Love You Dead

23 Tuesday 24 February

Roy Grace was seated behind his desk, with a sandwich beside him, scanning the weekly Brighton & Hove Independent newspaper. When he ate alone, he always liked to read — particularly about the city — and to get as balanced a view as possible from different sources. When he had finished the paper, he turned to the ream of paperwork from the Lyon police, via Interpol, on their processing of Dr Edward Crisp. It had come through, frustratingly, in French. A local firm he’d used before, Tongue Tied, did a fast-turnaround translation job for him.

Attached was the DNA and fingerprint confirmation that this was, without doubt, the Brighton serial killer. As Grace began to eat, a prawn fell out of the sandwich onto a sheet of the report, marking it. Cursing, he picked the prawn up and put it in his mouth. His phone rang.

‘Detective Superintendent Grace,’ he answered, chewing.

‘Hey, pal, how you doing?’

Instantly he recognized the Brooklyn accent of his NYPD friend, Detective Investigator Pat Lanigan, who was on the New York Mafia-busting team. ‘Doing good, thanks! How are you? How is Francene?’ He dabbed the smear off the printout, as best he could, with a paper napkin.

‘Yeah, she’s good! Listen, hope you don’t mind my calling you direct?’

‘Of course not, always!’

‘I kind of guessed I’d get a quicker answer from you than by going through the Interpol bureaucracy.’

‘Tell me?’

‘I’m dealing with a homicide here in New York. A pretty nasty one involving torture. It’s looking organized-crime related — a courier for a Russian Mafia organization we’ve had under observation for some months. He was found dead in his hotel room, at the Park Royale West. Name’s Romeo Munteanu — a Romanian national. But that’s probably not going to mean anything to you. Word on the street is he lost a bag containing a large wad of cash he was carrying for a drug deal, and no one believed his story.’

‘How much?’

‘Two hundred thousand dollars. We’re trying to trace an English-woman who was with him in the bar of the hotel, we believe under an assumed name, the last time he was seen alive. Probably a long shot, but I thought you might be the person to help us find her. We’re not sure she’s necessarily connected — the bar staff we’ve interviewed say he appeared to have picked her up in the cocktail bar around seven in the evening on Wednesday last. They left the bar together around half eight. Then she checked out of the hotel just after ten that night. According to the staff she seemed pretty agitated.’

‘Do you have her name?’ Grace asked.

‘The name she checked in under was Judith Forshaw. But we’re pretty sure her real name is Jodie Bentley. It looks that way from the CCTV footage. Earlier in the day she had checked into the Four Seasons under her real name, and gave her address as her fiancé’s apartment on Park Avenue. We think she was being hounded by the media and may have switched hotels and identities to get away, although we don’t have all the details yet — the Four Seasons had a problem with their video, they’re trying to recover it, but I can send you a copy of the Park Royale’s CCTV footage if that would be useful?’

Grace jotted the names down on his pad. ‘What do you have on this Jodie Bentley, Pat?’

‘Her fiancé was a big-time financier, Walter Klein, who was under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission, and about to be charged. Rather conveniently for him, he died in a skiing accident two weeks ago. Possibly suicide. According to Klein’s lawyer, she was a fortune hunter, but knew nothing about his true financial situation. The lawyer told us she’s from Brighton — which is why I’m calling, in case she’s on your radar. The address the Park Royale has for her is in a street called Western Road, in Brighton.’

‘Doesn’t ring an immediate bell,’ Grace said. ‘But she sounds quite the grieving bride-to-be, picking someone up in a bar barely two weeks later, under a different name.’

‘Oh, I hear she’s a regular sweetheart. It gets even better. Her first husband died from a snake bite some years back.’

‘She might be very unlucky — or perhaps there’s more to it,’ Grace said.

