Page 39 of Girl, Entangled

‘I heard something, but the details weren’t concrete.’

‘Well, that detail was.’

‘Oh, wow. Well, there’s something interesting here, because this knot is pretty good, as far as knots go. But there’s one problem.’

Ella’s ears pricked up. This was what she needed. The discrepancies. ‘Go on.’

‘Your man fancies himself an executioner? Well, he needs to try harder, because this isn’t a hangman’s knot.’

Ella went still. ‘Come again?’

‘It’s not a hangman’s knot. A proper hangman’s noose is a fixed loop. The knot is there to stop the loop closing further than it needs to. The whole point of it, mechanically, is that it doesn’t tighten after the drop. The loop holds its shape, the weight transfers through the coil to the knot, and the force of the drop is directed laterally into the neck at the site of the knot. The knot is placed just under the jaw to provide the lateral force that fractures the cervical vertebrae. This isn’t that. This is something different.’

Ella looked at the rope again, and now that he’d said it she couldn’t unsee it. She’d taken the knot at face value because the photographs had told her this was a hanging and the pathologist had told her it was correct. A fat ugly knot at the end of a noose was a hangman’s knot, because what else would it be?

‘Then what is this?’

Hale looked at the rope again. ‘It’s a running bowline over a fixed hang point. The loop is adjustable. It would tighten under load rather than hold a fixed diameter. If this man dropped through a trapdoor with this around his neck, the loop would have closed as the weight came on it. The lateral force would have been reduced. Whether he died from fracture or from constriction would depend on the drop height and the weight.’

‘The drop height was calculated. We know that from the pathologist.’

‘Then a longer drop, with the right calculation, might have compensated for the loss of lateral force. But it’s not what you’d choose if you’d done your homework on the Marwood method.’ He sat back. ‘It works. It gets the job done. But it isn’t the knot a man uses if he’s read the primary sources on judicial hanging. If he’d read the sources, he’d have tied the proper noose. Does that make sense?’

‘Kind of,’ said Ella.’

‘Basically, it’s a knot somebody who’s worked with ropes before ties without thinking, because it’s the one their hands already know. Muscle memory. It’s in the fingers.’

‘So let me make sure I’ve got this right,’ she said slowly. ‘A man researches the long drop. He gets the drop distance right. He gets the knot placement right, under the left ear, where the books say. He does the maths on the body weight. He gets everything right that you’d get from study, from reading, from learning the theory.’

‘Pretty much.’

‘And then, at the actual moment, when it comes to the one thing his hands have to do on their own, he doesn’t tie the knot the books would have taught him. He ties the knot his hands already know.’

‘That’s what I’m looking at. The brain learned one thing and the hands had already learned another, and when it came to it, the hands won. In this game, the hands know more than the body.’ Hale showed his palms, which were burned and scarred to hell. ‘Whoever your man is, he studied the death. But he didn’t study the rope. He already knew the rope. From somewhere else. From before.’

Ella bagged it back up with hands that wanted to move faster than she let them, and signed the box, and thanked Francis Hale, and meant it more than he probably understood.

‘For what it’s worth, you might have just helped me find a serial killer.’

‘No problem,’ Hale said. ‘Anything to help the famous Agent Dark.’

Once out of the interrogation room, Ella rushed to find Ripley, because she was now certain of something she’d been meditating on since last night.

This killer, whoever he was, had spent a lot of time in prison.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Ella started with height.

Six foot eight or thereabout. A man that size was not a needle in a haystack. A man that size was a fence post in a haystack. You couldn’t hide it, couldn’t fake it, couldn’t make yourself shorter without major surgery. It was the single most distinctive fact she had about her unsub, and she’d come in this morning certain it would do most of the work for her, because how many men of that height could possibly have passed through the Maryland and DC prison systems in the last decade with the kind of proximity the rest of it demanded?

The answer, it turned out, was complicated.

The problem was the data. State correctional systems did not, as a rule, record height with the precision she needed. Intake measurements were done on arrival, usually by a corrections officer with a wall chart and varying degrees of attention, and the records had a known error range of two inches in either direction. She could search for inmates recorded at six-eight and miss a man who’d been logged as six-six. She could search for six-six and find a hundred men who were nothing like what she was looking for. She ran the search both ways across Maryland’s Department of Public Safety database, the Virginia DOC, the DC jail system, and the federal BOP records for the facilities within a hundred miles. She filtered for male, released within the last five years, and got a list of forty-three names.

She ran the forty-three names for two hours.

At the end of two hours, she had eliminated forty-two of them and the one she hadn’t eliminated was a man in a supervised care facility in Silver Spring who had suffered a stroke.