‘Sure. Just know I’m here.’
‘Thanks. How are things with Stephen?’
Isaac looked guiltily at the floor. ‘Good. He’s moving in.’
Erika nodded.
‘Don’t judge me,’ he added.
‘I’m the last to judge,’ she said, holding up her hands. ‘I’ll see you soon.’ She gave him a grin and walked off down the long corridor.
38
Erika had called her team for an early morning briefing. She stood in front of the whiteboards with the crime scene photos of Gregory Munro and the new addition of Jack Hart. They were just settling down when Peterson arrived.
‘Peterson is back, and he’s brought decent coffee,’ said Moss, seeing him enter with a large tray of coffees.
‘Here you go, boss,’ said Peterson, offering Erika the large tray of Starbucks cups.
‘Where were you yesterday?’ she asked, taking a cup.
‘I had a dodgy Chinese,’ he said, not missing a beat.
‘Okay, well, I’m glad you’re back,’ she said, giving him a smile.
‘Thanks, boss,’ he said, looking relieved. He moved around the room, handing out coffee to the other officers.
‘So, this dodgy Chinese. Where did you meet her?’ asked Moss with a wicked grin, leaning up to take a cup from the rapidly emptying tray.
‘It was Kung Pao Chicken,’ Peterson said.
‘You got her name too! She sounds classy: double-barrelled.’
‘Piss off, Moss,’ he said laughing.
‘Okay. Right, let’s concentrate,’ said Erika. Everyone in the room settled down to listen. ‘So here we are again. We now have two murders, two weeks apart. Both victims live within the same fifteen-mile radius. I can confirm both were killed in exactly the same way: drugged and asphyxiated with a plastic bag.’
She paused as a murmur went around the room.
‘One was a regular family GP. The other was one of the most well-known faces on British television. So, as I always say, let’s go back to the beginning. And there are no stupid questions.’
‘They’re both male,’ said DC Warren.
‘Yes, we can see that from the crime scene photos,’ said Erika, pointing at the two men lying naked on their beds. ‘And?’
‘They were subdued with a date rape drug administered to an alcoholic drink inside their property, which aided the suffocation with the plastic bag,’ said Singh.
‘Yes, and it’s the same specific type of bag used in both murders. A “suicide” or “exit” bag. These are available to buy from specialist sites on the Internet. So we need to check out which sites sell them, and get a purchase history, a list of credit card transactions and addresses.’
‘They were both of a similar height,’ said Moss. ‘Gregory Munro was older, and wasn’t as fit and healthy as Jack Hart.’
‘The killer adjusted the dose for the size of his victims. Jack Hart was given a higher dose than Gregory Munro, so potentially he had studied them from afar,’ said Erika.
‘They were both stalked, at night,’ added Peterson.
‘Why do you use the word “stalked”?’
‘The killer could have already been inside their houses when they got home… He probably stalked them round the house, watched them. It might not have been the first time,’ said Peterson.
‘Yeah, it was planned. He staked out the houses beforehand. He mocked up a fake security firm leaflet for Gregory Munro; he knew how he was going to get into Jack Hart’s house,’ added Moss.
‘Maybe he’s ex-military? He left virtually no DNA evidence,’ said Singh.
‘Or he works in a hospital or pharmacy. He was able to get hold of liquid flunitrazepam and a syringe… We found the cap of a syringe under Jack Hart’s bed. Although you can get all that stuff off the Internet these days,’ said DC Warren.
‘That could link him to Gregory Munro,’ said Peterson.
‘But how does it link him to Jack Hart?’ said Erika.
‘There’s no history of gay relationships or a gay past with Jack?’ asked Peterson.
‘Not that we know of,’ said Erika. ‘His wife is going to formally identify the body later today, but obviously we need to tread easy when we question her. Gregory Munro has a son; Jack Hart has two small children. They’re both estranged from the mother. Has anyone got anything to say about that?’
There was silence.
