Page 51 of Girl, Entangled

‘Why? He can’t be a suspect in your investigation. He’s dead. I saw his body.’

‘No. He’s not a suspect, but someone close to him might be.’

‘Okay, well, everybody who worked here when he was here remembers him. You don’t forget a man that size. We had to special-order a bed.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Quiet, mostly. He didn’t really get involved. He was the only death row inmate here, so we had to keep a close eye on him. Most inmates steered clear of him though, because of his size, even the big ones.’

Ella turned the call to loudspeaker. ‘Did he have visitors? Or anyone in the prison he bonded with?’

‘I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head, and I’ll be honest with you, the records won’t help either. He was here on a federal housing contract, not as one of ours, and the visitor logs from that far back, for a contract inmate, they didn’t all transfer when he went to Terre Haute.’

‘Dammit. Is there another way we could find out who visited him? CCTV footage?’

Roy laughed. ‘You’re kidding if you think we still have footage from that far back. But actually, now that I think about it…’

‘What? What is it?’

‘Nothing. It’s just…’

‘Roy, please,’ Ella said. ‘We need every piece of information on Thomas Greaves, no matter how minor, and if you-’

‘His notebook,’ said Roy.

‘What about his notebook?’

‘Greaves used to write and draw a lot. That was all he did. He took a couple of classes, but he had to do them alone because of his notoriety. But I remember checking his cell one night – we have to check the high-profile inmates’ property occasionally – and I saw in his notebook he’d written everything down. Like, everything that happened in his entire time in the slammer. I think it was his way of coping with it all.’

‘Including visitor logs?’

‘Yeah. I remember reading a passage he’d written about seeing a psychiatrist, so I can only assume he logged every visitor he had, which definitely wasn’t zero.’

Ella was slowly assembling the jigsaw, and she could already see the grim, inevitable result. ‘And where’s that notebook now?’

‘So, it’s kind of weird, but Greaves had no family left that wanted him. Nobody claimed the body after his execution, and here’s a thing you might not know: When nobody claims a man, his property goes in with him. Whatever he had in his cell that wasn’t contraband, they box it and it goes in the coffin.’

Ella looked at her partner, who was shaking her head. Ripley said, ‘Roy, you said earlier you’d seen Thomas Greaves’s body after he died. How is that possible, if he was executed in Indiana?’

‘Terre Haute sent his body back to us. He might have been a murdering scumbag, but apparently everyone’s equal in death or some garbage, so we had to do the respectful thing.’

‘Which was?’

‘Bury him closer to home.’

Ella’s heart was in the pit of her stomach. ‘How close to home?’

‘So close that I could spit on his grave from here. He’s buried in the cemetery next door.’

Ripley leaned in and said, ‘Roy, can I put you on hold for a second?’

‘Sure. Don’t keep me too long, though.’

‘No, no, no,’ Ripley said as she pushed the mute button. ‘Don’t think about it, Dark. How stupid would we look if it’s a waste of time?’

‘You got any better ideas?’ asked Ella.

‘No, but that doesn’t mean we have to indulge the craziest shit we can think of. Do you know how long it takes?’