CHAPTER THIRTY
Ella woke because somebody was saying her name, and for a moment she did not know which somebody, or which room, or which case was the reason for her sudden memory loss.
‘Dark. Get up.’
The side of her face was stuck to a sheet of paper. She came up off the desk and the paper came with her, then peeled away from her cheek and hung there a second before it dropped back down.
‘Hello.’
‘Yes, hello,’ Ripley said. ‘Do you sleep better in police stations or something?’
Details of yesterday returned: the burned victim and the strange revelation about all of this having to do with the murder of a woman named Mary Monroe, and then her descent into the life and trials of a dead man named Thomas Greaves.
And what a journey it had been.
The thought woke her up. Ella erased the sleep from her eyes with a violent scrub and said, ‘Mia, listen, I found something last night.’
‘I bet you did. Thanks for leaving me at the crime scene, by the way. Hibbert was kind enough to drop me home.’
‘Sorry. A spark hit me. Do you remember that-’
‘Jennifer Darling,’ Ripley interrupted as she dropped a stack of papers on the desk. ‘That’s her name.’
Ella quickly glanced over them. They were from the Medical Examiner’s Office, but it wasn’t a full autopsy report. ‘What’s this? A preliminary?’
‘No, it’s confirmation of the victim’s identity.
Massri was kind enough to spend the night with our burned woman, and dentals gave him a name, which was Jennifer Darling.
I ran it and found someone by that name working at the District of Columbia Council.
Her car is in the lot at their offices, and has been since yesterday morning. ’
‘Yes!’ Ella said. The name tunneled through her ear canal and surged from the depths of her memory to the forefront. She’d heard the name in the past few days. The catch was the same catch Mary Monroe’s name had snagged on at the bench.
‘That’s an awfully cheerful thing to say,’ Ripley said.
‘Darling. Darling. Darling. I know it. I’ve read it.
’ Ella ransacked last night’s paperwork until she had Billy Hayes’s file again.
She had been working backward through it for hours last night, paging from the most recent disciplinaries through the middle years and into the original intake, and somewhere in the back third her eyes had stopped holding the words on the page.
She scrolled past the cover. Past the intake photograph.
Past the transfer memo. Past the flag with the Mary Monroe summary on it.
Past the line that had walked her into a cold sweat last night.
There were attachments behind the summary, two of them, paper-clipped to a yellowed sleeve of newspaper photocopies the records office at Jessup had kept on any inmate connected to a high-profile case.
She had glanced at the sleeve last night and turned past it because the clippings had looked like background. Background was what she wanted now.
The first sheet was a press cutting, scanned and a little crooked, with the masthead of a Maryland paper across the top. A photograph she could barely make out in the grey of the scan, a woman at a lectern, hands flat to either side of it.
The headline ran above her. DARLING: ‘NO SOFT JUSTICE FOR MONSTERS.’
Ella read it through.
Three years ago. Jennifer Darling, then a first-term councilwoman, had built a campaign on the back of the Mary Monroe murder.
The piece laid it out without quite meaning to.
Darling had stood at the front of every meeting, every vigil, every press line, and she had used Mary Monroe’s name and Thomas Greaves’s name in the same breath every time she did it.
She had wanted the death penalty for him.
She had said so, on the record, at the lectern in the photograph.
The cutting quoted her, and Ella read the quote twice.
‘If a man cuts up a woman in Prince George’s County and buries the pieces of her in our nation’s capital, and the worst thing the system can promise him in return is three meals a day for the rest of his life, then the system has stopped working.
I refuse to live in that system. The people of this city refuse to live in that system.
Thomas Greaves doesn’t get a bed. Thomas Greaves gets a needle. ’
The next sheet explained the rest of it.
It was a summary of the legal route the case had taken, and somebody, a Bureau hand years ago, had appended it to Hayes’s file because it touched the interstate element.
Mary Monroe had been killed in Maryland.
Her remains had been carried across the line into the District.
Maryland had no death penalty and the District had none either, and on the face of it Thomas Greaves should have spent his life in a cell and died of old age in one.
But the crossing of the line had made it federal, and the federal government did have a death penalty, and the decision to charge it federally rather than leave it to the state had not been an automatic one.
It had been pushed. There had been a public campaign to charge Greaves federally precisely so that the needle would be on the table, and the woman at the front of that campaign, the woman who had stood at the lectern and demanded it and built her first term on it, was Jennifer Darling.
This was it.
Darling had got what she wanted. Greaves had been charged federally.
He’d been convicted, sentenced to death, shipped to Terre Haute, and put down a week later.
And the field where it had all begun had been reseeded and given a bench, and Jennifer Darling had stood under the oak and unveiled a plaque, and then she’d gone on being a councilwoman until someone wheeled her back to that exact tree and burned her at it.
Billy Hayes had been the suspect they looked at and let go, and then he’d been hanged.
Jennifer Darling had been the woman who made sure Thomas Greaves died for it, and then she’d been burned alive on the spot where she’d built her monument to that fact.
Curtis Brennan didn’t fit, at least not yet, but he was surely a part of this.
Three people on a list.
‘Dark. Say something,’ Ripley said.
‘I don’t have Brennan yet. I’ll get Brennan. But Hayes and Darling, that’s not a pattern that points at Mary Monroe. It points at the man who killed her.’
‘What? Who’s Mary Monroe?’
‘I don’t know, but this has everything to do with her and a man named Thomas Greaves. I’d stake my life on it.’
‘Mary Monroe? Thomas Greaves? Who are these people?’
A burst of adrenaline later, Ella was scouring the FBI database on her laptop. If this case was federal, she’d have access to all of the details.
Ella pulled the laptop across, typed the name into the database, and the page opened on an intake photograph.
She’d been looking for the man’s height all week.
Here it was, years earlier, staring back at her off a booking wall.
Thomas Greaves was a giant. Thomas Greaves was a monster of a human being. And for a moment, Ella couldn’t tell whether she was looking at a dead man or the executioner she’d seen on the video.