Page 40 of Girl, Entangled

No luck.

The trouble was the assumption underneath the search, and she could feel it now. She’d been hunting a tall man who’d been let out of jail, but a man could learn the machinery and never have been a prisoner at all. He could have worked the place. He could have visited it. He could be in none of these files. The system was a sieve, and she was trawling it for a fish that might have come in through the side.

She moved to staff. That was the harder search and the one she’d been saving, because corrections officers didn’t sit in a database you could filter by height. There was no field for it. A guard’s record had his name and his service and his commendations and his disciplinary notes, and nowhere did it say how tall he was.

So she did it the slow way. She pulled personnel rosters and cross-referenced them against anything with a photograph, ID badges, training-course group shots, the staff pages some facilities kept on internal sites, and she looked for a big man. It was crude, and it was slow, and after two hours of it she had three maybes, and she ran all three down, and all three were ordinary tall men, none of which resembled a Viking.

Dead end.

She got up. She walked the length of the corridor and back to make her legs remember they had a use. She needed five minutes in which the case was not in front of her so that when she went back to it the case would look different.

However, it didn’t look any different when she got back.

So, she went back to victim number one, Billy Hayes.

She didn’t know why she went back to Hayes. The case had moved past him in some sense. He was merely the thread that everyone had already pulled on. But something Hale had said was still in her ear. A man who learned from rope. And Billy Hayes, by Ella’s theory, had lived inside the same building as the man who had killed him, for the better part of four years. She’d read Hayes’s file yesterday for the prison politics, for the snitching, for the long list of men who might have wanted him dead. She read it now for the man.

What was new, or new to her attention, were the finer details of Hayes’s four years in MCI Jessup.

Hayes had worked the laundry for his first eight months. Then the kitchen, briefly, which had ended when he’d been involved in the incident that eventually produced the SIS cooperation. Something had happened in the kitchen involving an inmate named Greer, whose name she noted and moved past, because a further check confirmed Greer had been dead for two years. Then grounds, which was where the rope work lived, Ella presumed. Then laundry again. Then a stint in the library. He’d done a period on the sewing detail in the vocational wing, which he’d done alone according to the attendance log. Understandable, Ella thought. She guessed not many inmates would be willing to sign up for something typically girly. Then there was a ceramics class in there which lasted a few months. He’d kept busy. Busy men lasted longer inside, and Hayes, by every account, had wanted to last.

She kept moving.

There was a flag in Hayes’s file which reached back to his time inside. It was a police report. A woman named Mary Monroe had gone missing from Prince George’s County around three years back, and Billy Hayes had been named in the early pages as a person of interest, because he’d known her and because he’d been near where she was discovered.

Ella read it through. Hayes had been questioned twice and released both times. The case had stayed open a while and then closed, because forensic evidence had come back and tied another man to the killing, and that man had gone to prison for it, and Billy Hayes had walked away from the one serious accusation of his life with his name eventually cleared. Mary’s body had been found in pieces, and Councilwoman Darling had ordered the district to build a bench in her memory. The end.

Ella went back to the part that mattered, which was who’d want Billy Hayes dead now, and the answer the file kept giving was the same answer it had given on the first night. Hayes had informed on so many men across four years that the staff couldn’t narrow it, and any one of them, released and aggrieved, was a candidate. But that was the prison theory, and the prison theory had a hole in it the size of a man. A vengeful ex-con who’d done time with Hayes would have stabbed him in a stairwell or run him over in a parking lot. He would not have learned the Victorian long drop, dressed himself as a headsman and hanged Hayes in a public square with a gallows he’d modified for the purpose.

The method didn’t align with the prison theory.

Ella became aware, distantly, of the quality of her own attention changing. She’d stopped sitting back between entries. She was leaning in now, close to the screen, and scrolling faster than she could properly read.

There was a man out there the size of a doorway who had already killed twice and who, she was now certain, had a third already chosen. Mission-oriented killers like this didn’t stop between courses. They ramped up the intensity until their final blow-out.

None of this made sense.

What the hell was going on?

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Jennifer Darling had stayed late again. The budget markup wouldn’t write itself, she reasoned, but this empty office was also the only hour she got to herself throughout the whole day. Jennifer had spent ten years on the council, and in that time she’d discovered that the work that mattered never got done in meetings, and that the seclusion after everyone went home was worth more than any workday.

She was alone, or as alone as one could be in a government building. Her staff had cleared out at six, now it was just her and a man called Sefton running his floor polisher somewhere down near the lifts.

Jennifer had cleared most of it. That was something. The morning had been the Edgemoor rezoning, which involved a lot of talking and not much saying from every involved party. The afternoon had been three back-to-back meetings about a footbridge that half her constituents wanted and the other half were prepared to lie down in front of a bulldozer to stop. Then there was a letter from Mrs. Grisham, whose nineteen-year-old son was in a young offender’s institution for something he’d done at seventeen. Mrs. Grisham wanted to know, in increasingly plain language, how the councilwoman who had stood up at the rally two years ago and said that today’s sentences weren’t severe enough (and thus made examples of whatever criminals were on offer at the time) could square that with the teenager she was now describing.

Jennifer opened a reply. She typed Dear Mrs. Grisham, and then she sat and looked at it for a while, and then she shut the laptop instead.

Too much for one day, Jennifer thought. The problems would still be there in the morning, and Jennifer had a date with an empty house to get to. She packed her bag, shut everything down, and made for the exit. Her car was in the lower lot, where it always was, in the bay nearest the stairwell.

Out in the hallway, Jennifer could hear Sefton vacuuming in one of the other offices. She thought about putting her head round the corner to say goodnight to him and decided against it. He had his headphones in most nights. She would only startle him.

The door at the bottom let her out into the lower lot. Humidity greeted her with an unforgiving blast. After ten hours of recycled office air it was almost pleasant. At this hour, Jennifer’s Volvo was usually the only one left in the lot, but she glimpsed, across the lot, a second car she didn’t know.

It was a big black sedan, and it hadn’t been there this morning. Jennifer prided herself on knowing what vehicles her staff drove. It was an easy topic of conversation when she needed small talk with someone.

Sefton’s new car, she decided. He’d mentioned getting something with a bit more room in it, for the grandkids, and good for him. It was nice that someone on a cleaner’s salary could afford such a beast.