Page 44 of Girl, Entangled

‘Got it. And the second thing?’

‘Rope and steel,’ the forensic tech said.

Ella waited.

‘The rope wouldn’t be strange if it wasn’t fused to the body. There are three or four turns of it across the chest and the waist. The doc’ll map it properly, but I think you can put two and two together there.’

‘The victim was restrained,’ Ella said.

‘That’s up to you guys to decide, but then there’s the really odd find, which was steel.’

‘Steel?’ asked Ripley. ‘What kind of steel?’

‘We’ve got a steel frame in there. It was a little bent up but it was a frame. Aluminum-and-steel composite, by the look of the segments we’ve recovered. Some of it’s tubular. Some of it’s flat strap. Bearings in the middle of each. And rubber slag where rubber shouldn’t be.’

Ella looked back at the pyre. The pipes she’d registered from fifty feet away were not pipes. They were the bones of a wheelchair. If nothing else, it confirmed this was the same man who’d pushed Billy Hayes through Rock Creek Park.

‘Would you be able to pull any DNA off the steel components?’

‘Unlikely. Fire’s the ultimate countermeasure. I’ll be over in my van until the coroner arrives.’

The tech headed back across the grass toward the van, peeling his gloves as he walked. Ella, Ripley and Hibert then moved toward the wreckage. Given their hesitant footsteps, it was clear none of them wanted to get too close. There was nothing for them to find except a giant pile of burned rubble and body parts, or at least nothing that the technician hadn’t already mentioned.

At twenty feet, she could see the shapes inside the char. At ten she could see the body properly. At five, the smell of burned flesh engulfed her senses. From what Ella could make out, the unsub had tipped the wheelchair over so that the poor victim was face down in the flames. Ella doubted the victim would be able to move, so her initial positioning would most likely be her last positioning.

‘This is messed up,’ said Hibbert. ‘In my twenty years, I’ve never seen anything like this, and we don’t even know who it is.’

This victim had a name. The fire had taken their face and her clothes and her fingerprints, but it had not taken the fact they existed until maybe an hour ago. People would wake up tomorrow not yet knowing. Somewhere a phone would ring unanswered. Somewhere a chair at a table would stay empty, and the person who set that table would not understand why for another day, or two, until the FBI knocked on their door.

Hibbert continued, ‘How long until we can get an ID, do you think?’

‘Dental can take days, and that’s if the vic’s records are on file,’ said Ripley. ‘It’s a waiting game. Dark, you want to get home? I can wait until the coroner gets here. Same goes for you, chief.’

‘If you could supervise, that would be great. I’m gonna have a press shitstorm to deal with tomorrow, so I’ll need to get ready. You coming, Ella?’

‘No. I’ll stay,’ she said. ‘I need to think.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The morgue van had its back doors open and its interior light on, and from a hundred feet that yellow square was the brightest thing in the field now that the brigade had killed the halogen down to standby. Ella leaned forward on a bench at the edge of the treeline and watched Ripley work the loading.

It was a slow process, and it had to be. Ella could see the shape of it even at this distance: the coroner’s two people in their suits and Ripley a step behind them with her hands in her coat. The three of them were gathered around the chair as the body came out of it.

A burned body did not lift like a sleeping one. It came apart easily, and so Ripley and her new friends didn’t rush it, so what should have taken two minutes took fifteen.

Three victims now.

Ella ran them in order.

Billy Hayes had been a snitch and an ex-armed-robber, and they’d hanged him at a Renaissance faire on a gallows built for tomato-toss audiences. The killer had drugged him with ketamine and wheeled him in a chair to his own platform.

Curtis Brennan, loud-mouthed advocate for the death penalty, had been decapitated in the studio where he’d advocated. Drugged with ketamine, live on his own stream, in his own chair.

Now a victim – a woman by the technician’s analysis – wheeled to her own pyre and immolated.

Ella had already spent the morning proving that Hayes and Brennan had never stood in the same room. The connection did not live in the victims. It lived in the man who chose them, and that was the only place it had ever lived.

All of these murders required planning. The pyre tonight had been finished before the victim arrived, which meant hours of preparation in a public field. He had snuck into Curtis Brennan’s house without issue. The gallows at Rock Creek had been modified; the prop rope swapped for a real rope, and that was not the behavior of a man who improvised. He had taught himself the long drop out of primary sources and got the maths right. But the knot had been slightly off. The knot a pair of hands tied on their own from some older habit, and that split was the center of him. Studied in the head, practised in the hands, and the two halves did not match.