‘There must be some reason why this guy is targeting these two men!’ said Erika, drawing a large black circle on the whiteboard around the photos of the two men.
‘But what the bloody hell does a local GP have in common with a tabloid TV presenter?’ asked Moss.
‘Well, we need to find that out, and fast,’ said Erika. ‘The link will be to the killer. Whoever this is, chose the victims. Watched them in the days leading up to the murders Now, there haven’t been any fingerprints recovered from either murder scene, or from Jack Hart’s next-door neighbour whose daughter’s nursery was broken into, but we did get an ear print from the outside of the back door at Jack Hart’s house. Have we had anything back, Crane, from – where is it again?’
‘The National Training Centre for Scientific Support to Crime Investigation,’ said Crane. ‘I’ve just heard that they’re about to run this through their database of over two thousand ear prints. So we could get a call any time.’
‘I’m not holding out much hope, but two thousand ears – those odds are better than I thought,’ said Erika.
‘I’ve just had the pictures back off the memory card we confiscated from the journalist,’ said Moss, looking at her computer.
‘Why has it taken so long?’ asked Erika.
‘The metal contacts were bent; the photographer probably bent them when he yanked the card out of the camera and swallowed it,’ she said.
‘Okay, let’s put them up on the projector,’ said Erika. DC Warren grabbed a multimedia projector off a shelf at the back of the incident room, went over to Moss’s PC and plugged it in. After a couple of minutes of positioning, they had it trained on the whiteboard.
Erika turned off the lights, plunging the room into darkness, and then an image of a car on a busy street, surrounded by people, appeared on the back wall.
‘Okay, boss, I’ll just go through these,’ said Moss, clicking with her mouse. A series of similar photos flashed by, and then some paparazzi pictures of an unknown celebrity leaving the Ivy restaurant in a car with tinted windows.
‘Okay, here we go. These are Jack Hart’s house.’
The first picture was of Jack Hart arriving back at his house on the night of his murder. Moss flicked through the images, taken in a rapid-fire, almost like jerky animation. Jack leaving the black cab, walking to his gate, opening it, stopping for a moment to turn and say something. Then Jack moving to his front door, reaching into his pocket and pulling his key out, opening the front door and going inside.
‘Okay, so the paps outside got him going indoors,’ said Moss. ‘The time stamp on this last photo is… 12.57 a.m.’
She flicked through photos, and the perspective changed to the back garden of Jack Hart’s house. She stopped at a photo taken at a low angle, looking up to the back bedroom window, where the light was on.
‘Jesus. That bloody photographer was in the back garden before Jack Hart was murdered,’ said Erika.
The view then jumped forward to pictures taken on the flat roof directly outside the bedroom window. The curtain was open and there was a view of the bed from the side. Then, again like animation, the naked figure of Jack Hart walked in. He held a towel in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. He moved to the nightstand over by the opposite window at the front of the house, put the bottle down and sat on the edge of the bed.
‘Stop! What’s that!’ cried Erika. ‘Go back, two pictures.’
‘Shit, look! There, under the bed,’ said Peterson.
Jack was sitting on the bed with his naked back to the camera. A clear silhouette of a figure could be
made out, crouching under the bed.
‘Hang on, I can zoom the image in,’ said Moss, rapidly clicking and pushing the mouse across the mouse pad. The picture enlarged and shifted so the whiteboard was filled with the dark grainy image of a figure crouching under the bed. Two hands could just be made out, fingers splayed on the carpet, and the bottom half of the face had been caught in the light, showing the tip of a nose and the mouth.
It was the mouth that disturbed Erika the most. It was grinning widely and the teeth were on show.
‘Jesus Christ. He was already inside the house, waiting for him,’ said Erika.
Breaking the silence that followed in the incident room, a phone began to ring. Crane snatched it up and began to talk in a low voice.
‘Can you make it any bigger, Moss?’ asked Erika. The photo zoomed in on the figure under the bed, but the image was too blurred and grainy.
