Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries) (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five: Cry Me a River

Jason started awake at one o’clock in the morning, his phone blaring at him. He groaned and reached blindly for it, hearing Cerys complain loudly from the room next door. “What?” he answered, irritably.

To his surprise, Amy’s voice came down the line, sounding very far away. “Jason, I’ve been texting you. You need to get to the crime scene and take pictures. There’s a body.” He sat up instantly, rubbing the sleep from his eyes and trying to take in Amy’s instructions. “Any camera will do,” she was saying, “but I want the photos as soon as you’re done.”

The line went dead. Jason took the phone away from his ear and stared at it. How was he meant to know where this body was, exactly? If he walked into Cardiff centre, would his Spidey Sense start tingling and lead him to the latest victim?

Then he realised he had six new messages. The address, sent through twice, ten minutes apart; a message telling him to get out of bed, another telling him to drag himself from the pub; and then two that just said
Call me.
Amy must be desperate if she was resorting to using old-fashioned telephony to get what she wanted.

Jason, on the other hand, wasn’t sure old-fashioned blagging was going to get him very far on this one. He wasn’t a police officer—in fact, he was an ex-con, and Bryn hated him at the best of times. Turning up at a fresh crime scene in the middle of the night was only going to fan the flames of disharmony between them. But what Amy wanted Amy got—she had already sent another text asking him to bring her the victim’s laptop. Jason threw on yesterday’s T-shirt and jeans before sloping off down the stairs.

“Jason?” Gwen called from her bedroom door, and he looked up, waving a hand at his mam.

“I’ve just got to do a favour for a friend. I’ll be back in no time.”

Gwen’s face hardened. Jason hadn’t seen her look like that since his court date. “A favour? At this time?”

“Mam, you have to trust me,” he pleaded.

She didn’t say a word, just shut the door and left him to make his way down the stairs.

As Jason’s brain started firing on all cylinders, the last vestiges of sleep fading away, the significance of Amy’s call began to sink in. There was another crime scene. There was a body. He had killed again.

As he pulled on his trainers, a quiet despair settled in his chest—they had failed to find him in time, and now Jason had to take pictures of the consequences. There was part of him that protested—he wasn’t a cop, he could just go back to bed and hear about this on the morning news, like everyone else. But he now had the urge to know, the need to seek the truth. He wanted justice for these girls, and he wanted to see this piece of shit in a high-security prison, where every bruiser who wanted to hurt something knew his cell number.

Armed only with Cerys’s camera, Jason stepped out into the cool of a Cardiff night, pushing down his feelings of failure, and concentrated on the righteous fire burning in his chest. They were going to get him now. There was no alternative.

* * *

Jason hovered behind the police line, craning his neck for a glimpse of Bryn. He was honestly the last person Jason wanted to see at two o’clock in the morning, and he imagined he was skirting the bottom of Bryn’s list too. But he was here now, jumping from foot to foot in an attempt to keep warm, clutching the digital camera to his chest as the tips of his fingers turned blue.

He’d approached the nearest officer ten minutes ago and told him who he was and that he needed to speak to Detective Hesketh. The guy had looked at him sceptically but had gone inside. After he’d come back, however, he’d ignored Jason’s attempts to catch his eye. Great, he really was going to be stuck here all night.

Jason figured he’d give it another ten minutes before asking again, because leaving without the photographs wasn’t an option. Three women were dead and Amy was the only person actually discovering things about the girls’ deaths. So Jason would make her toast or bring her photographs in the early hours, if that was what would help. He looked round the crowd of morbidly interested onlookers, feeling apart from them. He was a man on a mission.

He also felt a touch guilty. Despite his efforts over the weekend, he hadn’t found out anything useful about Melody. He’d written down the few facts he had discovered and left them on Amy’s desk, tactfully not telling her how he’d come by them. He didn’t think Bryn would approve of him sleeping with the victim’s housemate.

But then he had brought in the CCTV from the headboard lead—that had all been him, and they now had their first glimpse of the killer. Except that had done fuck-all to stop him, hadn’t it? Jason’s grip tightened on the camera.

An ambulance was parked at the end of the street, just within the bounds of the police cordon, and Jason could see the back doors were open. At first, he thought they were here for the body, but from his vantage, he could see a pair of legs hanging below the line of the door, a red blanket trailing in a puddle. Perhaps it was someone who knew the victim? Maybe they could tell him something important.

Abandoning his post by the front door, he worked his way through the sparse crowd, the people who would be interviewed by the news crews later and, yes, he could already see a photographer and a BBC Wales van parking up. Bad news travelled fast.

At this end of the cordon, there were no police officers—at least none paying attention—and Jason easily slipped under the tape and towards the back of the ambulance. He stuffed the camera in his pocket and straightened out his jacket before rounding the open door.

