Missing Persons (A DCI Morton Crime Novel Book 5)

by Sean Campbell

‘We’ll discuss this another time,’ Morton said through gritted teeth. ‘What’s the plan?’

  ‘We open up communications,’ Stuart said. ‘The doc, here, will be with us the whole time, and we’ll radio in the ARV team, our sniper, and the boys in Air Support. I’m setting up in the lobby.’

  Ten minutes later, they were ready to roll.

  Ayala, Rafferty, and Mayberry arrived together. Ayala was carrying a tray full of sandwiches and a thermos full of coffee.

  In the calm before the storm, Morton took Rafferty to one side.

  ‘Are you okay?’ he asked. ‘How’s Paddy?’

  ‘Fine, and fine. Let’s do this.’

  Chapter 58: Ring Ring

  Tim was still on his knees, and Faye still had a knife to his neck. He could hear movement below, and if he could hear it, then Faye could, too.

  ‘Faye, you’ve got to let me go,’ he pleaded. ‘If the police come up and see you holding a knife to my throat, they will shoot you.’

  It was infuriating how long she took to respond. Every second, Tim could feel his heart thundering in his chest. He wanted to be somewhere else, anywhere else, more desperately than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.

  ‘I’d rather be dead than go back to prison,’ Faye said.

  ‘You don’t have to do either,’ Tim said quickly. ‘Take the money from the safe and go, now, before the police come up.’

  Faye hissed in his ear, ‘Do you think I’m stupid? I can hear them on the stairs outside. We’re surrounded.’

  The building was oddly quiet. It was like that Christmas a few years earlier, when the snow was terrible and London had become a ghost town. Tim had no doubt that it was just the three of them and the police left in the building. He thought he could hear the whir of a helicopter somewhere out of sight, but he didn’t dare turn his head to look out the window. The blade was too close to try that.

  ‘Faye, think about it. You’re not you right now. If you let me go, then maybe the police can find you some help. Don’t you want to get better?’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me!’ Faye yelled right in Tim’s ear.

  He tried not to shy away from the noise, but it was automatic. He felt the knife graze his throat just a millimetre or two.

  ‘Okay!’ Tim held his hands up in surrender. ‘Then, what do you want? You don’t want to kill me. I’m not here to hurt you at all.’

  ‘I want to go back to how things were yesterday.’

  ‘And I’d like to be twenty-one again, have all my hair, and not have to worry so much about dietary fibre. Yesterday is gone. What can you do now to get where you want to be? Think about it. Your best bet of walking away from this is pretending to be crazy.’

  Tim rolled his eyes. Pretending.

  ‘And then what? Spend my life in a hospital with actual lunatics? I’m not crazy.’

  ‘Okay, but if you had the right lawyers, maybe you’d be found not guilty. The money I offered you could buy you a really good lawyer. Rich people get away with a lot.’

  Faye was about to answer when the landline rang.

  ‘It’ll be for you,’ Tim said. ‘It’s probably the police. Do you want me to answer?’

  ‘No. Not you. Stay where you are. Laura! Laura! I know you can hear me, Laura. Come out here.’

  Tim prayed for Laura to ignore her, for Laura to stay safely behind the locked bedroom door.

  ‘Come on out, Laura, or I’m going to kill Tim right now.’

  ***

  Laura froze. She knew opening the door was reckless. She knew she should stay exactly where she was and wait for the police to burst in. That was what Tim would have wanted her to do.

  She found herself reaching for the lock. Faye couldn’t threaten both of them at once with one knife, could she? What was the door really doing, other than making her feel safe?

  ‘Come on out, Laura, or I’m going to kill Tim right now.’ Faye’s voice was muffled by the door. It was so strange to hear her best friend’s cheerful lilt twisted and contorted into something undoubtedly evil.

  Laura opened the door.

  ‘Good girl,’ Faye taunted. ‘Now, answer the phone. It’s got a speakerphone option, doesn’t it? Don’t lie. I’ve heard Tim using it.’

  Walking the ten feet across the living room to the phone seemed to take forever. Laura’s eyes darted from Faye to Tim and then across to the window. No matter where she looked, the image of her boyfriend with a knife to his throat followed her.

