The Career Killer

by Ali Gunn

  ‘Either you’re dealing with the luckiest moron to ever cross paths with the Met, or...’ His voice trailed off as if his thoughts had meandered.

  ‘Or what? Give it to me straight here, Uncle Bertie.’

  Bertie crunched a ginger snap. ‘The positioning of the body rules out money in my mind. I can’t rule out a hedonistic or sexual component. I read the autopsy report that you emailed me. The way the killer plunged the knife straight into each victim’s heart suggests you’re being taunted by a highly intelligent serial killer who is driven by a sense of inner rage. He’s angry enough to want everyone to see his handiwork. That’s why he’s posed his victims in public the way he has.’

  ‘Are the benches significant?’

  ‘Perhaps, though why they would be, lord only knows. Something is driving me mad. There’s an inconsistency in the crime scenes. Your killer is arrogant enough to use the most public dump sites imaginable. He didn’t faff at the crime scene. It was careless snagging the dress which contradicts the planning required to get in and out without being seen. It just doesn’t gel.’

  ‘Adrenaline is a hell of a drug.’

  He nodded. ‘That it is. My point is your killer has mixed the recklessness of a knife-wielding murder with the planning required to pose a body in zone one without being seen. Why has he dressed them up? Why has he chosen gardens with benches? It’s an exceptionally high-risk strategy.’

  ‘They’re police heavy areas too.’

  ‘Quite,’ Bertie said. ‘So there are four reasons to dump the bodies the way he did. Either he didn’t care about the risks, was oblivious to them, or he thought the benefit was worth it.’

  ‘That’s only three reasons.’

  ‘Very good. Number four is that he had no choice. He could have a compulsion that stops him from being rational.’

  It sounded plausible. The police dealt with more mental health issues than the public knew. Elsie had heard junior colleagues complain that much of the time they spent on the beat was wasted triaging mental health problems rather than solving crime. ‘What would drive such a compulsion?’

  ‘It could be driven by physical attraction like the BTK killer over in the States. Dennis Rader picked his victims based on how much he fancied them.’

  Bind, torture, kill. Rader was a textbook example of the kind of crazy that Elsie hoped never to come across. ‘Moving on,’ she said quickly.

  ‘Some killers use their victims as proxies. In their mind, the victim isn’t the victim. They’re imagining an ideal victim, and the body in front of them is just a proxy to take their place.’

  ‘Like a killer who wants to murder their ex, but they can’t so they kill someone who looks like her?’

  Bertie nodded. ‘Pretty much. Perhaps the bench represents a place of significant trauma for the killer. Or maybe he’s just lazy and it was easier to dump the body on the bench than the floor. Revenge is a simple primer. Think of Robert Hanson.’

  He named another American serial killer. Hanson had taken his victims prisoner, released them, and then hunted them down.

  ‘Any sign the victims were stalked? Text messages? Emails?’

  They still hadn’t managed to crack Layla Morgan’s iPhone. Elsie bumped that task to the top of the team’s to-do list. ‘Nothing yet. Can’t rule it out.’

  ‘And then there’s the “because he could” sort of killer like Gary Ridgeway. Sometimes just being able to do something and get away with it is enough.’

  The sheer range of evil scared Elsie and this time even Occam’s razor wasn’t helping. Psychology was just so messy. She checked her own notes on her phone for the scenarios she’d outlined before driving over.

  ‘Your killer is losing control. He couldn’t wait a fortnight before he struck a second time. You know what that means.’

  Bertie let the ticking clock hang in the air. It was five minutes to midnight. Serial killers never stopped at two and they always got quicker as they lost control.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A week I’d say. Maybe less.’

  The imperative to find the killer grew and with it, the pressure on Elsie intensified. She felt a knot form in her throat thinking that at any moment some poor girl could be slaughtered and left on display like a doll.

  Perhaps though, it was really one kill disguised as a series. Her father had seen that before. ‘Can we rule out the possibility that the killer has picked a strange modus operandi just to mess with the investigation?’

  She expected the answer to be a firm no, that such a psychopathic approach was impossible to disprove. He surprised her.

  ‘I think so,’ Bertie said. ‘The level of hatred required to stab someone through the heart is astounding. That doesn’t strike me as a clean, dispassionate way to kill. It is possible the killer is a sociopath pretending to be an obsessive anger-driven compulsion killer... but that sort of wheels within wheels logic will give me a headache and I already feel drained.’

  He looked it too. In just the half an hour that they’d been chatting, his skin had grown sunken, waxy, and grey.

  Elsie leant forward to pat his knee. ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m old!’ he cried. ‘But it sure as heck beats the alternative.’

  Chapter 17: Most Called

  Thanks to persistent pestering on the part of DS Matthews, Layla Morgan’s phone network had given up a list of her most frequently called numbers without having to resort to a warrant. The telephone that Stryker was assigned to investigate belonged to an unregistered pay-as you-go mobile phone. It was just his luck.

  He swung by the Met’s Digital, Cyber and Communication Department to see what they could do about finding who owned the number.

  The IT liaison assigned to Mabey saw him coming and quickly focused his attention on his screen as if he thought that his in-ear headphones would save him from being accosted. Fat chance. Even at this distance, Stryker could see that he was playing some sort of card game. That was leverage he could use.

  He approached the tech from behind and yanked one of his earbuds out. The man spun around in his chair and leapt to his feet as if to berate Stryker for such insolence. He cowed the moment he saw how tall Stryker was.

  ‘Hi,’ he said with a smile. ‘I need to trace a pay-as-you-go phone. Can you do that?’

  ‘Naw, mister, not without you filling in form two two eight B—’

  Stryker tutted. ‘You’re such a stickler for the rules, huh? Aren’t there one about running unvetted programmes on the Met’s system?’

