Broken Dolls (A Jefferson Winter Thriller) (23 page)

She reached the hall, saw the front door through the veil of her tears. So near, yet so far. On the other side of that door was the world she had left behind, a world she was convinced she would never see again. Adam saw where she was looking and grinned. Then he jabbed at her with the cattle prod to get her moving. Rachel braced herself for the next jolt of electricity to fire through her body, but all she felt was the sharp jab of the cattle prod. She looked at Adam. He was still grinning. He held up the cattle prod, made sure she got a good look.

‘Number Five will go back to the basement. Do I need to tell you again?’

Rachel started walking, one slow, painful metre at a time. She was trembling all over and could hardly see for the tears. The edge of her vision was filled with grey static and every breath was a dry gasp, her lungs rattling like they were filled with dry paper. Adam followed a few steps behind. He marked her progress with the cattle prod, a muted
tap tap tap
on the side of his leg that made her think of the cane tapping on the basement floor. She wanted to scream at him to stop, but she bit her lip, kept quiet. Adam pushed open the door that led down to the basement and switched on the light.

She glanced back and Adam smiled at her. He pushed the tip of the cattle prod gently into the small of her back, and she went down the stairs. She moved carefully, still using the wall for support. Reached the bottom and shut her eyes. For a brief moment she could see the beach and the sunshine. She could smell the salt on the breeze and feel her father’s rough hand wrapped around hers.

Then she heard Adam’s footsteps on the stairs and the dream dissolved. She opened her eyes and saw Adam staring at her.

‘Number Five will keep moving.’

Rachel glanced back up the stairs at the thin strip of light glowing beneath the door and wondered if this would be the last time she ever saw daylight. She took a deep breath and struggled along the corridor. Adam unlocked the basement door and Rachel went inside. The room was a bright white blur through the tears.

She was trembling harder than ever. Adam was going to tell her to sit in the dentist’s chair. Then he was going to strap her down, pump her full of drugs and go to work on her with the knife. She glanced over at him, waiting for the order. Dreading it. Adam was staring at her from the doorway, his expression unreadable.

‘I’ll be back when I’ve thought of a suitable punishment,’ he said.

The door closed, the lights went off, and Rachel was left alone.

45

ladyjade: how will i no its u?

tesla: I’ll no u

ladyjade: seriously?!?

tesla: I’ve got dark hair and I’ll be wearing a long black woollen trench coat.

ladyjade: eyes???

tesla: brown

ladyjade: red rose in the lapel??? LOL ☺

tesla: soz allergic to roses ☺

ladyjade: send a photo pleeeeezzzzzz

tesla: sorry I h8 having my pic taken

ladyjade: cant w8 to cu

tesla: cant w8 to cu 2

ladyjade: xxx

tesla: xxx

I held out the laptop and Templeton took it so she could read through it a second time. Sumati Chatterjee was grinning and wouldn’t stand still. The combination of adrenalin and the run up the stairs and her discovery of the fragment on Rachel Morris’s computer had put her in a state of perpetual motion. All around me, the incident room was a chaos of noise. Voices bounced off the walls and the ceiling, hitting me from all angles, but I barely noticed. All that mattered were the words on the laptop screen.

My first real glimpse of the unsub.

‘Good work,’ I said.

Sumati’s grin got even wider. She was practically glowing. ‘Thanks.’

‘Was this on Rachel Morris’s laptop or her work computer?’

‘Her work computer. It was in a Word file.’ Sumati was talking at a hundred miles an hour. ‘She’d cut and pasted it from an IM conversation. Something you might find interesting. She’d removed all trace of the file from the Recent Documents list.’

‘How?’

‘She kept loading files until it disappeared from the list. When I checked the files in Recent Documents, a whole load had last been accessed within three minutes of one another.’

‘Did you find anything else?’

‘Not in Word. But now I’ve got some screen names to work with, I’ll go back through her computers with a fine-tooth comb. I thought you’d want to see this straight away. I’m going to take another look at the other victims’ computers, too. Maybe I’ll come up with something there.’

‘We need to find where this conversation originated from,’ I said. ‘Start by looking at chat groups dealing with infidelity. In particular, any forums that deal with revenge cheating.’

