Believe No One (43 page)

Simms winced, ‘I'm guessing this story doesn't have a happy ending.'

‘Big Sis kept running off, refusing treatment,' Hicks said. ‘She got complications – liver damage, diabetes, heart problems. Died before her seventeenth birthday. And get this: little brother Will was with her when she died. His momma found Will holding his sister's hand and talking to her, long after she was gone.'

Driving the back roads, Fergus kept his baseball cap on and his speed down. The gun he'd stolen from the deputy lay under a map on the passenger seat. The news bulletins had named the body at the house as William McIntyre Jnr, a person of interest in the murders of six women and children, so the police must have his fingerprints. Which meant that in his headlong dash for notoriety, that unspeakably moronic
dickhead
had failed to implement protocols: he had left evidence in the trailer.

So, the police knew Will's real identity, but there were still six degrees of separation between Will McIntyre and him; the trick was to keep those lines of connection separate, even as they threatened to converge.

All right. Think.

He hadn't found much in the way of technical gear at the house. Those items must be found and destroyed. There were two places where they might be: the kill room, and Sharla Jane's trailer home. The police already knew about the trailer: it was accessible to any number of people and was therefore most at risk. Decision made, Fergus set the satnav to take him to Lambert Woods trailer park.

Lambert Woods Mobile Home Park, Williams County, Oklahoma

The police cruiser lit out of the trailer park around midnight. Riley waits, but he hasn't had more than a few sips of creek water in two days, and finally thirst and hunger drive him out of his hiding place.

He crawls to the back of the house, feverish with thirst. He takes out his pocketknife to cut the police seal, but at first he can't get it open. Whimpering, he tries again, and at last the blade swings back and clicks in place. He cuts the seal and jiggles the door lock till it springs open.

The trailer smells stuffy and old, like it's been empty for years. The blinds are closed and, to his right, the door to his momma's room stands open. It is awful dark in there, and he can't bring himself to look inside Momma's old room. He thinks maybe it was a bad idea to come back. He will just get some provisions and clothes, head into the woods. His backpack is on the lounge chair, the other side of the kitchen counter. Police must've checked it and left it alone, it being empty. He scoots under the counter to fetch it and jams it full of sodas and cheese, a half-loaf he finds in the icebox, staying half turned to the open door of his momma's room. The light from the fridge blinds him to the dark, and he starts to feel panicky, the skin on the back of his neck rippling. He slams the fridge door, his heart tripping, moves past the bathroom on his left, on to his own room.

One window blind has jammed and a corner of window is exposed, so he stays low, under the level of the sill. Greedily, he cracks the can and guzzles the pop, burps loudly and throws most of it back up. He takes smaller sips until his throat stops hurting. His eye is drawn to his closet door; it's shut, but a corner of cloth has caught between the door and the frame and pokes out like a tongue.

It takes a second to build enough courage, but he boosts himself off the floor and opens the closet. There's nothing in there but his clothes and a pair of sneakers. Not wanting to stick around any longer than he has to, he takes a T-shirt, pants and the sneakers and throws them in his backpack. As he swings the bag onto his shoulder, he notices a pair of shorts and a T-shirt on his bed. Momma must've laid them out, ready for their special summer recess treat. His legs give way and suddenly he's kneeling on the floor, tears pouring down his face.

He curls up, his whole body aching, his head most of all. He takes a hold of the covers and pulls them off the bed, and lies there on the floor, too weak and tired and hurting to go on.

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

E
INSTEIN

Incident Command Post, Westfield, Oklahoma
Wednesday, sunrise

There were no signs of Faith or Ava at Will McIntyre's house. The CSIs recovered a camera and a quantity of DVDs – the DVDs were unreadable due to heat damage, but some of the labels could be retrievable with enhancement; also personal and business letters – mostly the parents', and mostly destroyed. They would check them anyway; any links back to Hawick could give them McIntyre's accomplice. They also discovered a small shrine to the dead sister in the mother's bedroom. Photographs of a smiling teen, some taken with little brother Will at her side. In every picture, he had sliced out the girl's eyes with a scalpel blade.

