Believe No One (17 page)

He swivelled on his bar stool and propped his elbows on the counter behind him. He seemed surprised to see the dark and dusty tables populated.

‘Bob,' he said, offering his hand, ‘it's been a pleasure.' He took out his wallet, and Hicks edged in front of him to block the view of those hungry faces shimmering in the dark.

They stopped for coffee at the diner on Main Street frequented by the Assistant District Attorneys, court investigators and cops giving evidence at the courthouse, Hicks feeling it would be good for the Professor to be seen around the law while she sobered him up. After his second cup of coffee, she said, ‘You were lucky back there.'

‘I have the feeling you're not talking about the rather beautiful Adams trout flies I just bought.'

‘You need to be careful where you drink, Professor,' she said. ‘There are men in these parts would spill your blood for the price of a rock of meth, and some of those men drink in Danley's Bar.'

‘Okay.'

‘“Okay”, you believe me, or “okay”, you won't go drinking in back-alley dives again?'

‘Both.' He frowned, staring at some sugar crystals on the melamine tabletop. ‘You know, I've never been kicked out of a case conference before.'

‘You did push pretty hard.' He looked puzzled and she reflected that, for a bright guy, he was awful slow in understanding what makes people tick.

‘We need to get one thing straight,' she said. ‘Sheriff Launer is my problem – I will handle him.'

He pushed his coffee cup to the centre of the table with the tips of his fingers. ‘I shouldn't have interfered.'

She sat back. ‘Well, you're just full of surprises, Professor. And your apology is accepted.'

‘It wasn't an apology, it was a statement of fact.' He paused. ‘He is a nasty piece of work, though, isn't he? Always on the attack. He's got to be hiding something. What's his guilty secret?'

It seemed like today was a day for revising her opinion of Professor Fennimore. She couldn't ignore the question, but she couldn't answer it truthfully, either.
So tell him something that is true and might suffice.

The waitress appeared from nowhere, and Hicks silenced Fennimore with a warning look. While she filled their coffee cups, Hicks calculated how much she needed to tell the Professor. He was watching her, and she could almost see his nose twitching.

When the waitress vanished back to the kitchen, Hicks told him something of Sheriff Launer's history. ‘He was in the military. Served in Afghanistan.'

‘A war hero?'

‘He was in logistics – not that there's anything wrong with that, an army needs supplies. But he will drop small details into conversations to make people believe he fought gun battles with the Taliban and dodged IEDs to get food and munitions to where they were needed.'

‘The reality was more mundane.'

‘More harsh words by satellite phone than an exchange of gunfire in the theatre of war.'

‘So he came to law enforcement after he left the army?' he said.

‘When he quit the military, he worked three years at a big hardware store while he studied and got his practice hours in for his realtor's licence.'

‘Wait,' Fennimore said, with a grin that told her he wasn't completely sober, yet. ‘You're telling me he's an estate agent?'

‘If that's what you call selling real estate in England, then I guess so. Made a good living at it, too, selling affordable homes to folks who really couldn't afford to buy. Then in 2006, sub-prime went toxic. His end of the market. And being a resourceful man, he looked around for something else.'

‘And law enforcement seemed a natural career change for an ex-military man,' Fennimore said. ‘He any good?'

‘Oh, those years in logistics made him a natural at stretching his budget. He hired three new deputies, like his campaign publicity says – I'm one of them. But he fired three others who had got to the end of their six months suck-it-and-see contracts. He also reassigned one of his administrators to the county jail as a corrections officer – their hiring rates're lower. She quit.'

‘You've researched him thoroughly.'

She shrugged. ‘Just trying to understand why he's such a mean sonofabitch.' She watched Fennimore trying to work her out, showing him her blankest, blandest face. After a little while, he gave up with a shrug.

She dropped a ten-dollar bill on the table and stood. ‘Let's go,' she said.

‘Where to?'

‘Up the road a ways,' she said. ‘St Louis Task Force's request. They got a few questions they want to ask.'

‘Let me see her face – her eyes.'

