by Ashley Dyer
Emma took his words as a good sign and smiled gratefully at him.
He glanced at Ruth. She had been a cop for long enough to know that the prognosis for habitually heavy drinkers was never good in trauma cases. She explained this to Emma.
The doctor went on: “Greg’s drinking pattern means there’s an additional risk attached to anesthesia, even before we operate,” he said. “But the risk of permanent and catastrophic brain damage is even greater if we don’t.”
Emma nodded, dumbly, and the doctor turned to Ruth with a slight lift of his shoulders. He looked young to be doing this kind of work. Not dealing with death as such—Ruth herself was just twenty-four when she worked on her first murder scene—but what came after. She had always been grateful, back then, that the task of breaking the bad news to a victim’s family was on others’ shoulders. How much harder it must be to talk families through life-and-death situations, helping them to make decisions that, should things go badly, could make life worse than death.
“Emma, he’s asking for your permission to operate,” she said.
“Mine? But we’re—I haven’t even seen Greg in over a month. We . . . oh, God.” Her shoulders slumped. “I asked for a divorce.”
“You’re still listed as his next of kin,” the doctor said, his tone apologetic. “If there was anyone else . . . But as I understand it, he has no other family.”
Greg’s wife pressed her fingers to her lips.
“Emma?” Ruth prompted.
Emma slid her hands to her cheeks, as though physically holding herself together. “Tell me what to do,” she begged.
Given what she had already done, it really wasn’t her place to say, but Ruth said what was expected of her, anyway: “I don’t see that you have a choice.”
Emma brought her hands down from her face and clasped them in her lap. “Then you have my permission,” she said.
Chapter 6
In the critical care unit, Carver dreams.
Sefton Park, seven days ago, a light dusting of snow, and bitterly cold.
She is seated on a flat stone under a tree lit by fairy lights, a frozen waterfall as the backdrop to the staged scene. He sees her first from a distance of thirty feet, and his heart stops. Blond and slender, she is wearing skinny jeans with wedge sandals, a blue peasant top. Her hair, silky and long, is combed in a center parting.
The backdrop, her blond hair, the center parting, her clothing—it’s a tableau of the honeymoon photograph he keeps on the dresser in his sitting room.
Emma, he thinks. Before he knows it, he is running.
Twenty feet in, he slows, every nerve crackling with tension, his heart stuttering.
It isn’t Emma. He murmurs, “Thank God,” though he is not proud of it.
“Greg!” Ruth calls to him from the pathway. “Stop.”
He turns, sees his shoe marks tracking back through the frosted grass. There are no other tracks. Already, he is thinking timelines—the exact time of the snow flurry and the frost that came after it will tell them when the body was placed here.
“Do not touch the body,” Ruth commands.
He swivels to look again. Tattoos covering every inch of her flesh make it seem that she is wearing a long-sleeved top. A wash of light from LEDs festooned in the tree gives her face a bluish cast, and frost glitters like tiny jewels in her eyelashes.
“Walk back to me,” Ruth says. “You know the drill: take the same path; match the footwear marks, if you can.”
Next he is in the postmortem room, although he doesn’t remember getting there. The body is lain out on the table. By now, he knows that the victim is Kara Grogan.
As he watches, the mortuary technicians undress the body, taking pictures as they go, and the tattoos inflicted on Kara Grogan’s body are revealed. The camera flashes illuminate the ink patterns: heads on grotesquely elongated necks, their faces upturned, featureless. There are gaps between the clusters, and from these spaces eyes stare out—thousands of them.
But the eyes scored on Tali’s body were closed, or half closed. The ink on Kara’s body is black, when all of the other victims were tattooed using blue ink. And the eyes tattooed on Kara are all wide open. Some have an avid look, others appear almost threatening. He is feverish to write this down in case he forgets, because in dream logic, he knows beyond all doubt that the tattoos hold the answer to the puzzle—and to the identity of the killer.
