Believe No One (5 page)

He grunted in acknowledgement. ‘Which means that untrained police officers regularly go out to complex crime scenes and trample all over the evidence.'

‘Yes, sir, they do.'

Ah, now they were getting to it. ‘If I can hazard another guess, I'd say one of these untrained officers messed up your first victim's crime scene.'

‘That untrained officer was me, Professor. It was my first murder; I compromised the scene, lost vital evidence, got in a shitload of trouble with the Medical Examiner's Office. I can't go to the ME with this because in this part of Oklahoma all forensic autopsies're carried out by the FME's office in Tulsa, and it happens that Dr Quint was the ME did the autopsy on the first victim.'

Fennimore paused. ‘O-kay … I can see that would be awkward. But you could talk to your District Attorney.'

‘DA's an asshole,' she said. ‘The ADA's all right – I
would
take it to him – but I just don't got enough.'

‘Which is why you've come to me. Is Dr Quint really so unforgiving? Maybe I could talk directly to her – she's best placed to do any supplementary tests or examinations.'

She sighed. ‘Professor, I made a
big
mistake recovering that body.' For a second, all he could hear was the creak of katydids and crickets, then she puffed air into the mouthpiece. ‘It just about kills me, telling you this, but here goes: I was a sheriff's deputy over in Creek County, a little bit south-west of here. Six weeks in and I was green. The victim was found in a creek by a fishing party. It had been raining for three days and nights. Whoever dumped her didn't weight her right and she floated, got carried to a bend, washed up on the shingle. When I got to the creek, the rain started coming down hard and she began to float again. Seeing her there, thinking that water was going to carry her away before too long, and those fishermen waiting on me to do something, I guess I panicked. Sheriff's office was out of range of my cell, and the patrol car was parked a mile up the track. I should've got those men to help me, anchored her to a boat, wrapped her in a tarp – done
some
damn thing to preserve the evidence. But I rushed right in, dragged her out.' She sighed. ‘Stupid rookie mistake. I didn't even get pictures. All that rain, the river running full, me manhandling the body—' She stopped and again, he heard a long outrush of breath. ‘That body was almost skeletalized; you know how it is – in that condition, they can pretty much fall apart on you if you don't treat 'em right. The current pulled me off balance, I stumbled …'

‘You lost the hair, and with it the duct tape-residue.'

‘Wouldn't be so bad if it was just that – I lost the hair, the jaw, some of the neck bones. I only kept a hold of the skull because – oh, well, you don't want to know.'

He could guess: Deputy Hicks fumbling in the water, snatching at anything that would give her a finger-hold – there are only so many things you can grab onto on a human skull.

‘I lost the evidence, but that glue was there all right,' she said.

‘I believe you,' he said. ‘Have you run this past your sheriff?'

‘Sheriff Launer isn't interested in other counties' homicides. Anyway, he thinks the answer to this crime is in the backwoods. We got a lot of families out here used to deal in home-made hooch; now they grow cannabis out in the woods, or cook up methamphetamine. The Sheriff is convinced our victim stumbled across one of those backwoods factories, or pissed off her supplier.'

‘Was she a meth addict?'

‘There were physical signs, but she had been through rehab, seemed to be getting her life together, before she died.'

‘But your sheriff is resistant?'

‘He's campaigning for re-election, drugs is a major problem out here. He doesn't want me messing with this, Professor: he wants me out there, proving to the voters that he is doing his job.'

‘I don't see how I can help you, Abigail,' Fennimore said.

‘Why don't you come on over, take a look for yourself?'

‘It's a bit of a hike …'

‘Three and a half hours max from St Louis to Tulsa.'

‘How did you know I was Stateside?' he asked. ‘Deputy Hicks, are you stalking me?'

She laughed. ‘It's on your publisher's website.'

Fennimore's publicist would harry him every few months for an update, and he would send the less sensitive aspects of his schedule, but he'd never checked out the website and rarely even thought about what went up on it.

‘According to your schedule, you did a book signing in St Louis tonight,' Hicks went on. ‘You've a couple of lectures in Chicago and the IHIA symposium after that, but not for a couple of weeks – so I know you got the time. Unless you got some secret mission going on.'

