Fever of the Bone (44 page)

‘How do you know this stuff?’ Paula asked. ‘You just said, you’ve never worked for Mrs Levinson.’

‘I wrote a dissertation about medical information sharing in a digital age for my BSc,’ Elinor said. ‘I’m an ambitious junior doctor. I’m addicted to qualifications.’

‘There must be a back-up,’ Paula said. ‘You wouldn’t rely on just one computer for that.’

‘I’m sure there must be. But I have no idea where it is and I don’t imagine anyone outside the ICT team at the HFEA would know.’ Elinor stirred her coffee thoughtfully.

‘She could have told us all that, but she didn’t,’ Paula complained. ‘She just sent us off with a flea in our ear. She wouldn’t even tell us how the same sperm ended up in Birmingham.’ Paula bit into her panini savagely.

‘I can tell you that. It’s no big secret. We’ve got guidelines that say we should avoid producing more than ten live births from the same donor. The reason being that you don’t want to compromise the gene pool with hundreds of kids running around with the same gametes. But you don’t necessarily want ten kids of approximately the same age and with the same father in the same town. Because the psychologists tell us we’re more likely to fall in love with an unknown sibling than a stranger.’

‘Really? That’s wild.’

‘Wild but true. So if you’ve got a particularly fertile donation, it’s common after half a dozen successful pregnancies to swap sperm with a clinic in another city. I imagine that’s what happened here.’

‘That makes sense.’ Paula gave Elinor a frank look. ‘You’re doing quite a job of making yourself indispensable.’

‘What I live for.’ She was still looking pensive. ‘I know this might sound a little off the wall . . . But are you guys thinking that the sperm donor might be the killer?’

Wondering where she was going with this, Paula said, ‘Our profiler thinks that’s a possibility.’

‘I don’t know much about these things, but it seems to me that someone who’s going around killing people might have come to your attention before,’ Elinor said. ‘If he has, wouldn’t he be on the national DNA database?’

‘I suppose so,’ Paula said. ‘But their DNA is different.’

‘I know. But I vaguely remember reading about a cold case where they got the killer after twenty years because his nephew was convicted of something and the database flagged it up.’ Elinor pulled out her iPhone and connected to the internet, turning the screen so they could both see it.

‘So how do you know this? Another dissertation?’ Paula teased as Elinor navigated to Google and typed dna murder relative cold case into the search terms box.

‘Dustbin mind. I have a desperate accumulation of trivia in my head. I’m your girl on pub quiz night.’ She scrolled through the results. ‘There, that’s it.’

‘“Man convicted fourteen years after crime by relative’s DNA sample,”’ Paula read. As she read on, she grinned. ‘Good to see you’re not infallible.’

‘So it was fourteen years, not twenty.’

‘And rape, not murder,’ Paula said. ‘But I take your point.’ She finished her coffee and stood up. ‘Now I have to go and talk to Stacey.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘And meet a colleague from Worcester.’

Elinor walked her to the door. ‘My twenty minutes are up too. Thank you.’

‘What? For mercilessly picking your brains?’

‘For getting me off the ward and reminding me there’s life out here.’ She leaned into Paula and kissed her, warm breath tickling her ear. ‘Go and catch your killer. I have plans for you when this is all over.’

A delicious shiver unsettled Paula. ‘There’s an incentive, if I ever heard one.’

When Carol finally made it back to her squad room, she found Tony sitting in the visitor’s chair in her office. He was leaning back, fingers interlocked behind his head and feet on the wastepaper bin, eyes closed. ‘I’m glad someone’s got time for a nap round here,’ she said, shrugging off her coat and kicking off her shoes. She snapped the blinds closed, opened her desk drawer and took out a miniature of vodka.

Tony straightened up. ‘I was thinking, not napping.’ He watched her open the vodka, look at him, then screw the cap back on and throw it back in the drawer. She glared at him and he held his hands up in a gesture of appeasement. ‘I didn’t say a word,’ he protested.

‘You didn’t have to. You can do sanctimonious without moving an eyebrow.’

‘How did it go with Blake?’