A woman sat on the back step, clutching the blanket and shaking. It looked like she was trying to send a text, but her fingers were jittering off the keys and her cheeks were wet with tears. She looked up as he approached and hastily wiped her eyes, her bottom lip trembling. “H-have you moved her out yet?”

“Not yet,” Jason said softly, and sat beside her in the back of the ambulance. “I know this must be difficult for you, miss, so many people asking questions, but can you tell me what happened?”

The woman’s expression was suddenly fierce. “I’ll tell you. I want you to catch him. H-he killed Laurie.” Her eyes filled with tears again and she buried her face in her blanket. Jason put an awkward arm around her shoulder and she curled into him, shuddering with her sobs. “M-my name is Gina Matthews. Laurie’s my...” She trailed off, shook her head. “I came home from uni—I think it was nine-thirty, and I th-thought I heard something. It sounded like...like the bed moving.” She gasped, choked with tears. “I thought she was cheating on me.”

Jason rubbed circles into her back, making vague shushing sounds as Gina released her sorrow and her guilt. There was nothing to be done but wait, holding her against his shoulder, as her tears slowly subsided. She stayed there, shivering with cold and shock, and wiped her nose on the edge of the blanket.

“I saw him,” she said.

Jason started. “What did he look like?” he said, trying to keep his tone calm. If she’d seen him, got a good look at his face, they might be able to find him in less than a day, his whole damn face in every paper, on every channel, on the internet. They’d have him in their sights.

But Gina shook her head, her cheek rubbing against the lapel of his jacket. “Just the back of his head. He had dark hair and he was wearing black. Not very tall and not fat. God, I’m useless.” She scrubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand and moved away from Jason, drawing the blanket closer. Her voice grew flat and she looked very far away. “And then I found her. He had...raped her. There was blood, but she...she was still warm.” She looked back to Jason. “She looked terrified. And I wasn’t there.”

Jason tried to remember the questions they always asked on cop shows, the ones that would get useful information for Amy. “Did she have any enemies? Did anyone want to hurt her?”

“Everyone loved Laurie. It was always me that caused trouble. She was always out with friends from her course and everyone at that Aussie club loved her. She started doing shifts there—not ’cause we needed the money, but because she loved the place.”

The Aussie club... “Wait—you mean Koalas? Laurie worked there?”

Gina nodded, and Jason couldn’t help the thrill that rose in his chest. The nightclub was the key. Two of the victims worked there, and now he was sure they’d find a link to Melody. They had a body, they had a witness description—maybe Amy wouldn’t even need the photographs to figure this one out.

“Was there anyone Laurie had a problem with at work? Any of the guys giving her hassle?”

Gina thought about it for a moment, then frowned. “There was this one guy, had a problem with her being a dyke. He made no secret about it too, was fucking rude when I was there last night.”

Jason leaned forward. “What was his name?” He held his breath, as she raided her memory, so intent that he completely missed the approaching footsteps. “Um...Dan? I think it was Dan.”

“Well, this is cosy.”

Jason looked up to see Bryn and Owain staring down at him, Bryn looking perturbed and Owain honestly stunned. Bryn folded his arms and shook his head as if he were dealing with a particularly disobedient child. “Come with me, boy.”

Chapter Twenty-Six: Dead Men Tell Tales

Giving Gina a pat on the shoulder and thanking her for her time, Jason followed the detectives, waiting for the bollocking that was surely due. Bryn leaned close, breath stale with cigarettes and cheap coffee. “So, she tell you anything?”

Jason blinked, but wouldn’t let go of this opportunity to be useful. “Laurie worked at Koalas, same club as Kate. There was a guy there who had a problem with her...girlfriend, name of Dan. I met him—seemed like a good bloke, but who can tell, eh?”

Owain frantically typed everything Jason said into his phone, as Bryn looked at him appraisingly. “No, you never can. Come on—Amy’s been texting me all flaming night. Take your pictures and get them over to her before she burns a hole in my phone.”

For one horrifying moment, Jason thought she might actually be able to do that, then dismissed it as ridiculous. However, his hand unconsciously went to his pocket and removed his phone, only to find another three texts.
Done yet?
R
u
coming over?
R
u
dead?

He sent back
No soon no
as Bryn led him across the police cordon and into a white tent that had been set up in front of the door. An efficient woman with a clipboard looked at Jason as though he were the living embodiment of contamination.

“Overalls, boots and gloves.” It was obviously a well-rehearsed phrase and she intended to enforce her rules to the letter. “And this...officer will have to sign in and remain under escort at all times.”

Bryn gestured to a set of white overalls that were neatly bagged and tied behind the woman. “Could I just have those back?”

“New entrance, new set.” The woman’s robotic demeanour was terrifying. Jason hurriedly scribbled his name on the clipboard and shifted into his overalls, keeping the camera in his hand until he could slip it into the overall pocket. The woman looked pointedly at the device but said nothing. The boots were more like flimsy shower caps, which barely fitted over his trainers, and the gloves were too tight and restricted his fingers. He could already feel sweat gathering on his palms under the latex.

