False Witness (John Steel series Book 3) (12 page)

John Steel looked confused for a second, then it dawned on him. “The truth serum! So he was interrogated before he was killed?”

Tina shook her head. “In certain doses it has different effects. Its effect as a truth serum is one of them. But used in higher doses it can be used as a good suggestive tonic. It’s like a date-rape drug but the person is awake and has no memory of the event.”

McCall looked at Tina in surprise. Sure, she had expected something to have been in his system, but not that.

“And if the dose is too high?” McCall had already figured out the answer, but she felt she had to ask anyway.

Tina just gave that look she had that needed no further explanation.

“Well that explains why he wasn’t restrained, he was knocked out!” McCall said, looking over towards Steel excitedly.
This is the first piece of a puzzle
, she thought to herself.

“It was also in your second vic’s system as well,” Tiny told them.

Steel had figured as much. These killings were connected somehow. Someone wanted these guys out of the picture, but the question was why?

They stood by the body of Edward Gibbs, who Tina had been working on before they came in.

“Okay,” Tina continued, “so your boy here was sewn up like the first vic, and he too had a note shoved into his mouth.” She pointed to a clear evidence bag, and once again, inside was a note. McCall lifted the bag but the stomach juices had gone to work on the paper.

“How come we can’t read this one?” McCall asked.

“This fine fellow tried to throw up but the piece of paper stopped his vomit from going anywhere,” Steel said, nodding as if he could visualise the effect.

“Don’t worry, I am sending it to the lab, to see if they can lift anything off of it,” Tina said with a less than hopeful tone.

“So, in essence, he choked on his own puke?” Steel concluded.

Tina nodded as she pulled the sheet back so that the detectives could get a better look. Steel saw something on the man’s left side near the ribs that made him move in closer.

“What are these?” he asked, pointing out the twelve small round burn marks.

“I don’t know,” Tina answered. “I took some photographs and sent them to trace to see if they had any idea.”

Steel looked at the small marks and tried to work out their pattern. Each was almost the size of a mark from a ballpoint pen, and around an inch apart. John looked up and faced the two women. “I know what this is. He has been tasered.”

Tina looked confused for a moment. “No can’t be. Those marks don’t match any taser we know of.” Her words rang with assurance.

The English detective used his thumb and index finger to measure them. “It would fit if he had been zapped several times.”

McCall’s face screwed up in disgust at the thought. “So someone really wanted him to suffer!”

Steel nodded in agreement. These were not just random killings, these killings were personal, very personal.

“Did you take any pictures of the hallway leading to Edward Gibbs’s office?” Steel asked.

McCall took out her little camera and flicked through the latest pictures, thinking how convenient it was that she had forgotten to upload them onto her computer. “Uhm. Wait a minute.”

Steel looked on impatiently as she sifted through her shots from the crime scene.

“Okay, here they are, why?” Her question was short-lived as Steel snatched the camera away from her and tried to make any detail out on the inch-square monitor on the back of the small device.

“Damn it, you can’t see anything,” he snapped. “We will just have to go there, come on. You’re driving.”

Sam McCall scowled as he left the room, leaving the double doors swinging after him.

“Oh, bye then,” Tina shouted after him with a blank expression on her face.

As McCall left, she turned to say her goodbyes to her friend before running after Steel.

Agent Lloyd had gone
back to the comfort of her office downtown, leaving Tony and Tooms to dig up as much as they could find on the men on the bus. If Steel had been right the bus crash had been planned, and someone on that vehicle knew about it. Tooms looked round to see where McCall and Steel had gone.

“Hey, man, where’s McCall and Steel? Thought they would be back from the ME’s by now.” Joshua Tooms groaned as he looked at the mountain of files on the inmates who had travelled on the crashed bus.

“McCall and Steel are on their way to Edward Gibbs’s apartment to work on a hunch—she phoned it through earlier,” Tony said, smiling as he felt his partner’s frustration.

This case had been more a paperwork exercise than anything else—checking phone records and eventually financials once they had gotten through their backlog. Tooms preferred the field work of the job to riding a desk, and Tony was the same. But this case was all about finding out who these people knew and who had the means to pull it off.

*

When McCall and Steel arrived at the floor where Edward Gibbs had lived and ultimately died, all they saw was the yellow police tape over the door warning people not to pass. The uniforms at the door had left as soon as CSU were clear from the site and had secured it.

McCall took out the key she had gotten from the super and unlocked it. With a gentle push the door swung open freely. The smell of chemicals and dried blood filled their nostrils, the suddenness of the stench making them back off.

They climbed through the tape and Steel immediately headed for the hallway.

“Now I saw it before but didn’t really pay it much notice,” he commented, leading McCall to a picture that was hanging wrongly: one side of it was tilted, as though it had been moved.

“Wow. So you think the killer knocked this in a struggle?” McCall asked. She was tired and she could tell he was having a ‘head full of theories’ moment.

Steel shook his head and knelt on the ground next to the skirting board. “If you look you can see scuff marks on the wall, which in itself does not say anything, I will grant you that.” John Steel pointed to six marks on the wall: all of them were straight-lined and vertical.

McCall looked puzzled as she examined the fresh evidence, if indeed that was what it was. “Oh come on. How do you know it was made by our vic? Surely they would be horizontal if he was kicking while he was been attacked?”

The English detective smiled and lay down on the floor and raised his own boot to the area. “Who said he was standing?”

Sam reached down and helped Steel to his feet with a
yeah, yeah
sort of look on her face.

“The first hit would have put Gibbs down and the others were, well the killer thought they were necessary,” Steel said. “Look if you’re going to taser someone you are not going to be holding them.”

Steel dusted himself off as McCall looked back at the marks.

