Splinter in the Blood

by Ashley Dyer

  Parsons leaned back in his chair, thinking about it. “I’ll run it past the forensic psych, see what he thinks—but I’m not sure how it will help us to find the killer.”

  “If I get to know the victims as people,” Ruth said, “maybe I can work out what it is that attracts him.”

  “Character traits?” he said, finally in complete agreement with her. “Victimology?”

  It seemed it was all about textbooks and box ticking for Parsons.

  Ruth said, “Kara is fresh in people’s minds. I need to get to know Kara, sir.”

  “All right. You have the witness statements: go over those, see if anything stands out.”

  “I’ve already done that, sir—I need to talk to actual people.” She immediately regretted the slip in her mask of politeness.

  Parsons bristled. “Your colleagues talked to ‘actual’ people when they took the witness statements.”

  “Even so, I need to talk to the witnesses again.”

  He shook his head. “That could take months.”

  “It doesn’t need to,” she said. “I’ve selected a few that I think are worth a second look.”

  “Because?”

  “They’re lying,” she said.

  “Why on earth would you think that?”

  If she was honest, it was Carver’s angry scrawl in the margins of the transcripts that had persuaded her. She couldn’t tell Parsons that, but she could quote her former boss.

  “Their answers seem rehearsed,” she said. “Too many of them use exactly the same phrasing. Everyone is being too nice . . .”

  Parsons stared at her, flicking the corner of the log he’d been reading, his thumb making a repetitive zip zip ziiii-ip sound that quickly became irritating.

  “So,” he said, eyeing her as though he suspected her of trying to trick him into something, and he wasn’t about to fall for it, “you want to reinterview anyone that you believe has been holding back or hiding something?”

  “I do,” Ruth said.

  He seemed doubtful. “You must see how it looks, going back over old ground.”

  “It looks like thorough investigation, sir.”

  He tilted his head, showing that he was listening, but not yet convinced.

  “It looks like maybe we’ve found a new line of inquiry.” It hurt Ruth to use that inclusive “we,” but she needed an okay from Parsons to do this—the detectives who had done the original interviews would not be happy having their work reviewed.

  “It won’t sit well with the superintendent, you dragging people away from their family fires at Christmastime.”

  Who would have thought—Parsons, a sentimentalist?

  “The Christmas vacation is almost over, sir. The academics may well be on campus already. Spring term starts in just over a week, and most of Kara’s friends are final-year students, so they’ll be around, too.”

  He considered a moment longer. “All right,” he said, slowly. “But this must be approached with tact.”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll want to see your list of questions,” he added, as if you could stick to a script when you knew witnesses were lying to you.

  “No problem,” Ruth said, as glib as any sociopath, but at least aware of the irony.

  “But before you start on that, I want to know who leaked the information about those earrings to the media.”

  “The earrings went to a private lab for analysis,” Ruth said. “There were CSIs, mortuary techs, and a pathologist at the PM—they all witnessed Carver’s reaction when he saw the earrings on Kara. You could try, but I wouldn’t waste my time.”

  He held her gaze: she had more or less told him, Do it yourself, and good luck, ’cause you’ll need it. For a silent moment, she sensed he was teetering on the edge of bawling her out, but finally he nodded and sent her on her way.

  The Major Incident Room was open plan, which was how Ruth liked it. Twenty-plus desks set out in a fairly haphazard fashion. As the killings had gone on over the past year, the number of officers allocated had increased, and they jammed a desk wherever there was space, adding sockets for power and computer jacks.

  As soon as she got back to her own desk, Ruth contacted everyone she wanted to reinterview and made some appointments. A few were not around; these she e-mailed, asking them to call her without delay.

  At eight forty-five, she was compiling a list of questions that she thought would keep Parsons happy. She sensed a movement to her left and glanced up.

  “Sarge?” The speaker was a young detective with fine, ginger hair already thinning at the front. He was pale and freckled, with the eager look of a starved whippet. Ruth recognized him from a house-to-house she’d led a couple of years before. He was in uniform back then.

