Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries) (12 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Body of Evidence

“You took your time,” Amy said, as Jason handed her the camera and placed the laptop on the coffee table.

“Sorry,” he said, looking dazed and far away.

Amy wondered if she should ask, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know why he was so distracted.

“You want me to start it up?”

“Check there’s nothing plugged in.” Amy turned the camera over in her hands until she found the connection point. “USB sticks, external hard drives, modems. Check the bottom too. He didn’t erase the others, but he might be getting wiser if he thinks we’re coming for him.”

Jason dutifully checked the laptop, sweeping his hands over the sides and base as if it were the body of a motor. Amy watched him open it up and push the start button, checking the inside for anything remarkable. The only mark was a dark discolouration to the right of the touchpad. He ran his finger over it questioningly.

“Where she rested her wrist.” She also traced the stain, her fingers brushing against his. She had to ask. “Did you...see her?”

He hesitated, and she saw the answer in his eyes. “Yes. It’s pretty grim.”

She nodded, digesting his words, and touched his arm before walking back to her computer terminal and the images that were appearing on her monitors. It seemed natural to touch him, to give physical comfort. If that was what he needed, she could do that.

Jason came to stand by her shoulder. “I got some pictures of the crowd. Owain said I should.”

“Some killers like to watch,” Amy said absently, starting to flick through the images. And then there was the body, remote and sanitised on the monitor, the horror of the scene muted by pixels. “How did she die?”

“He hit her over the head with a hockey stick. The doctor thinks that killed her.” His voice sounded detached, almost cold, and Amy didn’t like it.

“The coroner’s photos will tell us more. You did well. This will give me the information to access her accounts.”

“It will?” Jason looked up at the photographs, his brow furrowed. “I didn’t find a list of passwords.”

Amy looked at him in horror. “Tell me you don’t write down your passwords.”

“No.” Jason was defensive, a shade of his usual self coming out from behind whatever walls he’d thrown up to deal with seeing Laurie. “I only have the one.”

She closed her eyes, an internal groan echoing inside her head. “Your one password is B-zero-N, J-zero-V-one? Kill me now.”

Jason gaped like a fish. “How did you know that?” he said, voice an octave too high for dogs to hear.

Amy shrugged. “They’re listed as the first of your favourite bands on Facebook and your profile picture, at least two years out of date, is of you in a Bon Jovi T-shirt. It’s not rocket science.”

“But I did capitals and numbers. Like you’re meant to!” He scowled, clearly annoyed that he’d been so transparent.

She found his temper rather endearing. “I’ll change it for you. Your sister’s birthday—full four-digit year—and your mother’s maiden name, with the second letter capitalised. That will do for now. We’ll work on a stronger password after we find this man.”

Amy put Jason’s password woes to one side and started sorting the photographs while tracking down Laurie’s various social networks. “She was well-connected—Facebook, Twitter, El-jay, Foursquare, Tumblr, Pinterest. There should be a lot of information we can find here.”

“What are you looking for?” Jason asked. She ignored him for the moment, putting in several password combinations, all of which failed. “She’s got a decent password, has she? Not her favourite band or her dog or something?”

“Yes,” Amy said sulkily. “I may have to resort to a cracker.” She tapped on her mouse, pausing to think. “To answer your question, a killer like this will focus on one victim at a time. He won’t have a stack lined up. We can assume he found Laurie recently—after he killed Melody. If we can find Laurie’s pattern of behaviour, we can see who she connected with in the past two weeks.”

“Makes sense. What about Gina? She was important to Laurie.”

“Mmm. Tried name, date of birth, anniversary. What else do couples do?” Amy was out of her depth. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the acts of romance—she’d read a lot of fan fiction, after all. No, it was the in-between times that puzzled her. Did they just talk? She had always preferred silence to conversation. It was one of the things that had driven her sister out of the house.

Jason hovered his hand over the mouse. “Can I?”

Amy hesitated, before pushing her chair back from the desk. He went back to the pictures, bringing up a series from the living room. “Maybe they had a favourite song, or could be the first film they saw at the cinema. A favourite café.” There were photographs all over that room, and Amy marvelled at how much of their life was on display. The last photo of her was the one her sister took before she left for Australia—Amy hadn’t wanted to look at it, afraid of what she might see.