“But why move him?” she asked. “We found our first vic exactly where we found him.”

Steel raised a curious eyebrow. “Yes but that then tells us something about the killer or killers. He, she or they have very little in the way of strength.” Steel thought for a moment, thinking back at the size of Andy Carlson. He was a big man and it would take some strength to move him, but it was possible. “The killer never brings anything that can be traced back to him, that’s why he used Andy Carlson’s own dental floss to sew his mouth shut.” Steel quickly headed for the bathroom. Moments later noises of things been emptied into the washbasin told McCall he was having ‘one of his moments’.

She was just about to follow him when he came out, so quickly that he almost frightened her to death, holding a case of dental floss.

“He did the same thing here,” Steel declared. “He used Edward Gibbs’s floss to sew him up.” Steel place the container into one of the special evidence ‘baggies’ that McCall held out for him.

Steel then stopped and slowly took in the layout before him, his brain processing everything as he looked around the sitting room.

“What’s wrong?” McCall asked. She knew that look all too well: it was one of those expressions that someone has when they are doing a jigsaw puzzle with no diagram to start you off. Steel looked over to McCall, and she could see he was working out the series of events in his head before he stood and stared at her.

“We need to know what was on that note,” he told her.

The afternoon sun was
bright but gave very little warmth to the city below. The air had become still and the easterly wind had died to nothing stronger that a breath. People went on their merry ways, some going to lunch and others just wasting the day away. Restaurants and delis lined the street, everything from coffee houses to Chinese restaurants.

A girl dressed in dark clothes with a dark hoodie sat at the window counter. This could not be classed as a table, as it was just a long counter with several tall stools.

She sat pretending to drink the coffee, and nobody noticed her, she just blended in. The girl looked out of the window and took note of the human traffic as it marched past, oblivious to her existence, but she preferred it that way.

The dark cowl hid her pretty young face from the world, and the short black hair and pale complexion made her look older than her nineteen years.

She took another ‘pretend’ sip from the cardboard
to-go
cup as she had been doing for some time, for the cup was empty. Her gaze suddenly fixed on a black woman in her mid-fifties; this woman wore a black jacket and skirt with a white blouse. The women’s eyes locked on to each other and the younger one didn’t dare to blink in case she lost her quarry in the sea of people.

Quickly, the girl got up off the chair and made for the door, trying to keep her target in sight as she ducked under a man’s arm as he opened the door to enter the coffee shop.

The girl looked around in the crowd of pedestrians, frantically searching, then she smiled as she suddenly caught a glimpse of the woman walking on the other side of the street. The younger woman didn’t know the person she was following, but she recognised her face from an old photograph.

They walked for what seemed forever, the Caucasian girl wondering where they were going, then she stopped suddenly as they approached the court house. Its large majestic form held a sense of foreboding.

The teenager shook off the thoughts running through her head and made for the black woman, all the while hoping that her destination was past the large grey-stone building.

The black lady walked up the steps to the court house, making the girl’s heart sink.
Maybe she is there on jury duty,
the girl thought, along with other comforting fantasies.

“Afternoon, Judge Mathews,” one of the security guards cried out and gave the black lady a friendly wave.

“Afternoon, Mr, Jeffries, how’s the wife and kids?” the judge replied, almost happy to see a friendly face.

“Oh just fine, thanks, you have a good day, Judge.”

The woman waved and disappeared through the large doors at the entranceway.

Oh great she’s a judge, no matter
, the girl thought to herself. After all, she had found her, and that was all that mattered for now.

*

The day had been a long one for all of them. Much had been discovered but it wasn’t enough to draw them closer to the killer or to find the missing prisoners.

McCall looked up from her computer screen and looked out at the dark purple of the sky as the sun began to set. She had not realised just how late it had become, it was as though the last few hours had been stolen away, taken up by all the sifting through files and records.

She stretched, trying to dispel the pains of desk work, and stood up, planning to make it home and settle down after a deep bath and a glass of red.

Sam smiled to herself at the thought of a quiet evening at home, but that soon faded as her desk phone began to ring. Sam just stared at it for a moment, daring herself not to pick it up, her hands still on her jacket collar as she had pulled it up.

But then she cursed herself as she picked up the receiver and answered the call, hoping it would be something that could wait until tomorrow.

“McCall, homicide.” She had to feign enthusiasm—after years of practice, she was good at it.

“Detective, if you want to know more about the killings come to this address.”

The caller gave her the address of a warehouse near some elevated train tracks. Before she could ask anything the phone went dead. Every instinct in her body told her that there was something very wrong about the call, but it was her duty to check it out. Steel had already left to sort some ‘personal’ things out, but she sent him a text explaining everything and telling him where she was going.

*

All the way to the meeting point she had a bad feeling—the sort of feeling you have when you wished you had a bigger gun. As Sam turned a corner leading onto the appointed street of the meeting, she noticed that the sun had begun to go down into the distance and was pulling the light of the day with it like a dark blanket.

The address she’d been given was in a large parking lot near some elevated tracks of the subway.

McCall pulled in slowly and then stopped to get a lay of the land. In the distance she saw two large buildings and in the centre sat a red Camaro car. The place was bathed in darkness apart from an exterior light from one of the buildings and the odd blare of illumination from passing trains.

Sam looked at the situation and pulled out her Glock 17 handgun. She pulled back the custom stainless-steel top slide and let it pull forwards under its own spring power.

McCall pulled up slowly, getting nearer to the other car, taking note of the scattered vehicles in the lot as she went by, and making sure they were alone or, more to the point, to try and see if Steel was hiding somewhere.

She stopped and got out of her faded blue Mustang, whose motor she left running just in case she had to get the hell out of there.