‘I’ll get it over to the cyber crime guys and see if they can enhance it any more,’ said Moss.
‘Boss, you’re going to want to hear this,’ said Crane, excitedly, having just put the phone down.
‘Please tell me it’s something – some kind of evidence about the man who is doing this?’ said Erika.
‘It is evidence. But it’s not a bloke.’
‘What?’
‘Nils Åkerman has been working on the small amount of DNA he swabbed from the ear print on the back door of Jack Hart’s house, and some samples of skin cells found on the outside of the suicide bag used to kill him. It’s a woman.’
‘What?’
‘It’s from a white woman. Nils ran the DNA through the national crime database, and there’s no match, no previous convictions – but the DNA is female. It’s a woman who’s doing this.’
A murmur went round the incident room.
‘But what about the fact that we’ve linked the two murders?’ asked Peterson.
‘We have linked the two murders,’ said Erika. ‘What? The link is now thrown into doubt because it's a woman?’
‘Shit. Whoever she is, she’s got a good lead on us. We’ve been looking for a bloke,’ said Moss.
They let that sink in for a moment. Erika went back to the whiteboard and looked at the figure under the bed, the bottom half of the face emerging from the shadows with a row of grinning teeth.
‘Okay. So we go back to the beginning. We re-examine every piece of evidence. We revisit interviews with local residents. And bring that bloody photographer back in for questioning. We’re looking for a woman. A female serial killer.’
39
Simone arrived home after a long shift at work and closed the front door, drinking in the silence in the gloomy hallway. Sloughing off her coat, she went to her computer, which was tucked into the nook under the stairs. She booted it up, logged into the chat room and started to type:
NIGHT OWL: Hey, Duke. U there?
A few moments passed, and DUKE began to type.
DUKE: Hey, Night Owl. What’s up?
NIGHT OWL: I saw him again. Stan. My husband.
DUKE: Yeah? You okay?
NIGHT OWL: Not really. I knew he wasn’t real, but he was there, as real as anything.
DUKE: Did you start the new meds?
NIGHT OWL: Yeah.
DUKE: Which one?
NIGHT OWL: Halcion.
DUKE: What’s ur dosage? 0.125 mg?
NIGHT OWL: Yeah.
DUKE: Visual disturbances are a side effect.
NIGHT OWL: Tell me about it!
DUKE: I’ve been there, done that. They took me up to 0.5 mg and it still did nothing: endless days of no sleep… So what u up 2?
Simone stared at the screen. It blurred slightly and she rubbed at her tired, scratchy eyes. She’d suffered from insomnia for years. It stemmed from when she’d been taken into care, when she’d been afraid to close her eyes after being put to bed at night in the children’s home.
Over the following years, twenty and counting, she had learned to cope with the insomnia, to cope with the feeling of numb exhaustion, the feeling that her body was slowly rotting from the inside. She had learned to function as a normal human being.
She craved sleep – it occupied her thoughts constantly – but when it came to bedtime, a phrase that seemed like a bad joke whenever she heard it, her body went into a cold panic. Panic at the knowledge that sleep would be out of her grasp, that she would spend endless hours lying in bed watching the red glow of the digital clock, thoughts spinning wildly out of control in her mind.
Fear, Simone knew, was particularly prevalent at night. When everyone else seems to have departed the world, the insomniacs are alone, stranded in the half-light. Simone’s insomnia had guided her into an abusive relationship and an unplanned pregnancy. She’d lost the baby soon after her shotgun wedding to Stan. It was ordinary, the doctor had said. Extremely common to lose the baby the first time you become pregnant. But it hadn’t felt ordinary. She’d been devastated. She had thought her life was finally coming right, and she’d been so excited to meet and care for the little life growing inside her.
As a newly-wed, Simone had thought that sharing a bed might help her insomnia, but again she found herself staring into the darkness. She would watch Stan as he moved through the stages of sleep: the gentle rise and fall of his broad chest, the twitch of his eyelids as his eyes flitted underneath.
