Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries)

by Rosie Claverton

  Nothing could prepare him for this. Laurie was lying in the centre of the bed, legs dangling over the bottom, spread. She was naked except for the heart pendant around her neck and the rust-red blood drying on her thighs. The sheet was tangled on the floor, as if it had been cast off in a hurry.

  Her eyes were staring at him. They were frosted over, like winter glass, and he knew instantly that she was dead. Her skin was mottled, pale and purple, and a man with a camera leant over, snapping pictures.

  Jason couldn’t imagine how Gina felt, walking into the bedroom and seeing this. He swallowed down the bile rising in his throat and took pictures: one of Laurie, and then pictures of the room, the bookcase, the sheet on the floor. But he couldn’t bring himself to take more of the victim, like she was some posing centrefold. It felt wrong.

  “Who is this, Hesketh? And why does he have a camera at my crime scene?” The man examining Laurie turned and folded his arms, glaring at Jason over his glasses. “If he’s a journalist—”

  “He’s Amy’s assistant,” Bryn said, and the man’s scowl deepened.

  “When are you going to stop running to that introverted child to solve your problems, Detective? And now you’re letting her ‘assistant’ take pictures of a murder victim. Next, they’ll be all over MySpace.”

  “Rob,” Bryn said tiredly, “just tell me when and how she died. We need to get her to the mortuary before the press all come out to play.”

  Rob snorted. “Oh, just when and how, nothing much then. Work it all out in my head and then give you a ten-minute window and the exact object that caused her skull to explode, that’s all.”

  “He hit her over the head?” As soon as he’d asked, he saw the blood matting her hair and the red stain above her head where she might’ve been dragged down the bed.

  Rob sighed, as if it were beneath him to answer questions posed by Amy Lane’s assistant. “Yes. And, as it happens, I can identify the object.” He reached for a large plastic evidence bag containing a worn hockey stick, blood coating the head and spatter up the shaft. “Hockey stick. Different method again to the other victims. A weapon of opportunity, I believe—the victim has a number of trophies for university hockey.”

  “That’s what they have in common: weapons of opportunity. As if he doesn’t really want to kill them when he plans it.” Bryn paced as he expounded his theory, his plastic gloves making shapes in the air like a mime artist. “Anything else?”

  “She put up a fight—defensive marks on her hands and forearms, and I’ve scraped blood out from under her nails. Sexual assault kit positive, left his DNA and everything, but the nature of the trauma sustained indicate that it was post-mortem.”

  Jason felt like he was going to be sick. “He raped her after he killed her?”

  Even Rob looked faintly ill. “Blunt but accurate. She’s only just going into rigor and the temperature here’s pretty steady, so I can use liver temp to get a fairly accurate time of death—between eight and ten.”

  “Gina came back at half-nine and scared him off,” Jason said. “She said Laurie was still warm when she found her.”

  A look of horror crossed Rob’s face. “She touched the body? Please tell me she didn’t do something so incredibly stupid.”

  “She said she was warm,” Jason repeated, anger building in his chest at how callous this Rob bloke was. “She was in shock, mate—her girlfriend just died.”

  “No excuse for contamination,” Rob said flatly. “Does she want us to catch him or not? Moronic.”

  Bryn, clearly sensing that Jason was about to take a swing at the medical examiner, took him by the arm and led him out of the bedroom and back into the hallway. “Dr. Pritchard is a knob, but he’s good at what he does. You got the pictures?”

  Jason nodded curtly, and put the camera in the pocket of the overalls. “She wants Laurie’s laptop too. I saw it downstairs.”

  “We’ll bag it up for you.” Bryn clapped Jason on the shoulder. “You did well for your first dead one, son. Now get out of here.”

  Jason slipped away from Bryn’s hold and tried not to throw up. “First dead one”—fuck, he hoped there wasn’t another.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Body of Evidence

  “You took your time,” Amy said, as Jason handed her the camera and placed the laptop on the coffee table.

  “Sorry,” he said, looking dazed and far away.

  Amy wondered if she should ask, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know why he was so distracted.

