“You brought me to the place where y-you dumped her!” Tears were streaming down her face now, and Jason’s heart broke for her.
“Teresa, let me explain—”
“Explain what? How you killed her? How you lured me here? I’m such an idiot! John told me it was dodgy, but I wouldn’t listen.” She was rambling to herself now, shoulders shaking with her sobs.
Jason racked his brains on how he could possibly explain to her that he wasn’t a murderer. He decided the only way was to come clean. “Teresa, I didn’t kill Melody. And I’m not going to hurt you. But...it’s not coincidence that we’re here.”
She froze, as if she was expecting him to continue denying it and this new revelation had thrown everything out of whack again.
Jason took a step forward. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you. I didn’t just happen by your house the other day. I was coming to find you—to ask you questions about Melody.”
Teresa cautiously lowered the shoe. “Are you the police?”
Jason grimaced. “No.” The shoe started to move. “But I’m working with them to catch Melody’s killer. And...I thought you’d have information to help us.”
Teresa’s face shifted from fear to anger in the blink of an eye. “You used me?”
Jason held his hands out, coming forward to placate her. “Teresa, it wasn’t like that. I like you! It started out that way, but that wasn’t why we...y’know...”
But she shook her head, face hard and eyes cold. “Keep the fuck away from me.” She stalked off to stand by the road, her back to him, defiant.
Jason sighed and plucked his phone from his pocket. Time to call in the cavalry.
Chapter Thirty: Prime Suspect
Within half an hour, the reservoir was cordoned off and swarming with police and SOCOs. Teresa, wrapped in a blanket, leaned on the bonnet of a police car, giving her statement to a uniform copper and glaring daggers at Jason. For his part, Jason just stood by his car, trying to explain to Bryn exactly how he’d managed to take a girl on a date to a body dump.
“I was trying to find dirt, not a dead body!” he said, scowling and stuffing his freezing hands in his pockets. The sun had truly set now, the moon casting an eerie light over the water as a dredge looked for Kate Thomas’s body. Melody was already in the back of a van, Rob prodding at her prior to transfer. He’d already had a go at Jason for contaminating his crime scene with a wine bottle.
“I imagine your girlfriend was less than impressed,” Bryn said, glower fixed firmly in place. “And am I right in thinking the young lady in question is—”
“Melody’s housemate, Teresa.”
Owain just shook his head and walked off. Jason had no idea what he had to be smug about when his stupid system was a complete failure, but he could gloat about that later. Right now, he had to explain to the detective how he’d ended up dating the friend of their murder victim.
“Have you completely lost your mind? I guess you didn’t tell her what you were doing. How else would you have got in there?”
“I thought I had it under control,” he said, which was clearly bloody naïve. “I like her.”
“This isn’t the bloody playground! She’s a person of interest, a witness. You’re on Amy’s team, which means you’re on my team. And if you want to continue to play the game, you can’t go around sleeping with the witnesses!”
Jason winced. “Is there any chance you won’t tell Amy?”
Bryn gave him a look of pity. “Is there any chance she doesn’t already know?”
* * *
Amy knew. Oh boy, did Amy ever know.
“I see you found the bodies,” she said. “Too bad your girlfriend was there. Teresa Danvers, former housemate of Melody Frank. Now lives in Roath. In a house you left on the same morning you were late coming to me. Strange coincidence.”
Jason wisely kept his mouth shut and let the passive-aggressive tirade continue.
“I hear she thought you were the murderer. I suppose it was because you lied to her and then took her to a place with dead bodies in the water. I think that’s a turn-off.”
Continuing his dedicated scrubbing of the kitchen floor, Jason resisted the urge to point out, for the hundredth time, that he did not take her to a place with dead bodies. The fact that dead bodies happened to be there was neither here nor there—it was his intention that was important. And his intention was that no one got hurt. Unfortunately, the road to hell was paved with the good intentions of men like Jason Carr, who meant well but were clearly inept and should just go back to stealing cars. He’d been good at stealing cars. Until he got caught and sent to prison. Maybe he was just useless and should hide in his mother’s basement until someone invented a cure for that.
Things were also going south with Derek. Everyone and their dog knew about how Jason Carr had found the bodies in the lake, how he was a hardened criminal with priors for assault for which he’d served time. Of course, Derek knew he had a criminal record, but he was having difficulty squaring it with his clients when today’s headlines read Ex-Con Lures Melody Friend to Watery Grave with Jason’s picture on the front page.
His mother hadn’t been best pleased about it either.
“She’s not even that pretty,” Amy muttered and Jason raised his eyes heavenward. She was never letting this go. He was doomed to hear about how he’d slept with Teresa Danvers from here to eternity. That was if he still had a job by the end of the day.
“It was a stupid mistake,” he said, suddenly snapping and taking up his own defence. “I shouldn’t have done it and I’m sorry. What more do you want from me?”
Amy huffed and sank further into her chair. But she did finally click off Teresa’s Facebook page and return to her new crime scene photographs of the lake, taken by a reluctant Owain. “Cup of tea would be nice.”
Jason smiled to himself and went to fetch the tea. At least some things never changed.
