Wanted (17 page)

He used Jackal to explore the area, gliding across the concourse and outwards. To the north, a leaded stained-glass roof stretched into the distance. Several trains stood at platforms, as passengers embarked and disembarked, and luggage was loaded and taken off. To the south, the terminus opened out onto the Victorian brickwork of Steem city.

Ignoring the attempts of other newbie avatars to engage him in conversation and ask for directions, Danny moved his thumb across the iPhone’s screen, scanning the nearby businesses. Settling on a café called Rest Cure, he used a gesture to zoom in on its sign and double-tapped. Rest Cure’s InWorld™ location coordinates popped up on his phone and, with another swift gesture, he copied them.

He then dragged Jackal through the crowd to the right of the ticket office, to a Public Contact Board. This was a feature common to all InWorld™’s central locations, enabling any game player to post a message where others could access it from any other part of the virtual world. There were thousands of messages, which you could sort by category. It was a useful way to find other players with similar interests to your own. And it was a perfect way to establish covert contact with someone too.

Danny typed:
LOST HOOK SEEKS FISHERMAN. LOST HOOK’S NAME IS JACKAL.
He attached the Rest Cure’s game location, so that anybody reading the message, or monitoring the contact boards for its appearance, would know where they needed to go to continue the conversation.

That done, he disengaged from the Public Contact Board and dragged Jackal over to the Rest Cure’s doorway, where he double-tapped his screen to gain access to the establishment. The smoked-glass door swung open and Danny moved Jackal inside. It was busy, with plenty of other players’ avatars sitting at wooden tables with a variety of healthy drinks before them – anti-viral software for which they’d have paid to protect their avatars’ in-game integrity, or potions to endow the avatars consuming them with abilities such as strength and temporary invisibility, anything that might progress them in the wider quests available in the game.

Some of the avatars’ conversations were visible to the public, floating in tiny speech bubbles above their heads, which you could click on to enlarge. Others sat in seeming silence, but were more than likely communicating privately using global Instant Messaging, which was hidden from view and protected from electronic eavesdropping by standard InWorld™ text encryption software.

Danny had never actually met Crane in the flesh. Didn’t even know his real name or if he was in reality a she. He had always only communicated with him online here in InWorld™. But since his and Crane’s old avatars had been hacked by the Kid, there was no way Danny could just meet up with him here as he’d used to.

Which was why he’d needed to come up with another way to contact him. And what he’d done was this: before his trip to Pripyat with Spartak, Danny had used a fresh dummy email account to email Brian Nowak, an old CIA buddy who’d introduced him to Crane. Danny had told Brian he’d been set up. He’d also asked him to forward the message ‘LOST HOOK SEEKS FISHERMAN’ to the real-life Crane, and tell him to monitor the InWorld™ Public Contact Board system, where Danny would post a message once he was ready to communicate.

It was a sound enough plan, he knew, but it was still a risk. For one thing, Brian Nowak might have chosen not to accept Danny’s protestations of innocence. Instead he might have gone to the CIA with Danny’s email, which meant it would be the CIA, not Crane, who’d be monitoring InWorld™ and waiting for him to appear.

Similarly, even if Brian Nowak had believed him and had passed on the email to the real Crane in good faith, the real Crane might have decided independently that Danny was guilty as hell and contacted the CIA himself.

Danny’s only hope was that Crane had believed his message and had kept it to himself. And had since been willing to help him in any way he could. In which case, any second now, the real Crane, as some new avatar, might walk through the virtual café door on Danny’s screen and make contact.

Danny glanced at the dark window of the closed caravan door. If he had been betrayed by either Nowak or Crane, someone might already be coming for him in the real world. Because the second he’d surfaced on InWorld™ and posted his message, any government agency that had been tipped off would have set about tracing the location of the phone he’d sent that message from. And the second they found it, they’d trigger the nearest hunter-killer team to close in on it.

If that was the case, he did not have long. It would take a team on standby no more than an hour to be here from London. Less if they’d been assembled at an airbase closer by.