In truth, Simms was his secret mission, and now that she was firmly out of the picture, he was stuck in St Louis with time on his hands, and he knew from experience that would lead to brooding.

‘I know you like to fish,' she said, her tone coaxing. ‘We got great fishing down here.'

‘Fishing,' he said. ‘What kind of fishing?'

‘Bass and catfish, bluegill—'

‘Trout?'

She clicked her tongue. ‘Oklahoma is kinda warm for trout fishing,' she said. ‘We got all kinds of bass, though.'

She must have sensed his disappointment, because she said, ‘But if you're real sneaky and know where to go, you can fish for trout near Tahlequah, Cherokee County. There's a couple of ice-cold streams below Tenkiller Dam, about an hour's drive from where I'm situated.'

Three and a half hours' flying time,
Fennimore thought. Far less time than it took to travel from Aberdeen to London by train. It was ninety-five degrees in St Louis, humidity in the mid-eighties. Country air, cold streams and fly-fishing were just too a tempting prospect – and he remembered the deputy as pert and pretty.

‘All right,' he said. ‘You got me. Meet me off the first flight into Tulsa tomorrow morning.'

Location: Scotland

The kill is strapped, naked, to a table. Her hair is mouse brown, her nose small; there is a hole for a nose stud in the crease of the right nostril. Her head is tilted back, her mouth slightly open, revealing a chipped front tooth. Her skin has the colour and translucence of skimmed milk. Her lips are almost blue. You can't see her eyes, because they are covered with tape. It is wrapped tightly around her head in a double layer.

A man stands over her. He is tall, dressed entirely in black, apart from the purple nitrile gloves he wears on his hands. His face is covered with a black ski mask. He hooks his gloved thumbs in the pockets of his pants and tilts his head on one side, thinking.

‘The angle's off,' a voice says from behind him. ‘Move the cam left a bit.'

The masked man turns obediently and makes an adjustment to a webcam attached above the screen of his laptop. ‘Okay?'

‘Better.'

Fergus sighs, settling back into his armchair to view the action. A wood fire crackles in the hearth, a cold north-easterly spatters his windows with sleety rain; winter has lingered in Scotland.

Over the years, he has received videotapes and, as the technology improved, DVD recordings, but he always watched the kill in real time first. The recordings were delivered to a drop-box a month or so later. Until Skype, the two men had used live-streaming to a private URL for the kill; it was relatively low risk, but there was always the chance that some Red Bull-swigging Nethead in continuous surf-mode would stumble onto their web address. The risk went off the scale of acceptability with the invention of automated web 'bots and crawlers. But Skype had its limitations, and the recording suffered from audio lag. So, the live Skype event had been disappointing. Thankfully, he'd had the foresight to insist on a backup digital recording – not just for the better image quality, but for the chance to replay the action. Fergus rationed his viewings because the law of diminishing returns applied; no matter how exciting a thing is to watch, if you see it too often, it ceases to be exciting. Even if it is the death of another human being.

He is watching now on a newly purchased fifty-five-inch, high-def widescreen TV with 9.2 surround sound and high-speed internet access; for future events he will be able to Skype direct to the big screen, which might even compensate for the less-than-perfect picture quality.

‘Shift the spotlight,' he hears himself say, though he doesn't recognize his own voice, disguised as it is by voice-changer software. Coming out of the new speakers, it has the slightly echoey quality of cinema sound. Darth Vader issuing orders to a minion.

Obediently, the minion moves a lighting stand and directs the spot lamp to the woman's face, but she is unresponsive.

‘Is she unconscious?'

‘Watch this.' On-screen, the man takes hold of the kill's foot and scrapes his thumbnail along the sole from heel to toe. Her toes flex.

He faces the webcam. ‘She's fakin' it.' His accent is Midwestern United States, though some might say it is not entirely authentic.

He takes out a box cutter and presses the cold blade against the skin under her eye. ‘Stop fooling,' he says, ‘or I'll cut you.' He has a thing about blood.