* * *
“It’s not a bloody match!”
Amy looked up from the keyboard as Bryn marched into the living room, waving a piece of paper.
Jason stirred on the sofa, where he’d caught a few hours’ rest following his night by the lake, the seam of the cushion imprinted on his right cheek. “Doesn’t match what?” he said, voice woolly with sleep.
“Dan Anderson’s DNA is not a fucking match.”
Amy stared at her monitor. Jason had been so sure. She had been sure.
Jason sat up, completely awake now. “But...it has to match. He’s the one who killed them!” He scrubbed his hand over his face and Amy read the bitter disappointment in his eyes. They were back to having no suspects, and all the media’s attention was now on that terrible man who assaulted the police officer and just happened to find the bodies.
Bryn looked defeated, weary. “Not the blood under her nails or the rape kit. I liked him for this, son, but he’s not our man.”
Jason slumped back on the sofa, bleary-eyed and miserable. Amy struggled to think of something to say that would make him smile, but she didn’t know how. She didn’t know how to handle people. She didn’t know how to make them happy.
“What do we do now?” Jason said finally.
Bryn looked uncomfortable, shifting from foot to foot, and she suspected that what he was going to say wouldn’t make Jason happy either. “I think you should lie low for a while. Just until this thing blows over. You can’t help while everyone’s pointing fingers.”
Amy expected Jason to shout, to rant and rave and insist that he could help them. But instead he bowed his head, crumpling forward like wet paper. “Alright then,” he said. “I won’t be no bother to you, Detective.”
“I still need you.” She wasn’t losing her assistant just because Bryn had decided it was a good idea. But Bryn was still looking uneasy and Amy had a feel
ing he was going to try and disrupt her life all the same.
“Maybe it’s best if Jason doesn’t come here for a while,” Bryn said and Amy clenched her jaw, preparing for a fight. But Bryn held up a hand to forestall her. “If you’re working with us, Amy, and everyone with a newspaper is liking Jason for this, what are they going to think when they find out he’s here every day? They’re gonna cry foul and I’ll have to pull you out of this investigation too.” His eyes were pleading with her. “I need you to catch this guy.”
So, it came down to a choice, then. She could see Jason, her cleaner, her assistant, or she could help the police hunt down a serial killer. She hesitated, inexplicably torn. A few weeks ago, the choice would’ve been easy, immediate, but now it seemed the hardest thing she’d ever done.
In the end, Jason saved her the agony. He stood up from the sofa and shouldered his bag. Without looking at either of them, he headed for the door. “See you around, Amy.”
The silence was unforgiving. Amy struggled to remember how to breathe, felt the room going dark. A warm hand squeezed her shoulder and she contained the panic, the rising feeling that she was lost and couldn’t handle anything anymore.
“You did the right thing,” she heard Bryn say distantly, and her head nodded forward. The right thing. Of course.
Then why did she feel so terrible?
* * *
They’d found the lake.
He’d been at work when he’d heard and he swallowed down his scream, calmly walked to the bathroom and hid in the cubicle until the shaking stopped.
It was bad enough that he’d left the last one. He’d been so stupid, giving in like that, but she was so beautiful. He was meant to be having an affair, so why not have one? But by the time he’d fucked that tight warm hole, losing himself in the scent of her hair and the faint tinge of iron from her blood on the sheets, he’d been discovered. Careless. He’d almost lost everything. He couldn’t have his freebird if he was behind bars.
He’d have to lie low for a while. Wait until things calmed down. Then, he’d make his move. No more wasting time with this jealousy game. No more making time with other girls. It was time he took the prize. He’d be with his freebird forever.
Chapter Thirty-One: Back to the Start
Derek fired him.
He looked apologetic about it, but Jason knew that he needed him shifted as soon as possible. Despite it being the middle of autumn, the man was sweating in his little office, mopping his brow with his handkerchief, as his assistant’s phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing.
“Roath Cleaning Company. No, Mr. Lawrence is not available for comment. No, I won’t talk about Jason. Goodbye.” Over and over, the same thing, until the poor woman finally gave up and took the phone off the hook. Jason stared somewhere over Derek’s shoulder and waited for the man to pluck up the courage to say the words.
“Look, Jason, you started out well. And getting into Miss Lane’s flat—well, no one’s been able to do that for months. So...good show on that one, yeah?”
Jason dredged up a small smile and Derek smiled like a maniac, either trying to pacify the serial killer or just glad to see some flicker of response.
“But you’ve been late recently. I’ve had some...concerns from the clients. And now with all this—” he waved his hands expansively, as if to indicate the collapse of the universe, “—I just don’t see how we can carry on with you. You understand, right?”
“You’re firing me.” Jason watched Derek flinch. If he wasn’t going to be man enough to say the words, Jason wasn’t going to give him an easy out. He’d liked this job, actually enjoyed it—chatting with the clients, getting their places in order. Meeting Amy.
“I’m sorry, Jason. And...we’ll need the supplies back. And your uniform.”