The man in black watches himself on the TV screen, sweating in that damn ski mask as he stripped the duct tape from Laney Dawalt's face, humiliated by his own dumb obedience.

The nitrile gloves he wore were dripping, literally dripping – sweat oozing out from under the cuffs; he was
dying
in the heat and humidity, but he meekly followed orders.

Laney was trussed like a turkey at Thanksgiving, her breasts flattened and pale under tightly stretched food wrap. It's sickening. Disgusting. Fergus is a sick fuck. He keeps thinking up new perversions – ‘refinement',
he
calls them. Sick, sick fuck.

He watches himself on-screen, doing as he's told like a loser kid being pushed around on the schoolyard, and his head prickles with the shame of it, because he was that loser kid, and he hates Fergus even more for reminding him.

‘Now,' the distorted voice says. ‘Do it. Finish it.'

Laney's eyes widened as he approached. He untied the end of the rope and took the strain. He was dog-tired that day. She struggled, mewling, bucking against the plastic wrap, her head thrashing from side to side. Her voice was too weak for screaming by then, but she pleaded with him anyway, mouthing the words.

He eased off, paying out the line an inch at a time.

Squeak, squeak, squeak.

She stopped watching him; she looked up at the roof of the kill room, her lips moving like she was praying. He wanted to hear what she was saying and leaned in closer.

Her words sent a pleasant flush through his chest and head and he experienced a tenderness almost like love. She was praying to
him.

‘What the fuck?' Fergus yelled. ‘What're you doing?'

The rope slipped. His gloves tore and he felt the burn of the rope.
Squeaksqueaksqueak.
He gripped harder and it held. And all the time Fergus cursed and abused him.

The final moments of the recording, she was quiet: a series of stuttered out-breaths, a tick in her throat as she made the effort to reinflate her lungs. Failed.

The light of terror in her eyes faded and went out, her face slackened; she was still.

‘Is she dead?' Fergus's voice sounds deeper than in real life because of the distortion software.

He pinched Laney and nothing happened. ‘Okay?' he said.

‘Try again.'

His back was turned to the camera when Fergus issued this latest order. On the recording, he sees his shoulders tense, and feels a mix of pity and contempt for himself.

He'd wanted to scream, ‘Screw you!' To crash the camera to the floor of the kill room, smash every piece of equipment in the place, then go looking for Fergus, cave his face in, ram his fist down his throat. But he didn't.

On the recording, his screen-self pinches Laney's face and ribs. No response.

‘O-
kay
?' he said. ‘Satisfied?'

Seconds passed.

‘Make sure,' Fergus said. Bastard likes to squeeze every ounce of pleasure from The Kill. ‘The Kill', like he hunted them down himself, galloping over a heather moor on a sturdy mount.

‘Look.' He scratched his thumbnail down the sole of Laney's foot. ‘See? Nothing.' He looked into the camera. ‘She's gone, man.'

He pulled the Internet connection.

The man in black takes a cool chug of Coors, his eyes on the blank TV screen, not wanting to miss the instant the recording starts again. When it does, Laney's body is free of the food wrap, but still lying naked on the pallet, her eyes half closed. A small carryall lies open on the floor, next to the pallets – medical kit, tracheal tubes, portable respirator, stethoscope, syringes, a yellow defibrillator pack. A digital camera is set up to the side of the pallet, in view of the second camera, at the foot of Laney's body. The red light is flashing – the camera is recording.

He watches himself perform resuscitation like a pro: epinephrine kick-start, injected directly into the heart. Check pulse. Faint, but regular. Bag and mask for half a minute; move to the head, tilt back to ‘sniffing the morning air' position; insert laryngoscope, tilting it up and away to lift the tongue and epiglottis and display the vocal cords. Insert tracheal tube between the vocal cords and into the trachea. Remove the laryngoscope, inflate the cuff with 15 ml of air from a syringe. Attach bag and valve, and ventilate.

He nods to himself.
Like a freaking pro.

