Page 61 of Girl, Entangled

‘In our workshop,’ Ella accidentally said aloud.

‘They have workshops in jail. Classes.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘But?’

Ella cast her mind back, then asked, ‘Who says our workshop? Don’t inmates usually say the workshop?’

‘Yes, but that’s language for you.’

This letter suggested that the killer and Billy Hayes shared a workshop, which meant they had to have been in prison at the same time and that person would have since been released.

But Ella had already exhausted that avenue, and there wasn’t a single prisoner in MCI Jessup that matched the height and build of her unsub.

Which meant her killer wasn’t a prisoner.

And now that she thought about it, she’d read about a class once already, in a different room, in a different document.

And not only that, but she’d heard about one too.

‘Mr. Hoy,’ Ella said, ‘did Thomas Greaves attend any workshops in prison?’

‘Yes, he did, as a matter of fact. Just one.’ Hoy turned and pointed to the strange cross-stitched quilt hanging from his wall.

Ella looked at the quilt for two seconds.

Then she ran.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Daniel Barton had played pool every Tuesday for the better part of forty years, and the only thing retirement had changed about it was that he could now lose all afternoon instead of just the evening.

He pulled the Buick into his driveway a little after six with twenty dollars less in his wallet than he’d left with. He’d waged a bet with a man named Pete that he could clear the table, but he’d fallen at the third ball and subsequently been humbled. Then the bartender had charged him ten dollars for a double whiskey, and if this was just a couple of years ago, Barton would have sent the man down for daylight robbery.

Retirement was an odd beast, he’d realized. Most people spent their lives wondering what the next chapter would bring, but once you gave up the job, you’d consigned to the fact that there’d be no more chapters. This was it, until your number got called and you went to the great courtroom in the sky, sentenced to eternity in a wooden box with only the insects for company.

It was a sobering thought, which was exactly what he needed before he went inside and faced Jenine. If she knew that he’d driven home with two shots of whiskey in him, she’d remind him of his grand old age of 65 and that there was nothing worse than a hypocrite. She said that if word got out of a former judge bending the rules, the press would jump on it and shame him into oblivion. Barton used to tell Jenine that she was greatly overestimating how many people would care about such a low-stakes scandal, but he’d stopped arguing with Jenine because she always had the last word. Thirty years of bringing the gavel down had conditioned him to believe that he always had the last word, but Jenine, like Pete from the bar, kept him humble.

Barton killed the ignition, left the car, and made for the front door. His driveway was annoyingly vast for his old bones, and he idly considered downsizing now that he’d reached his twilight years. And why not? At his age, it was time to give back, because God knows he’d taken enough over the years. Daniel Barton would be the first to admit he hadn’t always acted morally or even legally, and perhaps if he sacrificed some of what he’d earned, it could be his way of atoning for his sins.

He aimed for the lock with his front door key, but the moisture on his hands caused them to slip and clatter on the ground. Barton bent down, scooped them up, and when he returned to a standing position – no easy feat for a man of his condition – he found he was not alone at his front door.

From the passageway beside the house, a figure had emerged without sound and without ceremony. Barton had lived in Massachusetts for many years, and back then it hadn’t been uncommon to find a giant bear hanging around your property in the colder months.

That was Barton’s first thought as the shape materialized: a hulking black bear with paws like pavement slabs had decided to take up residence in his garden.

But this wasn’t the colder months, nor was it Massachusetts, and that was when Barton realized the figure had human proportions, as exaggerated as they were. It was a man so large that for a half-second Barton thought he was looking at two men, one in front of the other.

He had a pistol in a drawer in the bedroom and another in the glove compartment of the Buick. The Buick was behind him. The bedroom was beyond a door he had not yet unlocked.

Barton got as far as asking who the devil this person was before a gigantic hand wrapped consumed his vision. One sting in his neck later, and Daniel Barton, going down into a black he hadn’t seen coming, felt the great arm take his weight and lower him with terrible care, and his last thought, absurd and almost sweet, was that he had been wrong as he’d contemplated the rest of his life not two minutes ago.

Maybe there was one more chapter after all.

***

It had been right in front of Ella since Monday and she hadn’t seen it.