Binary Witness (The Amy Lane Mysteries) (14 page)

Chapter Thirty-One: Back to the Start

Derek fired him.

He looked apologetic about it, but Jason knew that he needed him shifted as soon as possible. Despite it being the middle of autumn, the man was sweating in his little office, mopping his brow with his handkerchief, as his assistant’s phone kept ringing and ringing and ringing.

“Roath Cleaning Company. No, Mr. Lawrence is not available for comment. No, I won’t talk about Jason. Goodbye.” Over and over, the same thing, until the poor woman finally gave up and took the phone off the hook. Jason stared somewhere over Derek’s shoulder and waited for the man to pluck up the courage to say the words.

“Look, Jason, you started out well. And getting into Miss Lane’s flat—well, no one’s been able to do that for months. So...good show on that one, yeah?”

Jason dredged up a small smile and Derek smiled like a maniac, either trying to pacify the serial killer or just glad to see some flicker of response.

“But you’ve been late recently. I’ve had some...concerns from the clients. And now with all this—” he waved his hands expansively, as if to indicate the collapse of the universe, “—I just don’t see how we can carry on with you. You understand, right?”

“You’re firing me.” Jason watched Derek flinch. If he wasn’t going to be man enough to say the words, Jason wasn’t going to give him an easy out. He’d liked this job, actually enjoyed it—chatting with the clients, getting their places in order. Meeting Amy.

“I’m sorry, Jason. And...we’ll need the supplies back. And your uniform.”

“Fine.” At the end of his tether, Jason got up from his seat and pulled the bloody lilac T-shirt over his head, chucking it in the middle of Derek’s desk so the sleeve landed in his tea. “And here are your supplies.” He dumped the holdall on the desk too, sending the pot of pens flying.

“Now there’s no need to be like that.” But Jason was already leaving, pulling his jacket over his bare chest and running out the door, running back to the dole queue.

* * *

In times of trial, Amy took refuge in the internet.

The ebb and flow of information was soothing. Tracking down the genesis of a meme or following a complex IP trail through the servers of the world was like playing hide-and-seek in the playground again. No one ever found her hiding places—or perhaps they never looked too hard to begin with.

Today’s treasure hunt was for the identity of a serial killer. To her immense frustration, she had lost his IP address reroute somewhere in Eastern Europe, in what was probably a server in a wooden shack. It wasn’t complex, intricate systems that gave her a problem—it was small, shoddy, half-assed attempts at systems that invariably lost any and all information of value.

However, the reroute signature itself was interesting. It looked like it had been custom-made, selecting a series of servers that were alien to the bigger IP address maskers and mirrors. She might not be able to find the end of the path, but she might be able to find other sites and accounts that had been routed similarly. He had to have an internet presence, she was sure of it—no one with this level of technical knowledge could keep away from his own kind.

The key, she decided, was the Eastern European server, which upon further digging turned out to be in Warsaw. It was small and unreliable, but that also made it likely to be his obfuscation point of choice. He was relying on the fact that no one could get beyond it. However, she didn’t need to find the next link in the chain—she just wanted to know what other chains it was part of.

The more she looked into it, the more it seemed like a private server, possibly only used by the killer. Perhaps he had some link to Poland, or perhaps he merely knew someone online who could arrange that kind of thing. The selling of overseas servers was a growing trend and easy to arrange, if you knew where to go.

But the idea started to form in her head that, while she had praised the use of a slow, unwieldy system as the perfect concealment, perhaps it was only this awful because that was the limit of the creator’s skill. Maybe he made his own server. Amy’s server, of course, ran like diamonds and ice, but that was only because she could never bear to make something so horrendous as an unreliable server. The artisan’s pride.

If it really was a single-use system, then all the addresses routed to it would be the killer’s browsing history on a plate. She’d have to trace them forward, of course, but for an expert in the field, it was mere child’s play. She even had a program that would run it for her, but where was the fun in that?

Amy cracked her knuckles and went to work.

* * *

“Back again, are we?”

Jason sat across from Martin and scowled. That was enough to send the man back to his cowering, shaking ways, and Jason got a childish satisfaction out of it. Then he remembered that everyone in town thought he was a murderer and he sobered up fast.

