BURN, BABY, BURN

by Jake Barton

  "What do you think?" Kate asked.

  "I’ve seen enough punishment beatings and killings in my time, too bloody many, and this doesn’t seem right to me."

  "Why not?"

  "The amount of violence for one thing. The torn-out fingernails suggest torture, either to gain information or as a punishment, but chopping off fingers is different. Why not lop the whole hand off at the wrist of you want to make a point? Unless, whoever killed him was just enjoying himself. That’s always a possibility. Also, we know something it doesn’t say in this report – the actual cause of death was very unusual, too bloody clever, too precise for it to be drug-related. Also, the heroin left by the body. Alex Melia wasn’t in that league. Our enquiries suggest only that he was a very minor dealer and never in hard drugs."

  "Maybe he branched out when he had enough cash to make that step?"

  Dexter grinned. "Playing Devil’s advocate now, are we?"

  "Maybe," Kate shrugged.

  "It’s possible," Dexter conceded. "But not likely in my view."

  Donna cleared her throat, feeling it was about time she said something. "You said the use of a knife was significant. Why is that the case?"

  Donna had aimed the question at Dexter, but it was Kate who answered. "A knife is such a personal weapon. You know, up close and personal? Not like with guns, blasting away from a safe distance. With a knife, there’s blood, lots of it. That close you see the spark go out, feel the last breath leave. It takes real intent to kill with a knife. It takes passion. You really have to mean it."

  "Have you seen this method before?" Dexter asked. "The business with the knife?"

  Kate nodded, her expression grave. "Once or twice," she replied. "But only once locally, and certainly not at first hand, possibly originating in the Far East. I’ve not heard of it done with a knife, a sharp piece of metal like a welding rod, would be easier to control. Using a knife would take a great deal of skill."

  "I don’t really understand," Donna said.

  The understatement of the century. It must be difficult having a retard in the room.

  Kate sighed. "It’s a method whereby the actual artery is pierced internally. Blood drains into the body cavity, filling the lungs. Not a good way to die."

  "Almost like drowning, then?"

  "The same."

  "How long before…?" Donna’s voice tailed off.

  Kate shrugged. "How long can you hold your breath? A couple of minutes at most. Actually, the heart would probably stop beating before that. It would be a massive shock to the system."

  "Did you say you'd heard of it locally?"

  "Not as such. I found a reference to it as a possible cause of death in a case a few months ago in Chester. Middle-aged man killed by one of his homosexual pick-ups was the best guess. Still unsolved, as far as I know. One of my routine trawls through the files relating to suspicious deaths. I only filed it away because of the unusual method used."

  "Any connection with our case?"

  "I assume not, and the cause of death may have been incorrectly recorded in any case. Always possible. Certainly, the man we're after is not homosexual."

  "Ignore it then?"

  Kate grinned wolfishly. "Never ignore a coincidence."

  She fell silent. A frozen frown distorted the brooding features of Dexter, but Kate remained expressionless. She spread the fingers of her left hand on the table, her other hand rapidly dotting the point of a pencil between her out-stretched fingers.

  Donna excused herself and went down the corridor to the bathroom. While perched on the toilet, Donna wondered about their host.

  She lived for her gruesome work, that much was certain. Donna couldn’t imagine living a life confined to these few claustrophobic rooms, shunning personal relationships, and seemingly, in a permanent state of fear. Her own illness convinced her of the fragile nature of the human psyche, but Kate Davies was as bad a case as she’d ever seen.

  On Donna’s return, Kate was looking serious. "I think you’ve got a bad one, Dexter. I’ve done a fair bit of digging since I saw you last, and I think he's done this sort of thing before."

  "What?"

  Kate held up her hands. "Bear with me a minute. Think back, oh twelve, thirteen years or so. Young girls went missing, all from good families, no reason to suggest they had run away."

  "My case," Dexter said, his voice a low growl.

  "The first one, a girl from Hoylake. Your case, as you say."

  "Juliet Bevan. Lovely looking kid, only fourteen. We never found her.'

  "You remember her?" Donna said, shocked at the gravity of his expression.

