Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries) (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Frogs and Snails and Puppy Dog Tails

Her living room looked like the waiting room at the mortuary. Nobody had slept, and Jason had thrust strong filter coffee into everyone’s hands instead of their usual soothing tea.

“How could we miss him?” Bryn growled, voice gravelly and despairing. Jason took his customary place behind Amy’s chair, as she continued scanning through the footage from all the exits. From the moment of Carla’s abduction to the following morning—when the uniforms had stopped checking cars and hospital security confirmed they’d clapped eyes on every room in the place—Amy had already looked through two hours of footage at ten different exits. They’d found an abandoned wheelchair by the entrance to the dental school and concluded that he must’ve left it behind as he made his escape. Forensics were all over it, but had already declared they were unlikely to get a print out of the mess of a hundred hands and winter gloves that had gripped the handles.

“We were looking in the wrong place.” Amy ignored the wounded look Jason sent her way. It was only the truth—she wouldn’t lie to save him pain.

“I think...” Owain began slowly. His brain seemed most affected by the lack of sleep. “We looked in the right place but the killer got wise to it. We caused a queue of people into the hospital—everyone was complaining about it. He might’ve seen that and tried his luck elsewhere.”

It was a possibility, particularly as Amy’s searching had almost brought her up to eight o’clock. If he had chosen another exit at that point, it might well be that he’d been deterred by the information that the police were checking the exits. Then again, he’d managed to drive or carry her out of the hospital grounds without being seen. It was true that the fences around the hospital weren’t particularly well maintained, but a man carrying a woman over his shoulder should arouse someone’s suspicion.

The hospital closed its more obvious doors earlier in the evening, so he had to know his way around to avoid the main entrance. Perhaps he worked at the hospital—Jason said that Carla was receiving threatening phone calls at work. If they were routed internally, they had no hope of tracing them, but if they came externally, switchboard should have a log, perhaps even a recording.

“There we are,” Jason said quietly, as she cycled back to the main entrance feed. “We didn’t miss anyone, Amy.”

She believed he believed that, but she needed to see it for herself. Still, in deference to his pride, she set the main entrance feed to one side while she examined the others. He was paying just as much attention as she was, determined that his theory was correct, that the killer had planned to get Carla out at the end of visiting. She was just about to give up on the ever-changing crowd of smokers outside A&E and flick back to the concourse when she saw the wheelchair.

“There—there!” Jason pointed over her shoulder as she froze the picture.

It was difficult to make out faces at this angle, particularly with the cigarette smoke in the air, but the woman in the chair appeared unconscious. She had something on her head, a bandana maybe, and the man bending over the handles of her chair wore a porter’s uniform. He’d walked out of the hospital and they’d been looking in the opposite direction.

“Fuck,” Jason said, echoing her thoughts perfectly, as Bryn and Owain joined them at the desk. They stared in silence at the image for a moment, and Amy felt the sharp knife of failure cut through her chest.

“There should’ve been someone on those doors,” Bryn said, a tinge of desperation in his voice. “Where were the bastards?”

But Owain grimaced. “We redeployed them to the back entrance. We didn’t have enough bodies to do both—Friday night.”

“Fucking drunks.” Bryn pulled out his mobile and called through to the station. They were meant to be sleeping, taking a couple of hours to rest and recharge before rejoining their colleagues on the case, but they were too wired to sleep—and they’d come to her, looking for answers. She had none.

“We need to look at Carla Dirusso,” Amy said abruptly, pulling up all the pages she’d found after they’d realised she was the woman on the phone. “He knows her, he’s obsessed with her. If we find out everything about her, we can find him.”

“Carla’s parents are at the station,” Owain said. “Her brothers are on their way. She used to live with a boy called Tom Davies, but we’re having trouble finding him. They think he went back to his parents, but guess how many Davieses live in Canton.”

“I know that area,” Jason said. “I can find him.”

Owain shot him a sceptical look, while Amy quietly panicked. “Be careful,” she blurted. “You’re not Canton’s favourite face right now.”

“In trouble again?” Bryn said, hanging up and returning to the huddle around her chair.

Jason flashed him a quick smile, drawing a crease through the purple-yellow bruise of his black eye. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

“They’re sending a profiler down from London,” Bryn said. “I’ll need everything you have so far, Amy.”

She nodded, copying her research folder and database to a USB drive before handing it off to him. She grabbed a yellowing Post-it from her desk drawer and wrote out a series of letters and numbers, pausing only once or twice to draw the code from her memory. “Here—the password to unlock the files.”

Bryn looked at the device and password as if they were going to bite him. “You don’t mind me having this?”

“It changes every two days. AEON will update it now that I’ve removed files—she’s paranoid like that.” She stroked the edge of the keyboard. AEON had a life and personality all of her own. Amy had no doubt that, when the robot revolution came, AEON would be leading the charge, followed closely by the Googleplex.

Bryn just looked at her as if she’d grown an extra head, and put the USB drive in his pocket. “When you find anything, call me. My PC is on—just do that remote thing where you put stuff on there.”