‘No secrets round here, are there?’ Carol fell into her chair. ‘This job sometimes offers moments of pure pleasure. It was a beautiful thing to watch him wrestle between his smouldering desire to save money and his burning desire to kick off his time here with a brilliant coup. Even more beautiful because he made the right decision. If we can identify the next victim, we get to go with full surveillance.’

‘Well done. I also hear that DS Ambrose has found us a suspect. ‘

Carol had had more time to think about Patterson’s phone call. ‘Well, he’s found a possibility. It’s based on a lot of assumptions. First, that Fiona Cameron’s geographic profile is on the money. Second, that the killer used his own vehicle. And third, that Warren Davy isn’t just off having a jolly with his mistress.’

‘Good points, all of them. But I still think Davy’s a strong possible. If Stacey can identify the next victim, that’s likely to be a more definite way to go. Do we know anything about Davy yet?’

Carol brought her monitor to life and clicked on her message queue. There was a brief from Stacey. ‘He’s got no form. He’s got one credit card which he seems to use for business only. No store cards. No loyalty cards. She says it’s a typical profile for someone in his field. He knows how easy it is to breach security so he keeps his presence to a minimum. His phone hasn’t been switched on for days. The last time it was on was when Seth disappeared on Central Station. And it pinged the nearest tower to . . . Care to guess?’

‘Central Station,’ Tony said.

‘Got it in one. So he’s definitely elusive.’

‘Has anyone spoken to the girlfriend about him?’

Carol shook her head. ‘I don’t want to spook her into warning him off. He’s perfectly placed to fake or steal an identity. If he chose to run now, we’d struggle to find him. He could go to ground anywhere. Here or abroad.’

Tony shook his head. ‘He’s not going to disappear. He’s got a mission and he’s not going to stop until he’s finished. Unless we stop him, that is.’

‘So what’s his mission?’

Tony jumped out of the chair and began to pace in the confines of the office. ‘He thinks he’s the bad seed. Something’s happened to fill him with fear and self-hatred. Something that he thinks is passed on through the blood. I don’t think it’s as straightforward as a medical condition, although that is possible. But he’s determined to weed out the bad seed. To be the end of the line. He’s going to kill all his biological children. And then he’s going to kill himself.’

Carol stared at him, horrified. ‘How many?’

‘I don’t know. Can we find out?’

‘Apparently not. According to the extremely unhelpful consultant at Bradfield Cross, all information about anonymous donors is totally off limits. So bloody off limits that, frankly, you wonder why they keep it. If they’re never going to use it, why not just destroy it? Then nobody could ever abuse it.’ Carol took the vodka from her desk drawer again. She also took out a small can of tonic water. She poured them both into the empty water glass on her desk. ‘You want a drink?’ she said defiantly.

‘Oh no, not me. I’m high enough with all that’s buzzing in my brain right now. Because there’s something not quite right with this picture,’ he said.

‘But it makes sense of everything we know. I can’t think of another theory that fits the facts.’ She sipped her drink and felt some of the tension in her neck start to ease.

‘Neither can I. But that doesn’t mean I’m right.’ He turned sharply and stopped by her desk. ‘If this information’s so hard to get hold of, how did he find it out? And what happened to set him off on this crusade? He’s spent ages grooming his victims. How has he kept it all together?’

‘Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe his girlfriend’s been covering his back at work.’ She knocked back the rest of her drink and sighed in satisfaction. ‘God, that’s better.’

‘I wish I could talk to her,’ he muttered.

‘I know. But we have to hang fire till we see what Stacey can do.’

‘I appreciate that. But I’ve almost never come across a serial offender who’s had a sustained emotional relationship. If we’re right about Warren Davy, there are so many questions she could answer. So many insights she could give us.’ He sighed.

‘You’ll get your chance.’

Tony grinned. ‘I’ll be like a kid in a sweet shop.’

Carol shook her head, amused. ‘You’re weird.’

‘I don’t know how you can say that when there are people like Warren Davy out there. Compared to him, I’m normality itself.’

She laughed out loud. ‘I wouldn’t bank on it, Tony.’

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: [email protected]: 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. [email protected].’

‘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?’