Sometimes, without warning, the rhythm of Stan’s laboured breathing would break, and his eyes would open with a hungry, vacant stare. And then, at the time of night when Simone felt most vulnerable, exhausted and unattractive, he would wordlessly climb on top of her and part her legs with the back of his hand – almost dismissively, as if her legs were a tedious obstacle to what he wanted.
When they were first married, she’d endured this. The sex was often rough. It often left her in pain, but she’d thought that it was his desire for her that caused him to lose control. And besides, she’d felt that it was her job as a good wife. It was her job to make the right noises, to perform enjoyment.
And she’d longed to be rewarded again with a baby; to be given another chance to be a mother.
Then, one night when he was pounding into her, he’d bitten her on the breast. It had shocked her. The shock had almost overridden the pain. He’d lifted his head, her blood glistening on his teeth, and just carried on.
He had apologised profusely the next morning. There were tears and promises to never do it again, and for a while the late-night sex had stopped.
Then, slowly, things reverted back. It had coincided with a time where Simone was getting no sleep, not even a few fitful minutes. She was weak and desperate, and she let him do it. As the months, and then the years passed, she lost all fight, which only seemed to fuel her husband’s dark desires. She wondered how her life had ended up this way. Hadn’t she had dreams? Weren’t there things she’d wanted to do with her life: travel, escape, become someone else?
Her saviour would be a baby, she was sure – but a baby never came, and tests finally showed she was unable to conceive, a result of the complications in her first pregnancy. The devastation sharpened the problems in her marriage to an angry spike. Simone was raped repeatedly, and then left awake in the darkness in pain. Every time, Stan would leave her and go back to the land of sleep.
Sometimes, she thought she would be able to cope with the violence and the abuse if only she could sleep. The lack of sleep was more of a torture. It was unknown, malevolent. The chemicals in her brain were conspiring to keep her in the world, when others could leave and disappear into their dreams.
By the time Simone had reached thirty-five, her husband was drinking heavily and they had fallen into debt. Around the same time, they had the Internet put in, and during her sleepless nights Simone discovered a pinprick of light: online chat rooms. At first, she gravitated towards support groups, speaking to other battered and abused wives whose only outlet for their fears was talking through their experiences. But she saw her own situation reflected back in their p
osts, and from the outside thought them pathetic.
Then she met Duke.
Duke, like her, was an insomniac. He listened to her without judgement. They also talked about normal stuff: TV shows they liked, funny things that had happened to them. They flirted.
Duke described himself as tall and dark (which Simone doubted) but then she described herself as tall and blonde (which was also a lie). They would go off and have private chats, in cosy virtual spaces, and sometimes it would get hot and heavy. He would describe what he wanted to do to her sexually; she responded. He made her feel loved and desired.
She opened up to him about her situation. Told him about her abusive husband, who she never named. She told Duke everything. Her deepest secrets, desires and fantasies. He did the same in return. The only thing they held back from one another was where they lived, and their real names. He was DUKE, and she was NIGHT OWL.
She couldn’t remember exactly when their conversations had taken a darker turn. It had happened one night after she’d been raped. She’d started to refer to it as that – rape – and not as sex. She’d been complaining that her doctor had prescribed yet another batch of pills which weren’t making a dent in her insomnia. And Duke had written:
DUKE: Maybe the pills would work better on yur husband!
She’d stared at the screen for a long time. Then she’d carried on chatting.
It had taken her two more nights to pluck up the courage. She’d cooked Stan spaghetti bolognese, and as the hot tomato sauce had bubbled away on the stove, she’d opened one of the capsules of Zopiclone, the latest sleeping pill she’d been prescribed. She remembered separating the capsule and holding the two halves over the large steaming pan… Then stirring the white powder into the food.
The Night Stalker: A chilling serial killer thriller (Detective Erika Foster Book 2) Page 16
