Page 28 of Girl, Entangled

‘Yeah. What are we doing about the video?’

‘I’m on it. Well, the tech guys at HQ are on it. I’ve been on the phone with them since stupid o’clock. They’re using the child-exploitation agents to scrape the internet for images that match any stills from the video. It scours the web every sixty seconds and blocks the host, whatever that means. I’m just repeating what they told me.’

Good, Ella thought. This footage didn’t need to be seen by anyone other than the people hunting this monster. ‘Who says artificial intelligence is useless?’

‘Me, but that’s another story. And before you ask, yes, I’ve got the tech guys devouring every detail for something we can use. Reflections in the background, little bits of audio, whatever. He filmed the murder for us, so let’s use it.’

There was something different about Ripley these past two days, and it took Ella until now to place it. There’d been a period last year when Ripley had been going through the motions, culminating in a short-lived retirement. However, the Ripley next to her was the old Ripley, the fiery bitch who never hesitated to crack a few skulls and, in some cases, welcomed it.

It was contagious. Ella felt the slack go out of her own spine.

‘Then let’s stop standing in his crime scene,’ Ella said, ‘and go make him regret leaving that camera on.’

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ella knew, before she opened the first tab, that Billy Hayes and Curtis Brennan would never have stood in the same room, but two men didn’t need to share a room to share an enemy, and so she spent her morning investigating the overlap anyway.

At her desk at the MPD precinct, she built the comparison on paper: two columns on a legal pad with a line ruled down the middle, because victimology done by hand stayed in the head longer than victimology done on a screen. The left column belonged to Hayes. Born in Baltimore, 1979. Education finished at sixteen. Thefts and possession charges through his twenties, an assault pled down, then the gas station in Laurel and five years at Jessup. He was released into social housing in Anacostia and he’d seen a caseworker regularly.

The right column belonged to Brennan. Born in Alexandria, 1991. He’d attended community college, then did four years in a marketing job he walked out of, then started his YouTube channel and self-published a book. His parents lived in a lavish part of West Virginia, and Ella expected they’d paid the deposit for their son’s house. She ran him through every database her credentials would open, and the worst thing the system held against Curtis Brennan was a speeding ticket from 2019, paid within a week.

So they hadn’t met in a cell, which had been her best hope. She moved to the next-best one.

The Watchlist’s platform generated captions for every upload, and the captions were searchable, which meant nine hundred videos of Curtis Brennan’s opinions could be strip-mined in minutes rather than weeks. She searched for Billy Hayes and got nothing. She searched for Hayes on its own and got a congressman from Ohio. She tried the Laurel robbery, the sentencing date, even MCI Jessup itself, and the archive gave her back nothing she could use.

It made sense once she gave it some thought. Brennan trafficked in high-profile cases with a specific angle, and that angle was that justice hadn’t been delivered. In Hayes’s case, justice was served because he was given a reasonable prison sentence, not to mention that a man waving an unfired pistol at a gas station cashier wasn’t content. Brennan had never said Billy Hayes’s name in his life, and yet here they both were, butchered by the same hand thirty hours apart.

What the archive did give her was Brennan himself, and two hours of him was quite the education. The Watchlist had a position and the position never moved: punishment in this country had gone soft, criminals knew it, and the only language the violent understood was violence returned. Brennan wanted the death penalty restored in the District. He wanted parole boards abolished. In one video he proposed, with no visible irony, that sentences should be served in full plus ten percent, the ten percent being interest owed to society. His book – which Ripley had swiped from his office – ran along the same rails for three hundred pages. It was clear that his audience loved him for it, given his numbers, and Ella could see why, because Brennan was funny and fluent and spoke with conviction.

The financials landed in Ella’s lap at 10AM, and Hibbert’s warrants had been thorough. Hayes’s account was a short story of benefit payments and cash withdrawals, a phone top-up here and a liquor store there, and nothing over fifty dollars since his release. Brennan’s ran to eleven pages of camera equipment, software subscriptions, restaurants in Georgetown, a florist twice a month. She put the statements side by side and went looking for a shared merchant, a shared gym, a shared anything, and there was no point of contact anywhere in the paper. Even their geography refused to cooperate. Anacostia and Brightwood sat at opposite ends of the city with the whole of Washington between them, and neither man’s records ever placed him within five miles of the other.

The phones were the last door. Hayes’s handset had walked out of Rock Creek Park in his killer’s pocket, but the carrier records hadn’t, and Brennan’s phone had been sitting on his desk in an evidence bag since dawn. She had both call logs run against each other. No common numbers. No common towers.

Ella sat back and looked at her legal pad, at two columns that described two complete strangers, and accepted what the morning had been telling her for hours. The overlap she was hunting didn’t exist in any record, most likely because it didn’t exist. It lived in the killer’s head. One man had broken the law for thirty years and one man made his money demanding that those lawbreakers suffer. Externally, a third man had looked at both of them and decided they both needed to be executed.

The door opened and Ripley came through it with her jacket still on.

‘Anything worth reporting?’

‘I’ve got proof that Billy Hayes and Curtis Brennan never met, or as close to proof as I can get. The headline is that this criminal and this criminal-hater had nothing in common.’

‘Shocker. Anyway, stop staring, because we’re moving. Brennan has a girlfriend. Kate Millward. She lives in Petworth. Hibbert’s already spoken to her, and apparently she’s holding it together better than anyone expected, which usually means she’s about to stop. Either way, she’ll talk to us before she stops, and we want to be the ones in the room when she does.’

Ella closed the laptop. Ripley was still two steps ahead, thankfully. ‘Let’s go. Hopefully, Curtis was a different man when the camera was off.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

‘Miss Millward, before anything else, I’m sorry for your loss. And I’m sorry about the way you found out. Nobody should learn something like this the way you did.’

‘I wasn’t even watching it live,’ Kate Millward cried. ‘That’s the stupid part. I never watch the Monday streams live. I clip them the next morning. I woke up, and my phone had two hundred notifications, and I thought, oh good, something’s gone viral.’

Ella and Ripley were in a kitchen in a ground-floor apartment in Petworth. Ella had never met a Kate that wasn’t, at the least, conventionally attractive, and Kate Millward was no exception. She was thirty-one, blonde, taller than average, and had the frame of an Olympic runner. Even though she’d drowned herself in a grey sweater, the physical attributes were obvious. Her eyes were dry. They were also about a millimeter away from not being.

‘Can we ask you some questions about Curtis? I promise we won’t keep you long,’ Ella said.

‘Yes. Ask your questions. I want to be useful.’

‘Then let’s start simple,’ Ella said. ‘Tell us about your relationship. How long were you and Curtis together?’