Page 16 of Girl, Entangled

Ronnie skimmed for eavesdroppers. There weren’t any. His pale face suddenly went the same color as his wooden pillory as he placed his screwdriver back down. Ella tried to picture this man as a mock-executioner, and while he didn’t quite fit her admittedly narrow psychological profile of the unsub, she couldn’t rule anything out completely.

‘Alright, I was here all night, but I know what you’re thinking and I didn’t kill anyone. I promise.’

Ronnie Cobb had patchy stubble, bitten nails and he was squirming to do something with his hands. Ronnie Cobb could not sit still inside his own skin. His eyes went to her, to the gallows tent, to the path, to the sleeping bag, and back to her, and the rotation never broke. Her unsub had brought his own rope, lured his victim to a public location and pulled off the most difficult method of homicide in the book. Organized killers had a self-awareness about them. They had a place for every thought and a place for every body, and you could sit across from one for an hour and watch nothing happen on the surface at all.

‘You possibly saw this killer, and you still said nothing?’

‘You gotta believe me. I’ve had trouble with the law in the past. I don’t need any more eyes on me. You know how it is.’

Ella was already certain that Ronnie Cobb, tomato-toss stall owner, could not be her killer. She’d been wrong about people before and she’d be wrong about people again. But she’d back this one with her own money.

‘I believe you, Ronnie, but you need to tell me everything you know.’

Ronnie wet his lips and started. ‘I was here, like I said. Eleven, give or take. I’d had a few bottles and I was nearly off. Then I heard noise down by the gate. I thought it was kids. They wreck our sites sometimes. They come in, steal stuff, piss in our buckets. So I heard the noise and I thought, right, here we go, here come the little bastards.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I ran. I’m not a fighter, miss. I’m 120 pounds soaking wet. I assumed they’d be in a group, and they might assault me. I grabbed the bag, and I went out the back, round the long way, and headed north for the treeline. I was going to wait them out in the woods and come back when they’d disappeared.’

‘So what stopped you?’

‘I looked back.’ Ronnie’s hand went to his mouth and dropped again. ‘I was halfway across the open ground, by the jousting rail, and I looked back over my shoulder to see how many of them there were. And I saw the gate.’

‘Go on.’

‘A man was coming through it. Pushing another man. In a wheelchair.’

Ella’s pulse spiked. Wheelchair. That explained how the killer got the victim here. Ella nodded for him to keep going but he didn’t. ‘That’s what stopped you? A man being pushed in a wheelchair?’

‘No.’ Ronnie shook his head, hard, as though clearing water out of an ear. ‘No, the chair was just the chair. It was the man doing the pushing.’

‘What about him?’

‘He was massive. Properly. Six-eight, easy. I’m not saying that because it was dark and I was scared, I’m saying that because there’s a height marker on the east post, where kids stand for the photos, and his head was over it. The marker’s at six-six. He was over it. And he wasn’t lanky-tall either. He was wide, like one of those guys off World’s Strongest Man. Shoulders out to here.’ Ronnie held his palms a foot off each of his own and they trembled there. ‘Arms like my legs. I’ve never seen a man that size in real life.’

Ella placed the description into her mental profile. She didn’t like the sound of it. ‘That’s what scared you off?’

‘No, miss.’ Ronnie looked at her properly now and his pupils were dilated. ‘That wasn’t even the scary bit.’

‘Then what was?’

‘He was dressed up like one of them old executioners. Black hood pulled down over his head, with the eye holes cut in it. Long dark top, sleeves rolled up. Like he’d come straight off the page of a history book. I thought I was dreaming it. I thought I’d had a bad bottle or something. I thought it was a stall worker here or something, someone playing the part of a hangman, and if he was a worker, I didn’t want him to know I was camping out here. So I slept about a mile away, barely. I came back this morning, hoping it was all a dream. Then I saw… the thing.’

Ella remained stoic while her pulse climbed up her throat.

If Ronnie’s version of events weren’t some alcohol induced fever dream – and she believed they weren’t – then she was looking for a giant executioner built like a wall, and that wasn’t like any killer she’d hunted before.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner was on E Street SW, and it was the most modern coroner’s office in the country. Ella had been here twice before and both times she’d thought the same thing: for a building that handled every violent death in the District, it was awfully polite about advertising the fact.

She and Ripley stood on the sidewalk out front. The afternoon had gone cool and the light had started to slant. She’d told Ripley everything Ronnie Cobb had said, and then they’d escorted him to the MPD precinct to give an official statement. Ronnie hadn’t seen anything else other than a well-built murderer and a wheelchair. He didn’t see the victim, at least not in life.

‘And how much of his story do you believe, Dark?’ asked Ripley.

‘That’s the question.’

‘It is the question. Because what you’ve got there is a tipsy witness who slept rough on the scene, ran from the murder, hid for the better part of seven hours, neglected to tell the police that and then handed you a description out of a Hammer film the second you put any pressure on him.’