  She stopped typing and waited for him to go on.

  He coughed. “Um, DCI Jansen asked if you could spare a minute,” he said.

  “Well, he must have developed some manners since I last worked with him.”

  The young detective flushed a delicate rose.

  “What did he really say?”

  The young man looked at his feet.

  “What’s your name, Constable?”

  “DC Ivey, Sarge.”

  “Got a first name, DC Ivey?”

  “Tom.”

  “Okay, Tom, I’ll take a wild guess.” She drew her brows down, dropped her voice a bit, and added a slathering of north Liverpool: “‘Tell Lake to get her arse in here.’ Am I close?”

  Ivey gave her a rueful smile. “He did call you Sergeant Lake . . .”

  She leaned back in her chair and gave an answering grin of recognition. “You’re all right, DC Ivey.”

  He flushed to the roots of his hair, and she let him go, taking her time to put on her jacket and log out of her account before sauntering through to the Carver Major Incident Room down the hall.

  Jansen had a full briefing in session. He didn’t acknowledge her at first, so Ruth leaned against the doorjamb and folded her arms as if she’d popped in for a friendly catch-up. A crime scene photo of Carver’s sitting room was up on the data projector screen behind him. The check on Carver’s financials hadn’t uncovered anything unusual, she learned. No credit card transactions, checks, or transfers that would help them with the timeline leading up to Carver’s shooting. House-to-house was ongoing, but no suspicious activity had been noted.

  When Jansen finally deigned to notice her, some minutes later, he announced her presence and thanked her for sparing the time. “Although Ruth can’t be active in this investigation, she will be consulted as someone who knows DCI Carver well and has been working on the serial murders right from the off,” he explained.

  Ruth felt eyes on her, but focused on Jansen, keeping her expression pleasant. It hadn’t escaped her notice, or anyone else’s, that he’d not seen fit to acknowledge her rank.

  “How can I help, Simon?”

  He stiffened, turning a little too sharply to the young detective he’d sent in search of her. “Tom, would you bring Sergeant Lake up to date on the phone situation?”

  DC Ivey was seated dead center of the room, just two rows from the front. He turned to speak to her. “The techs are still working on DCI Carver’s mobile phone,” he said. “The only thing they’ve turned up so far is a mobile number he’s been calling on a regular basis over the past month. It’s untraceable—a pay-as-you-go.”

  “What’s the number?” she said.

  Jansen clicked the projector remote control and a screenshot of Carver’s phone log came up.

  “Does that mean anything to you?” DC Ivey asked.

  “Nothing.” Looking past the younger officer, Ruth saw DCI Jansen watching her closely. Had he set Ivey up to ask the questions while he watched for her reaction?

  “Could it be an informant?” Jansen said. “Someone helping with the case?”

  “It could be.”

  “But you don’t know.”

  “No.” She left it at that, and after a moment, he we
nt on.

  “DCI Carver rang that number the night he was shot. We’ve looked at CCTV, traffic cams, and so on, tracked his car from police HQ to home. At twenty-fifteen he made a stop, got out of his car, and walked.” Jansen paused, still watching her.

  “Okay,” she said, but she was finding it hard to quell the jittery feeling in her chest.

  “We tracked him all the way to a hotel.” He clicked the remote again and ran a section of footage. Ruth thought she recognized the hotel: a high-end boutique-style place near the business quarter of the city. People came and went along the street: the well dressed and the shabby, although only the well dressed turned and walked through the doors into the hotel lobby. Well-fleshed men in tailored suits; sleek women in cashmere overcoats, stepping out of taxis in high heels. Then Carver, seen only from the back, but his figure, his gait were so familiar that she didn’t need to see his face.

  “He stayed for two hours, walked back to his car, and drove directly home,” Jansen said.

  Ruth nodded, as if accepting it as useful intel.

  “Do you know who Carver would go to meet at the Old Bank Hotel?”

  “Do you know that he did meet anyone?” she countered.

