When they’d finished he took back the floor.
“Is the blood’s Gruber’s, Des?”
“Preliminary DNA says it’s likely, but the shoe and palm prints definitely aren’t. They could belong to your perp.”
Liam cut in glumly. “Or a cleaner. We’ll only ever know if we find someone to make a match.”
Des shrugged. “Nothing new there.”
Craig continued as if Liam hadn’t spoken. “OK, so Gruber… we’ll have his definite ID this evening when his parents arrive, and we believe he was killed in his office on Monday and then left there for several hours before being moved to the scene.”
He turned to Ash suddenly. “Ash, a place working on engineering innovations must have tight security, so get their CCTV. With any luck our perp’s on tape.”
He returned to his story. “Gruber was killed at his work on Monday night, which means he wasn’t abducted three days before his death like all the others. So, why did our perp deviate from his set procedure? Suggestions anyone?”
Liam got in first. “Maybe Gruber wouldn’t go quietly, and he reckoned he could take the perp on. Physically, I mean.”
“Yes, I think you’re right. Our perp intended to abduct Gruber, but something went badly wrong. Gruber fought back, they struggled, and Gruber came off worst.” He nodded to himself. “OK, what does that tell us, apart from the fact our killer is strong? Everyone jump in.”
Deidre was first, much to Susan Richie’s disgust; if they’d been at school Craig just knew Richie would have hissed ‘swot’ at her.
“Judith Roper’s body was left with Gruber’s, and I think that was always planned, Guv. But Roper had been held for three days like all the others, so why not Gruber? Was it an error, was the killer in a rush, or wasn’t Gruber ever intended to be held for the seventy-two hours? If that’s the case, then why was he different?”
“Yes!” Craig bounced to his feet. “Why? As Deidre said; was it an error, a rush, was Gruber special in some way, or… here’s another thought… didn’t the three-day timing matter so much this time because the date on which we found Roper and Gruber was more important?”
Deidre Murray was leaning forward enthusiastically, understanding now why Craig had been given the case.
“Maybe it’s the date of abduction that matters and not the date we find the bodies?”
As Craig shook his head Liam adopted Murray’s pose. “I think the three day period means something in its own right. It’s symbolic.”
Rhonda jumped in. “Three days is seventy-two hours. The victims were all younger than seventy-two too.”
Annette nodded. “Especially the seventeen-year-old. But I think that means something different.”
It brought Craig back to an important point. “Rick Jarvis.” He scanned the group. “Who did I ask to look into him?”
No-one owned up. The truth of it was they’d all forgotten their youngest victim.
“OK, Susan, you do it. Today, please.”
He turned away before she could object.
“Right, it’s the date of the bodies being dumped and discovered that’s important, not the date of abduction. And I think Liam’s correct, the three days is symbolic, but sorry, Rhonda, I don’t think it’s linked with your age theory. It wasn’t exactly seventy-two hours after abduction when any of the bodies were found. I also don’t think our killer ever intended to hold Gruber for the three days like the others. Deidre’s correct; he wanted to leave two people together and he’d already got Roper. She fitted the three days, but Gruber never could have, only being taken on Monday, and as far as we know that was our killer’s only attempt to abduct him. Although…” He turned to the analysts. “Davy, check that he hadn’t reported being assaulted or stalked to anyone, please.”
He took a sip of coffee and carried on. “So, the important question is, why didn’t Gruber need to fit the bill?”
It was John who responded. “Gruber was different in another way as well. There was no foreign DNA or kiss mark left on his forehead.”
Craig frowned, unsure what that meant. The pathologist continued.
“I think the important thing this time was leaving two bodies together, so I think Andy’s right about them being left to represent a particular time. Roper was a deliberate victim, but what if Gruber was just an afterthought? Maybe he wasn’t the person the perpetrator had really wanted to abduct but just a substitute, so the three days and kiss mark part of the killing didn’t seem so important with him?”