  “You want me to start it up?”

  “Check there’s nothing plugged in.” Amy turned the camera over in her hands until she found the connection point. “USB sticks, external hard drives, modems. Check the bottom too. He didn’t erase the others, but he might be getting wiser if he thinks we’re coming for him.”

  Jason dutifully checked the laptop, sweeping his hands over the sides and base as if it were the body of a motor. Amy watched him open it up and push the start button, checking the inside for anything remarkable. The only mark was a dark discolouration to the right of the touchpad. He ran his finger over it questioningly.

  “Where she rested her wrist.” She also traced the stain, her fingers brushing against his. She had to ask. “Did you...see her?”

  He hesitated, and she saw the answer in his eyes. “Yes. It’s pretty grim.”

  She nodded, digesting his words, and touched his arm before walking back to her computer terminal and the images that were appearing on her monitors. It seemed natural to touch him, to give physical comfort. If that was what he needed, she could do that.

  Jason came to stand by her shoulder. “I got some pictures of the crowd. Owain said I should.”

  “Some killers like to watch,” Amy said absently, starting to flick through the images. And then there was the body, remote and sanitised on the monitor, the horror of the scene muted by pixels. “How did she die?”

  “He hit her over the head with a hockey stick. The doctor thinks that killed her.” His voice sounded detached, almost cold, and Amy didn’t like it.

  “The coroner’s photos will tell us more. You did well. This will give me the information to access her accounts.”

  “It will?” Jason looked up at the photographs, his brow furrowed. “I didn’t find a list of passwords.”

  Amy looked at him in horror. “Tell me you don’t write down your passwords.”

  “No.” Jason was defensive, a shade of his usual self coming out from behind whatever walls he’d thrown up to deal with seeing Laurie. “I only have the one.”

  She closed her eyes, an internal groan echoing inside her head. “Your one password is B-zero-N, J-zero-V-one? Kill me now.”

  Jason gaped like a fish. “How did you know that?” he said, voice an octave too high for dogs to hear.

  Amy shrugged. “They’re listed as the first of your favourite bands on Facebook and your profile picture, at least two years out of date, is of you in a Bon Jovi T-shirt. It’s not rocket science.”

  “But I did capitals and numbers. Like you’re meant to!” He scowled, clearly annoyed that he’d been so transparent.

  She found his temper rather endearing. “I’ll change it for you. Your sister’s birthday—full four-digit year—and your mother’s maiden name, with the second letter capitalised. That will do for now. We’ll work on a stronger password after we find this man.”

  Amy put Jason’s password woes to one side and started sorting the photographs while tracking down Laurie’s various social networks. “She was well-connected—Facebook, Twitter, El-jay, Foursquare, Tumblr, Pinterest. There should be a lot of information we can find here.”

  “What are you looking for?” Jason asked. She ignored him for the moment, putting in several password combinations, all of which failed. “She’s got a decent password, has she? Not her favouri
te band or her dog or something?”

  “Yes,” Amy said sulkily. “I may have to resort to a cracker.” She tapped on her mouse, pausing to think. “To answer your question, a killer like this will focus on one victim at a time. He won’t have a stack lined up. We can assume he found Laurie recently—after he killed Melody. If we can find Laurie’s pattern of behaviour, we can see who she connected with in the past two weeks.”

  “Makes sense. What about Gina? She was important to Laurie.”

  “Mmm. Tried name, date of birth, anniversary. What else do couples do?” Amy was out of her depth. It wasn’t that she didn’t understand the acts of romance—she’d read a lot of fan fiction, after all. No, it was the in-between times that puzzled her. Did they just talk? She had always preferred silence to conversation. It was one of the things that had driven her sister out of the house.

  Jason hovered his hand over the mouse. “Can I?”

  Amy hesitated, before pushing her chair back from the desk. He went back to the pictures, bringing up a series from the living room. “Maybe they had a favourite song, or could be the first film they saw at the cinema. A favourite café.” There were photographs all over that room, and Amy marvelled at how much of their life was on display. The last photo of her was the one her sister took before she left for Australia—Amy hadn’t wanted to look at it, afraid of what she might see.