  “A member of the hotel’s staff said they recognized Carver from recent coverage of the shooting,” Tom Ivey said. “Saw him heading for the lifts up to the bedrooms.”

  “Was he with someone?”

  “He was alone, and there’s no record of his having booked a room,” Ivey said.

  “You’ve checked the CCTV in the lifts?” she said. “If you have a picture, I might recognize who he was with.”

  “They don’t have security cams inside the building,” Jansen said, taking back control of the discussion.

  “Then I don’t see how I can help,” she said.

  Chapter 11

  Kara Grogan had shared a house with five other students in Canning Street, only a few minutes’ walk from the Institute for Performing Arts. This was the lately gentrified Georgian Quarter of the city, at the summit of a hill with views across Liverpool, from the Anglican Cathedral all the way down to the Liver Buildings on riverside. At this time of year, a constant, cutting wind whipped up from the Mersey, and Ruth Lake buttoned up her coat and tightened the scarf around her neck as she locked her car. Kara’s digs were in an impressive building, three stories high, though the windows looked in need of repair. Ruth didn’t envy the residents their single-glazed grandeur in this weather.

  It was five days since Carver was shot, and the snow clouds had blown northward, leaving the city under ice-blue skies. The snowfall had turned to slush, then to packed ice, so Ruth trod carefully up the sandstone steps to the front door.

  She had phoned the previous day to arrange a meeting, so they were expecting her. Hurried footsteps clattered down the hall as soon as she buzzed: a large girl in jeggings, a pink tunic top, and a red tartan blanket scarf threw the door wide and waved her inside. “Come on in, for fuck’s sake,” she said. “I’m freezing my titties off!”

  “Shut the bloody door, Angela!” someone yelled from farther down the hall.

  Angela laughed, a throaty rich chuckle that sounded rehearsed. “Swear to God,” she said, “if the city planners allowed double glazing in these old iceboxes, they’d save the fucking planet.” Although Angela swore like a trouper, her cut-glass accent betrayed her privilege and wealth.

  Resisting the girl’s efforts to snatch her up on a wave of laughter and obscenities, Ruth remained on the doorstep. “Don’t you want to see my ID?” she asked.

  “Oh, you’re no stranger, Sergeant,” Angela said, indulging in another throaty chuckle. “You’re practically a celebrity!” She flung her arms wide to emphasize the point, then turned on the ball of one foot and walked away, her stiletto heels clacking on the expanse of black-and-white tiles.

  Ruth stepped inside and closed the front door just as Angela sang out, “Hide the crack pipes, guys—it’s the rozzers!” Laughing, she disappeared into a room off to the left.

  Ruth waited for a second or two before making her way to the door Angela had gone through. It was a high, square room, incongruously furnished with ugly black leather sofas and club chairs. A slab of black granite on a steel base served as a coffee table, and a wood burner the size of an industrial furnace was throwing out enough heat to melt the ice caps single-handed. She loosened her scarf, taking in the four avid faces turned to hers; three girls and one boy. She used “girls and boys” loosely—none of them would be under twenty-one.

  Ruth recognized the boy from a video of Kara online; the one who had flinched, half afraid, as Lady Macbeth bade him come to bed. This, she knew, was Jake. He sat hunched on a club chair next to the wood burner, warming his hands. The others were arrayed on the two sofas, Angela leaning over the back of one, her hands spread, fair hair curling over her shoulders.

  “Well, here we are, foregathered in the drawing room,” Angela said, “awaiting the denouement, Sergeant Lake.”

  Ruth stared at the student, widening her eyes and allowing a small smile to play on her lips. From where she stood, Ruth could see the whole group. One girl, Lia, bit her lip nervously; the other, Helen, shot Angela a look of bitter hatred.

  Angela became a little self-conscious under Ruth’s gaze, but she was not the type to be easily intimidated. She raised her shoulders and spread her hands, pantomiming surprise and disappointment. “What, no devastating insights?”