The mortuary technician lifts a hank of Kara’s hair, ready to comb it for trace evidence, revealing a pair of Ola Gorie silver millennium earrings. Carver knows exactly what they are, because he’d bought a pair for Emma as an engagement gift. She had worn them on their honeymoon, was wearing them in the honeymoon photo.
“What the f—?”
Ruth says, “Greg?”
He is breathing hard, seeing sparkles of light in front of his eyes.
“Greg, you’re hyperventilating,” Ruth says.
“If he’s going to pass out, mind it’s not over my body,” the pathologist says.
Ruth edges him to a corner of the postmortem room.
“Those earrings,” he says. “They’re Emma’s.”
“Like Emma’s, you mean?”
“No, they’re hers. They were a limited edition—hers went missing when I moved out. We had a row about it—she thought I’d stolen them.”
“We’ll check them for Emma’s DNA,” Ruth says.
Suddenly, he’s back at the postmortem table, and Kara’s body is naked. He hears a high-pitched snick—the sound of a sharp knife through flesh. He glances in question at the pathologist, but the doctor spreads his hands to show he isn’t holding a scalpel, and Carver knows he has not even touched the body, yet. They look down at her in unison. As they watch, a line opens up along the length of one of the tattooed necks. Snick, snick, snick, snick, snick—and the line becomes a gash.
Kara’s skin splits along the lines of the markings and begins to peel back in bloody strips. Kara screams, writhing in pain as her skin sloughs off, exposing muscle and tendons. Beneath the bloody strips of skin, something is moving.
Horrified, Carver backs away, but he cannot tear his eyes from her, and suddenly the skin of the girl’s face pares back and falls away and Carver sees Emma’s face, gory with Kara’s blood, her eyes huge with horror. His heart hammering, Carver turns to the people around him, begging them for help, but they are looking at him, and not at the body on the table. A sudden sharp beeping, and someone says, “You’ve set off the fire alarm.”
Nurses rushed to Greg Carver’s bedside. A deep-throated buzz almost drowned out the rapid beep of the cardiac monitor.
“He’s tachycardic,” the first said.
The second touched Carver’s hand. He twitched, throwing her off.
“Reactive to touch,” she said with a quick glance at her colleague.
Then she spoke directly to Carver, raising her voice over the noise of the machinery. “Mr. Carver? Greg—you’re in hospital. Everything’s fine. Greg—you’re safe. You need to calm yourself. Try to keep still. The doctor is coming.”
Carver’s right leg flicked, once, then, as the doctor arrived at his bedside, a series of shuddering contractions ran through his body.
“Hold him,” the doctor said. Swiftly and with steady hands, she increased the flow of propofol into the IV infusion.
Inside two minutes, the crisis was over, and Carver was stabilized. The doctor checked the time and made a note on Carver’s chart. The three exchanged a look that said, That was close. One nurse remained to check the monitors one last time and saw that tears were squeezing from under Carver’s eyelids and the thin strips of tape holding his eyes closed had lifted a little. She gently wiped his eyes and dried his cheeks, using a sterile swab, then applied new strips of tape.
Distraught, Carver reaches in to the mass of skin and blood that had been Kara, trying to recover his wife from the girl’s tortured remains. At last the pathologist seems to have noticed what’s happening on his p
ostmortem table, but instead of helping, he places a blindfold over Carver’s eyes.
“So you don’t contaminate the scene,” he says.
Chapter 7
Ordered to go home, Ruth Lake tried to get some rest, but every time she closed her eyes she saw Greg Carver staring at her from his armchair. She finally drifted off at around five a.m., jolted awake fifteen minutes later by her phone. It was Emma, calling to say that Greg had experienced some kind of seizure.
“Is he okay?”
“They’re doing another scan to check that the bullet hasn’t moved.”
“They haven’t removed it yet?”
“No—they need to insert a drainage tube into his brain first. The doctor said they had to sort out the brain swelling before anything else—remember?”
