Believe No One (37 page)

He found her in the meeting room. A few heads turned, and he realized that Simms must have passed on the news. She met him at the door.

‘All right?' she asked.

He smiled. ‘Yes. Thanks.'

Dunlap came over and offered his sympathies. ‘We'll be going over the police and autopsy reports, Professor. Of course, if you want to be here, you're in, but you know how brutal it can be, a bunch of cops raking through a cold file.'

Fennimore nodded.

‘I'm … concerned that folks might hold back with you in the room,' Dunlap said.

‘I appreciate your tact, Detective,' Fennimore said. ‘And I think I have the perfect solution: I'm heading out to Chicago for a couple of days.' He glanced at Kate Simms. ‘Got a minute?'

‘Chicago?' she said.

They were seated in a booth in the restaurant. ‘Might as well do something useful while I'm banished to the sidelines.' He preferred to keep his conversation with his publisher to himself. ‘I've been thinking about what you said earlier. What if some of the children did survive?'

‘Nick,' she said carefully. ‘We don't know if Rachel really did fall victim to one of these men.'

‘I know,' he said. ‘I'm just thinking through possibilities, eliminating lines of inquiry.' He slipped his laptop out of his bag and she shook her head.

‘Not the photograph again. Nick, we've been through this—'

‘Hear me out,' he said. ‘What if Suzie
is
part of this, and the man in the picture is the Scottish connection? Would you really want to dismiss what could be vital evidence?'

‘That's low tactics, even for you,' she said.

‘I know. But what if this is Suzie, Kate?' Before she could argue, he added, ‘And what if I could tell you where it was taken?'

She closed her eyes for a moment and exhaled. ‘All right,' she said. ‘I'm listening.'

He opened the image and talked her through why he was convinced the picture was taken in Paris, pointing out the green swan-necked lamps, the typically European design in the layout of the setts, knowing and not caring that it was only pity that kept her from leaving.

Then he slid the image so that the white box van was in the centre of the screen, enlarged it and watched her reaction.

She frowned, angling the monitor so that she had a better view. ‘Is that graffiti?' she said.

‘I think it's a gang tag.'

She nodded, thoughtful. ‘Could be.'

‘If it is, then it's territorial, and gangs' territories are geographically precise.'

‘All true.'

‘And I was thinking Paris Police might have a graffiti database.'

‘They do,' she said.

‘And as part of the Task Force, you would get further with a request for information than I would,' he said.

She was still scrutinizing the picture. ‘Email me the JPEG,' she said. ‘I'll see what I can do.'

‘It might need to be cleaned up and enhanced to get the detail,' he said, and she glanced sharply at him – she knew when she was being manipulated: enhance the image, and the scar/shadow question would be resolved at the same time.

‘I said I'll see what I can do,' she repeated.

Riley works his way around back of the house through the woods, stepping careful and quiet. By the time he reaches the fence at the boundary of the woods and the trailer park, he is light-headed. He reaches up to grab the top rail and swing over, but can't find the strength to haul himself up. He falls back and just lies there for a minute, staring up at the grasses nodding in a light breeze. He is so dry he can't swallow; it feels like he has glass lodged in his throat, and his tongue feels thick and swollen. His nose twitches, smelling the pungent scent of burning tobacco. Someone is nearby. He rolls into the shade of a bush up near the fence and listens, hears a blast of harsh sound, a squawk of voices.

A police radio?
he thinks.
Why're they still here? Why can't they leave me alone?

He crawls on his belly to the house. There's police tape all around it, and a seal on the door. He carries on down the slope to where the trailer is jacked up, crawls under. It smells of earth and faintly of raccoon scat; he creeps forward, trying not to snuff the smell in his nostrils in case the cop hears. He peeps through the gaps between the front steps. A police cruiser is parked right across the front of the house. A sheriff's deputy leans against his car with his back to the house, smoking a cigarette.

Too tired and weak to go back, Riley lies beneath the trailer with his face pressed to the cool earth.

