Page 42 of Girl, Entangled

This was where the wheels had been taking her. Whatever was going to happen had a location, and she had just arrived at it.

The world swam and then came clear, clearer than it had been since the parking lot, the drug burning off under the pure cold rush of it, and in that clarity she saw the base of the tree.

Someone had built a mound there.

Sticks, branches, logs – all laid over a blanket of leaves and grass.

Yes, this was the death site.

Jennifer had been here before. But back then, it didn’t smell so much like kerosene.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The autopsy results had come in for Curtis Brennan, and there was nothing Ella could use. The pathologist had concluded that the weapon was heavy, single-edged and very sharp, and that the man swinging it had possessed the strength of a hydraulic press. A felling axe, most likely, which could be bought at any hardware store in the country. Traces of ketamine were present in Brennan’s bloodstream too.

Ripley sat across from Ella with her feet up on the radiator and Brennan’s book open on her knee, reading bits of it aloud now in a voice that made the dead man sound even more pompous than he’d managed on his own. After a few minutes, she slammed the book shut.

‘Piece of crap,’ she said.

‘Anything useful in there?’

‘No. You can tell this guy never had a hardship in his life.’

‘Is he wrong?’

‘Yes and no. Do we need harsher justice for some criminals? Yes. Should we put them all to death? No. It doesn’t work like that, but these guys see everything in black and white.’

Despite what people believed, the death penalty was not a deterrent for violent crime. States with capital punishment reported just as many aggravated homicides per capita as states without it. Theories as to why varied, but it generally came down to one core generalization: the kind of people who committed crimes worthy of the death penalty weren’t concerned about dying themselves.

‘But the part I keep coming back to,’ Ripley continued, ‘is that our unsub’s ethics are all over the place. Brennan advocated for harsher punishments, and so he handed out a harsher punishment. In a way, he’s agreeing with Brennan.’

‘Hayes too. Hayes spent four years snitching on other men to make his own life easier inside, and our killer decided that deserved punishing. Then he punished him and Brennan with a method out of the same century Brennan was nostalgic for. He’s not picking people he hates. He’s picking people who said the world should be harder, or people who got soft treatment they didn’t earn, and he’s giving them the hard world they asked for. Properly. By the book. He’s the only honest man in his own head.’

‘Which means he isn’t finished, because there’s no shortage of people saying the world should be harder.’ Ripley put her feet down. ‘You hear them on the radio every morning. Half the callers want to bring back hanging and the other half want them flogged in the street first. If he’s working through a list of those, he’s got material for years.’

Ella asked, ‘But why? Something triggered this, and I can’t pinpoint what.’

‘Did Brennan ever discuss Hayes on his show?’

‘No. I’ve been through every transcript, every email. Hayes’s name didn’t come up once.’

‘What about the rest of the emails? The threatening ones.’

‘I isolated the ones that seemed legitimate and sent them to Amelia at HQ. She traced their IP addresses, and none of them are anywhere near D.C. No VPNs, either. Amelia can tell when someone’s used one. Don’t ask me how.’

A flurry of footsteps sounded in the corridor outside the office. It was not an unusual sound in a police precinct, but Ella could tell those footsteps were aimed right at her and Ripley.

On cue, Hibbert burst through the door without a knock.

‘Ella, Mia…. We need to move.’ Hibbert had his jacket half on and his phone still lit in his hand. ‘Fire. In Marston Hollow. The open ground east of the river. Big one. The brigade’s been on it twenty minutes.’

‘A fire?’ Ripley asked.

‘Yeah. A whole tree went up. Nearly caused a damn forest fire.’

‘What’s a fire got to do with this? It could be kids with a lighter, or a barbecue that got out of hand.’

‘No. They need someone senior there now and it needs to be us, because of what they found when the smoke cleared. Trust me. It’s very much ours.’