Page 34 of Girl, Entangled

‘We’ll photograph him from every angle and compare it to the footage,’ Ripley said. ‘If that doesn’t work, we’ll put screws through his hands.’

The door at the end of the corridor opened and Hibbert came through it with a clear plastic property bag in one hand and a paper bag in the other. He saw them and raised the bag.

‘I’ve booked him in, possessions included. Public lawyer is available if he wants it, but he hasn’t asked. Everything he had on him’s in here. Wallet, keys, sixty dollars in cash and a phone, but the phone will have to go through the tech guys before we can touch it. And before either of you ask, no, we didn’t find a black hood in his car.’

‘Worth checking,’ Ripley said.

Ella took the bag, set it down on the small steel table outside the interview room and unsealed it. She reached in, took out his wallet and began leafing through. ‘Everything checks out?’

‘Nothing weird in there that I could see,’ said Hibbert.

The first window held a Maryland driver’s license in the name of Francis Hale, with a photograph that looked like Francis Hale and a Frederick address that matched the workshop. Behind that was a punch-card for a coffee place in Old Town that had four punches out of ten on it. Behind that, a credit card from a small federal credit union she didn’t recognize. Behind that, a folded twenty-dollar bill.

She slid two fingers behind the credit card to lift it forward and a thin plastic card came up with it, half-tucked into the lining where it had been pushed deeper than the others. It was green and white and across the top were the words ONTARIO HEALTH. Below them, a red maple leaf the size of her thumbnail. Below that, a photograph of a younger Francis Hale.

‘Hmmm,’ she said.

‘Anything good?’ Ripley asked.

‘Maybe,’ Ella said. ‘Let’s go and ask him.’

***

The interview room at the MPD precinct was built for ordinary men, and Francis Hale was not one. His bulk filled the chair, and his forearms covered half the table, and when Ella and Ripley sat down across from him, the table resembled a tray balanced across his lap.

Ella ran the formalities for the recording, the date and the time and the names of everyone present, and Hale listened to all of it with his eyes down and arms folded.

‘You haven’t asked for a lawyer,’ Ella said.

‘Do I need one?’

‘That’s your decision, not mine. You can stop this at any time and we’ll get you one. I want to make sure you understand that.’

‘I understand. What I don’t understand is why I’m here.’

‘Lying to federal agents – and then fleeing from us – tends to have consequences. Want to tell us why you did that?’

‘Lie? What did I lie about?’

Ella opened the folder she’d brought in and didn’t take anything out of it yet. The folder did a lot of work just by being present. ‘Curtis Brennan. You said you’d never talked to him.’

‘I haven’t!’

She opened the folder and removed the first printout, which was a copy of Hale’s emails to the second victim. She pushed it over to him and said, ‘This correspondence says otherwise.’

‘Oh, this. Yeah. You said talked. This isn’t talking. This is emailing.’

‘That’s a fine distinction for someone who sprinted across a museum to avoid making it.’

‘I know how it looks.’

‘I don’t think you do, Mr. Hale, because someone killed Curtis Brennan last night.’ Ella took out the next picture from the folder. It was Curtis Brennan in the chair. The wide shot. The cream office, the three monitors fanned with dried spray, the body ending where a body should not end.

Hale’s face did not do what a guilty man’s face did when shown a photograph of a body he had personally produced. It did not flatten. It did not perform shock. It did not over-react and it did not under-react. Hale’s face went through the linear progression that a face went through when it was looking at the thing it had been afraid was going to be there. Hale looked away as soon as he registered what the picture was, then covered his eyes with his hand, the way a child might when playing hide and seek. ‘I don’t need to see that. I don’t want to see that.’

Ripley, beside her, did the small inward movement she did when an interview was going to bend. ‘You don’t seem all too surprised about this man’s death,’ she said.

Hale sighed, removed his hand and glanced upward, presumably to avoid his peripherals catching the graphic imagery in front of him. ‘Yeah. I know he’s dead, alright? I doubt there’s a person in D.C. that hasn’t heard about it. I lied, because I thought…’