  He grunted. "It’s the failures I remember most, not the successes. There were two more. One from Ellesmere Port and the other from Guilden Sutton. Both went missing within a week of Juliet’s disappearance."

  "What happened?"

  Dexter shrugged. "We put a hundred men on it and got nowhere. Never found any of them. The parents were at their wits’ end with worry. Papers put up a reward for information. Nothing ever came of it, apart from the usual cranks. Then there was Janet Hope."

  "What happened to her?"

  Dexter sighed. "She vanished while walking her dog. The dog turned up, but she’d disappeared. It probably made her feel safe, having the dog with her. Common fallacy. The trouble is lone women are attacked too often for that to be the case, dog or no dog. A pet dog is unlikely to be much use for defence – they’re conditioned to like people. The only dog that would be a deterrent wouldn’t be much use as a pet. There are exceptions, obviously. Many dogs are protective of their owners, but it’s rare to find a dog that will do real damage to an attacker. We thought we'd got another one. Then she turned up the next day – stripped naked and left in a ditch. We got lucky and pulled in a van driver who'd been seen in the area. He coughed to her murder. One problem though."

  "What?"

  Dexter sighed, the memories obviously still painful. "He was in Scotland the previous two weeks, banged up for being involved in a fight at an Old Firm game. Rangers and Celtic. There was no way he could have been involved with Juliet, not to mention the other missing girls that followed."

  "What happened to him?"

  "He went down, drew life. As I recall another sex offender in some argument or other stabbed him, died a week later. Bloody good riddance."

  "When was this? When the girls went missing?"

  Dexter pursed his lips. "About twelve years ago?" He looked questioningly at Kate who consulted one of the papers on her desk.

  "Yeah, twelve years ago. October, the first girl disappeared."

  "It could have been him," Donna said, gabbling in an attempt to persuade Dexter and Kate that her ideas were valid. "Marcus Green. He would have been what? Twelve? Maybe thirteen? He wasn’t much older when he was put away."

  That would explain one thing at least," said Kate.

  "What?" Dexter demanded.

  "Three girls go missing in a month and are never found, then nothing. No more disappearances. These people don’t just stop."

  "Because he was in custody by then, waiting trial," Donna burst out.

  Kate nodded in apparent approval of Donna’s excitement. "Makes sense. If it was a repeat killer, and he’d just moved away, the pattern would have been repeated somewhere else. It wasn’t. I checked. There's one problem that occurs to me. Transport. He'd have had problems getting around, being too young to drive, but not enough of a problem to rule it out. In the absence of any other ideas, I’m going to go along with the idea that Marcus Green is the person we’re looking for. I’ll try and find what you need to catch him. If Donna is right about Marcus being our man, that means we’ve got a problem. The clever ones are always the worst, especially if it is the same person. Years ago he would have been very young, just learning his trade, if we were going to catch him that would have been the time, while he was..." She stopped abruptly.

  "What?"

  "I was going to say, while he was just practising. He’ll
be better now."

  Donna noted the way Kate credited her with the idea of pursuing Marcus. Donna had pushed for it, but in all honesty, if Dexter hadn’t been prepared to back her, she’d have given up on the idea long ago. She tried to say something along these lines, but Kate stopped her in her tracks.

  "Don’t ever put yourself down," she said, looking at Donna sharply. "I’m a big fan of original ideas. So is Dexter. If either of us thought your idea was shit, we wouldn’t be having this conversation."

  Dexter nodded, his expression thoughtful. "If he’s so clever, why allow the body of Alex Melia to be found?"

  "Muddy the waters? I’m guessing he wants us to know it’s him. Look at me, he’s saying, this is what I do. If it were anyone else, I’d think he almost wants to be caught."

  Dexter grimaced. "But not in this case?"

  "No. I think he just doesn’t care. He’s telling us he’s too fucking clever to be caught."

  "Unless he makes a mistake?"

  "Right," Kate agreed. "But there’s a problem with that."

  "What?"

  "He doesn’t make mistakes."

  "But we'll catch him, right?" Donna could hear the note of desperation in Dexter’s voice.

