Breaking Point (9 page)

Valdek pulled out his keys and pressed the keyfob. Nothing. He paced round to the front. The bonnet was slightly raised. He lifted it and peered inside. The alarm wiring had been cut. This was not random vandalism.

Valdek stepped back, small cubes of glass fracturing under his boots. He picked the dog up and held it in his massive arms. A fucked car was one thing. A bleeding dog might send Maclyn over the edge.

Valdek pulled out his mobile. As he held the dog, he took a few shots of the vehicle from different angles and said, ‘Your owner is not going to like this.’ Then he carried the dog ten paces down the road and tied its lead to some railings. He returned and made another tour of the car. He noted that his sunglasses were still on the dash,
and
the sat nav screen was untouched. He opened each picture on his mobile and sent it to the same number. Then Valdek glanced up and down the road again and pressed the 9 button three times. He crunched over the wide spray of glass towards the dog, and stared hard into its eyes. ‘Going to have to get this fucker towed. And that means letting the cops know.’ Valdek waited for the call to be answered. ‘Rico,’ he said again, ‘Maclyn is not going to like this.’

19

IT WAS ALL
happening too quickly, Mina told herself. Too much going on. Too much information, too many events, too many implications. Circumstances that left her slightly queasy, a sensory overload that threatened to overwhelm her. Mina had always had a sense that her head could become full very quickly if she let it. Routinely, she edited and filtered, only allowing in what was absolutely necessary. It was a system she had evolved throughout her career, a career in which numbers and patterns and techniques and crime scenes and facts and times and dates and names and statistics and protocols had the relentless power to engulf her. Open the floodgates and it would come rushing in, filling up every nook and cranny and swamping the room
she
needed for rational thought. But sometimes, like today, it seeped in despite her best defences.

The two dead females lay either side of her. She looked down at them. Their eyes, thankfully, had been closed. On the left, Tabatha Classon, on the right, Toni-Anne Gayle. Both naked, almost negative images of each other: Tabatha pale and marble-like, Toni-Anne dark, almost black. The skin of Mina’s hands, as she glanced down, appeared midway between the two extremes. In the three hours since the morning’s meeting, Pathology had finally come up with a possible cause of death for Tabatha. A keen-eyed Path technician had spotted the smallest of red marks on Tabatha’s skin. And then, after a magnifying glass was run over Toni-Anne’s entire body, a similar mark had been found. It had been enough to prompt blood samples to be sent to the specialist toxicology centre at the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Poisons Unit. Needle pricks meant the possible injection of unspecified substances.

Mina waited impatiently, her fidgeting starkly at odds with the stillness of the corpses next to her. Sarah and Charlie were on their way down, and she wanted to run an idea past them. But Mina was distracted. Her head was full of the Negatives. Before the meeting she had been
mining
the database, still spooked by the fact that its location had changed and that it had been accessed several times over the previous few days. She ran through the arguments again, breathing in the cold static air.

As Judith had pointed out, just because a person had been genetically excluded from one crime didn’t mean they were innocent of all others. That was fine. A given percentage of any population would always misbehave. In fact, as Mina thought about it, it was even possible that some of the Negatives were more likely than normal to be associated with criminal behaviour. Take Danny Pavey. He was one of a number of white van drivers ruled out of a previous hit-and-run incident. But there was the thing. One hundred van drivers might be more likely than, say, one hundred accountants to commit a crime. So statistically, the Negatives database was skewed. And if it was skewed …

Mina stopped. Her head was filling up again. She glanced at the door, and then at the large metal clock. Sarah and Charlie were taking their time.

When she arrived at work she had started cross-checking with recent crime databases and daily incident reports. And names had begun
dropping
out, people on the Negatives who were involved in the whole gamut of criminal behaviour. But more than this, Mina had felt like she was on the edge of sensing a pattern. Something didn’t quite seem random about it. A small number of incidents appeared almost to be recurring. Mina visualized names and dates, locations in the city and descriptions of crimes.

Her brain was off and running again. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, the pinch of formalin catching in her sinuses like the warning of a headache.