  “I was hoping to gain insights from you,” Ruth said. “Kara being your friend, and all . . .”

  “Oh, that’s so sweet.” Angela chortled, then rubbed her snub nose vigorously. “We shared a house, Sergeant . . .”

  Lia smiled, shamefaced, but Helen looked like she could happily strangle her housemate.

  “Am I missing something?” Ruth said.

  As she’d expected, Angela was the first to speak. “Kara was what you might call . . . charismatic.”

  “Reserved,” Lia said, nodding agreement.

  “Yes, that word came up a lot in your witness statements,” Ruth said. “Charismatic is a new one on me, though.” She put enough of a question into her tone to invite explanation.

  Angela shot an amused look at Lia that said, Poor plod needs a dictionary definition. Obligingly, Ruth played to the stereotype, holding her pencil poised over her notebook, a carefully contrived look of fatuous interest on her face.

  “Oh, I only meant that she was something of a mystery, but compelling . . . in her way,” Angela said, with a deprecating shrug.

  Keeping her voice light, Ruth said, “And I thought you meant opaque, but with a bit too much personality to be called boring.”

  Angela flushed, and Jake scowled at the fire and began chewing on his thumbnail. Lia hunched her shoulders, clasping her hands between her knees. That wasn’t good—she’d meant to shut down the ringleader, not put a damper on the entire group.

  “Now look,” Angela began, “we’ve gone to some trouble to be here today. Some of us have dissertations to work on, finals start next week. We didn’t have to—”

  “You’re right,” Ruth interrupted, laying on the Liverpool accent a little heavier than usual. “Down the station, they won’t let me open my gob till I’ve had my caffeine fix in the morning.” She smiled brightly at Angela. “How’s about a nice brew, and we’ll start again?”

  It had the desired effect. Angela’s eyes widened, and Ruth read a mixture of fascination and cold contempt in them. “Well, jump to it—someone fetch the sergeant a ‘brew,’” Angela said, in a fair imitation.

  Helen said, “I’ll get it,” her voice tight.

  Helen was interesting. Angela and Lia were dressed in elaborate layers, with flounces of fabric and a bright palette of colors. Helen, on the other hand, wore cords with a thick shirt and sweater, dark trainers on her feet. Helen seemed kitted out for efficiency.

  “Helen,” Ruth said, “why don’t you stay? I’m sure Angela and Lia will do the honors.”

 
; The girls blinked. Lia looked as chastened as if her mother had just walked into the room and demanded to know why she was treating her guest so abominably. She tucked her hair behind her ears.

  “Of course,” she cooed. “We really should’ve asked.” She shot Helen a worried look. “I suppose we do have tea?” Helen rolled her eyes, and Lia apologized again. She turned away and made toward the door, but Angela remained stubbornly behind the sofa.

  “Sexist, much?” she said. “What about Jake?” She jerked her chin petulantly at the boy, who was now scowling into the flames of the wood burner. “He does know which end of a kettle is for pouring.”

  “No doubt,” Ruth said. “But I want to talk to Jake.”

  Jake shifted uneasily in his chair, but still didn’t make eye contact.

  Suddenly protective, Angela said, “You cool with that, Jake?”

  Ruth saw the slow blink and the slight flare of his nostrils that said Jake would be way cooler without Angela in the room.

  “He’ll be fine,” Ruth said.

  Angela sucked her teeth, regarding Ruth with obvious dislike. Ruth fixed her with that calm, mildly curious gaze and finally the girl shrugged and flounced out of the room. Lia, the nervous girl, made a move to follow her, but Ruth said sharply, “I’ve changed my mind. Lia, you can stay.”

  Lia’s pearly skin reddened, and she looked like she might burst into tears.

  Chapter 12

  When Angela left the room, it was as if the three housemates remaining heaved a collective sigh. Helen threw herself onto the sofa muttering an obscene insult; Lia smiled in answer, then bit her lip, apparently appalled at herself. The biggest change, though, was in Jake. He uncurled from his stricken posture and sat up straight.