Incident Command Post, Westfield,
Williams County, Oklahoma
Monday afternoon

Web Spiders deployed by the United States techs discovered a forum whose members were discussing the recording of Sharla Jane's murder. A forum member calling himself SouthernKingfish had posted the link earlier in the day. He took issue with those who claimed the murder was faked – a combination of careful editing and CGI effects. One poster said that the ‘victim' was in fact a willing participant, an addict, high on meth – which explained the rasp in her voice.

SouthernKingfish wrote that the cops knew different. Sharla Jane, too. He described the resuscitation equipment he'd used. He chose the wrong breathing tube, he explained, and had damaged her throat before changing to a size smaller, and
that
was why her voice was so harsh when she came round.

The damage to Sharla Jane's throat had been kept in-house.

The linguistics specialist confirmed that the style, with its slips into British-English sentence construction, were similar to the video recording of Sharla Jane's murder. Deputy Hicks also pointed out that the southern kingfish was a type of mullet, and their guy had a mullet hairstyle.

The web spider gave them a list of email addresses. From there on in, they needed the Internet Service Provider's cooperation. On behalf of the Task Force, Dunlap asked for and got a warrant to gain access to SouthernKingfish's account, including any messages sent or received.

Within hours, he had a senior technical adviser with the company on speakerphone. Members of the team not out canvassing gathered round.

‘No sends, no incoming mail.' The voice at the other end of the line was male, and sounded very young.

‘He must have received one email at the very least,' Dunlap said. ‘To confirm his account details when he set up the account.'

‘Deleted,' the tech adviser said.

‘So the account wasn't used?'

‘Oh, it got used, just not in the way you'd think.'

‘You need to explain,' Dunlap said.

‘Okay. So, every time you send or receive an email, it leaves an electronic trail, like pixie dust in the ether.'

‘Okay …' Dunlap said.

‘So, you set up an account, agree a password with … whoever, then you draft an email. You don't need to send it, because the other guy can just punch in the password, check the drafts folder for new messages wherever he is. And because it doesn't get sent—'

‘No pixie dust,' Dunlap said.

‘Right. He deleted everything in the drafts folder.' A collective groan from the team must have been audible at his end, because he added, ‘Oh, wait, that doesn't mean they're gone,' the young expert said. ‘We keep multiple copies of emails in case the system goes down, or you delete something you didn't mean to.'

‘Even if you permanently delete a file?'

‘It can take a while for us to get around to, uh, emptying the trash can. Deleted files – non-priority, right?'

‘So,' Dunlap said, ‘what about these particular deleted drafts? Do you have them, or don't you?'

‘
Dude
,' the kid said. ‘They've been in your inbox like ten minutes already.'

It would take a few hours to work out the chronology and create a discourse from the drafts the technical manager had sent. When they had something near coherent, Dr Detmeyer and Professor Varley would compare notes.

In the meantime, Hicks invited Kate Simms to ride along with her to Lambert Woods trailer park and help with the canvass. She led the way across the car park and stopped at her beat-up Suzuki SUV.

‘No department vehicle today, Deputy?' Simms said.

In reply, Hicks handed her a grid, marking out each of the park homes. ‘One resident has been hard to pin down,' Hicks said. ‘The guy in lot thirty-two isn't home, no matter
what
time of day officers call – his car's outside, but no sign of him. It's the nearest to Sharla Jane's place. If anyone saw something, it'd be him.'

‘He's very close to the boundary fence,' Simms commented.

Hicks nodded. ‘I'm beginning to think he's sneaking off into the woods to avoid us.' She took her hat off and put it on the back seat. ‘Figured we'd go in undercover.' She gave a rare smile; Deputy Hicks had high, flat cheekbones and a naturally guarded expression, but when she smiled, her cheeks dimpled.

The SUV had no air con, so they drove the back roads with the windows down, throwing up a dust cloud behind them.

‘Known Professor Fennimore long, Chief?' Hicks asked.

