Page 17 of Girl, Entangled

‘I know.’

‘A six-eight executioner in a black hood. With a wheelchair.’

‘I know, Mia, but look at the positives. There can’t be many guys in this city that size.’

‘And if it’s lies, we’ll have wasted our time looking at every tall guy in the city. Come on. Let’s see what the doctor’s found.’

Ella followed Ripley into the building. The lobby was wide and cold. They came to the desk where the receptionist sat behind a curve of glass under a row of fluorescent tubes that did nobody any favors.

Ripley said, ‘Agents Ripley and Dark with the FBI. We’re here to see Doctor Massri.’

The woman glanced at the badges and tapped two keys. ‘End of the corridor. Last door on the right.’

A buzzer went somewhere above the door behind her and Ella pushed through it. The corridor on the other side ran long and white under the same flat lighting, and the temperature dropped a degree with every door they passed. They came to room AUTOPSY 4, and below it the sign said NO ENTRY WITHOUT AUTHORIZATION. Ripley knocked twice, and the door opened at once.

‘Hello, my friends. Would you like to see the strangest thing I’ve seen in years?’

Doctor Massri was a doctor by every metric, including his bedside manner, which was to say he had none. He was Lebanese, or possibly Syrian. Ella had never asked and Massri had never volunteered. He was in his sixties, with a grey beard and a pair of black glasses that sat halfway down a nose that looked like it had been broken once and never healed properly. Ella had worked with him once before.

‘Yes, we would,’ Ripley said.

‘Come in.’ He gestured for them to enter in lieu of a handshake, then shut the door behind them. The room’s tiled floor sloped to a central drain. There were two stainless steel tables in the center. One was empty and rinsed clean, and the other bore what they’d come for. The victim’s body was under a white sheet drawn up to the collarbone. The head and the neck were visible. His face was turned slightly toward the door, as if he had been waiting for someone to come in. The eyes were closed, decently, presumably by the good doctor.

Massri said, ‘I have good news and bad news. Which one would you like first?’

‘Good,’ said Ripley. She found a box of latex gloves, pulled out a pair and handed them to Ella.

‘The good news is that we have a name for this man. Chief Hibbert called me an hour ago after matching his face to a former inmate at MCI Jessup. I have since confirmed it from my end. My identification unit lifted his prints when he came in this morning and ran them through the federal database, and they came back to the same name Hibbert gave me.’

Ella asked, ‘Who is he, doc?’

‘Billy Hayes, forty-six years old. He was released from jail four months ago after serving five years in jail.’

Ripley looked over at Ella and gave her the nod. She’d been right. The victim was an ex-convict. The troublesome part of that fact was that there was probably no shortage of people who’d want to kill an ex-convict.

‘Thanks, doctor. What else did you find?’

Massri unveiled the body – who Ella now knew as Billy Hayes. ‘Where would you like to start?’

‘Cause of death,’ Ripley said.

‘Cause of death.’ Massri nodded, as if this were the answer he’d hoped for. ‘Then come closer, please. Both of you. The two of you can see what most of my colleagues will never see in their lives.’

Ella stepped up to the head of the table and pulled on the gloves Ripley had handed her. The neck of the corpse was exposed to the collarbone, and Massri reached down and very gently rotated Billy Hayes’s head a few degrees to give them the full line of it. The skin beneath the rope mark had gone the colour of an old plum.

‘He was hanged,’ Massri said. ‘But more importantly, he was hanged correctly. This is the strangest thing I am going to tell you today, so take notes.’

Ella turned on her mental voice recorder. This was all going in the bank.

‘When a layperson hangs themselves at home,’ Massri said, ‘they die from strangulation. The rope obstructs the carotid arteries and the airway; the brain is starved of oxygen, and over several minutes the person dies. It is, despite popular belief, not a fast death and not a clean one. We see this every week. It is what most of these cases look like.’

Ella knew this, but she suspected Massri was about to get into the weeds, of which she was likely unfamiliar.

‘Then there’s the other side of the coin. If a person falls too far, their head fully detaches. But then there’s a middle ground. If you look at Billy Hayes here, the tongue is in the mouth where it belongs. The eyes are clear. There is no petechial hemorrhaging in the conjunctiva, none on the eyelids and none on the face.’

‘So, no asphyxiation,’ Ella said.

Massri lifted the head a fraction, supporting the base of the skull with the flat of his palm. ‘Internally, the picture is unambiguous. The second and third cervical vertebrae have separated cleanly. The spinal cord at that level has been severed. There is bruising and tearing of the surrounding soft tissues consistent with a sudden distractive force. That means that the head was pulled sharply away from the body by a known weight falling a known distance. The medical term is hangman’s fracture. The historical term, if you prefer, is the long drop.’