Did he? “Yes. Yes, of course he did.” For God’s sake, Ruth—you’ve got to get your shit together. “Sorry,” Ruth added. “But I thought they were sedating him?”
“They gave him a lower dosage of the anesthetic than usual because of his blood alcohol levels. He came out of the coma very briefly.”
Ruth sat up straight. “He woke up?”
She almost blurted out, It’s too soon! Said instead, “Did he say anything?”
“He wasn’t fully awake,” Emma said. “But he was getting there. They said it’s a good sign.”
“That’s—that’s great, Emma,” Ruth said, thinking she needed to get to Carver before he spoke to anyone about what happened. “I’m guessing they’ll keep him under until they get the pressure in his brain down to normal?”
“Yes.”
She suppressed a gasp of relief. “Would you do me a favor, Emma? Would you ring me when they decide it’s time to wake him up?”
“Of course,” Emma said. “You do know you saved his life?”
Ruth tasted bile at the back of her throat and swallowed hard. “This is important, Emma—you need to tell me before you talk to anyone else. Okay?”
“Okay.” She heard uncertainty in Emma’s voice. “Ruth, is there something you’re not telling me?”
Oh, so much . . . “I just need to know what’s happening,” Ruth said.
“Ruth, I’m sorry—this must be awful for you, too.”
“I have to go,” Ruth said. “Work.” This, at least, was true: DCI Simon Jansen, the senior investigating officer handling Greg’s shooting, had called a briefing at eight a.m.
Ruth arrived a few minutes after the hour. Jansen welcomed her with a nod and, with standing room only, she took up position at the back of the room, dropping her shoulder bag between her feet. Simon Jansen was a tall, somber man with dark hair, turning gray. He had thirty-five years on the job, but as a European police champion in judo, and one of three coaches to the national team, he wasn’t expected to retire anytime soon, and he was known to keep close control of his investigations. Ruth knew him as efficient, rigorous, and dispassionate to the point of ruthlessness. He had a team of ten detectives already in place, and another thirty uniform police were helping with house-to-house door knocking. The inquiry would be run entirely separate from the Thorn Killer investigation—standard procedure.
The owner of the flat downstairs had already been interviewed: he was out at a party, didn’t get back until the early hours. He said he’d neither heard nor seen anything unusual over the last few days. The house stood in its own grounds, and none of the street’s residents noticed anything suspicious—most of them had been roused from their beds by the police and ambulance services lights, or the chatter of the police helicopter as it searched the area.
CSIs were still going over Greg Carver’s house, but John Hughes, the crime scene manager, was at the meeting, and he reported that key areas had been wiped down, and only Ruth Lake’s and DCI Carver’s fingerprints were present in the flat.
“So if we’re going to have any chance of finding the shooter, the timeline for the hours leading up to the shooting is going to be crucial,” Jansen said. “What’ve we got?”
“He had no recent run-ins with local criminals, as far as I can make out,” a detective constable Ruth didn’t recognize said. “And no meetings last night. At least none he’d logged on his schedule.”
“DS Lake?” Jansen said.
She leaned off the wall. “I can’t help much,” she said. “But I guess my after-hours meeting to talk about the serial killings wasn’t on Carver’s schedule either.” It sounded like overexplanation, and Ruth was known as someone who didn’t say more than was strictly necessary. But she didn’t like to be caught on the back foot, either, and judged it best to get the fact of her rendezvous with Carver in before Jansen asked her directly. A few of the men shifted in their seats to take a sly peek at Carver’s late-night visitor.
“Did he say why it wouldn’t wait until today to have that conversation?”
She was ready for that. “He said he didn’t want to talk over the phone—but it was urgent.” Her answer contained a simple truth, and a complicated lie. Of course, she had already lied about her time of arrival, pushing it back by ten minutes; a few eyebrows raised over an unscheduled meeting was the least of her problems.
Jansen grunted. “So we’ve got Carver’s decision logs and policy files for the investigation to date,” Jansen said. “If he kept personal notes, I’d like to see them.”