Amy nodded, already extending a link to Bryn’s clunky old work computer that was somehow still running Windows XP. She always suspected that he’d refused to update, having got used to the OS, and she couldn’t say she blamed him. There was a reason she ran Linux.

Bryn and Owain showed themselves out, and Amy felt a wave of tiredness wash over her. She was always tired, the heavy feeling in her limbs just part of life, but this was pushing her beyond the limits of her meagre reserves.

A heavy hand settled on her shoulder. “You should get some sleep,” Jason said.

Amy made a vague noise of assent and shuffled over to the sofa, curling up at one end.

When Jason went into the kitchen to wash up, she pulled out her iPad and browsed Carla’s Facebook again. Welsh mother and Italian father, two older brothers, raised out in Haverfordwest, the wilderness of West Wales. Moved to Swansea, the nearest big town, and qualified as a Registered General Nurse in 2011. Recent breakup with Tom Davies—though she’d tried hard to erase all evidence of said relationship. However, Zuckerberg kept everything, and Amy was soon able to find exactly which Tom Davies she’d been seeing. He didn’t go on there much, and he didn’t list his relatives or employment details. He did, however, text update and that made her life a lot easier.

An iPad was not designed for this kind of work, but she was comfortable on the sofa, half-listening to Jason’s off-key humming in the kitchen. She set up the trace remotely through AEON and rested her eyes for a minute.

Amy woke to AEON’s insistent beeping and sat up, belatedly catching her iPad as it slid off her lap. The washing machine was whirring in the kitchen and Jason was dozing in his armchair. Amy glanced at her wristwatch—two o’clock. She’d lost four hours of work time.

Prising herself off the sofa, she padded over to AEON and examined her findings. She’d struggled to find Tom because he’d been moving in and out of dodgy signal areas, but she’d finally narrowed him down to a ten-metre radius in Canton.

Amy glanced over at Jason. She didn’t want to wake him, but he’d said he wanted to do this. On the other hand, she could just send it to Bryn and have Owain do it. Jason would never be any the wiser and he wouldn’t have to go to Canton, where people hated him and might hurt him. In fact, that sounded like the best plan.

“Have you found him?” Jason’s eyes were open and he was looking at her keenly. A coarse beard coated his cheeks, dark fuzz visible on his shaven head, and his black eye gave him the look of a hard man. He stood up, stretched and wrinkled his nose at the stink of his clothes. He looked at her screen and grinned. “Yeah, I know that street. I’ll change at mine and head over. You need anything?”

“Some bread,” she said, suddenly desperate to stall him. This man could be a killer. She didn’t want to send Jason into danger, not to a place with sparse cameras when the police were occupied elsewhere.

“On my way back.”

Amy handed him a picture of Tom’s face, Welsh Dragon painted on his cheek, and Jason’s fingers brushed hers as he took it. “He could be dangerous.” But her words fell on deaf ears, the spark of excitement already alive in his eyes. He missed the thrill of the fight, she realised. Running with his gang, flipping off the police, getting into it with other boys. And, this way, he got to do it with the protection of the law—Amy’s protection.

Amy watched him go, sick to her stomach, before heading to the shower to wash away the stench of fear.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: She’s a Lady

It seemed like the entire police force was in the detectives’ office.

The open-plan office was sterile white and glass, usually haunted only by a few unlucky detectives at this time on a Saturday. Now it was thrumming with activity, a mixture of plainclothes detectives and uniform cops talking and typing and drinking strong coffee. The whiteboards were out, covered in a battered map of Cardiff with the residences, workplaces and murder scenes of the girls spread across them. One of the uniforms was adding Carla to the board. “Mark her differently,” Bryn said to her. “She’s not like the others.”

The room hushed at his arrival, as his super came over with a look of pity and disappointment. Bryn hated that look.

“What have we got so far?” Roger Ebbings asked, taking in the boards and Bryn’s dishevelled appearance.

Bryn held up the little toggle Amy had given him, and one of the boys in tech took it off him with the password and loaded it up on the smartboard. Hundreds of images unfolded—Jason’s scene photographs mixed with drunken Facebook snaps and CCTV footage from the Heath. There were spreadsheets, documents of notes in Amy’s rambling style, and half a dozen examples of highly illegal data mining that could get Amy sent down for ten-plus years. Thankfully, the super looked more inclined to hug him than prosecute his source.

“This is a good place to start.” Roger dropped his voice, stepped closer to Bryn. “Is she working on anything else?”

“She’s tracking down Tom Davies. I think we’ll have him down here by evening.”

Roger stroked his greying beard thoughtfully. “Take the boys off Tom then. No point covering the same ground twice.”

Bryn was barely listening, his tired eyes scanning the evidence before him. He was out of his depth with a serial killer who was snatching girls out of their houses, from the Cardiff streets by night. He knew where he was with kids like Jason, the lads of the old Tiger Bay, who wanted to be part of something and nicked cars to prove their devotion.