  She answered the phone with a quivering hand and pressed the speakerphone button.

  Chapter 59: Clean Shot

  Keira Thornton both loved and hated her job.

  What she loved was the challenge. Hitting a target as small as a human hand from hundreds of metres out was no easy feat. But the moral quandary was always there, hiding in the back of her mind. Taking a life weighed heavily on her each time she had to pull the trigger. Whenever she could, she’d aim for a non-lethal shot. That didn’t happen often.

  If the order came down, today’s shot would be the hardest she’d ever had to take.

  She’d located herself atop a block of residential flats opposite the Medici building. It didn’t have a fancy name or fancy residents. It just had a clean view straight into the penthouse.

  The hostages were in plain sight. One was on his knees with a knife held to his throat by his captor. The other was standing no more than ten feet away. To see that the captor was a woman was a surprise. Most women killers used passive methods, like poison or smothering. Keira had to give it to the captor: she was pretty badass.

  The main challenge was distance. At thirteen hundred feet away, Keira had to take gravity into account, as well as the curvature of the earth. Then there were wind speed, humidity, air temperature, and barometric pressure.

  The Coriolis effect was the hardest to account for. By the time the bullet travelled the thirteen hundred feet, the earth’s rotation would have moved the target by a couple of inches. Combine that with the need to fire above the target to account for gravity, and it was a hard shot, though nowhere near the world record.

  Keira had her DOPE book with her. It was her personal record of how her equipment had performed in the past, and she used it to help calibrate her shots.

  Even with the best data, Keira couldn’t predict everything. The wind could change, rain could pour down from the sky, or the target – or worse, one of the hostages – could move during the half-second or so the bullet would take to travel. The odds weren’t great, as it was so windy. If the wind died down, Keira knew she could make the shot. The key would be to aim at a larger hitbox. It would be impossible to guarantee hitting the medulla oblongata, or “apricot” in sniper parlance, the part of the brain which controlled motor function. Hitting that exact spot would prevent any further movement before death, and thus stop the hostage-taker from slitting her victim’s throat. Sometimes, hitting the second vertebrae was enough to do the same, but standard operating procedure was to hit the apricot.

  She radioed the negotiators on the ground. ‘In position, over.’

  Chapter 60: Not Feeling Yourself

  Saturday 2nd July, 18:00

  Stuart heard little for the first few seconds after the landline was answered. He had a directional microphone pointing at him so that only his voice would be picked up while the rest of the gathered police stood around him with bated breath. Jensen the psychiatrist was sitting next to him, his original report on Faye open on the desk.

  A live video feed was streaming at potato quality from the helicopter to an LCD television. There was a little lag between real time and the video feed. In the situation, it was the best they could do.

  ‘Faye, this is Joshua Stuart. I’m with the police. Can you tell me what’s happening?’

  ‘Go away.’

  ‘I can’t do that, Faye. You must be having a tough time in there. Is there anything I can do to make things easier? Are you hungry?’ Stuart’s own stomach rumbled as if to emphasise
the point. It was dinner time.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Could you tell me what you do want?’

  ‘No.’

  She wasn’t making this easy. Stuart looked around the room for encouragement. He caught Rafferty’s eye. She mouthed, ‘Ask her about Mark.’

  ‘You must be missing Mark,’ Stuart said. ‘What would he say if he were with you right now?’

  ‘Yes. I do miss him. He was good to me.’

  It wasn’t much, but he had wedged open the door just a little bit. Stuart shot Rafferty a quick thumbs-up.

  ‘You say he was good to you. In what way?’

  There was a pause before Faye replied. The video showed her face softening. She didn’t look quite so animalistic, so wild, anymore. ‘He looked after us. We lived on a nice boat, we ate nice food, and he always made me tea in the morning.’

  ‘That must have made you feel safe. It makes me feel safe when I know people are going to be okay. Would you consider letting one of your two friends go?’

  ‘No.’

  Damn. She was back to blanket denial.

  Stuart tried something less contentious. ‘What was it like, living on a boat?’

  ‘Cosy.’