‘I’ll get right onto it.’

Sumati held out a hand and Templeton returned the laptop. She hurried out the room, a woman on a mission, and the door swung shut behind her.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We’ve got some new information. How does it help?’

Templeton thought for a second, then said, ‘Well, for starters we’ve got that screen name to work with. Tesla.’

‘You’re right, that’s interesting. But not for the reasons you think.’

‘And how the hell do you know what I’m thinking, Winter?’

‘You’re thinking that we could go back to the other victims’ computers and look for references to Tesla. You’re also thinking that we can go fishing on the internet for Tesla. You’ve probably got some fantasy going where we could set up a cyberghost, someone who’s been cheated on and is looking for revenge, and use that to lure our unsub out.’

Templeton’s eyes narrowed and a faint blush settled on her cheeks. ‘Wouldn’t that be the logical thing to do?’

‘It would be logical. But it would also be a waste of time. Tesla is the name he used with Rachel Morris. He would have used a different screen name with the other victims, and he’d have used a different name with whoever he’d targeted next. It would be stupid and unnecessary for him to keep using the same screen name, and our guy is definitely not stupid, or unnecessary.’

‘So the name doesn’t help.’

‘Of course it helps. Names are special. They have power. This name wasn’t chosen at random. So, the unsub called himself Tesla. Why?’

‘Does there have to be a reason?’

‘There’s always a reason. Organised offenders never do things just for the sheer hell of it. Every act, no matter how bizarre it might seem, has a reason behind it. Reason and forethought. Plenty of forethought. You hear the name Tesla, what’s the first thing you think of?’

‘The inventor.’

‘He wasn’t just any old inventor, though. Nikola Tesla was a genius. For me, he’s right up there alongside da Vinci and Thomas Edison. His theories were crucial in the development of wireless communication and radio. He was also highly influential in the development of alternating current as a viable power source.’

‘Are you saying that Cutting Jack is a genius?’

I shook my head. ‘No way. I think he’s overcompensating for his low self-esteem. He’d like to believe he’s some sort of genius, that he’s superior to the rest of the world, but deep down he knows that’s not the case. By calling himself Tesla, he’s trying to convince himself that he’s more than he actually is. His low self-esteem drives his need to torture his victims. There’s a lot of anger there and he needs to channel it.’

‘What’s the root of his low self-esteem?’

‘My money would be on the parents, or whoever the main parental influence was in his life. Something this entrenched has to be rooted in the way he was brought up. Nurture as opposed to nature.’

Templeton thought about this a moment. She was chewing her lip in a way that was both sexy and way too distracting. She looked vulnerable and intelligent all at the same time. A neat trick. She stopped chewing and said, ‘What about Rachel Morris’s screen name?’

‘I’m going to throw that one back at you,’ I said. ‘The fact you’re asking means you have a theory. So, let’s hear it.’

‘Lady Jade,’ she said. ‘It’s aristocratic, classy. She wants to be seen as someone whose status is higher than it actually is.’

‘That makes sense,’ I said. ‘Donald Cope is working-class through and through, but he definitely aspires to get higher up the greasy pole.’

‘And he would have passed that attitude on to Rachel,’ Templeton finished for me. ‘Maybe Cutting Jack isn’t the only one who’s overcompensating.’

‘Without a doubt,’ I said. ‘And the internet is the perfect place to do that. To some degree, when we go online we all become avatars. We’re constantly reinventing ourselves. So what else have we learned here?’

‘He didn’t want to give Rachel a photograph.’

‘But he has given her a photograph of sorts, only this is a photograph made from words.’

‘It’s pretty ambiguous, though,’ said Templeton. ‘Dark hair, brown eyes, a woollen trench coat. Like you said yesterday, he’s not giving anything away. At least, nothing useful.’

‘You’re missing the point. By the time they had this exchange Rachel was desperate to know what he looked like. Remember that long, drawn-out “please” when she asked for a photo. Why did she feel the need to keep this conversation? Why did she hide it?’

‘Because it’s the next-best thing to a photograph. And the reason she hid it was because she wanted to keep it all to herself.’

