Page 18 of Girl, Entangled

‘The long drop,’ Ella repeated. She knew it well. It was devised by a British hangman in the 1800s as a more humane way to execute criminals than strangulation.

‘Yes indeed. Used in Europe centuries ago. The executioner would calculate the body weight and the length of rope required to deliver sufficient force at the bottom of the fall to fracture the upper cervical spine. You position the knot – here, behind the left ear, the submental position – so that on the drop, the head whips backwards and to the side. When done correctly, the cord is severed instantly. Billy Hayes was hanged by someone who had done the maths. The drop was correct for his weight. The knot was correctly placed. The rope was the correct diameter and the correct material. I would estimate the fall at six feet, perhaps a little more. Any shorter and he would have strangled. Any longer and he’d have been split in two.’

Ella took that information and rolled it around her head. She had a giant unsub who seemed to obsessively embrace the role of an executioner, or perhaps a hangman from the nineteenth century. He’d dressed for the part and done the part properly.

‘Our unsub is more organized than we thought,’ Ripley said.

‘More than organized,’ Massri continued, and that was when Ella realized he wasn’t finished.

‘There’s more?’

‘There is more. I said I had bad news, didn’t I? This is the bad news.’ He moved to the other side of the table and indicated, with one gloved finger, a small dark mark on the left side of Billy Hayes’s neck. Ella had to step closer to see it. A pinpoint puncture, the surrounding skin slightly bruised, no bigger than a sesame seed.

Ripley leaned down. ‘An injection site?’

‘Exactly that. Subcutaneous to intramuscular, judging by the depth. I sent bloods to the toxicology lab as soon as he came in, and I asked them, very politely, to put my case at the front of the queue. They did. The result came back forty minutes ago.’

‘What was in him?’ Ella asked.

‘Ketamine. A substantial dose. Enough to put a man of his size into what we call a dissociative state within a minute of injection. Awake, technically. Breathing. Heart going. But not present, in any useful sense of the word. The body is there but the man is not in it.’

Ella was already running it. Billy Hayes had been lured to Rock Creek Park. The killer had likely blitzed him and put a needle into his neck. Within sixty seconds, Hayes had been a passenger in his own body. He could be lifted. He could be wheeled. He could be propped in a chair and pushed up a ramp and have a noose dropped over his head, and wouldn’t have been able to do anything about any of it.

‘He was awake for it,’ she said.

‘Certainly. Aware enough to register what was happening. Not aware enough to resist it. Whether Billy Hayes felt the drop, I cannot tell you. Whether he understood the drop was coming – that, I’m afraid, is more likely than not.’

Ella asked, ‘How hard is it to get your hands on ketamine, doctor?’

‘Too easy. It’s up there with marijuana as one of the most accessible drugs. Recreational users don’t tend to take in the dosage that ended up in Mr. Hayes, though.’

Ella looked down at the small dark mark on Billy Hayes’s neck and thought of all the things their killer had needed to know to put it there. The drug. The dose. The victim’s weight. The drop. The knot. The hour the park went quiet. The route in past the cameras. He had taught himself an old trade, item by item, and last night he had practiced it on a man.

Practiced.

And what concerned Ella was the fact that most people didn’t practice something just once.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ella was back at the MPD side office by half past six, the spider plant still dying on the windowsill, the laptop awake from sleep and her network finally talking to the building. She’d left Ripley downstairs in conversation with Hibbert about manpower. Whatever they decided would land on Ella’s plate inside the hour and she wanted a head start on Billy Hayes before it did.

She started with Hayes’s rap sheet.

Billy Anthony Hayes. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, 1979. Forty-six years old at the time of his death, which had been somewhere around midnight last night. The page itself was the standard federal layout. The photo on the left was a booking shot from his most recent intake. He had a shaved head, a small old scar through his left eyebrow, and his eyes were pointing far past the lens. Ella matched it against her memory of the face on Massri’s table and found the same man, less the colour in him.

The history was a working man’s record of a clichéd criminal. Petty thefts in his late teens. A run of possession charges through his twenties, mostly heroin, occasionally crack. One assault in 2009 that had been pled down to a misdemeanour. A short stretch at a state facility in his early thirties for receiving stolen goods. Nothing that looked like a man building toward anything except more of the same.

Then five years ago, Hayes was involved in an armed robbery. He’d held up a gas station in Laurel. Hayes had carried a handgun he hadn’t fired. Hayes had served just under four of his eight years at MCI Jessup, in Jessup, Maryland. After his release, he’d been given social housing in Anacostia, which was, oddly, fifty miles from Hayes’s hometown. Ella made a note of the housing unit, and the next half hour took her into parts of Hayes’s record that weren’t free for the asking. She used her credentials, got into the Maryland Department of Public Safety system from the MPD terminal. The building’s network had its quirks but it shook hands politely enough with the state side once she wiggled hard enough. From there, she pulled Hayes’s inmate file, and judging by the 120 scanned pages, Billy Hayes had been a busy man at MCI Jessup.

He’d filed eleven formal grievances in four years.

That on its own was unusual. Most cons learned within a few weeks of being inside that grievances resulted in nothing except the attention of the people you’d grieved against. Eleven was the work of someone who either didn’t care about being seen or – Ella thought, reading the dates – wanted to be seen. The grievances were all small, all internal, and all aimed at other inmates rather than staff. There was a complaint about a cellmate stealing commissary, a complaint about being threatened in the yard, a complaint about a contraband search that had supposedly been timed to embarrass him. When read separately, they were the petty everyday activities of prison life, but read together they formed a pattern.

She trawled through every page. Some parts she had to skim. She found disciplinary notices, details of medical visits, visitor logs that were thin to the point of empty. Hayes hadn’t had many people on the outside, and what he’d had he’d lost piece by piece across the four years. Hayes had stints in the laundry, one in the kitchen, one short and unhappy spell on grounds. Three cell moves. The third cell move was a single page tucked between two longer documents and Ella nearly turned past it before she registered what she was looking at.

It was an internal transfer memo dated late in his third year. The cover sheet was routine. The body of it recommended moving inmate B. A. Hayes from Housing Unit C to Housing Unit E with effect from the following week, on the recommendation of Lieutenant Aaron Pell. The reasoning was given in a single sentence near the bottom of the page.

Recommend transfer in light of inmate’s protected status arising from ongoing cooperation with SIS.