The Domino Killer

by Neil White

  The top stair creaked like a crack in the darkness, enough to make her jump, and she put her hand to her chest, the fast rhythm of her heart fluttering against her fingers. Her breaths got a little faster as she descended, taking each step slowly. There was a door at the bottom that went into the living room and it loomed ahead like a trap. She stood in front of it, giving small nods, steadying herself.

  The handle creaked as the door opened into the living room. The moon at the back of the house shone silvery light along the room but it didn’t make her feel any safer. Dust danced in the moonlight.

  She could have gone out through the front door, but where would she go? It wouldn’t make the electricity come back on. Gina peered through the living-room window. The lights were on in other houses. It wasn’t a power cut. She thought about going to the house next door and asking for help from the man who lived there, just to lessen the menace she felt, but she dismissed it. That wasn’t her way, never had been. She didn’t play the little woman role, needing the big brave man to help her.

  The garage was attached to the house and accessible through the kitchen. As she went through the living room, she told herself not to be so stupid. It was her home, she knew every inch. Nothing to fear in there. She found the drawer that contained all the junk, the half-used packs of batteries, the tin with reels of cotton inside, some food scales she never used, wooden skewers that had spilled out of the packet, and found her torch. She clicked it on. It worked.

  She unlocked the door that led into the garage and stepped inside, swinging the beam around. It reflected back off muddy gardening tools and the treadmill that hadn’t been used for a while. An upright freezer was silent. Gina shone the torch to the floor and moved slowly among the boxes she needed to get rid of and broken electric fans, her holiday suitcases piled up alongside. She stumbled against her cross-trainer and reached round so she could pull down the cover on the fuse box.

  Gina frowned. The box contained a row of switches, each for a different circuit in the house. The sockets for each floor, the lights for each floor. She’d had to go to the box many times, because even a blown bulb could trip a switch. Whenever the circuit was tripped, a switch would be down, and sometimes it would trip the whole circuit and the larger red switch would be down too. The only switch that was down was the large master switch, so she couldn’t work out which individual circuit had tripped.

  She flicked the master switch upright and with relief she heard the house come alive again. The freezer in the garage hummed. A sliver of light appeared around the door back to the kitchen. The radio started to play. She should have turned on the light in the garage before she came in. She was still in darkness, only her torch lighting her way.

  As she stepped backwards, looking down to see what she was standing on, all her senses went into overdrive. A prickle of fear shot along her spine. The hairs on her arms stood proud. Her chest tightened, her throat clenched.

  The large garage door that opened upwards and outwards wasn’t closed properly. A thin line of streetlight crept onto the concrete garage floor. It shouldn’t be like that. She never used that door. It was always closed, her car left on the drive. Had she locked it, though? It wasn’t linked to the alarm, which covered just the doors into the house. And the circuit board? No circuit tripped. Just the power turned off. As if someone had found their way into the garage and flicked off the power to entice her down there.

  She swung the beam round in a panic, trying to move towards the door into the kitchen.

  A face. Pale in the torchlight, eyes glaring, teeth bared.

  She screamed.

  Sixty-four

  Sam’s journey home didn’t take him long, all of the traffic gone. As he swung his car into his cul-de-sac, the lights were off downstairs. Fear jolted through him, but he relaxed when he went inside and saw the light from their bedroom, just a blue glow of the television, fanning out across the landing.

  He looked into the living room. Ruby was lying on the sofa, her head on a pillow, the television on but the volume set low. She was more interested in her phone. He tousled her hair. She looked up and smiled.

  ‘I’ll go check on everyone else,’ he said, and tiptoed up the stairs, knowing that the doors to his daughters’ rooms would be ajar. He looked in on each, as he always did, and the sight of them always made him smile, however his day had been. Nothing so innocent as a child asleep.

  When he went into his own bedroom, Alice was propped up on her pillows. She was watching a reality show about some nonentities whose lives were chaotic enough to warrant being exposed to the world.

  ‘Hi,’ he whispered, not wanting his daughters to wake.

  Alice smiled. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Slowly. It feels like we’re pulling everything together, but…’ He shrugged. ‘These things are elusive.’ He didn’t mention that Brabham had thrown him off the case.

  ‘Are you coming to bed?’ she said. ‘You’ve been working hard.’

  ‘Not long,’ he said. ‘I just need to check something out.’ And he held up the sheaf of papers he’d printed out at the station and brought into the house.

  Alice just smiled and said, ‘Okay.’

  It wasn’t okay, of course, Alice worried about how hard he worked, but this was different. This was personal.

  He went back downstairs and spread the papers from the No One Tells site over the dining-room table. He made a coffee, knowing it was going to be a long night.

  Something was troubling him, though, had been for most of the day. It was as if the answer was just out of reach, like a distant figure in the mist or faint scratches at the window. Was it in the papers, or was it something else, something more obvious, or something he’d heard but not processed?