Fennimore had still not heard from Josh and, unable to sleep, he sat gloved and Tyvek-suited, tinkering with a digital camera at a workbench in the makeshift lab in the hotel, while he waited for the CCTV footage to come in on the first flight from Chicago into Tulsa.

He positioned a desk magnifier above the camera, which he had placed, per protocol, on a large white sheet of blotting paper. The casing had melted in places and the body had folded in on itself. He held it in his gloved hands and stroked the line of the battery door with a new scalpel, tracing its outline, as though trying to draw it where it had once been. Slowly, as carbon dust and plastic shavings accumulated on the blotting paper, the door revealed itself. He cut down into the hinge, scraping whisker-fine curls of plastic with each stroke.

Roper said he was wasting his time, but Fennimore was curious as to how much of the SD card had survived. The slow, laborious work kept Fennimore's mind free of oppressive thoughts, which in itself made the attempt worthwhile.

He replaced the scalpel blade twice, and finally one hinge yielded with a faint click and he got to work on the other. In another twenty minutes, he was able to prise the small oblong of plastic away from the main body of the camera. The black plastic of the SD card was partially melded with both the door and the battery, so he had to ease them out as one. At the business end, the contacts seemed intact.

Gently, using tiny, even strokes of the scalpel blade, he separated the battery from the card. The copper pins were discoloured, but intact. The SD card was still melded to the damaged battery door. He turned it over, examining it closely under the magnifier; it was slightly warped, but it might just fit into a card slot. He booted up his netbook, carefully cleaned the carbon off the contacts using a pencil eraser and eased the card into the reader slot.

He held his breath. The autoplay dialogue box opened, presenting him with a list of options. He exhaled slowly, as if a sudden movement might shatter the image into a million digital fragments, and clicked to import the files onto his computer. As the pictures transferred to the folder on his hard drive, the program flicked through the images like a card sharp zipping through a pack of playing cards. Some had been corrupted and all he saw in that short flash was a generic picture icon and an error warning. But there were others, too: pictures of the interior of Sharla Jane's trailer, instantly recognizable; one of what looked like the exterior of a shipping container –
the
shipping container – standing on concrete.

Roper looked over his shoulder. ‘You did it,' he said, and Fennimore grinned. But the next image, the last on the card, knocked the air out of him. It was Faith Eversley. She was strapped to a pallet; it looked a lot like the one Sharla Jane had been tied to before she was murdered.

‘Fuck,' he said. ‘Fuck.'

His phone rang and he checked the screen. ‘Josh,' he said. ‘Where the hell have you been?'

‘It's been a tough couple of days,' the student said, typically evasive. ‘The
Hawick News
found something. A thirteen-year-old. They crushed her with rocks, Nick.'

‘They?'

‘The way the body was found, she had to've been held down, and there was no head injury, so she wasn't knocked unconscious first. Police reckoned there must be at least two of them. I sent you a few press clippings.' Josh went on, ‘Police interviewed her schoolfriends – she was seen with an unidentified youth a couple of hours before she was found. I just got a list of all the boys on the school roll from the headmaster – I'm sending it now.'

Fennimore opened the press clippings first; they were dated sixteen years ago. It couldn't be a random coincidence that the McIntyre family emigrated to the United States that same year. He opened the second attachment. Will McIntyre was in the year above Isla, the murdered girl.

He told Josh that they were fairly sure they had their killer, that his name was McIntyre and that they had found him in the burning ruin of his house. ‘We think he was murdered by his accomplice,' Fennimore said. ‘Now, normally I would say that getting a murdering scumbag off the streets is a good thing,' he went on, ‘but this one snatched a mother and child about eleven hours ago. And they're still missing.'

‘Shit.'

‘Yeah. Look, Josh, the FBI have posted a sketch of the man we're looking for; I'll send you the link. Can you hawk it around your police contacts, the archivist at the newspaper, maybe the school? Sixteen years is going back some, but teachers have long memories – if these two paired up as schoolboys, someone will have noticed.'