  Kate looked across at him for a long moment, delaying her reply. She presented a cocky, aggressive attitude, which almost welcomed confrontation, together with a certain way of holding your gaze, which was disconcerting, to say the least. Donna would have thought it an invitation to fight had she been with anyone else, with Kate she wasn’t certain.

  Deciding to meet the challenge, Dexter met her gaze, determined to stare her down. Kate gave a small smile when Dexter dropped his eyes once more to the study of the papers covering the floor, and the minor triumph, transformed her features, smoothing and softening the lines of her face.

  "We hope he makes a mistake, that's our best chance," Kate said at last. "Since we don't know where he is, we look for evidence the only place we can. His background."

  Dexter leant forward, ready to interrupt. Kate held up her hand to forestall him, before continuing. "We know he doesn't give much away, no actual physical evidence, no clues, not anything that's helpful, anyway, but there's always something."

  "Not much so far," Dexter said, ruefully, slapping his left hand on his knee.

  "He's careful and he's clever," Kate agreed. "So we work with what we've got: his background and the victim, Alex Melia."

  "But he doesn't give us anything."

  "That's the game he's playing," Kate mused. "He likes to demonstrate his power. Show how clever he is. That could be how we catch him. Forget about the blonde hair found with the body. That’ll turn out to be as relevant as Alex Melia’s fingerprints were on the ransom demands. Someone with an IQ this high will never leave physical evidence, blood, fluids, hair, that sort of thing."

  "So, we can forget about evidence? Ignore it completely? Forget about the fingerprints of Alex Melia on the tape, on the ransom demand?"

  "Oh, don’t get me wrong, I hope it’s the breakthrough this investigation has been crying out for. But, I’m not hopeful. The man we’re looking for wouldn’t leave a lock of his hair behind. In any case, the man we’re looking for wouldn’t have a record, certainly not for drug possession, which rules out Alex Melia. If he were a drug user, that would involve a loss of control. He wouldn’t ever do that."

  "You could be wrong." Dexter sounded almost offended at her presumption of absolute certainty.

  "Not about this."

  "Nobody’s perfect."

  Kate snorted in derision. "Now who’s playing Devil’s advocate? You no more think Alex Melia is the person responsible for this than I do. Your former colleagues may be happy to go along that road, but you’ve always been able to see the broader picture. Fingerprints are not the Holy Grail. They’re nineteenth century science. Oh, I’ll grant you there’ve been some developments. The automated fingerprint identification system, AFIS to its friends, has developed over the last ten years. Nowadays a potential match can be processed as a template and cross-matched against the national database very quickly. It’s a big advance, but it’s still not a perfect system. It's science, that's its greatest weakness as well as its strength."

  "I’m sorry," Donna interjected. "You've lost me."

  "Well, what I mean is, forensic science has evolved to such a level of competence that it may even have reached the stage of being less valuable in cases such as this where there is so little to go on."

  "In what way?"

  "Forensics can give specific answers. This fingerprint is linked directly with this person. That’s the sort of specific, no-question-about-it fact that can go straight into a courtroom. The forensic scientist is the ultimate expert witness. Juries trust and believe in them, and quite right that they should if they prove the facts. That’s both a strength and a weakness."

  "What’s the problem, then?"

  "Experts are reluctant to be specific, not unless they can be one hundred percent certain. When they're certain, then it's evidence. It goes to court as it stands. When the facts can't be proved to absolute certainty, there's more of a tendency to fudge the issue. Determining the time of death, for example. There’s a reluctance to be specific. It's difficult to be certain, let's be fair, there are a lot of variables involved. What about assault with a blunt instrument. How many times have you heard that one? What the fuck does that mean? It could mean almost anything. It's a fudge. The lab boys will always try to cover themselves. It’s understandable. They know the penalties for being wrong, misleading the investigation, and all that entails. Bottom line, nobody wants to stand up in court and give expert testimony unless they're sure of their facts. So they fudge the issue. They deal in generalities. That's where we come together. I fudge the issue too. The difference is, you know up front that a fudge is the best you'll ever get from me, and you don't ever risk taking it as gospel."