Craig was nodding when he turned back to Deidre Murray. “Deidre, this is important. Get on those dates ASAP, please, both the abduction dates and the dates of leaving the bodies. We need to know if there’s anything special about them. Ash will help you.”
Just then he remembered something and walked to the back of the squad-room, dragging a second whiteboard back to face the group.
“Liam and I started looking at the occupations of our victims, now and twenty and thirty years ago. We can’t be exact until we find the date of the historical case, but you’ll see already that several of their jobs then weren’t the same as they are now.”
He turned to Annette and Rhonda. “You two were working on the weapons. As soon as you’ve finished with those, I want you to look at this. It will be rough until we find our historical case. When we discover that case and date we’ll find exactly what each of our victims was doing then, and show how, if at all, they were linked.” He glanced at the clock. “OK, five-minute break, then I’ll take Liam on Maria Drake, Annette and Rhonda on our weapons, I’ll update you on a man called Dan Torrance, then we’ll have Kyle on alcohol.”
Thirty minutes later Liam had removed the spectre of random hate crime from Maria Drake’s death, and put her lover’s ex-partner, Jess, and Drake’s ex-husband Rowan vaguely in the frame, along with the two families that Drake had pissed off through her work. He’d also introduced the name of a drug-dealer, Hugh Bellner, but without much conviction that he would prove to be their man.
Everyone was also holding a page containing a list of how each of the external injuries on their victims could have been caused; it included possibilities such as a fall through a window, a stab wound while cutting towards you instead of away, and someone falling head first on to the edge of an ornate coffee table.
Craig gazed at the information, knowing that as soon as they found their historic case the truth of how all the injuries had been caused would leap off the page. He set the list to one side.
“OK, like everything we’ve heard today, don’t dismiss these, but my feeling is that as soon as we find our historical case the injuries will start to make sense.”
He rose to stretch his legs, still speaking.
“Right, earlier today a man named Daniel Torrance entered High Street station saying that he’d been abducted. He’s a sponsor for AA and was lured to West Belfast at lunchtime yesterday, on the pretext of chairing a meeting, and was then abducted in the street. He was taken to a wood somewhere in The Glens of Antrim, paralysed with drugs, tortured with red-hot implements and told that he was going to die, but not until the killer had finished someone else off first.”
Liam opened his mouth to say something, but Craig shook his head, carrying on.
“As yet, we have no confirmation who that person might be, or sadly, have been, but a GP called Sarah Reilly seems the likeliest candidate. Her DNA matches the sample found on Judith Roper’s forehead and we know she was abducted while attending a fictitious home visit on Tuesday. That’s three days ago, so we can expect her body to show up soon.” He shook his head in disgust. “Take over, Liam.”
Craig only half-listened while the DCI reported what Dan Torrance had told them, the other half of his mind on the woman the killer had left Torrance to go and kill. Their chances of stopping Sarah Reilly’s murder now were negligible. Murdered for going to help a sick child; there was no bloody justice in the world.
As Liam wound up with, “Torrance also gave give us other
information, some of which directly supports our vengeance theory”, Craig turned to Des.
“I suppose it’s too early to know if there was any foreign DNA on Torrance?”
Des raised an eyebrow sceptically. “I only got his evidence an hour ago! I’m fast but not that fast.”
Craig smiled. It had been worth a try.
John shook his head quizzically. “Why wasn’t Torrance’s DNA left on Walter Gruber’s forehead?”
It was Des who answered. “Torrance wasn’t abducted until two days after Gruber died. It might be on Sarah Reilly’s forehead, when we find her.”
John was about to nod when he changed his mind. “Did anyone ask Torrance if he’d had saliva extracted?”
Craig looked at him in surprise. “What should we have asked?”
“About pain or discomfort in his mouth. Was Torrance seen by a medical officer? Maybe they asked him.”
Craig nodded Liam to make the call while he moved on. There was only the pathology and Kyle’s reports left. He looked at his friend hopefully.