‘Well, that’s what I’m hoping to find out, Roy. There’s two other things that may or may not be related to this. In the early hours of the morning, this character, Munteanu, looking a wreck, came down to reception at the Park Royale West, frantic to find this woman. He went bananas when they told him she’d checked out and left. He tried to bribe the desk clerk into giving him her address and any other contact details. He was offering a huge amount. The clerk had to get the night manager to try to calm Munteanu down — and it was only when the manager threatened to call the police that he finally went back to his room. He was subsequently found dead, and that’s when we got involved. It was pretty nasty — a Russian ritual killing.’

Lanigan paused for a moment then continued. ‘Around midnight, earlier that same night, a cab driver in the city brought a bag of cocaine — street value of around ten thousand dollars — into the 10th Precinct police station. Said he’d found it in the back of his cab — one of his passengers had sat on it and handed it to him. He gave a statement about all the passengers he could remember picking up that night. One was a woman, who he said seemed in a bit of a state. He’d picked her up from the Park Royale West Hotel, and she kind of fitted the description and time. Seems like she was undecided about which airport she wanted him to take her to — she eventually decided on LaGuardia.’

‘How did she pay?’

‘Cash. Gave him a big tip, he said.’

‘Which airline terminal did he drop her off at?’

‘American. The only flight at that time of night was a badly delayed one to Washington. Judith Forshaw was on it.’

‘Judith Forshaw. Presumably she had ID?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘But she flew into the US under the name Jodie Bentley, presumably with a full ID for that, too?’

‘Uh-huh. I’ve checked with Immigration.’

‘Interesting. Why does she have multiple IDs — and even more to the point, how did she get them?’

‘It’s sounding like her dead fiancé is a very big fraudster, Roy. Word here is that it could be on the Bernie Madoff scale, a Ponzi scheme that’s defrauded investors of billions of dollars. I wouldn’t think coming up with alternative IDs would be much of a problem to a guy like him.’

‘Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot for someone to lose,’ Grace said.

‘It is. We’ve run checks on Washington flights to the UK that she might have taken. There were fifteen to the UK the following day. We have CCTV footage of this same woman arriving at Dulles Airport in Washington around midnight — a match from the CCTV footage of her in the Park Royale West lobby. We have her crossing the departures concourse, but then she seems to have disappeared into thin air.’

‘Did you check outward flight passenger manifests?’ Roy Grace asked.

‘Sure. Nothing. She vanished like a ghost.’

‘I’ve been to that airport, it’s massive,’ Grace said. ‘Wouldn’t she at least stay in New York for her fiancé’s funeral?’

‘We’ve spoken to his lawyer. He told us that in his view she was just a gold-digger, and when he informed her about her late fiancé’s financial situation, she stormed out of his office. Sure, we’ll be looking out for her at the funeral — we don’t have a date yet. The family weren’t happy with the French police’s opinion that he had committed suicide and his children want an independent medical examination of their father.’

‘So either she went back into the city — by cab or bus or train — or she took a flight to England from another airport,’ Grace said.

‘Both are possible,’ Lanigan replied. ‘I’m waiting on a response from Homeland Security as to whether a Jodie Bentley has left the country — I’m hoping to hear later today.’

‘I know someone who may be able to help if she changed her physical appearance, perhaps in a cloakroom,’ Grace said. ‘Do you have CCTV coverage on domestic terminals for that day?’

‘I could get that for you.’

‘We work with a pioneering forensic gait analyst here in the UK, Haydn Kelly, who’s worked with a number of police forces here and abroad. Whatever her appearance, he could pick her out in a crowd.’

‘You serious? Forensic gait analyst?’

‘You don’t use this technology?’

‘I don’t know about it, Roy.’

‘If you could send me all the footage you have, I could get Haydn Kelly to check it over. However much she might have changed her appearance, he’d still be able to pick her out with his technology.’

‘I’ll get it to you in the next few hours. She may be innocent, but we’d like to talk to her as soon as possible.’

‘Ping it to me as fast as you can.’

‘You’ve got it.’