“Hey, is that Venice?” Jason asked, disturbing her thoughts. There was a shot of the couple in the prow of a pointed boat, water behind them and houses rising up either side. Amy reclaimed her mouse and opened up Foursquare, scrolling through Laurie’s activity. “Venice. April 2012. Two-week tour of Italy with Gina. She wrote glowing reviews of everywhere she went—including the gondola rides.”

Amy typed a password—Venice2012—and the accounts opened up before her, letting her into Laurie’s world. She sank into the chair with a sigh and immersed herself in the information, jumping from account to account and back to the pictures, a sense of contentment filling her as the pieces came together. She added information to a calendar as she went, timelining Laurie’s activities for the past three weeks, filling out all the corners of her life. She would know everything about Laurie’s last days. That was how she would find him.

She heard Jason yawn behind her and glanced at the taskbar. 05:15. “Coffee,” she said, and Jason obediently shuffled to the kitchen. She should probably feel guilty for ordering him around, but she was in the data. He had to understand she couldn’t leave it half-done.

Amy took a plate from him wordlessly and stuffed a slice of cake into her mouth whole. She heard the distinctive
ba-bing
of Microsoft Windows lurching to life, and turned to see Jason on Laurie’s laptop.

“She was looking at holidays in Austria. And—oh.” Jason looked up at her, slightly sheepish. “Forgot to say, Laurie worked at the same nightclub as Kate. Can we link Melody to it too?”

Amy’s mind sparked with possibility. “Yes, she walked past it on her way home the night she was murdered. Someone from the club could easily have followed her. I’ll review the footage again after...this.” Her brain was thrumming with the effort of holding together several sources of information and coalescing them into one timeline of Laurie’s last days. She couldn’t afford to be distracted.

But Jason kept talking anyway. “Laurie was trying to book some days off in January to go away with Gina.” He tapped loudly on the mouse. “But her boss said no—turns out Dan had booked the same dates. Gina said he had a problem with Laurie.”

“He was harassing her on Facebook too.” Amy brought up a long list of unread messages in Laurie’s inbox. “A mix of hate mail and sexual fantasy. Seems someone had a crush.”

Jason made a noise in his throat, almost a growl of frustrated anger. “Do we have enough to arrest him?” he demanded, seizing the back of Amy’s chair.

“Not nearly enough. Bryn can talk to him, though, shake him up. He’s good at that.” She heard Jason’s suppressed snort, and wondered how best to keep him out of trouble—with the general public, and with Bryn. “We need to link him to Melody’s death.”

“Crime of opportunity? Like his weapons?”

She could feel the heat of Jason’s anger from where she sat. She nudged the cake plate towards him, but he didn’t take it.

“The others were planned, attacked at their homes. Dan would have known where Kate and Laurie lived from their employment records. Melody is different.” Amy paused, insight rushing to the front of her mind. “We released the CCTV picture. He got scared. He went back to the way that worked for him, with Kate. He was interrupted with Laurie—he didn’t have time to get away.” She sighed, frustrated. “He’s made so many mistakes. Why haven’t we caught him?”

“We’ve got him,” Jason said. “We just need to prove it. We need to get his DNA.”

Amy looked up at him, her mind leaping to the fastest way to justice—and the quickest way to get Jason hurt. “You’ve met him. You’ve been to the club.”

Jason smiled like a shark, and she knew it was a lost cause. “I’ve got him.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Baby, Don’t Hurt Me

Jason went through his Saturday shift in a haze, torn between cloying exhaustion and blinding anger. He wanted this murder to stick to Dan, didn’t want him getting another girl before they got to him. He was surprised at how the ball of rage was forming in his chest, simmering there throughout the day. His shrink on the inside had told him his anger would be the death of him and he’d worked hard to hold it back, but there was the taste of righteousness in his fury now. The man would pay.

He sent the persistent calls from Teresa through to voicemail—he was too tired to be charming. Woodenly polite to the clients, he made instinctive chitchat, but his mind was focussed on that evening. On his plan to snare Dan.

His boss, Derek, had pushed his Amy time back to three o’clock. “Punctuality’s important,” he’d said cryptically, but Jason knew he had been pushing his limits, turning up at client appointments a few minutes late, out of breath and dishevelled. He couldn’t afford to lose this job, not when they were so close to finding the killer.

Amy was where he’d left her—at the computer terminal in her dressing gown—but she actually turned to look at him as he entered. “You look terrible.”

Jason scrubbed a hand over his face. His stubble was turning into a beard. Cerys would finally turn him into a scraggly indie kid. “I’m not used to running on empty.” He yawned behind his hand. “We should order the week’s shopping or you’ll have nothing to eat on Monday.”