Owain had excused himself, but Bryn was dressed in the same sterile white getup. Jason hoped he didn’t look half as ridiculous as the detective, beer belly warping the suit to turn him into a plastic polar bear. “Let’s get inside.”

Jason followed Bryn across the threshold, not sure what to expect. But the place was quite nice inside, wooden floors and everything in matching black and white. There were framed photographs of Gina and Laurie, and one of those Andy Warhol-style prints of the two of them in four different psychedelic poses. The place was fairly neat, with a few books scattered round, but nothing much in the way of clutter or mess. Two large bin bags sat by the back door, overflowing with paper plates and plastic cups. They certainly hadn’t been robbed or searched, at least not obviously. Jason turned on Cerys’s camera and lined up a few shots, including the ghastly Warhol replica. He turned to find Bryn waiting expectantly on the stairs. “She’s not looking for interior design. Get up here.”

The top floor was crowded, with several police officers and crime scene techs at work, all ghosts in the same anonymous white overalls. Two were in the bathroom, carefully lifting footprints from the tile floor and the windowsill. Jason took a snap.

Bryn walked into the front bedroom and Jason followed without thinking. And froze.

Nothing could prepare him for this. Laurie was lying in the centre of the bed, legs dangling over the bottom, spread. She was naked except for the heart pendant around her neck and the rust-red blood drying on her thighs. The sheet was tangled on the floor, as if it had been cast off in a hurry.

Her eyes were staring at him. They were frosted over, like winter glass, and he knew instantly that she was dead. Her skin was mottled, pale and purple, and a man with a camera leant over, snapping pictures.

Jason couldn’t imagine how Gina felt, walking into the bedroom and seeing this. He swallowed down the bile rising in his throat and took pictures: one of Laurie, and then pictures of the room, the bookcase, the sheet on the floor. But he couldn’t bring himself to take more of the victim, like she was some posing centrefold. It felt wrong.

“Who is this, Hesketh? And why does he have a camera at my crime scene?” The man examining Laurie turned and folded his arms, glaring at Jason over his glasses. “If he’s a journalist—”

“He’s Amy’s assistant,” Bryn said, and the man’s scowl deepened.

“When are you going to stop running to that introverted child to solve your problems, Detective? And now you’re letting her ‘assistant’ take pictures of a murder victim. Next, they’ll be all over MySpace.”

“Rob,” Bryn said tiredly, “just tell me when and how she died. We need to get her to the mortuary before the press all come out to play.”

Rob snorted. “Oh, just when and how, nothing much then. Work it all out in my head and then give you a ten-minute window and the exact object that caused her skull to explode, that’s all.”

“He hit her over the head?” As soon as he’d asked, he saw the blood matting her hair and the red stain above her head where she might’ve been dragged down the bed.

Rob sighed, as if it were beneath him to answer questions posed by Amy Lane’s assistant. “Yes. And, as it happens, I can identify the object.” He reached for a large plastic evidence bag containing a worn hockey stick, blood coating the head and spatter up the shaft. “Hockey stick. Different method again to the other victims. A weapon of opportunity, I believe—the victim has a number of trophies for university hockey.”

“That’s what they have in common: weapons of opportunity. As if he doesn’t really want to kill them when he plans it.” Bryn paced as he expounded his theory, his plastic gloves making shapes in the air like a mime artist. “Anything else?”

“She put up a fight—defensive marks on her hands and forearms, and I’ve scraped blood out from under her nails. Sexual assault kit positive, left his DNA and everything, but the nature of the trauma sustained indicate that it was post-mortem.”

Jason felt like he was going to be sick. “He raped her after he killed her?”

Even Rob looked faintly ill. “Blunt but accurate. She’s only just going into rigor and the temperature here’s pretty steady, so I can use liver temp to get a fairly accurate time of death—between eight and ten.”

“Gina came back at half-nine and scared him off,” Jason said. “She said Laurie was still warm when she found her.”

A look of horror crossed Rob’s face. “She touched the body? Please tell me she didn’t do something so incredibly stupid.”

“She said she was warm,” Jason repeated, anger building in his chest at how callous this Rob bloke was. “She was in shock, mate—her girlfriend just died.”

“No excuse for contamination,” Rob said flatly. “Does she want us to catch him or not? Moronic.”

Bryn, clearly sensing that Jason was about to take a swing at the medical examiner, took him by the arm and led him out of the bedroom and back into the hallway. “Dr. Pritchard is a knob, but he’s good at what he does. You got the pictures?”

Jason nodded curtly, and put the camera in the pocket of the overalls. “She wants Laurie’s laptop too. I saw it downstairs.”

“We’ll bag it up for you.” Bryn clapped Jason on the shoulder. “You did well for your first dead one, son. Now get out of here.”

Jason slipped away from Bryn’s hold and tried not to throw up. “First dead one”—fuck, he hoped there wasn’t another.