution was the costume. The kerosene and the missing head and the running bowline were the man underneath the costume, leaking through.
And the wheelchair. He was strong enough to overpower anyone he chose, and he chose people he had already taken the fight out of.
He drugged them first, dropped them into a wheelchair, wheeled them to the place he had built.
There was a tenderness in that order of operations that turned her stomach worse than the smell had.
This killer did not want a struggle. He wanted them present and powerless and delivered to the killing apparatus.
Ella processed it again and got nothing.
She needed the third victim’s name. Two was a coincidence but three was a pattern.
She sat back.
And felt something dig into her spine.
She turned on the bench, then got out her cell phone and illuminated the culprit.
By the light, she could see what she had not been able to see when she sat down.
It was a plaque.
IN LOVING MEMORY OF MARY MONROE.
Mary Monroe.
Where had she heard that name before?
It only took a second. Once Ella read something, it was in her memory bank forever.
Ella leaped off the bench and sprinted across the grass toward the cars. She had her phone in her hand and Ripley’s name on her lips, and the body bag and the spokes and the burned tree fell away behind her as she went.