He has no heavy kit – just the bag and tubes – so he needs to watch the rise and fall of her chest closely, taking care not to overinflate her lungs. A minute. A minute and a half. She's not responding. He drags the mask off and wipes sweat from his forehead and face with the sleeve of his T-shirt; his mouth is stretched tight and a high whine escapes his lips.

He checks her pulse again, detects the fatal quiver of ventricular fibrillation.

Jesus, Lord.
Frantic, he sets up the defibrillator, slaps pads on Laney's chest, waits for the gauge to show ready, zaps her. No response. He increases the voltage by fifty, then fifty more, weeping, muttering softly, ‘Come back, Laney. Please.
Please,
come back.'

One more try. The defib is charged. He tries again. Her body jerks, one hand falls, her arm dangling theatrically over the edge of the bed. She whimpers, her eyes flutter open.

‘There you are,' he says softly and rather sweetly. He feels a warmth and generosity that was once a big part of him. He has given her the gift of life.

She keens, her eyes seeking out the laptop monitor, because she knows that the shadowy figure will issue the orders, will decide what happens next. With a spurt of anger, he strides to the laptop and slams it closed.

She whimpers.

‘Shhhh,' he soothes. ‘It's all right. You don't have to worry about him any more – he's gone.' He brushes a lock of hair from her face. ‘It's just you and me now.'

Singularity is almost invariably a clue.

A. C. D
OYLE
,
T
HE
B
OSCOMBE
V
ALLEY
M
YSTERY

Four days had passed since the big meeting. The St Louis detectives had returned to Missouri, together with Kate Simms, to follow their own lines of inquiry. Detectives were sent to every jurisdiction in Missouri where a body had been found. They worked long hours, talking to police departments and sheriff's offices, photocopying notes: police, autopsy reports, lab reports, witness statements; duplicating audio recordings of interviews; visiting evidence stores to retrieve trunk-loads of boxed paperwork and any physical evidence they could lay their hands on. They had met with Medical Examiners who walked them through their findings, providing digitized copies of autopsy photographs, slides and samples. They had talked to witnesses and potential witnesses, re-interviewed neighbours, friends and acquaintances of the murdered women, as well as schoolteachers and classmates of the missing children. Laney Dawalt had attended Narcotic Anonymous meetings, but they hadn't been able to find a link with the other victims; they kept to themselves, didn't discuss their rehab or recovery with anyone; the very anonymity of the organization made it impossible to find connections.

The British contingent's attitude to witness statements was cheerfully sceptical, but the USA detectives talked enthusiastically about finding someone whose circumstances had changed, making them more inclined to talk.

Each statement – new and pre-existing – had been read and scoured for salient facts; detectives were going through the long and tedious process of logging those details on the FBI's ViCAP database. In the UK, the Serious Crime Analysis Section in Bramshill was working in parallel, entering the same data onto ViCLAS. The two systems had been designed with the same aim: to identify links between violent crimes and catch the criminals, but they weren't designed to talk to each other, so each was put through its paces independent of the other, and the UK and USA contingents took a competitive interest in which system would give them the most useful links and leads.

Meanwhile, in Oklahoma, Abigail Hicks continued her investigation more or less alone. Fennimore had remained in Oklahoma with the dual intention of offering his guidance and keeping out of Simms's way. Launer's position had not softened, so, as it happened, he had to stay out of the Sheriff's way, too. Hicks sent email queries during the day; evenings, they talked about the case, did some fishing – though the trout fishing would have to wait till they had more time, and some daylight to cast the flies. He slept over at her place twice, sharing her bed on the second occasion.

Detective Dunlap was now heading up the St Louis Task Force. He had called Fennimore for advice the previous weekend, putting him on speakerphone so the rest of the team could chip in.

‘The hospital lost the images of Rita Gaigan's autopsy,' he'd said. ‘The autopsy report said her body was in fairly good shape when she was found. We need those pictures, and Chief Simms says finding things is right up your alley.'

‘Oh, he's the patron saint of lost evidence.' Kate Simms.

The sound of her voice had made him smile. ‘Okay. The Sheriff's office should have copies.'