  The papers contained a long list of numbers and times but Sam had an unerring sense that the answer was somewhere in there. They were Sam’s favourite type of clue: something methodical to work through, slow and steady, looking for patterns, a recurring number, something out of sequence.

  Human behaviour is just that, behavioural; it follows patterns. When someone does something different, it stands out. Like someone taking longer to get home than usual or arriving to work late. A sudden spring clean of a house. Driving a different route. The papers from No One Tells were better than that, because they were incontrovertible, hard numbers, computer data revealing a fact that was hard to explain away.

  Everyone who connects to the internet has their own specific address, a series of digits that tells the internet provider where to send the information. That’s the IP address. Sam had worked on frauds where IP addresses were important, like fraudulent online auctions. He knew how they worked.

  The data from No One Tells contained all the IP addresses used by the vodkagirl poster whenever she logged onto the site. Or he, as Sam thought, if Proctor was posing as vodkagirl.

  It’s never as easy as that, though, because an IP address cannot identify the specific computer, just the internet address, so people who share the same wireless connection will share the same address. What is useful, however, is that the IP address can provide some geographical information, almost like an area code.

  What Sam noticed straight away was that the numbers all seemed different, almost random. Either vodkagirl logged on in different places, like using public Wi-Fi in cafés, or, as Sam suspected, she used a proxy server. Using the internet leaves a trail, digital footprints showing your every move, but if someone surfs the net using a proxy site, the trail ends there. Vodkagirl was hiding behind someone else’s connection, and there were enough internet proxy servers that were free and with no prospect of them ever giving out who’d visited their site.

  Proxy sites provided people with privacy when they wanted to visit the darker corners of the internet with no fear of being found out. They were also the refuge for criminals, because they left no trace, which was why the authorities, particularly in the United States, ran some of their own. There was no better way to watch crimi
nals than to get them to operate right in front of you.

  Sam scanned the list quickly. There were hundreds of numbers, trawling through the list could take him all night, and for a moment he remembered Brabham’s words, that he should leave the investigation alone. But then he thought back to Ellie, and that burn of her loss, still white-hot, made the effort seem worthwhile.

  He booted up his laptop and did a quick internet search to find a site that would look up IP addresses. There were a lot, and most were prepared to provide some information for free, usually just the location of the internet provider’s nearest connection, which could be within ten yards, or could be five miles away. If you wanted more, it cost, which was where they made their money.

  He took a sip of his coffee, he needed to be alert for this, and then went to the list. There was only one place to start: the top. He typed the first IP address into the search engine, just a sequence of numbers separated by decimal points. When he pressed enter, it gave him a location: Seattle. There it was: the first proxy server. He’d been right: vodkagirl was hiding. He ran through it with a red pen and resolved to keep on looking. Sam was seeking the mistake, the time vodkagirl forgot to go through a proxy and used a home internet connection. If it provided a link with Proctor, it might be enough to persuade Brabham to go deeper.

  It was going to be a very long night.

  Sixty-five

  Gina ran for the door into the kitchen. The man lunged at her, grabbed her sleeve. She yanked her arm away and threw the torch at him. She pushed at the door.

  The light inside made her blink. She whirled round, to close the door and lock it, but he was too quick, too strong. He charged at the door, throwing Gina back, her head hitting the handle of a drawer on the other side of the kitchen.

  She groaned, dazed, but she had to keep going. She scrambled backwards, getting ready to run for the front door. Fight or flight, that was the choice. Something told her flight was best, that noise was her friend. Just get onto the street. Shout, scream, anything to attract attention, so that the curtain-twitchers she hated so much would come to her aid.

  The hard thud of a booted foot stopped her. It struck her hard in the face, delivered with venom, and her jaw cracked. Her world faded and Gina groaned as she fell to the floor again. The sound of the radio was more distant. The footsteps that came towards her were slow and deliberate. She opened her eyes and the view ahead was greyed out. She coughed, and then winced with pain as a stream of blood spewed onto the floor.

  The pain sparked some alertness. She had to get out.

  She tried to crawl along the floor but she was too slow. He grabbed her hair, making her yelp, the agony of her jaw making her dizzy. She tried to kick out, but it was weak, impotent.

  He dragged her by her hair towards the living room, the slipperiness of the linoleum giving way to the burn of the carpet. She reached upwards and grabbed his wrists, to take the strain from her hair, the pain excruciating, but it just made it easier for him. Her sweat pants were dragged down her hips as she was pulled along the carpet, her sweatshirt rising up. She felt exposed, vulnerable.

  The fireplace shuddered as she was thrown against it and she lay back, sucking in breaths, despite the pain as the air rushed in. The metal grate felt cold on the back of her head.

