“Supernatural enemies plotting against him? And you look strange enough to catch his interest?”
Another little shrug. “Maybe. Whatever he’s got going on in that fucked up head of his, you have to admit that most people think I look pretty unusual. If he saw me, he might be curious enough to want to see more.”
“I take it you have a plan then?” I was trying to remain calm, but what I really wanted to do right then was smack him in the face. I thought we’d left this kind of thing behind us years ago, in Glasgow. No more setting traps with my cousin as the bait.
“Nothing risky or drastic. I drive into work with you from now on, come home when you do. My drones sit quietly, watching every approach to the station. With only the cameras running, the batteries will last for hours on a full charge. If he comes sniffing around, we’ll see him Con. I’ve even added a little facial recognition programme to the AI system and added all my composites in. It will beep me every time one of the drones spots anything close to a potential match.”
Well, that actually sounded reasonably safe, by his standards. If we did spot our suspect anywhere near there, I could have him surrounded before he knew what was happening.
“And if he somehow manages to get hold of you?”
“How, by assaulting the station? The risk is almost non existent. But okay, let’s say he does manage to, somehow. Remember the torc and the armband I put together for that Halloween bash, when we were after the McGill brothers?” I did. Shay had never enjoyed the Gang’s jokes about our ‘Changeling,’ but my God, he could pull off the ‘Faerie Princeling,’ with bells on, when he wanted to. “I still have those. And I can set my laptop to feed yours everything, if I fail to log on at specific times.”
I still didn’t like it but I couldn’t argue with his reasoning. Besides, that camera at Jackie’s house may already have been disconnected, anyway. How long could those things run for without being recharged?
“Alright,” I agreed. “That’s not as insane as I thought it was going to be.” He could keep working, as usual, so it wouldn’t slow us down. We could share my office, and I did like having him with me when we were working a case. It made it so much easier to keep up to date on each other’s progress. And I sure as hell didn’t want to leave him alone here now. Maybe our killer had seen him and maybe he had become curious. What did we have to lose by trying it?
Shay smiled happily. He must have been expecting more of an argument. I was going to bloody well arm myself though, just in case. He wouldn’t like that but he wouldn’t comment on it either.
“Oh, one other thing,” he said offhandedly, “I’m riding in the back of the car. Hold me by the arm going in and out too, like you would if I was a collar.”
“Why?”
“Because if he is watching, we want him to think that you don’t trust me not to try to slip away.”
“Okay,” I agreed. After what we’d both seen in Jackie’s bedroom that morning, I wasn’t entirely sure, just then, that I did.
I couldn’t think of anything my cousin wouldn’t do to prevent a repetition of a scene like that.
Twenty-Four
Sunday and Monday passed uneventfully. Everyone working the cases continued to pursue every possible line of investigation, and Shay kept feeding more of his faces into the DVLA and chasing up batch after batch of possibles. He flew the big drone in on Saturday night and positioned the six smaller ones around our building under cover of darkness. They docked again to recharge each night before resuming their positions. Nobody had noticed any of them yet, a good sign that he’d chosen his hiding places well, but there hadn’t been any sign of our man coming near the station either. It was beginning to look like he hadn’t seen my cousin or, if he had, was not interested enough to risk coming near us again. It was one thing to secretly watch us before we knew what he looked like, but the danger of being noticed was far greater now, and he knew it.
It was at about ten thirty on Tuesday morning that Shay finally struck possible gold.
We were sharing my desk, side by side, where we could look across at each other’s screens without having to get up and move. His slight change in position alerted me to the fact that something had caught his intense interest, like a cat that had noticed a rustle of movement in the undergrowth. Or like his namesake hawk, patiently perched, waiting for just such a sign.
“Got something?” I asked after giving him a few minutes to read through the various windows he was pulling up at a pace I couldn’t possibly match. He tapped a key and brought up one of his driving licence photos.
“A strong candidate, yes. Mr Brady O’Hara, aged twenty seven. His parents both died in a car crash, nearly a year and a half ago. As their only child, he inherited a good lump from them, as well as selling the family home and collecting on their life insurance policies. He pocketed over two million, after taxes, then quit his job and, according to his social media, decided to move to New Zealand last August. He hasn’t posted anything on that account since. Not many ‘friends’ on there either. It looks like he’s cut off all contact with them since then.”
“Where was he living before that?”
“Edinburgh, since he turned eighteen, but he grew up in Fort Augustus. The father was a modestly successful lawyer. Nice home in a nice neighbourhood.”
“So what’s your next move?”
“I need to start digging into his finances, see what sort of activity there’s been on his bank accounts since then. I want to check through what the solicitor who handled everything for him has too. He might have used the same firm to buy a new place. Medical records too.” He was typing away busily as he talked. “This looks good Conall.”
I was trying not to place too much hope on it, yet, but it really did.
“Send me the licence over please. I want to blow up that photo and get a good look at him.”
