Fever of the Bone

CHAPTER 38

Alvin Ambrose felt at home in the MIT squad room right from the start. These were the kind of cops he understood. Paula McIntyre had sorted him out with a desk, a phone, a computer and a coffee. Everyone who had passed through had stopped to introduce themselves, even the little Chinese woman in the corner who seemed to be hard-wired to her computer system.

He also relished the sense of being at the heart of the operation. The only problem was that there wasn’t really much for him to do there. Everyone was working their way through piles of paper or screens of data, but he knew they were only keeping busy. Everyone was on pins, waiting for Stacey to emerge from behind her barricade of screens with the motherlode.

With nothing else to occupy him, he thought he might as well check his email. Humming under his breath, he waited for the screen to load. The music stopped halfway through a bar as he realised what he was looking at. The second item in his inbox was: davywar1@gmail.com: how can i help?

Ambrose swallowed hard. He wasn’t sure what to do. He wanted to open the email, but Stacey and her ilk had warned him so thoroughly about the destructive potential of email that he didn’t want to take any chances. Still, he had an expert on the spot. He walked over to Stacey’s corner and waited while her fingers flew and clicked. After a minute or so, she looked up. ‘Did you want something?’

‘I think I’ve got an email from Warren Davy,’ he said. ‘It’s on my computer.’

Stacey looked at him as if he was a little slow. ‘Which account?’

‘My police one. Aambrose@westmerciapolice.org.’

‘Go and shut it down on your screen, please,’ she said. ‘Then come back and sign in here.’

By the time he came back, she had the sign-in screen in front of her. She stood up and looked away while he entered his password. He suspected it was just for show. She probably had a record of every keystroke on her system. Once he was in, he stepped back and let her at the screen. She cocked her head and looked at the subject line. ‘Let’s go for it,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, I’ve got every virus protection known to humankind and one or two alien ones running on this system.’ He wasn’t entirely convinced she was joking.

The email unfurled on the central screen on the lower level. On the screen above it, a stream of numbers and letters suddenly sprang into life. But Ambrose was only interested in the message.

Hi, Detective Sergeant Ambrose

My partner, Diane Patrick, said you wanted me to contact you. Something about my car? Sorry not to phone, I’m in Malta on business and it costs an arm and a leg, plus I’m working pretty much full on so email is easier for me. If you let me know what it’s all about, I will get back to you asap.

Best

Warren Davy

DPS Systems: www.dps.com

‘Interesting,’ Stacey said.

‘Looks pretty straightforward to me,’ Ambrose said.

‘Except that it’s not been sent from Malta.’ Stacey pointed at the upper screen, which had come to rest with a very straightforward message. ‘It’s come from a computer owned by Bradfield City Council libraries department. He’s in town, Sarge. And either he doesn’t care that we know it or he’s an arrogant twat who thinks we’re a lot less sophisticated than he is.’

‘Either way, he’s probably getting ready to roll. How are you getting on with your trap?’

Stacey shrugged. ‘It’ll be done when it’s done. These things are hard to predict.’ She began to tap the keys again, her eyes flitting between screens. As Ambrose watched, she suddenly froze. Seconds ticked by and still she didn’t move. He thought she’d even stopped breathing.

Then her fingers were flying over the keys, almost too fast to register. ‘Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha,’ she said, her voice a crescendo from whisper to shout. ‘We’ve got him,’ she yelled.

Almost before her words had died away, they were all clustered round. Carol Jordan elbowed her way through. Ambrose made room for her at the front. ‘What is it, Stacey? What have you got?’

‘I’ve got two. BB and GG. BB is on top right, GG top left. Both scrolling down to the bottom screen.’

They stood there transfixed as text unrolled before their eyes. BB was chatting to someone calling himself DirtAngel. From the sound of it, BB was setting up a meeting so they could go dirt biking the following day. He was promising to teach him the secrets of the sport. ‘He’s on the move tomorrow, ‘ Carol said.

GG and his chat-mate weren’t online live, but Stacey had pulled up their last chat. ‘He’s pretending to be a girl. He’s setting up 1dagal for a makeover. After school on Thursday. Look: “Tel no1. I’l show u t bigst secrt. U’l look gr8 when we’re dun.” Secrets again.’

‘He’s playing with them,’ Tony said. ‘He knows their biggest secret, the one they don’t know about themselves. So he teases them with the idea of secrets.’

‘Who are these kids, Stacey?’

‘I’m working on it,’ she said absently. ‘Why don’t you all bugger off and leave me in peace? I’ll email you all I’ve got from the C&A. Now I need to backdoor these accounts and the less you know, the better.’

They melted away. ‘She’s something else,’ Ambrose said to Paula.

‘She’s the best. She only works here for fun, you know?’

‘This is her idea of fun?’

Paula chuckled. ‘Oh yeah. She gets to poke her fingers into all sorts of stuff and nobody’s going to be coming after her for it. But when she’s not here? She’s busy making millions with her own software company. Talk about secrets. She thinks nobody knows about her other life, but one time she let the name of her company slip to Sam and that was a red rag to a bull. No way he was going to stop till he’d found out every last cough and spit.’ She cast a speculative look at Sam. ‘God help her if he ever realises she’s in love with him.’ Suddenly she stopped short, her face shocked and puzzled in equal measure. ‘Why am I talking to you like this?’