‘Sure – just send it to the account on the last email I sent you.'

Fennimore hadn't noticed the change of email address. ‘Josh, we agreed you would use your academic email for all communications.'

‘It's just a precaution. I had a bit of a security issue – no big deal.'

‘You're assisting in the hunt for two serial killers, – Josh
any
breach of security is a
very
big deal. Start explaining.'

He heard Josh exhale down the phone. ‘My computer's missing.'

‘Stolen?' Fennimore said. ‘Or lost?'

‘Stolen.'

‘When?'

‘Last night.'

‘How? Don't make me drag this out of you, Josh. Just tell me what happened.'

‘I brought someone back to my flat. Uh, a man.'

Stupidly, all Fennimore could think was,
He's gay – how the hell did I miss that?

‘I poured us a glass of wine, he must've slipped something into it. I know,' he added before Fennimore could say it, ‘I'm an idiot. He was cute – I wasn't exactly thinking with my head at the time.'

‘What makes you think you were drugged?'

‘We were talking, it was around midnight, Monday, my time. Then … nothing, till I woke up middle of the day on Tuesday.'

Fennimore closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘What do the police say?'

Josh didn't answer.

‘You haven't reported it? Josh, you have to report this to the police.'

‘No,' Josh said.

‘If you were drugged, you could have been sexually assaulted—'

‘I wasn't. I did the tox analysis, I took … swabs. I was drugged, but I
wasn't
raped.'

‘Look, if you're embarrassed—'

‘Nick,' he interrupted. ‘I'm not ashamed of my sexuality, I just – I don't want my DNA on the system.'

‘Why?' It was more than a year since they'd first started working together, but Fennimore still hadn't fathomed the student's pathological need for privacy. ‘Why don't you want your DNA on the system?'

Josh remained stubbornly silent.

‘Okay,' Fennimore said. ‘But consider this: as a forensic scientist, you'll have to provide a DNA sample at every crime scene you visit. You need to come to terms with that, or find another line of work.'

It was calculated to shock, but Josh said, ‘Elimination DNA samples don't go on the main database.'

Normally, Fennimore enjoyed their combative exchanges. But not today.

‘Josh,' he warned.

‘I know, I'm sorry. I take your point – I do. But I don't have to deal with it yet, because it wasn't
me
he was after. It wasn't money, it wasn't sex. He didn't take anything – except the computer.'

‘What are you working on?' Fennimore asked.

‘You know most of it: the transcripts of those recordings. A bit of word-pattern analysis; the UK murders; my thesis.'

‘You back up your files?'

A slight hesitation. ‘Sure.'

‘Josh?'

‘Of course I do.' He sounded insulted. ‘And my computer's encrypted. But I keep trying to tell you, it wasn't
me
he was interested in.'

‘Then who?'

Josh remained silent.

‘Me?'

‘Rachel and Suzie.'

The muscles in Fennimore's neck tightened. ‘And what did you tell him, exactly?'

‘Come on, Nick.'

Fennimore's mind flew to McIntyre's accomplice. But the man who murdered McIntyre couldn't be in two places at once. So why did this stranger steal Josh's computer?

‘This man you picked up – what did he look like?'

‘I dunno, beard, short hair. Cute.'

‘Jeez—' Fennimore ran a hand over his chin, and took a moment to calm himself, then grabbed the mouse to send the FBI link through to Josh. ‘Look at the FBI sketch,' he said. ‘Got it?'

A few seconds delay, then: ‘Yeah.'

‘
Well
– is that him?'

‘I don't know, Nick. He looks familiar, but …'

‘Look, Josh,' Fennimore said, trying to keep a grip on his temper, ‘a few days ago, I had an anonymous email. Someone sent me a photograph of a girl – she'd be about Suzie's age.' Josh didn't need to know that he was certain the girl in the picture was Suzie. ‘Now
you
tell me you were targeted by a man who's so interested in Rachel and Suzie that he's willing to get in your pants to find out what
you
know.'