John Hughes swiveled to look at Ruth and widened his eyes at her, as if to say, What the hell?
She had promised the CSM that she would tell Jansen about Carver’s missing files. You screwed up again, Ruth. Under normal circumstances she would never have expected John Hughes to cover for her, but these were not normal circumstances. Either he would, or he wouldn’t, so she took a breath, and said, “He didn’t share those with me, but I imagine he kept them in his flat somewhere?”
After a pause that seemed to last a minute but was only a second or two, Hughes said, “If he did, they’re not there now, or in his car. We did find an imprint on his bedroom carpet that suggests a large, heavy box had been resting there for some time. Also, A3-sized sheets of paper had been tacked to his bedroom wall until very recently.”
DCI Jansen rubbed a hand over his chin. Nobody spoke. At last, Jansen said, “What about his laptop?”
“The computer techs are looking at it,” Hughes said. “But it’s fully encrypted, per protocol.”
Jansen sucked his teeth. “Of course. It’s just paper files he leaves lying around.”
“There is a chance the password is written or encoded somewhere in his official paperwork, or on his mobile phone,” Hughes suggested.
“But we can’t rely on that.” Jansen gave a tight smile. “Well, we’ll just have to hope Carver didn’t give away any trade secrets, won’t we?” He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “All right. His mobile phone has already been taken into evidence—we need to know who he was talking to—and when.”
“The good news is he doesn’t password protect his mobile,” Hughes said. “So his phone logs, texts, and so on will be immediately available. His police e-mail account wouldn’t be accessible via his phone, but if he has a private account—”
“Okay, tell your guys to prioritize his phone.” Jansen located the DS who was managing task allocations. “We’re going to need multiple copies of his decision logs and policy files.” He pointed to two detectives seated near the front of the room. “You and you will sift through his paperwork for passwords, log-ins, codes—whatever.” His attention switched back to the task manager. “And I want someone to go through his credit cards, bank statements, cashpoint withdrawals—we need to know Carver’s exact movements for the last week. If he met with anyone, if his spending patterns changed, if he’s had a run-in with anyone—I want to know.”
Finally, he turned to Ruth Lake. “Meanwhile, if anything pops into your head, Sergeant . . .”
“I’ll let you know, sir.”
John Hughes was waiting for her as the team filed past on the corridor.
“Got a minute?” he said
.
She nodded toward the fire exit, and they walked up to the next landing.
“I thought you were going to tell Jansen about Greg’s unofficial file before the briefing.” Hughes had the weathered skin of a man who had enjoyed hiking and sailing since his schooldays. The lines on his face usually bore traces of laughter, but not right now.
“Yeah,” she said. “I meant to.”
“Why didn’t you?”
If she was honest with herself, she hadn’t really forgotten: telling Jansen that the files were gone when she knew exactly where they were was one lie too far, and she’d just put it off until it was too late to say anything.
“I’m sorry, John,” she said. “I dropped the ball on that one.”
He peered into her eyes. “Did you get any sleep?”
“Some.” Ruth reached into her shoulder bag and handed him a pair of shoes, already bagged.
He held them up to the light, peering in through the cellophane window of the paper bag.
“These are the ones you wore to meet with Greg?”
He seemed perplexed and she felt a spurt of anxiety. “That’s what you asked for.”
“Just—they look in good nick for having been through a snowstorm.”
“I was on the street, John, not walking up Ben Nevis. And I took them off as soon as I got home.”
He said, “Huh,” eyeing the contents of the bag dubiously.
“What?”
“I’ve already taken a squint at Carver’s phone logs—and right off the bat, I found an anomaly.”
Ruth felt a momentary stab of fear. He doesn’t know what you’ve been up to, she told herself, widening her eyes and clearing her mind of guilty thoughts.
“Great,” she said. “Anything I can work with?”
“Something you can explain.”
She stared earnestly into his face, repeating to herself, He doesn’t know.
“In your report, you said Greg called you at eleven twenty-five. But he actually called you twelve minutes before that.”