  “Hey, is that Venice?” Jason asked, disturbing her thoughts. There was a shot of the couple in the prow of a pointed boat, water behind them and houses rising up either side. Amy reclaimed her mouse and opened up Foursquare, scrolling through Laurie’s activity. “Venice. April 2012. Two-week tour of Italy with Gina. She wrote glowing reviews of everywhere she went—including the gondola rides.”

  Amy typed a password—Venice2012—and the accounts opened up before her, letting her into Laurie’s world. She sank into the chair with a sigh and immersed herself in the information, jumping from account to account and back to the pictures, a sense of contentment filling her as the pieces came together. She added information to a calendar as she went, timelining Laurie’s activities for the past three weeks, filling out all the corners of her life. She would know everything about Laurie’s last days. That was how she would find him.

  She heard Jason yawn behind her and glanced at the taskbar. 05:15. “Coffee,” she said, and Jason obediently shuffled to the kitchen. She should probably feel guilty for ordering him around, but she was in the data. He had to understand she couldn’t leave it half-done.

  Amy took a plate from him wordlessly and stuffed a slice of cake into her mouth whole. She heard the distinctive ba-bing of Microsoft Windows lurching to life, and turned to see Jason on Laurie’s laptop.

  “She was looking at holidays in Austria. And—oh.” Jason looked up at her, slightly sheepish. “Forgot to say, Laurie worked at the same nightclub as Kate. Can we link Melody to it too?”

  Amy’s mind sparked with possibility. “Yes, she walked past it on her way home the night she was murdered. Someone from the club could easily have followed her. I’ll review the footage again after...this.” Her brain was thrumming with the effort of holding together several sources of information and coalescing them into one timeline of Laurie’s last days. She couldn’t afford to be distracted.

  But Jason kept talking anyway. “Laurie was trying to book some days off in January to go away with Gina.” He tapped loudly on the mouse. “But her boss said no—turns out Dan had booked the same dates. Gina said he had a problem with Laurie.”

  “He was harassing her on Facebook too.” Amy brought up a long list of unread messages in Laurie’s inbox. “A mix of hate mail and sexual fantasy. Seems someone had a crush.”

  Jason made a noise in his throat, almost a growl of frustrated anger. “Do we have enough to arrest him?” he demanded, seizing the back of Amy’s chair.

  “Not nearly enough. Bryn can talk to him, though, shake him up. He’s good at that.” She heard Jason’s suppressed snort, and wondered how best to keep him out of trouble—with the general public, and with Bryn. “We need to link him to Melody’s death.”

  “Crime of opportunity? Like his weapons?”

  She could feel the heat of Jason’s anger from where she sat. She nudged the cake plate towards him, but he didn’t take it.

  “The others were planned, attacked at their homes. Dan would have known where Kate and Laurie lived from their employment records. Melody is different.” Amy paused, insight rushing to the front of her mind. “We released the CCTV picture. He got scared. He went back to the way that worked for him, with Kate. He was interrupted with Laurie—he didn’t have time to get away.” She sighed, frustrated. “He’s made so many mistakes. Why haven’t we caught him?”

  “We’ve got him,” Jason said. “We just need to prove it. We need to get his DNA.”

  Amy looked up at him, her mind leaping to the fastest way to justice—and the quickest way to get Jason hurt. “You’ve met him. You’ve been to the club.”

  Jason smiled like a shark, and she knew it was a lost cause. “I’ve got him.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Baby, Don’t Hurt Me

  Jason went through his Saturday shift in a haze, torn between cloying exhaustion and blinding anger. He wanted this murder to stick to Dan, didn’t want him getting another girl before they got to him. He was surprised at how the ball of rage was forming in his chest, simmering there throughout the day. His shrink on the inside had told him his anger would be the death of him and he’d worked hard to hold it back, but there was the taste of righteousness in his fury now. The man would pay.