“Sit down.” Amy gestured to the sofa. “I’ll tell you what I’ve found.”

Jason did as he was told and sat on the sofa.

Amy faced him, pressing her fingertips together in a steeple. “He posted another picture.”

The image flashed up on the screen, and Jason leaned forward. Laurie was laid out on the bed, the sheet covering her modestly, but the picture was taken from above, taking in the whole of her body at the foot of her bed. The others had been from the side, the classic sleeping woman, but this photograph was almost predatory. Jason shivered.

“He’s escalating,” Amy said quietly. “I think this was his first sexual assault. The way this picture was taken—you can tell what happened next.”

“He pulled off the sheet. He dragged her down the bed.” His voice was hollow, and he swallowed against his rising gorge. “He raped her.”

“He’s still sending messages. They’re not for us. They’re for someone else.” Amy drummed on her mouse impatiently, as though she expected the answers to blossom across the screen.

“The woman in the hospital,” Jason said grimly. “I can’t believe the interviews turned up nothing.”

Amy shrugged—they had to take Bryn at his word that there was no lead there. Jason might be expert at finding the word on the street, but he wouldn’t be able to cajole information out of the professional types at the hospital.

“What about the alarm we heard on the call?” Jason leaned back against the sofa, struggling to keep his eyes open.

“I’ve narrowed it down to a manufacturer.” The clacking of her keys carried across the living room. “I need to find which of those machines have been purchased by Cardiff and Vale UHB.”

“You will,” Jason said, listing against the arm of the sofa. “You find everything.”

“I’ll wake you,” he heard Amy say from across the room.

I’m not asleep
, he wanted to say, but the words never left his lips.

* * *

Jason woke on Amy’s sofa at seven o’clock with three missed calls from his mother and a terrible crick in his neck. He shifted himself upright, mumbled his apologies to Amy and went home to change.

Gwen made her displeasure known in the quiet, abused tone of the disappointed mother, one that was far worse than any amount of shouting. “You should have called. We were worried.”

Jason glanced across at Cerys, who didn’t look remotely bothered, but he kept his mouth shut on that point. “I’m not staying,” he said instead. “I’m going out—to town.”

Gwen pursed her lips. “Got paid, did you? Can’t say I’m surprised. I expected you to start all that again sooner or later.”

Jason resented her implication that he got drunk as soon as he had a bit of cash, but it was true to form. From before Usk. He hadn’t given her much reason to believe he’d changed. He’d never done anything to make her proud. He wanted to tell her how he was involved in catching the Cardiff Ripper, but he didn’t want her to worry about him. He’d tell her everything when it was over, when they’d locked the sick bastard up for good.

Dressed in jeans and a black shirt, reeking of cheap aftershave, Jason donned his jacket and headed back out into the city. The pavement was slippery with wet autumn leaves and he stumbled towards town, going over his plan in his head. He’d seen it on cop shows plenty of times: if he went into the bar and bought Dan a drink, he could then nick the glass and get both DNA and fingerprints off it. He’d taken a couple of freezer bags from his mam’s kitchen cupboard and stuffed them in his pocket, ready to safely stow the glass for the detectives. If he could just stop himself from smashing Dan’s face in, it would be a successful night.

He took a shortcut down one of the streets that held fancy hotels and few pedestrians—and felt a prickle on the back of his neck, the immediate sense of being followed. He slowed his pace, taking in the shadows and side streets around him. There were three of them, kids watching, keeping their distance. Waiting.

Jason risked a look and swore under his breath. He knew these kids—and they ran with Damage. Stuart’s gang. He did not have time for this tonight. With a burst of speed, he aimed for the well-populated streets of the city centre, where the kids wouldn’t dare touch him under the nose of the cops and the crowd of students roaming the streets for some midweek drinks offers. He was only two minutes from St. Mary’s Street—there, he’d be safe from a scuffle and able to find the evidence they needed on Dan.

He was so focussed on reaching his goal that he missed kid number four. The boy snagged his jacket, yanking him backwards, and then another ran in, slamming a fist into his gut. Jason got his fists up and cuffed one aside, but two had hold of his jacket and were trying to wrestle him into an alleyway. Jason would be damned if he gave up on the limelight. He twisted out of the jacket and tried to make a run for it.