Danny checked his watch. In fifteen minutes, whether he’d heard from Crane or not, he’d need to destroy his phone and leave with Lexie. And his last chance to contact Crane would have been well and truly blown.

Ray had circled the house, pausing and watching every couple of yards, checking in each ground-floor window he passed that didn’t have its curtains drawn. Having seen no movement either inside or outside, he knew he should feel confident that no one was there. But still a warning chimed in his head.
Confident? Hah. Sure. Just try convincing your thumping heart and sweating skin of that.

He was now at the wooden back door, his ear close to its chipped paint, listening, slowing his breath. Hearing nothing untoward, he crouched and slid a lock pick into the keyhole, then twisted, turned and twisted again. There was a click as it gave. He pushed aside the strip of ‘POLICE DO NOT CROSS’ tape, wincing at its sudden rustle as it fluttered to the ground. Then, slowly, he turned the handle and stepped inside.

A ticking sound. Ray moved slowly: he needed to rely on his night vision, at least until he’d satisfied himself that there really was no one else in the house or watching him from outside.

He kept his back to the door, as he closed it behind him. He peered into the gloom. He was in the kitchen, an L-shaped room. Shafts of moonlight shone down through a row of skylights set at a forty-five-degree angle to the house. Six matching windows below, each with their blinds drawn tight shut, would look out over the back of the property. A cooker and cupboards occupied an alcove to the left of the door through which he had just entered. Then there was the main part of the room, with an open doorway at its far end, blackness beyond.

Other objects slowly swam into focus. An American-style fridge with moonlight shimmering on its stainless-steel casing. A grandfather clock on the wall: the source of the ticking. And in the centre of the room: a dining table, with six chairs – the first things Ray would examine as soon as he got the chance.

But before that he gave himself time to listen. He stilled his body. It was cold as hell in here, colder than the night outside. He could feel it lancing his bones. He started to shiver, then couldn’t stop.

He listened to the tick of the clock. He counted to one eighty. And only then did he feel his grip on the ice pick relax. Three minutes he’d been standing there and, apart from the clock, he’d not heard a damn thing.

Even though his eyes had already grown accustomed enough to the dark to be able to discern the various pieces of furniture, he needed to be able to examine this place in greater detail than that.

He switched on a pen torch, not powerful enough to give off so much light that it might be picked up from outside via the skylight, or the open door that led into the rest of the house.

He surveyed the kitchen in more detail. In spite of the forensics report saying they’d found no evidence to suggest the family had been killed inside, a part of Ray had still expected to be confronted by a grim montage of blood-spray patterns, as had been left behind at Danny Shanklin’s cabin and in every other North American home that the PSS Killer had defiled.

Or, more specifically, every North American
kitchen.
Because that was why he’d been so keen to come here: it had always been in the kitchen – in the beating heart of family life – that the PSS Killer had done what he had to the people he’d killed.

But there was no blood here and no sign there’d been any. No scrubbed stains or patches on the walls. Nothing immediately visible on the floorboards.

Ray probed the extremities of the room with his torch beam, still half expecting to see blood there also, suddenly screaming out at him, dripping in gobbets from the wooden ceiling beams and the white plastic chandelier.

But there was nothing to indicate that anything violent had ever occurred. Everything looked perfect. Like a show home. Like no one had ever lived there, let alone died.

He scanned the work surfaces next. They were pristine white and clear of crockery. The same went for the table. The whole place was spotless.

In part, he knew, this would be down to Forensics. They’d have dusted everything down, bagged, tagged and shipped out whatever they thought might shed light on what had happened to the family outside.

But he had worked enough crime scenes to know that this didn’t
feel
right. Everything, right down to the cookery books on the shelf by the sink, was
too
perfectly aligned. It looked tidied. It looked
cleaned.

He checked the dark doorway at the back of the kitchen, leading with the torch beam, his grip on the ice pick tightening again.
What if someone’s through there? What if they’re waiting and watching and readying themselves to—

It led into a short, spotless tiled hallway with a closed front door at the end, and stairs leading up into more darkness. Another open doorway to the right. A living room.