There was a noise, and Mina looked round. Sarah and Charlie had stepped into the GeneCrime morgue. Mina noted that they were silent and focused, their minds obviously as occupied as hers. They walked over, stride for stride, then stopped together, just in front of the shallow tables supporting Tabatha and Toni-Anne.

‘So?’ Sarah asked.

‘Just an idea,’ Mina answered.

‘Go on.’

‘Look, we’ve had nearly three hours of forensic access to the bodies, but we’re groping in the dark. We have hundreds of samples of who knows what. DNA from here, there and everywhere,
fibres
that will probably match nothing at all, hairs that will probably turn out irrelevant.’

‘OK,’ Sarah said slowly.

‘Well, now that we are aware of the presence of tiny puncture wounds, if we could exactly match the needle marks with the point of entry on each victim’s piece of clothing, we would vastly increase our chances of getting a useable sample.’

‘You’re saying you want to dress the corpses again?’ Charlie asked.

‘Tabatha’s prick mark was on her right buttock, meaning that the jeans she was wearing will have been pierced somewhere around the rear pocket. Toni-Anne’s needle mark was lower and on her left side. That narrows the region of her skirt we would have to search.’

Charlie and Sarah glanced at each other, and Mina knew she was on to something. Before their deaths, the victim’s garments had presumably touched a multitude of surfaces throughout the working day. Tabatha and Toni-Anne would have sat on chairs used by others, brushed against colleagues and used communal toilets. They would be festooned with hairs and cells, microscopic traces of DNA that would muddy the waters. But immediately around the puncture mark, there was a chance.

‘Sounds logical,’ Sarah said. ‘And very strange. Dressing dead people.’

‘Look, if a hypodermic has been used, and if the killer held it in one hand and steadied it with the other, there might have been direct contact between skin and clothing at that point. It means we can avoid hour after hour of false negatives.’

‘Of course all of this is supposing that the women have both been murdered, that the weapon was a syringe and that the killer didn’t wear gloves.’

Mina shrugged at Sarah. All she could picture was having to dress two cold and naked corpses in the morgue. And, worse, finding some poor sap to help her. She thought briefly of Alex Brunton, who was probably too new to complain.

After a few moments, Sarah said, ‘I guess it’s worth a try. When will we have the toxicology results?’

‘Close of play tomorrow if we push hard enough. They’re running the mass spec and NMR overnight.’

‘And what exactly will that tell us?’

‘If there’s anything suspicious in their bloods. Toxins, chemicals, poisons. Recreationals, even.’

Sarah peered at the naked bodies. ‘And do
recreational
drug users generally inject themselves in their own legs and buttocks?’

‘It’s been known,’ Charlie answered dourly. ‘And worse places.’

‘But it’s unlikely, right?’

‘From what CID have come up with, neither victim—’ Mina checked herself. These females had been in their prime, with families and friends and dreams and aspirations. Everything had ended for them deep underground and surrounded by strangers. ‘Victims’ didn’t seem a nice enough word. She tried again. ‘Neither person fits the profile of heavy drug use. Although we can’t rule anything out.’

‘I guess not,’ Charlie muttered. ‘But this is horrible. Two girls, ended like that. Come on, I know we’ve got to be seen to jump through the hoops, but this isn’t accidental. This is cold-blooded. And some fucker is taunting us.’

Mina watched Charlie out of the corner of her eye. She could tell he was taking this personally. Charlie was a future leader. Crimes like this were an affront to him, outrages that should have been preventable. This was the spur that made him the dedicated officer he was, the CID pit-bull who never let a case go.

Sarah smiled at Charlie, a brief upturn of her
mouth
. ‘I think taunting is a bit far, but yes, DI Baker, I agree. The thing is, what do we do? Two deaths in as many days, but until we have definite toxicology we effectively know nothing. And it’s unlikely we’ll ever be able to confirm whether these are linked to the couple of deaths last month.’

Charlie shrugged at her. ‘So the options are what, exactly?’

‘We’re flat out testing,’ Mina said. ‘Should have some prelims by first thing tomorrow morning.’

‘And we’re hoping to have some CCTV footage to look at later today. So until we view that and get the toxicology results back, we’ll keep this in house.’

‘But what if there’s another?’ Charlie asked. ‘What then?’