‘Ten years,' Simms said. ‘But you already know that.' The Task Force had pored over the police files for Rachel and Suzie, so now they knew Simms was with Fennimore the night that his wife and child disappeared, that they'd had dinner, but Simms had gone home to her family instead of sharing the double room Fennimore had booked.

They drove for a few minutes without speaking.

‘Is he a good man?' Hicks asked. A flash of those dark-rimmed blue eyes.

Oh, for heaven's sake,
Simms thought.
She's fallen for him.
Fennimore would be back from Chicago soon and she wanted to know where she stood.

‘
Good
is not a word I'd use,' she said. ‘He's … odd. He can be rude and insensitive, but he's generous, too. And funny – sometimes. He's clever, though not as clever as he thinks he is.' She stopped, thinking carefully about what she wanted to say next. ‘But you should know that he's reckless.'

The deputy relaxed a little. Maybe she grew up around wild boys and reckless men; after all, this was America, founded on the spirit of adventure, a place where the landscape could change from farmland to wilderness in half a mile, and recklessness might be considered a species of courage.

‘Reckless, huh?' Hicks slid her a speculative look, and Simms knew that she'd judged right. ‘Is that why you avoid him?' Hicks asked.

‘That would be none of your damn business,' Simms said evenly.

‘I apologize, ma'am,' Hicks said. ‘It's just …'

‘You need to know if you can trust him.'

A hesitation, then Hicks nodded, staring straight ahead.

Simms took a breath, exhaled. ‘Listen, Deputy, you're just starting out in your career. I know what a struggle it is to overcome entrenched attitudes in a system that disfavours women.' She saw genuine surprise on the younger woman's face, as if it had never occurred to her that macho attitudes and misogyny could be a part of polite British society.

‘Fennimore is a gambler,' she went on. ‘And not just with money. He takes risks because he loves the adrenaline rush; he revels in the thrill of uncertainty – always has done. But after what happened to his family, it got darker, more self-destructive.'

‘I guess what happened made him kind of desperate,' Hicks said.

‘Yes, it did. And he's just found out that there could be a connection between his wife's murder and the man we're after. He will stop at nothing, do
whatever
it takes, to find out what happened to his daughter.'

‘You're telling me not to expect him to stick around.'

Simms thought about it. When she got hauled in front of a disciplinary panel after Rachel's death, Fennimore packed his bags and scooted off to Scotland without a backward glance, and the pain of his abandonment still ached like an old wound. But Fennimore in her life was so much more complicated than Fennimore out of it. Just hours ago, he'd dragged her in to investigate the anonymous photograph without a single scruple, without a hint that he knew or cared that it might make things difficult for her. She sighed.

‘Honestly, I'd be more concerned for you if he
did
stick around,' Simms said.

They completed the journey in silence, zipping past flat farmland bordered by wire fences tumbled over with honeysuckle, the grass verges already beginning to brown in the sun, but dotted still with pink and purple flowers. They turned into Lambert Woods Park and drove up to the lot in question. It was rented to a Vincent Goodman. The trailer on the lot was a double-wide with a porch, and looked to Simms like the chalets she and Kieran had rented for holidays on the East Anglian coast. A Ford Taurus was parked outside, and a chaise longue sat under an awning that ran almost the full length of the structure. Deputy Hicks parked at the side of the house, out of sight of the windows. In the distance, they could hear the baying of the tracker dog and the calls of the search party out in the woods.

‘I'll go around back,' Hicks said. ‘If he comes to the door, keep him talking.'

It was the middle of the day, and hot. The front door slammed shut behind the fly screen as Simms approached. She knocked and waited.

A scuffle of sound at the back of the house, then Hicks appeared, walking alongside a man about her own age and height. His hair was cut short and his beard was trimmed into a neat goatee. He wore a clean white T-shirt and walked with his right hand gripping his left forearm. He looked scared.

‘Mr Goodman,' Hicks said. ‘Why did you run away?'

‘I didn't,' he said. ‘I was just going for a walk.'

‘You do a lot of walking?' she said. ‘'Cos we been calling on you for two days, now. You are never home.'