“Lost my job,” he said sullenly.

Martin nodded with a look of pity that gave Jason the urge to shout and storm out, but he reined in his temper and forced himself to stay still. Losing it in here could lead to nothing good.

“I’m sorry about that. As it was still inside the probation period...” Martin shrugged, his smile turning sympathetic.

Jason slumped forward, elbows on the table and hands clasped at the back of his head. “What do I do now?

“There’s nothing much around at the moment.” Martin tapped on his mouse with one finger while he scratched at a shaving cut on his left cheek. It was amazing Martin had any face at all with the way his hands shook all the time, as if he had a permanent caffeine buzz. Jason must be bored if he was now obsessing over the guy at the Job Centre.

“I’ll take anything,” Jason said, with his best eager, willing smile.

But Martin just shook his head sadly. “I’ve got nothing to give you, I’m afraid. Keep looking in the paper and online. Something will turn up.”

The false cheer in Martin’s voice was another kick to Jason’s confidence and he couldn’t even look the man in the eye. “Can I...” The words caught in his throat, but he had to swallow his pride if he was to pay his own way at home. “I need to sign on.”

Martin gave him a knowing look, oblivious to his self-disgust. “Well then. Let’s get through the questions, shall we?”

Jason sighed, resigned. This day was unremittingly shite.

* * *

The look of disappointment on his mother’s face was worse than Derek firing him, worse than Martin’s questions, and worse than Amy doing nothing to stop him leaving.

“Your uncle came round,” she said hollowly. “Asked me if you killed those girls.”

Jason flinched and looked at the scarred kitchen table, swallowing against the lump in his throat. If his mam thought he was a murderer, he didn’t know what he’d do.

“What did you tell him?” he whispered, dreading her response.

Her mug slammed into the table, jerking him out of his misery to stare at his mother’s furious face. “I told him that if he really thought his nephew could do those terrible things, he wasn’t welcome in this house no more!” Gwen’s face was flushed with rage and Jason felt a strange sort of pride in his mother, defending her son in the face of the rising tide of suspicion. “But...” she said, and his heart sank, “you’re going to tell me everything that’s been going on this past couple of weeks and why you’ve been out at all hours of the day and night.”

So, reluctantly, he told her how he’d been involved in a murder investigation and watched her face turn ashen at how he’d taken blood from a suspect and pretended to be a copper about town. When he had finished, she was on her second cup of tea and had worried her hair into an Einstein-like tangle.

“Well, that explains why you were bothering so much with that Amy. She didn’t sound like your type of girl at all.”

For some reason, that statement stung him, though he had no idea why. True, Amy was nothing like the girls he chose to hang about with, but she wasn’t bad and he thought maybe he would’ve liked to see her, even if he wasn’t getting paid.

“What are you going to do now,
bach?
”

Jason had no idea, didn’t want to think about what he might do next, how much he wanted to go back to Amy and help her find the bastard who was murdering girls in his city.

But before he could answer, Cerys hurtled through the door, slamming it behind her. She’d been crying and Gwen stood immediately, taking the girl into her arms. “Whatever’s the matter? Hush now, don’t cry.”

Jason rose to his feet, torn between terror and anger. “Did somebody hurt you, Cerys?” Gwen looked at him over Cerys’s shoulder, eyes wide, clutching her little girl tighter to her.

“It’s Stuart,” Cerys bit out between sobs. “H-he’s been cheating on me.”

Jason subsided back into his chair. Ah—another loser boyfriend bites the dust. A look of guilty relief passed over Gwen’s face, as Cerys continued to cry into her mother’s neck.

“Now, do you know that for a fact,
bach?
” Gwen said.

Jason rolled his eyes. Cerys did have a tendency to overreact, but it wasn’t like the dumping of the boyfriend was a great loss. He didn’t know why his mother couldn’t just let things lie.

“He’s covered in her...marks! Scratches all over him.”

Alarm bells started ringing in his head, and Jason remembered Laurie’s hands, the red beneath her nails—her struggle to take her killer down with her. “What’s his name?” Jason asked. “Where can I find him?”

