Page 60 of Girl, Entangled

‘You’re a defense lawyer,’ Ella said. ‘You’d say the same about someone who shot the Pope.’

‘I’ve defended a lot of people. Most of them did it. You learn the difference. Tommy didn’t do it.’

‘You can prove that, can you?’

Hoy stood up. ‘Please follow me.’

Ella grabbed her Glock just in case. ‘Where are we going?’

‘To prove it.’

***

Ella was holding a handwritten letter. She and Hoy were in a spare room decked mostly with junk. Ella saw piles of books, cleaning equipment, a mass of clothes, and on the wall was a strange cross-stitched quilt.

‘What’s this?’

‘This was posted through my door about a year ago. Read it.’

Ella did.

Mr. Hoy. I am writing because somebody has to and nobody else will. Thomas Greaves did not kill Mary Monroe. I know this because the man who did told me so himself. Billy Hayes confessed it to me in our workshop. He stole the tarp from Thomas’s shed and used it against him. He watched a good man go to the chamber for it and said nothing. I cannot put my name to this. I have my reasons and they are good ones. I cannot give you a phone number because phones are of no use to me. If you want to know the rest of what Hayes told me, leave a note with an email address on the Mary Monroe bench in Marston Hollow, the one in the field, and I will be in touch. I am the only one who knows the whole of it and I am giving you the chance to know it too.

There was no signature.

Ella’s nerve endings were tingling with adrenaline, because she was absolutely positive that she was holding her unsub’s work in her hands.

‘Who sent you this?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you leave a note on the bench like he asked?’

‘No. By the time I got this, I was working in HR. What good would it do? This case ruined my career, and I wasn’t going to start corresponding with an anonymous stranger through a memorial bench. It read like a lunatic.’

‘And yet you kept it.’

‘I kept it because it might have been true, and a man was dead, so keeping it was the least I could do. I’m not proud of that. It’s just what happened.’

‘Did you show it to anyone?’

‘I took it to the judge. Barton. Daniel Barton, who’d tried the case. I thought, off the record, he might tell me what to do with it, but that’s where things got strange, because he said he received the same letter.’

Ella’s beating heart was making her legs tremble. This was it. This was the path that led to the killer – somehow. ‘The same letter?’

‘Yeah. Same letter, same time.’

‘And?’

‘Barton had retired by then. His view, thirty years on the bench, was that it was a crank. He said a judge gets confessions in the post after every murder case, people who want to be part of something. He threw his in the trash and told me to do the same.’

Ella read the letter through over and over again, focusing on the language, the grammar, the rhythms, the specific words, the space between words, the slant of the lettering, the curves on the lower case t and g, the type of pen used, the paper it was written on.

When people wrote, they gave away more about themselves than they realized.

And then, by the miracle of information overload, Ella’s hazy brain highlighted one particular section.

Billy Hayes confessed it to me in our workshop.