“You’re not fucking turning your back on me.” Damage seized his shoulder and pulled him round, smacking him across the jaw. Jason tasted blood but kept his feet, preparing to take down the little shit with a minimum of fuss.

“Stop! Police!”

Damage pushed him away and legged it, the rest of his little gang tearing after him.

Two police officers came up behind him, an older copper clapping him on the shoulder. “You hurt, mate? Nice fat lip you’ve got there.”

Jason touched his bleeding mouth and winced. “Yeah, ruined my good looks.” He bent down to retrieve his scuffed jacket.

“We’ll get you inside to clean up and get a sympathetic pint on the house, eh? Nice story for a barmaid.”

That was how he found himself in a back room at his target bar, nursing a pint of ale and having the DJ’s assistant fuss over him with a first aid kit. “Thanks, love,” he said. “Tell the manager I’m grateful, yeah?”

“It’s Dan on tonight,” she said, and Jason tried to hide his predatory smile. “I’ll pass it on for you.”

He flashed her his wounded-soldier grin. “If he’s got a minute, I’d like to see him, thank him proper. Tell him what great staff he’s got.”

The girl blushed prettily, and if he didn’t have things to do, he’d happily encourage her sympathy and smiles. As it was, he was on the hunt for DNA and nothing could sway him tonight. She left him, promising to bring Dan back when she found him, and Jason drank down his lager. He needed something that would made Dan slip up, catch him in a lie.

Jason didn’t have to wait long and Dan joined him ten minutes later. “Sorry about what happened, mate. Hey—do I know you?”

Squinting up at him, Jason pretended to consider his face. “Yeah, yeah—didn’t I meet you here the other day? I was on a cleaning contract.” Dan’s face lost the confusion and he nodded slowly, the conversation out back returning to him.

“I remember,” he said, with a slightly guarded smile. “We were...talking about Kate. Can’t believe she’s dead. And Laurie too. Fuck, it’s like someone’s out for our girls.”

Jason took another drink, watching Dan closely. “But the other one—what’s her name? Melody, that’s it. She didn’t work here, did she?”

Dan scratched his head, as if thinking. “Not now. Don’t think we’ve ever had a Melody—you’d remember a name like that, wouldn’t you? But the girls are getting scared. We’re trying to walk them home where we can, get their blokes to pick them up. It’s not safe for any girl in Cardiff right now.”

Because of you
, Jason thought, gritting his teeth against his anger. If he lost his temper with the bastard, he wouldn’t get what he came for. “I’m losing faith in the cops, mate. I don’t think the idiots have the first idea what they’re doing.”

“You’ve changed your tune,” Dan said warily. “You thought they were well set up to catch the guy before.”

“That’s before they found three girls dead, weren’t it? How hard can it be to find him? It’s not London or Manchester, is it?”

“Maybe he’s just very good.”

Jason felt his jaw tighten, his hand unwittingly curl into a fist. “Maybe,” he said, straining to keep his voice even.

“Well, I need to be getting back.” Dan stood up to leave. “Nice to see you again, mate. Pop to the bar for a drink after.”

Jason realised his quarry was getting away and he was no closer to getting a sample. He picked up his pint glass and stood, as if to shake Dan’s hand. Dan clapped his arm and Jason let the glass fall from his hand, shattering on the wooden floor. “Ah, mate, I’m so sorry. My hand’s still shaking, it is.”

Dan pushed him gently back into the chair. “No worries. It’s to be expected, ain’t it? Let me get it.” He bent down to pick up the shards and, to Jason’s delight, cut himself on a piece of glass.

“God, that looks nasty,” he said, removing his handkerchief from his pocket and pressing it into Dan’s hand. The man wrapped the cloth round his dripping finger, the blood absorbing into the white before Jason’s eager eyes. “You should get that looked at. You got a first aid kit?”

Dan gestured to the green box on the wall and, with a delicate hand, Jason disinfected the wound and placed a plaster over it, leaving his handkerchief to one side and forcing himself not to look at it, hoping the glee didn’t show on his face.

“Look, mate, I’ll wash that for you,” Dan said and moved to pick up the handkerchief.

But Jason shrugged and picked it up, with an easy smile. “My mam always says it’ll wash. Don’t worry about it—my mistake, anyway.”

“I’ll see you around,” Dan said and wandered over to the door, smiling at his new friend. Jason waved him off before carefully placing the handkerchief in one of his plastic bags and returning it to his pocket. “I know I’ll be seeing you, mate. Hopefully fucking soon.”