‘No. The reason she hid it is because the unsub has coached her to cover her tracks. He would have told her to delete any evidence of their conversations. He would have used her husband as the reason, telling her that she couldn’t leave any evidence behind in case Jamie Morris found it. That’s why it was on her work computer. Rachel figured that the chances of Jamie finding it there were zero. Okay, what else?’

Templeton was chewing her lip again, thinking. She shook her head. ‘I’ve got nothing, but I’m guessing you’ve got something.’

‘The unsub’s use of language is interesting.’

‘And interesting is good.’

‘Interesting is always good,’ I said. ‘Okay, there’s a lot of mirroring going on. When Rachel uses N-O for know instead of K-N-O-W, the unsub uses it in his response. She uses an eight and a two when she says she can’t wait to see him, and he fires that right back at her. Then you have those clusters of kisses when they’re signing off. Mirroring would make Rachel feel comfortable. She’d feel like she’d met somebody who really got her, something that’s missing from her marriage. The unsub will have been doing this all the way through the grooming process. Line four was the most interesting line in the whole exchange: I’ve got dark hair and I’ll be wearing a long black woollen trench coat.’

‘It isn’t written in textspeak,’ said Templeton.

‘Got it in one,’ I agreed. ‘There are no numbers being substituted for letters and everything’s spelt correctly. It’s grammatically correct, too. There are even capital letters and a full stop. This tells us two things. Firstly, it confirms that the unsub is educated. Secondly, it was important to him that Rachel got this piece of information.’

‘Because he needed her to recognise him outside Springers.’

I nodded. ‘So, how are you at breaking and entering? I think we need to find out more about Rachel and Jamie Morris.’

‘Please tell me you’re not being serious, Winter.’ She looked at me and I answered all the questions in her eyes with a single grin. ‘Jesus, you are being serious.’

‘Grab your coat,’ I said. ‘Let’s go have some fun.’

46

Templeton pulled up to the sidewalk and killed the BMW’s engine. She was parked illegally on a set of double yellow lines, but we’d been driving around for five minutes and it was the only space she could find. Camden had a cosmopolitan, bohemian vibe that made me think of Greenwich Village before the money, or Venice Beach before the tourists took over. There was a vitality to the area, a buzz in the air. The shopfronts were brightly coloured and the bars were busy even though it was half past three on a Friday afternoon. The sky was as dark as ever, though, and the low clouds made it feel like it was already night.

I got out the car but Templeton stayed where she was, frozen to the seat, her hands on the wheel at a five-to-one position.

‘I shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said.

‘Interesting choice of words. “Shouldn’t” implies that you’re going to do this, so why don’t we skip all that toing-and-froing where I pretend to talk you into something you’ve already decided you’re going to do?’

Templeton unbuckled her seatbelt and got out the car. She hit a button on the key and the immobiliser activated with a quick
beep-beep
. I lit a cigarette and offered the pack to her. She took one, lit it, blew out a plume of smoke.

‘I could get fired for this,’ she said.

‘And if you get fired you could always become a model.’

‘I’m serious, Winter.’

‘So am I.’

Rachel and Jamie Morris lived in a two-bedroom apartment that overlooked Camden Lock. This was telling in itself. Donald Cole had money and liked to throw it around. He liked people to
know
he had money and he would have wanted his daughter to have the best. This was not the sort of place he would have bought for her. He would have gone for something bigger, something grander, something that reflected his status. For starters, it would have been a house rather than an apartment, somewhere with plenty of bedrooms for future grandkids, and a yard for them to play in.

So either Rachel had chosen not to take handouts and go it alone, or Cole had not approved of her choice of husband and had withheld his money on a point of principle. Having met Jamie Morris, I was veering towards the latter reason.

Jamie was staying at a friend’s place in Islington, which meant the apartment was empty. Allegedly. I pressed the buzzer for number eight anyway, since it was possible he’d changed his mind, or was lying. No response. I tried again and still got no answer. I didn’t try a third time. When your wife has been kidnapped you tend to answer on the first ring.

The keypad was pretty standard. Type in the correct four-number code and you were good to go. The problem was that ten numbers gave ten thousand possible combinations, which meant the chance of hitting the right code at random was slim. I checked the door in case it was open, but it wasn’t. Then I took a closer look at the keypad.