Sarah pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘It isn’t perfect,’ she said, ‘but we don’t have a lot of choice. No point in causing a whole city to panic before we get our facts straight.’ She turned to walk out of the morgue. ‘And in the meantime we’ll pray to God that he doesn’t strike again.’

20

REUBEN TRIED TO
ignore the fact that the JCB had taken another large gouge closer to his building. Time was running out, days measured in hydraulic scoops and plumes of diesel. The number of men in hard hats and safety gear had grown. They were becoming a fluorescent swarm.

Moray was embedded in the sofa, talking in hushed tones on his mobile. Reuben could just make out the words SIM card, mobile records and testing. He dreaded to think. What Moray did in the rest of his professional life was probably best left confined to snatches of overheard conversation.

Judith straightened herself and slid off her lab stool. She walked over to Reuben’s section of white benching and handed him a small plastic
tray
. ‘Here,’ she said, ‘these are the final ten. The special ten.’

Reuben laid them down beside a grey box the size of a microwave oven. It was marked GeneImager, ABGene Inc. ‘Cheers,’ he answered. A thin lead connected the GeneImager to the laptop Reuben was tapping information into. Every few seconds, he stared intently into the screen. ‘What time are you off?’ he asked Judith without looking up.

‘I’m on lates. My shift starts at two.’

‘Anything interesting going down at Gene-Crime?’

‘You know the woman who dropped dead on the Tube the other night? Damned near crushed my unborn baby?’

‘Yeah,’ Reuben muttered.

‘Looks like there’s been another one.’

Reuben turned his head towards her. ‘Another? When?’

‘Last night. I got a call this morning checking how I was fixed for overtime.’

‘So they’re treating them as linked?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Let me know if anything comes out of it.’

‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Judith frowned. ‘As usual.’

Reuben grunted, deep in concentration. He picked up one of the ten items Judith had passed him and peered closely at it. It was postage stamp-sized, less than five millimetres thick and with a black plastic surround, marked with the number 4. On it, just visible to his naked eye, was a series of several hundred spots, each smaller than a full stop. Five major genes, 112 minor ones, numerous positive and negative controls, all in triplicate. The genetic code of evil.

‘Ready to go?’ he asked.

‘They’re all hybridized, washed, dried, and ready for the phospho-imager. You feeling brave?’

‘Yes and no. So who have we got?’

Judith picked a list off the bench. ‘On the side of Good we have me, my husband, Mina, you, and fat-boy Carnock over there, whose result we already know.’ She nodded in the direction of Moray, who pulled a face, still holding his mobile and muttering into it.

‘And on the other team?’

‘Right.’ Judith scratched the underside of her distended belly. ‘Let’s have a look. In the Evil corner we’ve got, as DNA samples illegally smuggled out of GeneCrime by yours truly, Aiden Boucher, killer of four homeless men; Lars Besser, category A psychopath, now deceased;
Michael
Brawn, recently sentenced, pitiless sociopath; Mark Gelson, much-feared crack and smack merchant; and Nathan Bardsmore. Five strangulations, five rapes’ – Judith took a deep breath – ‘and one attempted rape.’

‘Hey,’ Reuben said. ‘Come on, where are those famous guts?’

‘Yeah, well. Sometimes it’s difficult not to think, What if …’

Judith replaced the list and slumped back on the stool. Moray ended his conversation and glanced over. Reuben put the DNA chip down and rubbed his stubble.

‘And I don’t know about guts,’ Judith added, ‘but I think I’ve just been kicked in them for the first time.’

Reuben looked at her, uncertain of what she meant.

‘No, really.’ Judith stood up and held her stomach. Her expression had changed. ‘I’m serious. There, and again. Come and feel.’

Reuben walked towards her. ‘Are you sure?’

Judith took his right hand and guided it to the spot. She glanced over at Moray. ‘And you.’

Moray grimaced, and didn’t move. ‘If it’s all the same,’ he said, ‘I’m a wee bit squeamish.’

And then Reuben felt something. The smallest
of
movements under his palm. A new life beginning to kick and thrash. He grinned at Judith, who smiled back. Two human cells, then a blastocyst, an embryo and now a foetus that could move its limbs. The perpetual miracle of biology.