  His boot smashed into her face again, catching her nose this time, and her head clanged hard against the grate. Blood sprayed in an arc.

  Gina couldn’t move now. Her head throbbed and she drifted in and out of consciousness. He pulled at her legs. The radio still played; sometimes she could hear it, and sometimes she couldn’t. He dragged her by her feet. She was powerless to stop it as her head bounced along the carpet. Her ankles hurt, pushed up tightly against each other, but then she realised he’d bound them.

  She took long breaths, her mouth open, the metallic taste of blood in her throat. Every part of her face roared with pain. Despite this, she swallowed and grimaced and said, ‘What do you want?’

  The words came out muffled and shards of pain made lights dance in front of her eyes.

  He stepped forward and her eyes closed in recognition. She’d hung onto some vain hope that this was just a burglary gone wrong, or some sex attacker she could fight off, but she’d known all along who it was: Mark Proctor.

  ‘Where’s the box?’ he said, snarling.

  ‘Box?’

  ‘You know which box. The one from my workshop. Where is it?’

  ‘I haven’t got it.’

  He gripped her hair and pulled her head back. ‘Answer the question,’ he yelled, spittle flicking onto her cheeks.

  ‘I don’t know, I really don’t,’ Gina said, her eyes wide with fear, blood pooling on the floor beneath her mouth.

  He considered that for a moment, his fingers still clenched around her hair.

  ‘Is that all you want, the box?’ Gina said, swallowing, grimacing. ‘I can help you find it.’

  ‘No,’ Proctor said, letting go of her hair. ‘I’ve come to balance the books.’

  Gina tried to sit up but he reached out with the sole of his boot and pushed her back down.

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Gina said, sucking in air. ‘What do you mean, balance the books?’

  ‘It’s what I do. Finance is all about balancing the books.’

  ‘Not in your case,’ she said. She gulped down some blood. ‘Your books don’t mean anything.’

  ‘Oh, they do,’ he said. ‘It all depends on what the people looking at them want to see. Sometimes it’s all an illusion. Or misdirection. Take this.’ He gestured towards her. ‘What do you think people will see? A burglar? A rapist?’

  Gina’s eyes flickered at that.

  Proctor smiled, although the coldness in his eyes made it more of a grimace. ‘You wish it was only that, don’t you?’ He knelt down and tugged at her sweat pants, eased them the rest of the way over hips, exposing her pubic hair and the tops of her thighs. ‘I could make it look authentic, to throw them off the scent, because I’ve never done that. But you know that.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘That I’ve never raped anyone or abused anyone. I just made it look that way. I’m not one of those sickos. I can control what I feel.’ He reached out to touch her thigh, traced his fingernail along the skin towards her pubis.

  Her stomach clenched.

  He shook his head. ‘Not my style.’ He reached for the waistband of her pants and yanked them back up.

  ‘So what is your style?’ she said, nauseous from the pain and the taste of her own blood and the hard pounding of her heart.

  Proctor straightened himself and went into the dining part of the room. He returned with a high-backed chair. He set it in front of her and sat down.

  ‘Ripples,’ he said. ‘I told you earlier.’

  Anger welled inside her, taking away some of the agony. ‘Cut the enigmatic shit.’

  His eyelids flickered in surprise but his tone remained the same, calm and measured. ‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘Of the people you think I might have killed, were any raped? Assaulted? What about young Ellie Parker, your own case?’

  Gina didn’t respond.

  ‘You know the answer: none. I’m no pervert who can’t control himself. Do you think I couldn’t get sex if I wanted? Look at me, I’m a handsome guy. An intelligent guy. No, I seek something more subtle. I’m an observer of the human condition.’

  ‘You’re a murderer.’

  He shrugged. ‘Labels, labels, labels.’

  Gina closed her eyes. She didn’t want to indulge his ego, because that was all it was, his need for admiration. She didn’t want to give him what he wanted, but through the pain coursing through her, and the hatred for his invasion of her home, she knew that if he was talking, she was still alive. People might have heard her scream in the garage. Police cars might be on their way. One thing the exploration of his ego would give her was the most crucial weapon of all: time.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, opening her eyes, panting hard. ‘I’ll
play your game. Why are you different?’

  ‘I told you, it’s all about the ripples. Nothing I’ve ever done was about an immediate need, the scream of my desires. They were just vessels, all of them.’

  ‘You’re not making sense.’

  ‘I am, when you really think about it. You were a police officer for a long time, and you were after me, except you didn’t know who I was. Where did you look?’

  ‘Where else do we find creeps like you? The sex offenders register, as it grew. Local intelligence. Any sex offenders who’d moved into the locality.’

  ‘You thought that little girl was a fantasy for me, something I couldn’t control?’ Proctor said, astonishment in his voice. ‘That I liked the dirty pictures, but when that wasn’t enough I moved onto the real deal?’