  He sent the persistent calls from Teresa through to voicemail—he was too tired to be charming. Woodenly polite to the clients, he made instinctive chitchat, but his mind was focussed on that evening. On his plan to snare Dan.

  His boss, Derek, had pushed his Amy time back to three o’clock. “Punctuality’s important,” he’d said cryptically, but Jason knew he had been pushing his limits, turning up at client appointments a few minutes late, out of breath and dishevelled. He couldn’t afford to lose this job, not when they were so close to finding the killer.

  Amy was where he’d left her—at the computer terminal in her dressing gown—but she actually turned to look at him as he entered. “You look terrible.”

  Jason scrubbed a hand over his face. His stubble was turning into a beard. Cerys would finally turn him into a scraggly indie kid. “I’m not used to running on empty.” He yawned behind his hand. “We should order the week’s shopping or you’ll have nothing to eat on Monday.”

  “Sit down.” Amy gestured to the sofa. “I’ll tell you what I’ve found.”

  Jason did as he was told and sat on the sofa.

  Amy faced him, pressing her fingertips together in a steeple. “He posted another picture.”

  The image flashed up on the screen, and Jason leaned forward. Laurie was laid out on the bed, the sheet covering her modestly, but the picture was taken from above, taking in the whole of her body at the foot of her bed. The others had been from the side, the classic sleeping woman, but this photograph was almost predatory. Jason shivered.

  “He’s escalating,” Amy said quietly. “I think this was his first sexual assault. The way this picture was taken—you can tell what happened next.”

  “He pulled off the sheet. He dragged her down the bed.” His voice was hollow, and he swallowed against his rising gorge. “He raped her.”

  “He’s still sending messages. They’re not for us. They’re for someone else.” Amy drummed on her mouse impatiently, as though she expected the answers to blossom across the screen.

  “The woman in the hospital,” Jason said grimly. “I can’t believe the interviews turned up nothing.”

  Amy shrugged—they had to take Bryn at his word that there was no lead there. Jason might be expert at finding the word
on the street, but he wouldn’t be able to cajole information out of the professional types at the hospital.

  “What about the alarm we heard on the call?” Jason leaned back against the sofa, struggling to keep his eyes open.

  “I’ve narrowed it down to a manufacturer.” The clacking of her keys carried across the living room. “I need to find which of those machines have been purchased by Cardiff and Vale UHB.”

  “You will,” Jason said, listing against the arm of the sofa. “You find everything.”

  “I’ll wake you,” he heard Amy say from across the room.

  I’m not asleep, he wanted to say, but the words never left his lips.

  * * *

  Jason woke on Amy’s sofa at seven o’clock with three missed calls from his mother and a terrible crick in his neck. He shifted himself upright, mumbled his apologies to Amy and went home to change.

  Gwen made her displeasure known in the quiet, abused tone of the disappointed mother, one that was far worse than any amount of shouting. “You should have called. We were worried.”

  Jason glanced across at Cerys, who didn’t look remotely bothered, but he kept his mouth shut on that point. “I’m not staying,” he said instead. “I’m going out—to town.”

  Gwen pursed her lips. “Got paid, did you? Can’t say I’m surprised. I expected you to start all that again sooner or later.”

  Jason resented her implication that he got drunk as soon as he had a bit of cash, but it was true to form. From before Usk. He hadn’t given her much reason to believe he’d changed. He’d never done anything to make her proud. He wanted to tell her how he was involved in catching the Cardiff Ripper, but he didn’t want her to worry about him. He’d tell her everything when it was over, when they’d locked the sick bastard up for good.

  Dressed in jeans and a black shirt, reeking of cheap aftershave, Jason donned his jacket and headed back out into the city. The pavement was slippery with wet autumn leaves and he stumbled towards town, going over his plan in his head. He’d seen it on cop shows plenty of times: if he went into the bar and bought Dan a drink, he could then nick the glass and get both DNA and fingerprints off it. He’d taken a couple of freezer bags from his mam’s kitchen cupboard and stuffed them in his pocket, ready to safely stow the glass for the detectives. If he could just stop himself from smashing Dan’s face in, it would be a successful night.