  "You're not doing a very good job at selling yourself."

  Kate gave a half smile. "I call it as I see it. The police are suspicious of my work…" She glanced at Dexter. "…With occasional exceptions. It's part of their desire to eliminate the hunch, the gut feeling, from an investigation. Hunches don't put people behind bars. Evidence does that. An investigator, a detective, recognises a gut feeling, but he's trying to prove guilt. Beyond reasonable doubt. For that he needs evidence. What I give is a guess, an educated guess, but it's not evidence. A detective will take what I give him, but often sees it as being of little value. Evidence is the crux of police work, of any investigation. That's as it should be. Anything else is incidental. They listen to me when it's the only thing on offer."

  "Well, what then?" Dexter leaned forward, gripping the handle of his briefcase until his knuckles whitened.

  Kate shrugged. "Keep on trying." She nodded towards the glowing computer screens. "Perhaps the answer is in there. If it is, I’ll find it. Try and link him to the old favourites: means, motive, opportunity. Especially motive."

  "That’s the key, is it? The motive?" Donna asked.

  Kate nodded. "Crime usually has a reason, whether greed or anger, there’s usually some obvious reason. Most criminals commit offences for gain or are acting under the influence of outside stimulation, alcohol or drugs. The yob who scratches a Jaguar will probably not have set out that evening intending to scratch cars. It’s done on the spur of the moment, probably after ten pints in the pub, or being elbowed by the girl he has spent half the night chatting up. The vast majority of crimes are easily explained. It’s the others that are a bastard, the ones with the hidden agenda, some inner compulsion. These offenders obtain some form of gratification, obvious only to themselves. It doesn’t have to be a serious crime, but it can be. Sometimes it can be murder, or repeated murders, and when that happens, it’s a right bastard. Usually there’s no obvious motive, or if there is, it’s only known to the person committing the crime."

  "Is that the case here?"

  "Almost certainly. A right bast
ard, as I said."

  Dexter stood up collecting his papers from where he’d dropped them. "I’ve got to meet somebody," he announced. "We’ll get out of your hair. Leave you to it."

  Donna stood, and was preparing to follow Dexter when Kate took her arm. "Would you mind staying? I find it helpful to have someone to bounce my wilder theories off. There’s a bed made up down the hall if you need to sleep."

  Donna glanced at Dexter who shrugged. They’d arrived in separate cars, so Donna was a free spirit.

  "Fine by me," Donna said.

  Dexter paused in the doorway. "Don’t let me down, Kate."

  "You had nothing when you came to me, and you’ve still got nothing. Don’t start blaming me or expecting fucking miracles," Kate scowled, turning her head away. Dexter remained in the doorway. Donna wished he’d either go away or sit down again.

  "I’m sorry," Kate said at last. "I just hope I can build a picture out of shadows. If I get it right we could catch him, but no promises. I know you and Donna are running with the idea that the person responsible is Marcus Green, and I’ll go along with that. But, just bear in mind you could be wrong. What I can’t assume is that Marcus Green is the only one in the frame. That’s blinkered thinking and that’s not how I work. I’ll keep an open mind, but saying that, I’ll do all I can to help you prove Marcus Green is your man. I can’t be any more hopeful. Just mist and fog. At this stage that's all I’ve got."

  "Mist and fog? That’s all?" Dexter’s voice strained with the force of his need.

  "We have things now that weren't dreamt of twenty years ago, prints, hair, blood, D.N.A, all that lab stuff, and none of it helps with this. I’m left with what I’ve always had, just shadows. Nothing tangible. Nothing certain. I only have his past. I’m dealing with history. It may help with his future. It may not."

  "Is anything certain here?"

  "Not a damn thing, Dexter. Behavioural science they may call it, but it's a pretty inexact science."

  Dexter shook his head. "Put like that, it’s almost a guess, isn’t it?

  "No. Not a guess. That suggests I’m relying solely on serendipity. I’m not. It’s a lot more than sheer chance." Kate turned to Donna. "Do you know about serendipity?"