CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Reuben Hoy’s size alone cleared him of any suspicion, because he was around five-eight on a good day. Ella also thought it unlikely that a murderer would leave severed body parts on their own doorstep.
‘This is all so strange,’ Hoy said from his seat in his living room.
Ella had opted to stand and guard the only exit out of the room.
She’d waited for backup, and now two officers were guarding Curtis Brennan’s head on Hoy’s porch.
Upon closer inspection, Ella had found the head was wrapped in newspaper and the blood had leaked through.
‘You think?’
‘I mean, I saw some strange things in my lawyer days, but I’ve never had a head delivered to my front door. Do you have any idea who might have done this?’
‘Not have done this,’ Ella said. ‘Doing this. It’s still ongoing. We’ll get to that, but first tell me some things. Why aren’t you a lawyer anymore?’
Hoy laughed, or did the closest thing to it given the circumstances. ‘Too stressful for too little reward. To be a lawyer, you need to really love the game. I tried, but I didn’t love it enough, so now I work in HR.’
‘Quite the change.’
‘Not really. It’s the same kind of crap. Less pay, but I can live with that.’
‘What was your last case you worked on? And when was it?’
‘Domestic violence. Three years ago now. And no, I don’t miss it.’
Ella thought how best to bring up the current happenings. She didn’t just want to blurt out the relevant names. Never lead the witness. If they arrived at the same conclusion as you without prompt, it validated your theories.
‘That decapitated head on your doorstep belongs to a man named Curtis Brennan. Do you recognize that name?’
‘Yes, I do, and I figured as much as soon as you said the words severed head outside. I read the news. I saw images from the video. I didn’t know Curtis Brennan as such, but I interacted with him on two occasions.
Once outside a courtroom where he asked me questions about a case, another time when he emailed me for an interview.
But this was – God – four years ago now. ’
Ella guessed which case it was. But she didn’t get to the name yet. ‘I’m not sure if you’ve heard the rumors, but there’ve been other murders too.’
‘I heard about something in Rock Creek Park, but that’s all.’
‘Yes, that was one of them, and I’m going to give you the names of the victims. Billy Hayes and Jennifer Darling.’
Hoy’s face did the work before his mouth caught up. The color that had come back into it on the sofa drained out again. ‘Yes. I know both of them. Does this have something to do with… the Thomas Greaves case?’
There it was. He’d got there on his own.
‘Tell me about the Greaves case,’ Ella said.
‘Tell you what about it? It was the biggest thing I ever worked on. The only big thing, depending on how you count it.’ He rubbed a thumb along his eyebrow.
‘I wasn’t lead. I want to be clear about that.
I was second chair on the defense. David Bertram was lead and I did the legwork nobody else wanted.
But I was in that courtroom every day for weeks, and yes, I knew Hayes and I knew Darling, and now you’re standing in my living room telling me they’re both dead, and there’s a man’s head on my porch, and you’re asking me about the one case that ties the three of us together.
So you’ll forgive me for putting it together quicker than you’d like. ’
‘You’re not in danger. That head on your doorstep was a gift from the killer.’
‘Are you kidding? A gift?’
‘Yes. I assume the lead lawyer wasn’t as passionate about the case as you?’
‘Nowhere near.’
‘Then that’s why this killer focused on you. He believes Thomas Greaves was wronged and he’s enacting revenge on the people who wronged him. What do you know about Billy Hayes? I can’t find any mention of him in the official documents.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t, because it wasn’t relevant.
Hayes was a witness for us, briefly. Or he was supposed to be.
Hayes was the first man the police looked at for Mary Monroe.
They had him in twice before they ever heard the name Thomas Greaves.
The forensic evidence pointed towards Greaves, but we wanted to put Hayes on the stand to muddy the waters, to show the jury the police had been wrong once already, so why not twice?
Hayes didn’t want to do it. He was terrified of it. In the end we didn’t call him.’
‘And Darling?’
‘Councilwoman Darling lobbied the US Attorney to take the case federally. She wanted the death penalty on the table and Maryland didn’t have it. Without her, Tommy gets life. With her, Tommy gets the needle.’
‘And Thomas Greaves himself. You must have gotten to know him well. Tell me about him.’
‘Ah, Tommy. Big Greaves. He was genuinely one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. A gentle giant, you might say. I had all the time in the world for him. He was na?ve enough to think it would all work out in his favor, so that was why he was made an example of.’
Ella asked, ‘How do you mean?’
‘Miss Dark, do you know the Greaves case? The real case?’
She thought she did, but she guessed she was about to get an education from an insider. ‘Enlighten me.’
‘Well, the prosecution’s smoking gun was that some of Mary Monroe’s remains were wrapped in a tarp that came from Thomas Greaves’s shed.
Add that to the fact that Greaves was a giant with crazy strength and that he ran a scout club on the field Mary’s remains were discovered in and they had enough evidence to secure a conviction. ’
‘All of that seems flimsy.’