“Fine.” At the end of his tether, Jason got up from his seat and pulled the bloody lilac T-shirt over his head, chucking it in the middle of Derek’s desk so the sleeve landed in his tea. “And here are your supplies.” He dumped the holdall on the desk too, sending the pot of pens flying.
“Now there’s no need to be like that.” But Jason was already leaving, pulling his jacket over his bare chest and running out the door, running back to the dole queue.
* * *
In times of trial, Amy took refuge in the internet.
The ebb and flow of information was soothing. Tracking down the genesis of a meme or following a complex IP trail through the servers of the world was like playing hide-and-seek in the playground again. No one ever found her hiding places—or perhaps they never looked too hard to begin with.
Today’s treasure hunt was for the identity of a serial killer. To her immense frustration, she had lost his IP address reroute somewhere in Eastern Europe, in what was probably a server in a wooden shack. It wasn’t complex, intricate systems that gave her a problem—it was small, shoddy, half-assed attempts at systems that invariably lost any and all information of value.
However, the reroute signature itself was interesting. It looked like it had been custom-made, selecting a series of servers that were alien to the bigger IP address maskers and mirrors. She might not be able to find the end of the path, but she might be able to find other sites and accounts that had been routed similarly. He had to have an internet presence, she was sure of it—no one with this level of technical knowledge could keep away from his own kind.
The key, she decided, was the Eastern European server, which upon further digging turned out to be in Warsaw. It was small and unreliable, but that also made it likely to be his obfuscation point of choice. He was relying on the fact that no one could get beyond it. However, she didn’t need to find the next link in the chain—she just wanted to know what other chains it was part of.
The more she looked into it, the more it seemed like a private server, possibly only used by the killer. Perhaps he had some link to Poland, or perhaps he merely knew someone online who could arrange that kind of thing. The selling of overseas servers was a growing trend and easy to arrange, if you knew where to go.
But the idea started to form in her head that, while she had praised the use of a slow, unwieldy system as the perfect concealment, perhaps it was only this awful because that was the limit of the creator’s skill. Maybe he made his own server. Amy’s server, of course, ran like diamonds and ice, but that was only because she could never bear to make something so horrendous as an unreliable server. The artisan’s pride.
If it really was a single-use system, then all the addresses routed to it would be the killer’s browsing history on a plate. She’d have to trace them forward, of course, but for an expert in the field, it was mere child’s play. She even had a program that would run it for her, but where was the fun in that?
Amy cracked her knuckles and went to work.
* * *
“Back again, are we?”
Jason sat across from Martin and scowled. That was enough to send the man back to his cowering, shaking ways, and Jason got a childish satisfaction out of it. Then he remembered that everyone in town thought he was a murderer and he sobered up fast.
“Lost my job,” he said sullenly.
Martin nodded with a look of pity that gave Jason the urge to shout and storm out, but he reined in his temper and forced himself to stay still. Losing it in here could lead to nothing good.
“I’m sorry about that. As it was still inside the probation period...” Martin shrugged, his smile turning sympathetic.
Jason slumped forward, elbows on the table and hands clasped at the back of his head. “What do I do now?
“There’s nothing much around at the moment.” Martin tapped on his mouse with one finger while he scratched at a shaving cut on his left cheek. It was amazing Martin had any face at all with the way his hands shook all the time, as if he had a permanent caffeine buzz. Jason must be bored if he
was now obsessing over the guy at the Job Centre.
“I’ll take anything,” Jason said, with his best eager, willing smile.
But Martin just shook his head sadly. “I’ve got nothing to give you, I’m afraid. Keep looking in the paper and online. Something will turn up.”
The false cheer in Martin’s voice was another kick to Jason’s confidence and he couldn’t even look the man in the eye. “Can I...” The words caught in his throat, but he had to swallow his pride if he was to pay his own way at home. “I need to sign on.”
Martin gave him a knowing look, oblivious to his self-disgust. “Well then. Let’s get through the questions, shall we?”
Jason sighed, resigned. This day was unremittingly shite.
* * *
The look of disappointment on his mother’s face was worse than Derek firing him, worse than Martin’s questions, and worse than Amy doing nothing to stop him leaving.
“Your uncle came round,” she said hollowly. “Asked me if you killed those girls.”
Jason flinched and looked at the scarred kitchen table, swallowing against the lump in his throat. If his mam thought he was a murderer, he didn’t know what he’d do.
“What did you tell him?” he whispered, dreading her response.
Her mug slammed into the table, jerking him out of his misery to stare at his mother’s furious face. “I told him that if he really thought his nephew could do those terrible things, he wasn’t welcome in this house no more!” Gwen’s face was flushed with rage and Jason felt a strange sort of pride in his mother, defending her son in the face of the rising tide of suspicion. “But...” she said, and his heart sank, “you’re going to tell me everything that’s been going on this past couple of weeks and why you’ve been out at all hours of the day and night.”
So, reluctantly, he told her how he’d been involved in a murder investigation and watched her face turn ashen at how he’d taken blood from a suspect and pretended to be a copper about town. When he had finished, she was on her second cup of tea and had worried her hair into an Einstein-like tangle.
Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries) Page 14