Stepping inside, Ray scoured it with the pen-torch beam. All too perfect again. Another pristine, show-home room, with two sofas, two armchairs and two occasional tables arranged in a perfect semicircle in front of a gaping black granite hearth.

Even the newspaper beside the wicker basket full of logs had been neatly folded and set at a right angle to the whitewashed wall.

Paper . . .

His breath shortened as he stepped into the room and slowly made his way across to the hearth. Kneeling, he examined the paper up close with the pen torch. The sports page was face up, an article about a tennis championship from a week ago.

He slowly turned the paper over and – there – the second he saw its front page, he knew. He
knew
it, dammit. He’d been right to come here. He’d been right.

Because the PSS Killer
had
been here.

Because the front page of this newspaper had the headline ‘HUNT FOR DANNY SHANKLIN CONTINUES’ emblazoned across its top. But below it, where the remainder of the article should have been, the paper had been torn in a neat horizontal line, leaving nothing at all . . .

Someone had deliberately taken the remains of that article . . . And the photo of Danny Shanklin that should have been there could have been screwed up and forced down the poor girl’s throat . . .

Ray stood, hearing the creak of cartilage in his knees, and feeling the ache there too. As he turned back to face the doorway leading to the hallway and the kitchen, his heart was pounding, his mouth dry as dirt.

He walked slowly and silently back through the kitchen, a primal part of him noting a shift in the atmosphere, a sense of sudden pressure bearing down, as though he were under water or wading through oil. But he refused to let it undermine or paralyse him. He recognized it for what it was. It was knowledge. It was fear. With an effort, he forced it from his mind.

He warily crisscrossed the torch beam over the room. Then he got down on all fours and turned it on the wooden floor. He began crabbing slowly across the room, checking each bare board as he went, part dreading, part
knowing
what he would find.

He got nothing on the first few, but then he saw it. Yet more confirmation that he’d been right to follow his gut instinct and come all this way.

Tiny vampire tooth-marks in the floorboards. There, in the board near the centre of the room. In four groups of four, where four chairs with duct tape strapped to their legs could have been nail-gunned to the floor.

A square of tooth-marks, where the father would have been positioned to face his family. And three squares in a row opposite, where his wife, son and daughter would have been placed to face him.

So that, as in the homes of all the other victims Ray had visited, the father would have had no choice but to
watch.

The marks were small enough not to catch the attention of Forensics, particularly when they didn’t think a crime had been committed in here.

But why was there no blood?
If the PSS Killer had restrained, tortured and killed them right here, there would have been so much that these boards would have had to soak it up; they would have been stained.

Yet they were pristine.

Ray swept the torch beam round. He left the pattern he recognized. He searched for something new. And didn’t have long to wait. Because – by the wall – he saw additional tiny tooth-marks: running in a straight line along the floorboards, up against the wall, spaced evenly, six inches apart: the kind of marks that might have meant a carpet had once been nail-gunned there . . . or that instead confirmed to Ray that the freak he was hunting had called.

He noticed something else and shuffled quickly across to get a better look. A glint like glass. Snagged right there on a tiny shard of wood in one of the vampire tooth-marks.

He knelt down closer. It was plastic. A tiny rip of plastic. Holding the pen torch in his teeth, he laid the ice pick on the floor, then removed an evidence bag and tweezers from his jacket pocket. He unhooked the plastic and studied it up close. Heavy-duty industrial polythene. He bagged it up.

A tapping sound.

His heart skipped a beat, as he glanced to the row of windows by the back door.

But then the pattering got a little louder. It was rain. Fat drops splashed onto the skylights and spread.

Edging forwards now, he followed the straight line of nail holes. He found another rip of plastic in one. Then another. He bagged them. The line of nails ran round the perimeter of the room. And the table – he saw underneath it where the floorboards’ varnish had recently been scuffed.