  Stuart knew he had to steer the conversation back to something she couldn’t give a one-word answer to. ‘I bet it was exciting, wasn’t it? Travelling the waterways with Mark?’

  ‘Not really.’

  Stuart felt Jensen tap him on the shoulder. Jensen pointed at himself and then the microphone.

  It couldn’t hurt. Stuart shuffled over so Jensen was directly in front of the microphone.

  ‘Faye, this is Dr Jensen. You were saying how nice it was to feel safe. Didn’t you feel that way around Miss Ashley?’

  They watched the television stream with bated breath as Faye seemed to zone out for a moment. She looked around wildly, and then focussed back on the task at hand as if she’d almost forgotten where she was.

  ‘Miss Ashley?’

  ‘She’s here with me. Would you like to talk to her?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, please.’

  Rafferty was corralled over. She squeezed herself between the negotiator and the psychiatrist. ‘Faye, this is Ashley Rafferty. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?’

  ‘They... they did it. They hurt my Mark.’

  Jensen squinted at the screen. He couldn’t make out enough detail. There was no way he could analyse micro-expressions from that source.

  ‘Who did, Faye?’ Rafferty asked.

  ‘T-Tim! And Laura! They must have.’

  Rafferty settled on cold, hard logic. ‘What do you think about me coming up and getting them, then? If they’re guilty, we’ll prove it.’

  ‘No! No, you won’t! You think I did it. Even though I didn’t. I did your lie test and everything.’

  Rafferty was about to reply when her nose crinkled up in confusion. She reached forward and hit the mute button on the microphone.

  ‘What is it?’ Morton asked from the side.

  ‘This video footage... is it like a phone camera?’ Rafferty asked. ‘You know, back to front.’

  They all looked around for a technician. ‘No. It’s not mirrored, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  ‘Why?’ Stuart asked, bamboozled.

  ‘She’s holding the knife in her left hand.’

  ‘And?’ Stuart said, not understanding the significance of that.

  ‘Faye Atkins is right-handed.’

  Jensen leapt up as if he had suddenly made a breakthrough. ‘Her speech today. Is that how she normally talks? Long, complex sentences?’

  Rafferty cocked her head to one side, considering it. ‘No. She’s usually really quiet, simple.’

  ‘And what about her body language? Would you say she’s self-assured, confident, cocky?’ Jensen was speaking faster and faster.

  ‘No. She’s usually withdrawn, diffident, and hates being touched.’

  ‘And yet.’ Jensen grinned. ‘She’s strong enough to hold two people hostage?’

  He motioned for Rafferty to shuffle over, pushing Stuart even farther away from the microphone. He leant forward and unmuted the microphone.

  ‘This isn’t Faye, is it? Who am I talking to?’

  ***

  Morton felt his jaw slacken. It wasn’t often that he felt like the dumbest man in the room, but right then, he knew he wasn’t keeping up. He looked from Mayberry to Ayala. Neither of them had a clue, either.

  The speakerphone crackled as Faye replied, ‘I’m Leah.’

  Twins? Morton scribbled it on a piece of paper and held it up so Jensen could see it.

  The mute button was pressed once more. ‘No, David. Not two people. Two personalities. One is Faye, the sweet innocent girl whom Rafferty got to know. The other is Leah. She’s your killer.’

  ‘But, she passed a lie detector!’

  ‘Leah didn’t. Faye took the lie detector test for her. Think of it like two totally different people in one body. Faye had no idea what Leah was doing. She was just the little personality, the core, the sweet, harmless girl who trusted everyone. Leah is the alter.’

  ‘And who or what is Leah?’

  The doc took a sip of water and dove in. ‘Leah is the hostage-taker. If I’m not mistaken, she killed Mark. We already know Faye was in an abusive home. If I’m right, Faye split into two personalities, Leah being the second personality, when she was four or five years old.’

  ‘When her stepfather was abusive?’ Rafferty said sharply.

  Jensen nodded. ‘I think so. That would explain everything. Leah is the protector personality. Leah is aware of Faye, but Faye has no clue that there’s another person in her head. She thinks she’s been blacking out. That’s what she described before. Every time Leah took over, she’d wake up somewhere else with no recollection of how she got there.’

