Page 49 of Girl, Entangled

Three years ago. Jennifer Darling, then a first-term councilwoman, had built a campaign on the back of the Mary Monroe murder. The piece laid it out without quite meaning to. Darling had stood at the front of every meeting, every vigil, every press line, and she had used Mary Monroe’s name and Thomas Greaves’s name in the same breath every time she did it. She had wanted the death penalty for him. She had said so, on the record, at the lectern in the photograph. The cutting quoted her, and Ella read the quote twice.

‘If a man cuts up a woman in Prince George’s County and buries the pieces of her in our nation’s capital, and the worst thing the system can promise him in return is three meals a day for the rest of his life, then the system has stopped working. I refuse to live in that system. The people of this city refuse to live in that system. Thomas Greaves doesn’t get a bed. Thomas Greaves gets a needle.’

The next sheet explained the rest of it.

It was a summary of the legal route the case had taken, and somebody, a Bureau hand years ago, had appended it to Hayes’s file because it touched the interstate element. Mary Monroe had been killed in Maryland. Her remains had been carried across the line into the District. Maryland had no death penalty and the District had none either, and on the face of it Thomas Greaves should have spent his life in a cell and died of old age in one.

But the crossing of the line had made it federal, and the federal government did have a death penalty, and the decision to charge it federally rather than leave it to the state had not been an automatic one. It had been pushed. There had been a public campaign to charge Greaves federally precisely so that the needle would be on the table, and the woman at the front of that campaign, the woman who had stood at the lectern and demanded it and built her first term on it, was Jennifer Darling.

This was it.

Darling had got what she wanted. Greaves had been charged federally. He’d been convicted, sentenced to death, shipped to Terre Haute, and put down a week later. And the field where it had all begun had been reseeded and given a bench, and Jennifer Darling had stood under the oak and unveiled a plaque, and then she’d gone on being a councilwoman until someone wheeled her back to that exact tree and burned her at it.

Billy Hayes had been the suspect they looked at and let go, and then he’d been hanged. Jennifer Darling had been the woman who made sure Thomas Greaves died for it, and then she’d been burned alive on the spot where she’d built her monument to that fact. Curtis Brennan didn’t fit, at least not yet, but he was surely a part of this.

Three people on a list.

‘Dark. Say something,’ Ripley said.

‘I don’t have Brennan yet. I’ll get Brennan. But Hayes and Darling, that’s not a pattern that points at Mary Monroe. It points at the man who killed her.’

‘What? Who’s Mary Monroe?’

‘I don’t know, but this has everything to do with her and a man named Thomas Greaves. I’d stake my life on it.’

‘Mary Monroe? Thomas Greaves? Who are these people?’

A burst of adrenaline later, Ella was scouring the FBI database on her laptop. If this case was federal, she’d have access to all of the details.

Ella pulled the laptop across, typed the name into the database, and the page opened on an intake photograph.

She’d been looking for the man’s height all week.

Here it was, years earlier, staring back at her off a booking wall.

Thomas Greaves was a giant. Thomas Greaves was a monster of a human being. And for a moment, Ella couldn’t tell whether she was looking at a dead man or the executioner she’d seen on the video.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

It took her twenty minutes to find it, and it had been sitting in plain sight the whole time.

She’d been searching the Watchlist archive for the wrong name all along. She’d run Billy Hayes and got a congressman, run the Laurel robbery and got nothing, and never once typed in the name she hadn’t known to look for until last night.

She typed it now. Greaves. The platform’s auto-captions chewed on it for a second and gave her back a single result, one video out of nine hundred, and Ella opened it and watched the first thirty seconds and knew she had the last corner of the thing.

The title slate read THE GREAVES CASE: WHY WE STILL NEED THE NEEDLE.

Ripley returned to the office with coffees. She’d left twenty minutes ago when Ella was rambling names Ripley wasn’t familiar with.

‘Got it,’ Ella said. ‘Brennan. He did an episode on Greaves.’

‘Dark,’ she said. ‘I’m going to need you to walk me through the whole thing now. Because what the hell. I’ve been three steps behind you since you woke up drooling on evidence.’

Ella stood up, because she thought better on her feet. And because her back hadn’t forgiven her for being hunched over a desk all night. She began walking it out.

‘About three years ago, a woman called Mary Monroe goes missing from Prince George’s County, Maryland. Thirty-three, reported by her sister when she doesn’t show for a family event. Two weeks later they start recovering her, and they recover her in pieces, buried shallow across a single field. Except the field isn’t in Maryland. It’s across the line, in the District. Marston Hollow.’

‘The field from last night.’