I printed a copy out and compared it to Fisher’s sketch. The eyes were a little closer together and a little smaller, the nose and chin wider, the cheekbones less pronounced. Even so, it was an incredibly good likeness, drawn from the memory of a man who’d seen that face only briefly. Biometric facial recognition software did not work on ‘similar’ though. It used precise mathematical measurements to decide if two faces were the same. Allow that software any significant error margin and, as I now knew, you could drown in the resulting ‘matches.’
“How many versions of this face have you tried so far?” I asked curiously.
“Ninety-three, with a one per cent error margin on different features each time I ran them.” Shay’s fingers barely slowed as he remained focused on his screen. “This is going to take a while.” Meaning that talking wouldn’t speed it up.
Well, I should probably go and check on my team, anyway. I could grab a coffee while I was out there and bring a tea back for him. I couldn’t see Shay tearing himself away from his laptop any time soon, not now that he finally had a promising scent to follow. By lunch time, my cousin had some further news for me.
“Our Mr O’Hara transferred almost all of his funds to an offshore bank account at the end of August, two weeks after receiving the last of the payouts he was waiting for. I’m going to have to follow the money trail to get anything from there. That could take a couple of days, depending on how many times he bounced it around before deciding he’d hidden it well enough. He didn’t use the same solicitor to buy any property after that either.” The financial manoeuvrings were encouragingly suspicious, but ‘a couple of days’ was an unwelcome delay.
An hour later, we were sure that Brady O’Hara was our killer. Among his medical records was a note from one GP who’d asked about an old burn scar on the child’s right hand. The mother had explained that Brady, as an active toddler, had managed to reach up and wobble the ironing board enough to tip the iron over when she’d turned her back for a second. The tip had burned his poor little hand.
He’d been an accident prone kid, according to the records Shay found. A respectable family li
ke that, with a nice home in a nice neighbourhood, why would anyone suspect otherwise? Children were always giving themselves scrapes and bruises, falling off bikes or out of trees, tumbling downstairs, tripping up, sometimes breaking a bone or two in the process. Little Brady must have been well tutored and very convincing, the few times his mother had actually taken him to A&E.
It was time I called McKinnon.
“We've just identified our suspect, James,” I told him. “Our man grew up in Fort Augustus. His name is Brady O’Hara, but it looks like he changed his identity last year. Shay’s following the money trail now. It might take a few days to unravel and get the new name, but we should have an address too once he’s done with it. I’ve just emailed you O’Hara’s latest UK driving licence.”
“Aye, I’m looking at it now. You’re sure it’s him?”
“Ninety-nine-point-nine per cent, allowing for coincidence. Brady has a burn scar from an iron on his right hand. No criminal record either.”
There was a brief pause.
“You just go ahead and give your cousin a kiss on that brilliant little head of his from me, will you, Conall? That’s the best news I’ve heard in months. What do you need?”
“We know the earliest he could have moved now. I’d like Philips’ team to start looking into property sales and long-term rentals. Anything from the end of last August onwards that matches the kind of place we’re looking for. If they take everything west of the river and we take the east side, it’ll go a lot quicker. We might be able to find him quicker than my cousin if we get cracking straight away.”
“You’ve got it. Is there anything else?”
“Not just now, no, apart from having someone else keep on top of the calls in case there are any new sightings reported.”
“A new sighting would come straight to me, Conall. The phone teams have their instructions, don’t you worry.”
“He sounded pleased,” Shay said, as I lowered my phone.
“You heard all that?”
“He was hardly whispering. Still, I’m glad we’ve managed to cheer him up a bit. I think Saturday was harder on him than he’d like you to think. ‘Uneasy is the head that wears a crown.’ Henry IV and all that, to quote the bard properly. Although ‘heavy hangs the head’ does seem more apt sometimes. It’s no fun to be the one responsible for making the hard decisions, especially when they turn out badly.”
“You don’t hold him even partly responsible then, for what happened to Jackie?”
Shay blinked at me, a little surprised that I’d even ask.
“Of course not. Neither do you. We have more bloody sense. Looking back, after the event it’s easy for anyone to think that way. McKinnon used his best judgment, at the time, given the facts, opinions and options that were available to him. None of us were expecting such a rapid response from the killer, not even me, or I’d have argued my case more strongly. Should I have? Does that make me responsible? No. It’s just hindsight being a total bitch again. The only person to blame for Jackie’s murder is the man who committed it. So let’s get on with finding Mr Brady O’Hara shall we?”
Reassured by that answer I took his advice and got back to work.
At four thirty that afternoon, our suspect struck again. This time, he abducted a child, twelve-year-old Jimmy Stewart. The boy got off the bus at his usual stop, less than ten minutes’ walk from home. Two of his school friends, who lived further along the bus route waved to him out of the window as the bus pulled away. They were the last people to see him before he disappeared. He’d been taken somewhere between that bus stop and his house.
It had been snowing on and off for a couple of hours by then. When Caitlin and I arrived at the cordoned off street, Jimmy’s footprints could still be made out, marking his path along the pavement. They stopped short, a few hundred metres from his own gate. Philips was waiting for us when we got there. He must have come with McKinnon.
“There was a blue van parked up just here for a while, according to some of the neighbours,” he told us as I took a good look around.