  ‘But, why does Leah exist?’ Morton asked.

  ‘To take the pain, the stress, and make the difficult decisions. She deals with the things Faye cannot cope with. That’s why Leah is holding Tim and Laura hostage. Laura and Tim know they didn’t kill Mark. You know they didn’t do it. You also know Jake didn’t do it, because he had an alibi. Who does that leave? Poor little Faye. Innocent Faye. The protector personality is trying to reconcile Faye’s innocence with the possibility of going back to prison.’

  ‘But the note! The handwriting!’

  ‘Different personalities, different writing. I’m sure you saw Leah’s handwriting on the ransom note. As you can see, she’s left-handed. They’re not the same person.’

  Morton had never felt less sure of himself in his life. ‘So, what do we do now?’

  ‘We make Leah think we believe she’s innocent, and hope that’s enough to convince her to let Tim and Laura go.’

  Chapter 61: De-escalation Point

  The plan was simple: persuade Leah that they thought either Laura or Tim had killed Mark.

  The danger was obvious. If they managed to convince Leah, she might lash out at the person they had shifted the blame onto. They would become a symbol of her rage, and if she used the knife, then the situation would end badly. Laura was the logical candidate. Leah would know that Laura had been the last one to leave that Sunday.

  Jensen motioned for hush. He needed to concentrate.

  ‘Leah, we know you didn’t do it.’ It was a risky opening gambit.

  ‘Finally! Now you listen to me.’

  ‘We’re sorry, Leah. We didn’t know. Laura was alone with Mark that night, wasn’t she? Tim left nearly an hour before she did. You’re holding an innocent man hostage.’

  ‘You’re trying to trick me, aren’t you?’ Leah taunted them. ‘How’d she do it? I was in the other room. Wouldn’t I have heard something?’

  ‘Leah, you were asleep, weren’t you?’ Jensen said. He was reading from notes Morton was passing over. ‘If Mark was standing outside, she could have hurt him without you knowing. It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Then, I should kill Laura
, shouldn’t I? She deserves it.’

  Jensen looked horrified. He cast his gaze downwards as he felt the heat of everyone in the room staring at him. ‘No! You don’t want to do that. Let us arrest her. A life behind bars is more miserable than a quick death.’

  ‘But, wouldn’t Tim have to have known? He would have seen her come home after killing Mark.’ Leah continued to taunt them in Faye’s singsong voice.

  ‘If he did, we’ll arrest him too,’ Jensen promised.

  ‘Hmm. I’m hungry. I think I’ll have Laura make me a sandwich. Can you call back later, please?’ And with that, she hung up.

  There was a mad scramble the moment the line went dead. Everyone burst into conversation with those nearest them. Two personalities? Were they innocent? Few of those present had all the facts.

  ‘Enough!’ Morton shouted. ‘We have a crazy suspect here, not a hardened criminal. If there’s an innocent personality involved, how do we get her to come out? I want to hear ideas on how we can save the most lives here.’

  ‘We can’t kill Faye,’ Rafferty said flatly. ‘If Leah is the criminal, then the pair of them belong in an asylum.’

  ‘So, what do you suggest?’ Ayala piped up.

  ‘We need to make a show of being willing to arrest Laura,’ Rafferty said. ‘Can we show Leah the CCTV of Tim getting home first? If we can convince her to let Tim go, there will be a moment between him being released and her crossing the room to get Laura. That ten seconds would be enough for the ARV team to get up the stairwell, into the flat, and contain Faye.’

  ‘Someone would have to take the CCTV footage up there,’ Morton said. ‘We could load it onto an iPad.’

  ‘I know. I’ll do it,’ Rafferty said. ‘I’ll take it up. She trusts me.’

  Chapter 62: Finger-pointing

  Rafferty was quickly fitted with a Kevlar vest and given an iPad to show Faye. The technician in charge of the live feed attached a microphone to her collar so they could hear everything, even if the phone line was cut again.

  Jensen telephoned ahead. ‘Leah, we’ve got you video proof that Tim is innocent. We’re going to send it up with someone you trust. You know Miss Ashley won’t hurt you, right?’