Cerys looked up, face blotchy and startled. “I don’t need you to go beating him up,” she said, scoffing. “He’s bigger than you anyway.”

“I don’t want to fight him,” Jason said, slowly uncurling the fist that had formed of its own accord. “Just get some answers.”

Cerys looked at him strangely, and he saw the realisation in his mother’s face. “You’d better tell him,
bach
,” she said. “It could be important.”

And Cerys, confused and unknowing, told him everything: “Stuart Williams. From that Canton lot. You know him, don’t you?”

Chapter Thirty-Two: Rat and Mouse

Bryn had hit a brick wall. The post-mortem findings on Kate and Melody confirmed what they already knew—Kate strangled, likely with her shower curtain, and Melody suffocated, with a match between the fibres in her lungs and the fibres from the hotel pillowcase. The lake had washed away most of the useful trace evidence, but the medical examiner confirmed that neither girl had been raped. That fitted Amy’s idea that Laurie’s sexual assault had been an escalation, but didn’t otherwise help them.

The media were getting bored of the case now, having interviewed everyone they could think of and paying Teresa Danvers five hundred quid to dish dirt on Jason. However, she hadn’t given them much of a story, clearly having calmed down enough to realise he wasn’t the killer and that the whole thing just made her look bad.

But that meant the whole case was losing momentum. He had three bodies now, three murder scenes, and no excuse as to why he hadn’t caught the killer. He didn’t even have a convincing suspect. Amy said something about a server in Poland, but he fully expected her to get swallowed whole by the tech or take to her bed any day now. She was already fraying around the edges, and Bryn was starting to regret sending Jason away.

It had been the right decision at the time, every media outlet breathing down their necks, but now that the whole thing had subsided after the weekend, he should be calling the boy up and telling him that Amy needed her assistant back. And yet he didn’t, because as much as he liked Amy, it was her decision at the end of the day who she wanted in her house, and she was perfectly capable of fetching him back herself.

Meanwhile, he had nothing to go on. And no idea when the bastard might strike next.

* * *

Jason’s first idea was to go down to old Tiger Bay and pound the living shit out of Stuart until he talked. But he needed to be smarter than that. The only way he knew to be smart was to call Amy.

But Amy had made it clear that her work with the police was more important than him and he could respect that, knew what was at stake. So he’d have to do this alone. He’d have to find out what Stuart was doing and work out from there whether he was the killer. To do that, he’d have to follow him.

The Nissan Micra was not a car built for stealth, stakeouts or guys over six foot. But for all his complaints, it wasn’t a bad car. It had never let him down yet and, despite the tendency for the driver’s side window to fall inside the door and the complete inability to climb a hill, it could eat up a Valleys road. He just wished it looked less like a girl’s car.

Huddled inside his thickest winter coat, watching his breath mist before him and condensation freezing on the inside of his window screen, Jason peered out at the gloom of a Cardiff night. The Taff lapped up against the bank, swollen by the autumn rain, and a group of lads sat around in the light of their souped-up Puntos, smoking and drinking cheap cider. Jason liked to think he’d had a little more class at that age, but he was probably kidding himself.

He’d been sitting there for two hours and hadn’t learned anything remotely useful except that these boys could drink and liked to play pissing games in the Taff. Having asked around all yesterday, he’d found out that Stuart had worked his way round all of Cerys’s friends, liked a bit of MCAT and diazys, and was mixed up in something with his Canton boys but no one really wanted to find out what. It was the older members of the gang he was hanging with now, roughly the same age, same type, and Jason couldn’t really see them being up to much.

Of course, no one had thought his friends up to much until they’d tried to rob the gold exchange. It was a genius plan, really, right up until the point where their getaway driver came off the road. Kid was seventeen, just got his license—he was no Jay Bird. He landed Lewis in hospital with his arm broken in two places, handcuffed to the trolley in A&E because he was under arrest for armed robbery. And Jason hadn’t been there.

Jason was ashamed of the fact that some days he regretted running with those boys, and others he regretted not going down with them. They were fucking musketeers, him and Lewis. It had been their plan, but Jason had only gone and got himself arrested the week before, trying to get hold of the getaway car. But Lewis hadn’t rolled on him, just resented him from his prison cell, and set his little brother on him. Jason had known little Dai Jones since he was two years old—he wasn’t going to hurt the kid.