He doesn't cut her, but the threat is enough and she squeals. There's a displeasing distortion, and Fergus makes a mental note that adjustments will need to be made to get the sound levels right next time. It would be useful to do a sound-check in advance, but he fears this is beyond the capabilities of his accomplice.

Exasperated by his own inability to relax and immerse himself in the moment, he rewinds to the point where the kill's toes flex, and lets the recording play on.

‘I want you to bind her,' he says.

‘Dude, she's already tied up.'

‘I said “bind”, you glaikit lubbert –
bind.
' The man in the ski mask looks into the webcam, uncertain of himself, and Fergus says, ‘Use the food wrap. Take the roll and wrap it around her chest.'

This is new: he has read that you don't need to compress the chest hard to cause asphyxia; simply restricting the rise and fall of the ribcage can have the same effect.

‘
Encircle
it. Yes. Now step away.' But the other is slow to comply. ‘Get out of the frame,' he yells. ‘I don't want to see you.' Control of the other is part of the thrill.

The new cinema system makes it feel as if she's in the room with him – that he is alone with the kill. Her breasts are mashed flat under yards of plastic food wrap. He turns up the volume, listens to the gasp of her breath.

More than once, he complains, ‘I can't
hear
her,' frustrated by the limitations of the equipment and the distance between them. But now, listening to the recording again through his new speakers, he hears more than he ever did before. He hears his accomplice mutter a curse, the thrilling stutter and sigh of the woman's breath.

The wrap restricts her movement, takes her to a new level of fear – which is in itself exciting – but she's still breathing, still conscious.

‘Fuck's
sake,
I said wrap it tightly. Can't you do
anything
right?'

‘You want to come do this yourself?'

‘No,' Fergus yells. ‘I want you to act less like a moron and more like a thinking human being.'

The slump of other man's shoulders say he's hurt, and when he speaks, he sounds apologetic. ‘It isn't my fault – this stuff is designed to stretch.'

‘Can't you do
some
thing? Anything?'

He shrugs helplessly. ‘That's as tight as it goes.' He stares down at the woman as though she's a DIY problem he hasn't the brains to solve.

Which, at the time, gave Fergus an idea. Right there and then, he dictated a shopping list; this kill just got a few hours' reprieve.

A rest is good for the kill, and it's fun to watch them come round, to see them struggle when they realize the nightmare isn't over. If they give up too easily, accept their fate, he will tell the other man to bring the child in. It's an empty threat – the children are always disposed of by this stage – but it gives them a jolt of energy, peps them up in a very useful way.

Fast-forward two hours.

He watches the man on-screen rig up the apparatus he has purchased at the Home Depot. It's beautiful. Elegant in its simplicity. On his command, the apparatus is brought into play. She passes out. He issues an order and she is revived, so the process can begin again. He hears himself say, ‘Try this. Do that,' and all the time, he's thinking of ways to modify, to improve – to get the great lolloping brute right out of the frame.

The other man stands with his back to the camera, shoulders heaving, and Fergus knows he's trying hard to control his temper. Sweat soaks the cotton of his long-sleeved T-shirt, darkening it under the arms and around the collar. It's boiling hot under the lights inside the kill room; those two must be poaching like sardines in a tin. He tugs at the mask and Fergus knows he would love to tear it off, take a huge gulp of air, but that will not be tolerated. So the man works on, taking orders, puppet to the Master Puppeteer.

His senses are alive to every movement, every twitch and groan and whimper from the kill. This one responds to everything as if they had flayed her skin and applied electrodes to the raw nerves, and he is brought to the edge of his seat by her pain. She revives for the third time with a start, flails about, or tries to, and the new sound system relays the creak and tick of duct tape and food wrap as she strains against it. But she doesn't seem fully conscious – her responses are less acute, less exciting. They are nearing the endgame.

‘Okay. It's time. Let me see her eyes.'

He sees the other man shudder; he can't stand to look into their eyes. But for Fergus, the months of careful preparation, the hours of play, all build to this final moment. He needs to see their eyes at the last.