Tony, who had been standing behind them unnoticed, suddenly spoke. ‘Because he’s like you, Paula. People talk to him. The same way they do to you.’

Ambrose’s laugh was a low rumble in his chest. ‘It’s a scary gift.’

‘Don’t tell Carol,’ Tony said. ‘She’ll be recruiting you before you know it.’

Ambrose looked around the room where he already felt so at home. ‘A man could do a lot worse.’

Tony studied Carol, who was talking to Kevin, her head bent over her desk. ‘He could. On the other hand, you could say she deserves better than any of us.’ And he walked away, completely heedless of the small sensation his words left behind.

It was definitely Stacey’s day for demonstrating her value to the MIT. She’d been delighted by Paula’s suggestion of searching the national DNA database for familial connections to the murdered teenagers. ‘We can do it with the boys,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask me to explain, but it doesn’t work with female relatives in the same way.’

Paula backed off in mock-horror. ‘Oh please, Stace. Not the scientific explanation, I’m just a simple city girl.’

But Stacey was already sending an urgent request to the database, attaching the three sets of DNA. Unusually, she followed up her email with a phone call to one of the analysts that she’d worked with before. Paula, still hovering in the background, noticed there was no small talk. If the ICT staff had needed that to make things run smoothly, there wouldn’t be a functioning system in the Western world, she thought.

‘Stacey Chen here, Bry. I’ve just emailed you three sets of data that we need checked. I need you to prioritise it. We’ve got a serial killer working on a tight turnaround, and this might just break it before he takes his next victim . . . Now? . . . Thanks. I owe you.’ She hung up her headset and without turning said to Paula, ‘He’s on it. You can go and get a coffee now.’

Dismissed, Paula went back to her desk and the mountain of paper that always came with a murder inquiry. Carol and Kevin were closeted with a team that had been put together from Traffic and Western Division, planning their surveillance of Ewan McAlpine, the dirt biker. There had been a big discussion about whether they should warn the boy and have him wired. Paula had been a strenuous advocate of that approach. She knew how wrong these set-ups could go, and she wanted maximum protection for the boy, even if it posed a different set of problems. But she’d been outnumbered and overruled. Her opponents argued that a fourteen-year-old boy wasn’t going to be able to carry off the subterfuge and the killer would sense a trap and abort, leaving them with nothing. They were probably right, Paula conceded. But at least her way meant the kid would have a better chance of coming out of it alive.

She pulled up the transcript of his conversations with BB on her screen and read it again. Ewan sounded like a nice kid. He made cute jokes and he didn’t pick on anybody. Stacey had managed to track him down via his email account. He lived with his mum and dad near the city centre in a small enclave of Georgian houses that had somehow survived the post-war developers. His dad was a consultant urologist at Bradfield Cross, his mother a GP in one of the inner-city health centres. That was one thing about dealing with victims who were here as a result of fertility treatment - they weren’t exactly skint. A couple she knew had spent the best part of twenty grand on IVF and still had nothing to show for it except a series of miscarriages. The downside was that they were dealing with the articulate middle classes, the sort of people who would gut and fillet them if anything went wrong with this operation.

Another good thing was that, thanks to Stacey’s infiltration of RigMarole, they knew where Ewan was meeting BB - presumably Warren Davy. Ewan was to take the Manchester bus to Barrowden, a small village about five miles outside the Bradfield city limits. BB had arranged to meet him at the bus stop so they could go to his farm, a couple of miles away. I’l com 4 u on t quad bike, he’d said. Another enticement to a lad gagging for a bit of wildness in his very civilised city life.

‘Alvin?’ Stacey called. ‘You got a minute?’

Ambrose strolled across to Stacey’s corner, Paula in his wake. ‘What is it, Stacey?’ he said.

‘Warren Davy’s cousin? The guy with the garage? What was his name again? For some reason, I can’t find your report on the system.’

Ambrose cleared his throat, looking embarrassed. ‘Sorry, I forgot. I filed it with Manchester but I didn’t send it to you when I got here. His name was Bill Carr.’

Stacey pointed to one of her screens. ‘That’s from the NDNAD. There’s only one hit on our DNA. William James Carr from Manchester comes up as having a familial relationship to all three boys. Probably cousins or nephews, according to Bry.’

‘Are you saying Carr’s our man?’ Ambrose was clearly puzzled.

‘Well, he’s a possible, I suppose,’ Stacey said sceptically. ‘But it strengthens the case against Warren Davy. If they’re cousins, then it means the three victims also have a blood relationship to Davy. So what was hypothetical and circumstantial becomes more evidentially based.’

‘But he’s still only a possible,’ Paula said. ‘And we still don’t know where he is.’

‘Which means we still have to do the surveillance,’ Ambrose said.

Stacey shrugged. ‘As everyone around here delights in telling me, it always comes back to old-fashioned coppering.’ She turned back to her screens. ‘I better email the boss. There’s nothing she likes more than another brick in the wall.’