Stuart and the Canton boys finally got bored of the riverside, got back in their cars and headed off down the street. Jason started the car, rubbed at the misted-up windows and followed them. Stuart broke away from the others, heading back towards Butetown, and Jason followed at a distance, hoping he was doing more than taking a trip to his mam’s.

He was paying such close attention to not losing the car in front that, when Stuart finally stopped, it took Jason a moment to realise where they were—outside his house.

Jason got out the car, striding ahead to cut Stuart off before he got anywhere near his front door—and his sister. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Stuart sneered. “None of your fucking business. This is between me and your sister.”

“It’s between you and my fist.” Jason pulled himself up to his full height, glowering down at this jumped-up little shit who thought he could interfere with Jason’s family and get away with it. Stuart just laughed, starting to turn away, then throwing a vicious right hook.

It landed full on Jason’s cheek, pain exploding across his face. But he recovered quickly, landing a thump on Stuart’s shoulder, grabbing and twisting his arm up and behind his back. Stuart howled, sinking to his knees and crying for release. Pathetic.

“Stay the fuck away from her,” Jason spat. “Do you hear me?”

Stuart whimpered and Jason pushed him to the pavement. He heard the front door unlock behind him. “Go inside, Mam. I’ve got it under control.”

But it was his sister who ran past him to comfort the poor darling on the pavement, looking up at her brother as if he were Satan himself. “What did you do to him?”

Jason decided he’d had enough of this crap for one night and turned back to the house. Gwen stood in the doorway, taking in the scene with alarm, but Jason easily pushed past her. “Try to stop her getting killed,” he said and went upstairs to bed.

* * *

Amy stared at the monitor, hand poised over F1. Another tense minute passed.

Then, finally, Cerys Carr left her ex-boyfriend on the pavement and went back inside with her mother. Amy breathed a sigh of relief and, moving the feed to another monitor, went back to looking for the serial killer.

It wasn’t that she was nosy or interfering. It was just that crime was so easy to prevent. There were cameras all over the city and, while that was very useful for catching thieves or vandals after they’d committed their crime, if someone would just watch them live, they could nip most trouble in the bud before a crime was even committed. It did sound a bit
Minority Report
but Amy could live with that.

Monitoring the city’s criminal hotspots was easy enough, and required a simple nine-by-nine grid of camera feeds to her distant monitor. She had recognition software to detect potential threatening movements and then notified the police accordingly. Of course, now she had added Jason surveillance to her repertoire, but she’d only had to call the police twice. Given his record, she thought that was pretty good going.

In her ongoing quest for the killer’s internet history, she’d hit mostly dead ends. A few forums of questionable morality, the type that advocated domestic violence and rape under the term “spousal discipline,” where one could learn about everything from beaters that left no mark to how to construct your own cell. However, she couldn’t find any active threads with his signature, which meant he was consuming, not creating, and that didn’t tell her anything specific about him.

However, this current chain was more interesting, as it seemed to lead to a blogging site. Russian-owned, but very American in outlook, it was a hugely popular platform for fandom, bandom and text-based roleplay. Once Amy had navigated their mess of code, she would—ah, there it was. A personal journal with the name “yearntolove.” It had to be him.

The posts were unremarkable, except for some attempts at poetry, awful even to Amy’s school dropout’s eye. And they were addressed to someone called “freebird.” She was the focus of his obsession, Amy realised, the one who drove him to murder those other girls. He was trying to make her jealous, lure her away from her man. It made a sick sort of sense—posting the photographs of supposedly sleeping girls to hint at a series of liaisons, to make the girl of his dreams jealous. The girl who was most likely their woman at the hospital.

But his latest post was different from the others. He’d been following the news reports of their findings and he knew they were on his trail:

I won’t let them get to me before I get to you freebird. You know now how far I would go for you, I know you feel the same way. We’ll be together soon freebird. I’m coming to save you. Pack a bag and I’ll be there.

He was going after the woman in the hospital. She was his next victim.