Bryn was a street copper hauled through the ranks to detective, only to find there were bright young things chasing his tail, with their gas chromatography and their data capture devices. Give him a wire tap and a professional grass any day. That was why he had Amy, to close the gap between a man pushing sixty and a cop like Owain, who could analyse fingerprints on his phone.

“All this and you haven’t caught him yet?”

Bryn turned to see an immaculately dressed woman in her fifties striding into the office. Everything about her screamed “profiler” and Roger’s unease proved it.

“Bryn, Dr. Eleanor Deaver from Scotland Yard. Doctor, this is DI Bryn Hesketh—he’s been working the case.”

“Yes, I’ve been kept apprised of your...efforts.” Eleanor looked at him with the same pity and disappointment as his colleagues, her silver bob emphasising the sharp cut of her cheekbones and her disapproving frown. Approaching the board, she adopted the attitude of a woman making the best of a bad job. She reminded him of his wife just before their divorce. “I’m surprised you didn’t call me sooner.” She removed her laptop from her briefcase, glancing up at the smartboard. “Though this is more than I expected. Your tech department should be commended. Though data’s all very well, without extrapolation and analysis, it’s largely worthless.”

The mood in the office, already strained, took on a hostile air. Strangers were never welcome in a police department, regardless of their supposed skill, but her BBC English accent in a Welsh city added that extra flavour of distaste.

“Our boys did their best,” Roger said, which Bryn thought wasn’t entirely fair. Amy and the women hadn’t exactly slacked off.

Eleanor’s expression sobered. “I’m afraid it wasn’t good enough this time, Superintendent. Shall we see where we’ve got to? I’ll need a cup of tea for this.”

Detective Sergeant Owain Jenkins, reduced to teaboy, fetched her a drink while she reviewed Amy’s work and Bryn’s case notes.

“You have a pet hacker, Detective,” Eleanor said, and Bryn thought she might be impressed, perhaps even envious. “His information is useful and his conjecture reasonable for an amateur.”

“Her information,” Bryn corrected, more than a little gleeful.

Dr. Deaver just took his sniping in her stride. “Hers, indeed. From this, we can certainly throw up the basics.”

Owain took up a marker and wrote down Eleanor’s profile as she dictated around the plum in her mouth.

Single, white male.

Low socioeconomic class, basic education (exemplar: blog posts).

Linked to Carla Dirusso, possibly romantically, probably marginally.

Likely to have met Kate Thomas, Melody Frank and Laurie Fox in person.

Motive: to make Carla jealous with a type (tall, blonde, slim).

Stalked his victims (exemplar: Melody’s night out, Carla’s phone calls).

Likely resident in South Cardiff.

Possible university connection

“The university?” Bryn asked. “We’ve already gone up all the alleyways on that one—no lectures in common, shared one or two classmates who they never spoke to. Hell, there was only one day a week when they were both in class.”

“They’re all students.” There was a hint of stubbornness in her voice, as if she had gripped this idea with both hands and was unwilling to leave go. “Humanities students, no less. Maybe they all frequented the same library?”

“They didn’t have common friends, common interests,” Bryn said dismissively. “They spent more time in the pub than anywhere else.”

“It’s a connection,” Eleanor said firmly. “It may only be a trivial thing—he may only have met them once to set his sights on them. Try the libraries, try the bartenders at the students union.”

Owain ran off to scramble some uniforms to start the daunting set of interviews, while Bryn looked at Eleanor with grudging respect. Perhaps he’d set aside the university connection too quickly. These girls weren’t found in libraries—they had part-time jobs, wide social circles. They just happened to be at university. But the psychologist had a point—it only took one meeting for a man to fixate on a girl.

“I agree that the reservoir is largely irrelevant—it seems merely convenient, like his choice of murder weapon. Like he never means to kill them until it comes down to the moment.” Eleanor’s dark eyes glazed over, her full lips moving soundlessly.

Bryn shivered. Profiling scared him—getting into the killer’s head like that. It had to do something to you. “Melody’s murder revealed the most forethought, fetching her from the city centre and booking a hotel. He was no doubt the Mr. Dixon who checked out early, paid cash and never looked at the camera.”

“We checked all the others,” Owain confirmed, returning from his little exercise in management. He was hanging off Eleanor’s every word. Clearly, he’d found someone else to worship. If Owain had his way, they would install Amy and people like Eleanor in a sleek glass office, of which Owain was master, and solve international crime like some kind of James Bond outfit.

“The key to finding this man will be Carla Dirusso,” Eleanor said, echoing what Amy had said about six hours earlier. “We need to know everything about her—how many boyfriends she’s jilted, what she liked to eat, where she shopped.”

Bryn’s computer beeped at him. He pushed his chair over to the desk and opened another three pages of notes. Eleanor looked over his shoulder with interest, and Bryn grinned—he’d caught sight of
Usually Tesco
,
but M&S as a treat.

“My people are on it,” he said.