The spot was on a bend, limiting the views in either direction. A high hedge bordered the pavement just there, blocking the view of anyone living on this side of the street. As for the facing houses, only someone looking out of the window at exactly the right moment would have seen the boy walk behind the van and fail to reappear. Even if they had, they might have thought nothing of it when the van drove off again a minute later. Just some lad getting picked up by his dad.
Nobody had been looking just then though. It wasn’t difficult to picture what might have happened here. The man could have been watching for Jimmy to appear. All he had to do was slide the side door open and climb out at the right time, perhaps pretending to sort through packages for the one he meant to deliver, until the boy reached him. He could have had Jimmy inside the van and out of sight in a flash. It wouldn’t be difficult to silence a child caught by surprise. A firm hand could clamp the boy’s mouth while he got him into the van. Maybe he’d got him in a chokehold and squeezed until the boy passed out. That accomplished, he could gag and bind him before making off with his prize.
McKinnon was in the house with a family liaison officer and June and Gary Stewart, Jimmy’s parents. Their two younger boys were there too.
This time, the killer hadn’t come for one of us. We were no longer easy targets. Instead, he’d come for a boy who’d been named after his maternal grandfather.
Jimmy Stewart’s mother, June, was James McKinnon’s only daughter.
“It makes a kind of twisted sense, I suppose,” Shay said, his voice sounding alarmingly flat over the phone. “O’Hara’s discovered that he can’t get to any of you directly any longer, not safely enough to suit him, anyway. Taking your Commander’s grandson instead may have seemed like a clever idea. A way to make you think twice about going after him. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to find him either. McKinnon’s received a lot of press over the years, and some articles mention his wife and daughter by name.”
“What about the timing?” I asked. “Tonight’s a half moon. Is that significant?”
“I doubt it. This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with his ritual kills. If it does, he’ll keep the boy until March 21st and kill him then.”
“And otherwise?”
“There’s no pattern here, Conall. He could kill him at any time if that’s what he intends to do. Or he could keep him as a hostage in case we find him, kill him at the last minute if we don’t back off. Look, the best thing I can do to help you find Jimmy is to keep following the money. There isn’t any way that I can speed that up any further.”
“You’ll check for the blue van?”
“I already did. It’s the same story as the morning Chris Arnold was abducted. I lost it in traffic between satellite shots. Five minutes between images, in town, is a long time, especially at one of the busiest times of the day. I can tell you that it’s the same size the white van he used then was. It may even be the same one, resprayed.”
“Alright. Listen, Shay, I don’t know how long I’m going to be out here. I want to see McKinnon before I come back there. If I’m held up and you want to get home, ask Walker to arrange a lift for you with the uniforms, okay? I want all four of my DCs to keep checking through those house sales until they quit for the day.”
“I will,” he promised and hung up. I turned my attention to Philips.
“Have the officers going door to door been asking about security cameras as they go?”
“They have,” he told me, “and we’re extending those enquiries along the whole length of the street, and to businesses on the main roads at either end too. If anyone caught that number plate, we’ll soon know about it.”
That made me think of something.
“There was a little bank on the corner, opposite the end of this street, wasn’t there, Caitlin?”
“There was.” Her eyes widened slightly. “Do you think their security camera may have caught him if
he drove out that way?”
“It’s certainly worth checking. Come on. Let’s get back there and see who we need to talk to about accessing that footage. Maybe they haven’t all left for the day yet.”
They hadn’t. The branch was closed, but the manager and a couple of her staff were still there. They opened up for us after examining our warrant cards through the glass door. They must have noticed the unusual amount of police activity going on out there, with the street across from them cordoned off like that.
We got our number plate, but when we ran a check on it, we found that it was out of circulation. It had been stripped from a scrapped vehicle. We could put out an alert on it and did immediately, but the likelihood of it ever being seen on the road again was close to zero. We had no way of knowing how many such plates Brady O’Hara may have acquired.
Once again, our killer had left no useful trail for us to follow.
Twenty-Five
Shay
I kept working, the same as before, after Conall’s call despite the cold hard knot that it had left in my stomach. It was no good letting my mind turn to thoughts of what Jimmy Stewart might be going through.
The bank that Brady first moved his money to had been a tough nut to crack, but I’d managed to find my way into their system by then. Again, he’d left a token minimum deposit behind, just a few thousand, before bouncing the rest of his money elsewhere. While my carefully coded packages began to look for cracks in the next set of walls they needed to sneak past, I went back to looking through the O’Hara family history.
I knew what his parents had left Brady, but had there been any earlier inheritances, from other relatives, that I was not yet aware of? Brady had not been a wealthy young man up until last summer. He’d been working for Edinburgh City Council, an office job with a take home pay of a little over fifteen hundred a month. That was a better income than many low-paid workers could claim, but it certainly didn’t allow him the same standard of living that he’d been accustomed to as a child. I doubted he missed his family home, despite its affluence. If I was right about him, he’d suffered some mind shattering traumas in that house.
Death in the Black Wood Page 22