‘Very much so. The judge didn’t seem to care that the tarp could have been stolen, or the fact that Thomas Greaves had absolutely no idea who Mary Monroe was. The only connection they had was that they both worked a medieval faire once.’
Medieval faire.
Where Billy Hayes was hanged.
‘Seriously?’
‘Yup, and eyewitnesses also placed Billy Hayes at the same faire, probably loading up on hot property. But it couldn’t be confirmed, and you know what they say about eyewitness accounts.’
‘They’re useless in court.’
‘Exactly, so none of that was taken into account. So they had an easy target. On paper, the fibers and the circumstantial evidence is enough to get a conviction, but I never expected the death penalty. We’ve got Darling and her big ideas to answer for that, but I guess… well, justice was served in the end.’
Ella registered the past tense. ‘Justice was served. You mean Greaves.’
‘No, I mean Darling and Hayes, and Brennan too for perpetuating the nonsense that Greaves was guilty. Thomas Greaves wasn’t guilty. He didn’t kill Mary Monroe. Billy Hayes did.’
‘You’re a defense lawyer,’ Ella said. ‘You’d say the same about someone who shot the Pope.’
‘I’ve defended a lot of people. Most of them did it. You learn the difference. Tommy didn’t do it.’
‘You can prove that, can you?’
Hoy stood up. ‘Please follow me.’
Ella grabbed her Glock just in case. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To prove it.’
***
Ella was holding a handwritten letter. She and Hoy were in a spare room decked mostly with junk. Ella saw piles of books, cleaning equipment, a mass of clothes, and on the wall was a strange cross-stitched quilt.
‘What’s this?’
‘This was posted through my door about a year ago. Read it.’
Ella did.
Mr. Hoy. I am writing because somebody has to and nobody else will.
Thomas Greaves did not kill Mary Monroe.
I know this because the man who did told me so himself.
Billy Hayes confessed it to me in our workshop.
He stole the tarp from Thomas’s shed and used it against him.
He watched a good man go to the chamber for it and said nothing.
I cannot put my name to this. I have my reasons and they are good ones.
I cannot give you a phone number because phones are of no use to me.
If you want to know the rest of what Hayes told me, leave a note with an email address on the Mary Monroe bench in Marston Hollow, the one in the field, and I will be in touch.
I am the only one who knows the whole of it and I am giving you the chance to know it too.
There was no signature.
Ella’s nerve endings were tingling with adrenaline, because she was absolutely positive that she was holding her unsub’s work in her hands.
‘Who sent you this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Did you leave a note on the bench like he asked?’
‘No. By the time I got this, I was working in HR. What good would it do? This case ruined my career, and I wasn’t going to start corresponding with an anonymous stranger through a memorial bench. It read like a lunatic.’
‘And yet you kept it.’
‘I kept it because it might have been true, and a man was dead, so keeping it was the least I could do. I’m not proud of that. It’s just what happened.’
‘Did you show it to anyone?’
‘I took it to the judge. Barton. Daniel Barton, who’d tried the case. I thought, off the record, he might tell me what to do with it, but that’s where things got strange, because he said he received the same letter.’
Ella’s beating heart was making her legs tremble. This was it. This was the path that led to the killer – somehow. ‘The same letter?’
‘Yeah. Same letter, same time.’
‘And?’
‘Barton had retired by then. His view, thirty years on the bench, was that it was a crank. He said a judge gets confessions in the post after every murder case, people who want to be part of something. He threw his in the trash and told me to do the same.’
Ella read the letter through over and over again, focusing on the language, the grammar, the rhythms, the specific words, the space between words, the slant of the lettering, the curves on the lower case t and g, the type of pen used, the paper it was written on.
When people wrote, they gave away more about themselves than they realized.
And then, by the miracle of information overload, Ella’s hazy brain highlighted one particular section.
Billy Hayes confessed it to me in our workshop.
‘In our workshop,’ Ella accidentally said aloud.
‘They have workshops in jail. Classes.’
‘Yes, but…’
‘But?’
Ella cast her mind back, then asked, ‘Who says our workshop? Don’t inmates usually say the workshop?’
‘Yes, but that’s language for you.’
This letter suggested that the killer and Billy Hayes shared a workshop, which meant they had to have been in prison at the same time and that person would have since been released.
But Ella had already exhausted that avenue, and there wasn’t a single prisoner in MCI Jessup that matched the height and build of her unsub.
Which meant her killer wasn’t a prisoner.
And now that she thought about it, she’d read about a class once already, in a different room, in a different document.
And not only that, but she’d heard about one too.
‘Mr. Hoy,’ Ella said, ‘did Thomas Greaves attend any workshops in prison?’
‘Yes, he did, as a matter of fact. Just one.’ Hoy turned and pointed to the strange cross-stitched quilt hanging from his wall.
Ella looked at the quilt for two seconds.
Then she ran.