Page 45 of Girl, Entangled

Two different people. She had said it at the pyre and it had not fit, and it still did not fit, but it would not leave her alone either. The execution was the costume. The kerosene and the missing head and the running bowline were the man underneath the costume, leaking through.

And the wheelchair. He was strong enough to overpower anyone he chose, and he chose people he had already taken the fight out of. He drugged them first, dropped them into a wheelchair, wheeled them to the place he had built. There was a tenderness in that order of operations that turned her stomach worse than the smell had. This killer did not want a struggle. He wanted them present and powerless and delivered to the killing apparatus.

Ella processed it again and got nothing.

She needed the third victim’s name. Two was a coincidence but three was a pattern.

She sat back.

And felt something dig into her spine.

She turned on the bench, then got out her cell phone and illuminated the culprit.

By the light, she could see what she had not been able to see when she sat down.

It was a plaque.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF MARY MONROE.

Mary Monroe.

Where had she heard that name before?

It only took a second. Once Ella read something, it was in her memory bank forever.

Ella leaped off the bench and sprinted across the grass toward the cars. She had her phone in her hand and Ripley’s name on her lips, and the body bag and the spokes and the burned tree fell away behind her as she went.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

It was after midnight, but Ella didn’t stop until she’d reached the precinct, stormed her office and had Billy Hayes’s prison file in front of her.

The flag was where she had left it, two pages from the back of the document. It was at an old missing-persons report stapled into a photocopy of a Prince George’s County case summary. She read it again standing up.

VICTIM: Monroe, Mary Louise. W/F, 33. Reported missing on March 5, 2023, 14 days prior to recovery by sibling (sister) when subject failed to attend family event. No history of voluntary absence.

RECOVERY: Partial remains recovered from open ground, Marston Hollow, Washington DC. Remains recovered from multiple sites within single location. Burial shallow. Recovery effected over three days with cadaver-dog assistance. ID confirmed via dental.

Ella read it twice.

Marston Hollow.

The field she had stood in four hours ago. The remains had crossed the state line, Maryland to the District, and that single line of geography was the whole reason the file existed in this form. A body that crossed a state line stopped being Prince George’s County’s problem and started being the Bureau’s.

She kept going.

PERSON OF INTEREST (initial): Hayes, William Anthony. Subject acquainted with victim (nature of relationship undetermined). Subject placed in vicinity of recovery site by witness statement. Interviewed 2x, released w/o charge both occasions. No forensic linkage established.

So Hayes had been pulled in, looked at, and let go. The next entry told her why.

SUBSEQUENT: Forensic recovery (DNA, recovered implement) linked alternate suspect. Charge filed. See cross-ref.

CONVICTED: Greaves, Thomas Edward. Charged federal (interstate). Convicted on all counts. Sentence: death. Transferred FCI Terre Haute pending. Case closed.

Ella stopped on the name.

Greaves. She had heard that name today, and not in this file. She had heard it when she was standing on a platform on the top tier of MCI Jessup with a prison officer beside her, looking at letters gouged into a cell door across from Hayes’s.

Dead man walking.