Page 38 of Girl, Entangled

He’d settled on a method old enough that the men who designed it had at least done it honestly, out in the square at noon, where the town was made to look. The method was older and worse than anything he had done so far, a thing out of the deep past, designed by men who understood that punishment was meant to be witnessed and meant to be felt and meant, above all, to be slow.

He had studied it for years. He knew the apparatus. He knew the sequence. He knew what the body did at each stage of it and how long each stage took, and he had practiced the parts of it that could be practiced, on weight and on wood and once, briefly, satisfyingly, on something that had screamed. The advocate he had chosen for it had spoken, more than once, in favour of suffering as a deterrent. Had said, in that bright untroubled voice, that the trouble with modern justice was that it had forgotten how to make an example of a man.

And he intended to remind everyone what an example looked like.

Back in those days, there’d been a hood, and for a long time he’d had it wrong, had thought the hood was for hiding. It wasn’t. The hood was a kindness the headsman paid the crowd, so none of them would have to know the face of the man doing on their behalf the thing they hadn’t the stomach to do themselves. The mask was a mercy. He understood that now.

Beside the thing on the wall, on a wooden peg he’d fixed there for the purpose, hung the outfit. The tunic, the hood, the whole of it. He’d made it himself, by hand. It was a fine creation. Billy Hayes had even said so himself.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The evidence room at the MPD sat in the basement behind a steel door with a window of wired glass. The clerk who ran it was a heavyset man named Okafor who’d apparently been doing the job long enough that he no longer pretended to be glad of company. Ella signed the sheet, gave him the case number, and waited at the counter while he went back into the rows and came out with a long cardboard box that he set down on the counter.

‘Rope,’ he said, reading the label as though she might have forgotten what she’d come for. ‘You’re taking it out of the room?’

‘Just upstairs. I’ll have it back within the hour.’

‘You’ll sign for it going and coming.’ Okafor turned the box so the printed chain-of-custody form faced her, and Ella signed where it told her to sign, and then she lifted the lid.

The rope lay coiled inside on a sheet of butcher paper, bagged in clear plastic. The loop at one end had gone slightly out of shape from being handled and photographed and weighed and swabbed. It was new rope, or had been a few days ago. She was no rope expert, but she could tell it was three-strand, and the fibres were still bright where the lab’s cuts had exposed the inside of it. The knot at the working end was ugly, and she’d looked at it a dozen times in the photographs without it telling her anything, because she didn’t know what she was looking at. However, the man upstairs might.

‘He cleared yet?’ Okafor asked. ‘The big one. I heard you ran him down at a museum.’

‘He’s cleared. There’s a visa question hanging over him, but that’s somebody else’s headache, not ours.’ Ella fitted the lid back on the box. ‘He didn’t do ours.’

‘Pity. Easy when they’re that size. You can see them coming.’

That was the trouble, she thought, going back up the stairs with the box held flat in both arms. The one they were after, you couldn’t see coming at all. He came up a residential street with no cameras and left the same way, and the only picture they had of him was the one he’d chosen to give them.

She found Francis Hale where she’d left him. Somebody had brought him a coffee in a paper cup and he hadn’t touched it. He looked up when she came in, and there was a wariness in him that hadn’t been there an hour ago.

‘You’re free to leave, Mr Hale,’ Ella said. She set the box on the table but didn’t open it. ‘The motel checks out, top to bottom. Eleven hours on camera. As far as the Brennan case is concerned, you were never in it. I’m sorry for the museum, and I’m sorry for the cuffs.’

‘It’s fine. And the other thing?’

‘Mr Hale, the FBI is looking for a murderer. What I am not investigating today is visa compliance. Whether you do something about your immigration status is between you and your conscience. My recommendation would be to talk to a lawyer as soon as you get out of here.’

He took a breath that went all the way down and came out shaking at the end of it. ‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me. Not yet. Before you go, I want to show you something, and I want your honest read on it, the same as you’d give a customer.’ She took the lid off the box. ‘You don’t have to. You’re free to walk out of here right now and I wouldn’t blame you. But you know this world better than anyone I’m going to find today, and I’d be a fool not to ask while you’re sitting there.’

‘Umm, okay. What is it?’

She lifted the bagged rope out and laid it on the table with the knotted end toward him. Hale leaned back from it the way he’d leaned back from the photograph, then made himself lean in again.

‘I’m not sure if you know, but we’re not just investigating one homicide. We’re investigating two, and this rope was used in the first one. I can’t tell you the details of what was done with it, because you don’t want them and you don’t need them. What I want to know is the craft of it.’

Hale looked at it in puzzlement. ‘Can I touch?’

‘No.’

He looked at it for a long time. Long enough that Ella could only stand back and let the looking happen. Finally, Hale said, ‘Someone was hanged with this?’

‘Yes. From a gallows.’

‘Oh. Not the guy that was killed in Rock Creek Park?’

‘You heard about it, then.’