“Anything useful on Roper’s or Gruber’s cause of death, John?”
John had been cleaning his glasses, now he slipped them back on his nose and nodded, signalling Davy to show his first slide. It showed the needle mark between Judith Roper’s first finger and thumb.
“Right. Both our new victims had needle marks in the same location, but when Mike and I dissected the tracks… Davy, would you mind?” Another slide appeared, showing a line drawing of the various layers of the skin with a red line angling through them. “We both found nothing. Well, when I say we found nothing, we found needle tracks, illustrated here by the red line, but there were no chemicals in the surrounding skin layers-”
Just then Liam came off the phone, shaking his head. “Nothing in Torrance’s mouth, according to the FMO, Doc. I’ll get Jack to ask him direct after we finish.”
Andy used the interruption to ask a question.
“Shouldn’t the needles have been aiming for a blood vessel? I thought that was how drugs entered the body.”
John nodded. “You’re right, but even so there would still be a trace of the drugs in the local tissue. Through seepage from the needle or blood vessel.”
Craig nodded thoughtfully. “And you found nothing… So, what? The needle mark was just staging?”
Mike nodded. “That would be my guess. If it is staging, it could mean that the act of injecting is important to whatever scenario we’re dealing with.”
John agreed, carrying on with his report. “When the tox-screens of both victims came back, we found they had the same apparent cause of death as Jason Collier and all the other victims.”
“Alcohol poisoning?”
“Respiratory depression, but accompanied by such high blood alcohol levels that alcohol poisoning was thought to be the cause of it. The levels were so high that if they’d lived they would have been brain damaged. Our killer certainly likes to make their point.”
Liam had a question.
“No chance Gruber’s head injury could have killed him then?”
“No. It was just a small laceration and a bump. My guess is that Gruber didn’t go quietly so the killer had to knock him out at the factory, and the laceration left the blood traces that Des found. The killer obviously left him lying on the floor for a while, before he moved the body for display at Tyrella.”
“Hence the lividity marks.” Craig frowned. “OK, thanks for that, all of you.” He went to rise and then remembered something. “I don’t remember seeing any requests for exhumations, John. What happened to those?”
The pathologist shook his head. “We have seven bodies between the morgue and the new ones, so I’m hoping we’ll get enough consistent evidence on those not to need to exhume any more.”
“Keep me up to date.”
Craig crossed to the board, tapping the word ‘alcohol’ and turning in search of Kyle. The DI was seated on the periphery of the group, doing his best to avoid direct eye contact with Susan Richie, his erstwhile boss.
It wasn’t that he was exactly frightened of her, more that she’d treated him, well actually treated all her staff, with suspicion when she’d been Intelligence Director. Her dismissal by Craig had more than likely added the blame for that to his list of probable misdemeanours, even though he’d had nothing, well, almost nothing to do with Craig making the case to transfer her, and even if he had had, how could she possibly know?
Those thoughts were racing through the DI’s head now, causing him to hunch down behind Andy until Craig could only see the top of his head.
“Kyle.”
Spence’s eyes widened in alarm at the sound of his name being called. The feeling subsided slightly when he realised that it was by a male voice. He popped his head up above Andy’s shoulder, making the DCI look like a two-headed man. Craig knew that he should probably ask the ex-spook what he was playing at but he was too tired to care.
“Alcohol. You were dealing with that, Kyle, so report, please.”
Spence straightened up slightly, only to shrink again immediately as Susan Richie turned around. Craig was already sick of the DI’s jack-in-the-box routine, so he summoned him up to the front and handed him the marker pen.
“Turn the board around if you want to write something.”
As it was another way of delaying the inevitable Kyle did just that. When there was nowhere else to run he began to speak, fixing his gaze very deliberately on the board.
