Page 43 of Girl, Entangled

Ella looked at Ripley, and Ripley looked at Ella. No doubt Ripley was thinking the same thing as her, which was number three.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Pork was the closest thing Ella had for a comparison. To date, she’d never been near a body that had been completely immolated, but tonight was a night for new territory.

Ella, Ripley and Hibbert stood fifty feet from the wreckage. A halogen mast was up on the south side, which brought every detail into a hard white field even under the night sky. Ella could see piles of burned rubble at the base of a tree, about a foot in depth. Amongst it was the blackened outline of a human being, as well as large foreign objects that looked like steel pipes. The tree itself was charred, but not completely ruined. Two MPD forensics in white suits were down on hands and knees outside the ring.

‘He burned someone at the stake,’ Ella said. She wanted to be sick, partly because of the smell, but mostly out of sympathy for how this poor victim had met their end. If this charred body at the base of the tree had been anything like Curtis Brennan in life, then they were guilty of nothing more than advocating for harsher justice for criminals. Perhaps a controversial topic for some, but certainly not worthy of being incinerated.

Ripley said, ‘Jesus wept. Another execution method, straight out of medieval times.’

‘I haven’t been up close yet, but the fire marshal said he found some weird stuff in the wreckage. He left it in situ for us. What I’m wondering is how the hell he pulled this off, especially without someone seeing.’

‘Who called it in?’ Ripley asked.

‘Some guy on a bike going down the path over the way. He saw the flames.’

‘So they must have gotten pretty high.’

‘High-ish, but there’s a spot from just near the tree with a direct line of sight to the path. At the right angle, you could see the flames at any height. The flames just singed the leaves, so most of the fire stood at about ten feet. The fire marshal told me that the water from the body helped keep the flames in check. But if we’d have left it five more minutes, this whole field could have been scorched.’

Ella did the math, the physics. ‘So he used an accelerant to get the fire started. That’s the only way he could have achieved the necessary heat to melt a body in the time he had.’

‘Kerosene, apparently,’ Hibbert said.

‘Call me uneducated, but I don’t think they used kerosene in medieval times,’ said Ripley.

Ella said, ‘No, they didn’t, which means the medieval approach isn’t as important to him as we thought. That’s just roleplay until it becomes inconvenient.’

‘That goes against everything we know about a ritualistic offender,’ Ripley said. ‘It’s almost like he’s roleplaying being a serial killer, not just a medieval executioner.’

Ella went back to the start. Billy Hayes was hanged by a man in an executioner outfit, almost with every detail perfected, only the knot he tied wasn’t quite right. Curtis Brennan was decapitated by a man in an executioner outfit, and only when she applied the not-ritualistic filter to the crime did she realize something she’d missed earlier. Curtis Brennan’s head was still missing. Why would an executioner take a memento? That didn’t track.

And now this.

‘No,’ Ella said. ‘The other way around.’

‘Huh?’

‘He was roleplaying, but he’s since evolved into a fully-fledged serial killer. The incorrect knot, the missing head and using kerosene to accelerate flames. He’s been putting his personal mark on these crimes without us realizing, be them accidental or not on his part. It’s kind of like he’s two different people.’

Two different people.

Ella applied that idea to the murders so far, but it didn’t quite fit. Before she could dwell further, a forensic officer came over. He removed his mask and took in a lungful of air.

‘It’s all yours. We’ll need to come back and take more swabs once the smoke has died down, but we’ve documented and photographed everything. We’ve liaised with the fire service to get ladders up to the tree branches too, and we’re going to wait for the coroner to come in to advise them on how to load the body without impairing it.’

‘What’d you find in there?’ Ripley asked.

‘A lot,’ he said. ‘Some of it makes sense and some of it doesn’t.’

‘Start with what makes sense,’ Ella said.

‘Female, by what’s left of the pelvis. Adult. Carbonized down to the bone in places. Facial recognition isn’t going to happen. We’ll have to go dental or DNA. Clothing’s gone. There’s melted synthetic fused to the torso where a jacket or a coat went up, but nothing we can cut a label out of. Same with the shoes. There’s a phone in the lap that’s a lump of slag now, though the lab might pull something off the chip if they’re lucky. There’s a handbag, or what’s left of one. Clasp survived, bit of the frame, a set of keys melted into the bottom of it. We bagged a couple of coins that came through more or less whole. You can sometimes get a partial off a coin but I wouldn’t bank on it.’

Ella was already mapping the wreckage. None of it surprised her. A woman had been brought here, set on fire, and what survived was what survived. ‘And what doesn’t make sense?’ she asked.

‘Two things. The wood, first. So the bulk of it’s sticks and split logs, dry stuff, like what you might get bagged from a garage forecourt for a wood burner. There’s pale board mixed in, and the fire marshal thinks pallet timber from the nail pattern. Underneath all of it there’s a bed of leaf litter and dry grass that he’s fairly sure was raked in as kindling. The culprit didn’t grab stuff from around the tree. The treeline back there is mostly elm and we’re looking at pine.’