“OK, alcohol. Well, the drinking habits of the first nine victims were mostly unexciting. All of them, except Nathan Richards and Jason Collier, were light social or occasional drinkers. The odd glass of wine, champagne at a wedding-”
Liam cut him off with a chuckle. “Sounds exactly like me.”
It earned him a sarcastic laugh.
Kyle picked up his thread.
“So, I interviewed their relatives again and they all confirmed that was the case. I then went to meet Nathan Richards’ wife-”
It was Craig who interrupted this time. “He was a heavy drinker?”
Kyle glanced at him, shaking his head. “Just the opposite. The Devil’s buttermilk had never passed his lips. I wanted to find out if he had any bad habits at all, but from what everyone including his wife said, the man was so vanilla that I’ve pretty much ruled out alcohol as anything to do with why he was killed.”
“Apart from the fact it was all over him.”
Kyle shrugged. “There’s always that.” He turned back to the board and wrote up Jason Collier’s name. “Mister Collier on the other hand was a different case.”
Within minutes they knew all about Jason Collier’s first and second wives, his expensive house in Cultra and his struggles with ‘the drink’.
“Apparently Collier was done for death by careless driving of a five-year-old girl, back in ninety-two. Just careless because, although Collier had been drinking, the parents got some of the blame for letting the kid run out into the street. He got sentenced to two years and did twelve months inside with the rest on parole. He had to do a stint in rehab as well.”
Twelve months…The period over which they’d had a trail of corpses.
While Liam shouted “Yes!” the information made Craig frown. Could the girl’s death be linked to their case? It might be the decades-old episode at the heart of everything, and it was certainly a tempting straw to grasp.
He pulled himself up quickly, before he went down that road. They needed to investigate the child’s death for sure, but they had to follow up the other leads as well, in case they were wrong and this was just an incidental, although appalling, finding in one of their victim’s lives. If they dug deep enough there were probably equally bad transgressions against some of the other names. Hell, the same might be true of some of them, although he bloody well hoped not.
He carefully constructed what he was about to say, and shot Liam a warning look before he spoke.
“OK, good work, Kyle. Now, I know that you
’re all leaping to the end here. Jason Collier killed a child whilst under the influence of alcohol, so that must be our historic case. Well, stop, right now.”
He watched as several of the bright faces around him darkened again.
“All we can say at the moment is that this is a good line of investigation, so, Kyle, it would be worth you liaising with John and Mike over their cold cases.”
It was the inspector’s signal to sit down, and he did so with a smile, having managed the double win of avoiding Susan Richie’s steely gaze and getting public praise from the boss.
Craig moved back to the board and turned to the analysts. “Davy, you were looking at the whisky suppliers. Anything there?”
The analyst nodded. “Two wholesale companies s…supplied large orders of MacDonald Red Label this year and last year, but they won’t give me the details without a warrant.”
Liam and Aidan snorted in unison. “For whisky?”
Craig agreed, but he didn’t want to get into slagging off the wholesalers; he would do that to Katy later on.
“OK, stupid though we might think it, Aidan, you get the warrants and then pay them a visit. I want the names of any bulk buyers of that whisky in the past eighteen months. Take Davy with you if he wants to go.”
Davy’s immediate meerkat posture said that he most certainly did.
Craig had another thought.
“Davy, when you get back you might want to tip off customs and excise about the wholesalers’ reluctance to cooperate. My gut says they’ve been smuggling stuff in.”
Liam nodded, impressed. “That’ll teach them to be reluctant to assist.”
“It wasn’t revenge, Liam, although if it works…”
As he was facing Aidan, Craig was reminded of the victims’ injuries, so he raised the point.
“Anything more on that, Aidan?”
“I gave the composite to the Doc to check in his archives.”
Craig turned back to the pathologists. “John? Mike?”
John shook his head apologetically. “Nothing so far but the dust giving me a bad chest. If it is from an old case, then it was definitely before computerisation. We’ll keep digging.”
The Killing Year (The Craig Crime Series Book 17) Page 24