  He had no idea if it were true. It made sense in his head. Not only did the video game represent a waste of police time, it was also a security risk. Who knew what code it could contain?

  ‘Err... sorry, you said mobile phone?’ He sat back down and turned his attention to the monitor, hit alt F4 on his keyboard to close his game, and ran a programme that Stryker didn’t recognise, and certainly didn’t have access to. ‘Let me sort that for you now. Then we cool?’

  ‘We cool,’ Stryker said. He felt like he was talking to a teenager even though the greasy-haired man in front of him had to be pushing forty-five. ‘Here’s the number.’

  The tech looked at the screen, and then, quick as a flash, had typed it into his terminal. ‘I’m Ian by the way.’

  ‘Stryker.’

  He turned away from his monitor to face Stryker. ‘No way! That’s such a cool name. Why’d my mum have to go and call me Ian? Such a boring name.’ He tapped away at his keyboard. ‘Huh, it looks like your phone is unregistered.’

  Duh. ‘I know that. I told you that, didn’t I?’ Stryker hoped he didn’t look as frustrated as he felt.

  ‘Naw, you just said pay-as-you-go,’ Ian said. ‘So, what I can do is search for it online.’

  ‘Tried that.’

  ‘Guess you’re not as much of a jock as you look then.’ Ian stroked the fuzzy patch on his chin that passed for his beard. ‘I could triangulate it if the phone’s on. Lemme try that.’

  He
swapped from the database over to a map which showed all of the mobile phone masts scattered across London. There were thousands. Each had a circle drawn around them.

  ‘Each circle represents the optimal range of each tower,’ Ian said. ‘But that’s in perfect conditions.’

  He clicked a button and the circles shrank.

  ‘What’re the smaller circles?’

  ‘Typical coverage taking into account average British weather at this time as well as the background radiation the city usually generates. What I’m going to do is see which masts your number has connected to. Then from the strength of the signal, I know how far, roughly, it is from each mast.’

  ‘And then you triangulate to tell me where the phone is.’

  It was simple mathematics. A stronger signal meant quicker responses to radio pings and that strength was predictable enough to nail down a location to within a few feet.

  ‘Right,’ Ian said. He typed far faster than Stryker ever could, the spring-loaded keyboard underneath his fingertips clicking and clacking rhythmically as he worked. ‘Uh-oh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your phone is on, that’s the good news.’

  ‘And the bad news?’

  ‘It’s somewhere in Milan.’

  Chapter 18: Trace

  The boss refused his request to pursue the mobile phone to Milan saying it “wasn’t realistic” and that “they couldn’t afford it”. Don’t ask, don’t get, Stryker thought. He drummed his fingers against the steering wheel impatiently. Traffic was especially bad this morning despite the fact that he was driving away from the crowds. Nothing was going his way today.

  Instead of letting him go to Milan, Mabey had ordered him to keep chasing the lab results from Annie Burke’s plethora of samples. He’d already done the paperwork, emailed to chase the lab and left half a dozen phone messages. Nobody had called him back so now it was time to try in person. Mabey had asked him to bill it to Fairbanks which he felt a little uncomfortable doing. Nevertheless, the chain of custody logs were updated to reflect Mabey’s request and forensic services purchase orders were submitted to the independent body which oversaw DNA analysis.

  The UK National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database, or NDNAD as it was called in the force, had been operational since ninety-five, a fact which had surprised Stryker the first time he heard it. Back then, it was nearly empty. Now it had millions of DNA samples, all taken from criminals and crime scenes.

  As every police officer who had tried using it knew, the system had two flaws, one major and one minor. Since the Protection of Freedoms Act in 2012, samples belonging to those who were acquitted and to those who were never formally charged had to be deleted with no exceptions.

  That meant Stryker could only really use the database once a criminal had been otherwise identified. It was great for catching offenders that didn’t see the error of their ways, but anyone who wasn’t convicted essentially had a free pass simply because they weren’t on the database. If Stryker could find a first-time offender by other means – through witness testimony or CCTV footage for example – then he could use DNA to confirm the suspect was at the crime scene. What he couldn’t do was use the DNA database to identify them in the first place because their DNA wouldn’t be in the system. It was a win for civil liberties and a royal pain in the backside for him.

  For Stryker, DNA was a means to an end. The fact that the cowards at the Crown Prosecution Service almost always wanted a forensic slam dunk barely entered his consciousness.

  The minor flaw was less of a problem. It was too expensive. Even a DCI as moneyed as Fairbanks would never be able to sign off on testing every sample at a scene as big as St Dunstan. Annie’s report had stated that the number of unique DNA samples left at the church was in the low thousands. Hundreds of people had sat on the very bench the victim was found upon.

  Mabey didn’t know it yet, but Stryker had been taking an online course in forensics ever since he knew he’d be transferring to the Met. He wasn’t quite as thick as Valerie Spilsbury had made him feel during the autopsy. He didn’t need to be up to Annie’s level, he just needed enough of a grounding, and it seemed his reading so far had left him in good standing. Just this morning his breakfast literature had been a report about the new DNA-17 standard that had been adopted, a technique almost as impressive as its enormous price tag.

  Now forensic scientists looked at sixteen markers plus a gender identifier instead of six, the error rate had dropped so far that finding an unrelated match (which Annie called an “adventitious match”) was one in a billion. Even the late legal theorist William Blackstone would surely approve of that and he was famous for saying “better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be incarcerated”.

  Stryker scoffed. Money was now the barrier to justice. He parked his newly assigned BMW outside the London headquarters of the National Policing Improvement Agency, the public body responsible for managing the database.

  Part of Elsie’s cost-cutting had been simple triage. She and Annie had worked together to prioritise only those samples which were most likely to yield results and kept the rest in storage. She gave priority to the samples which tested positive for amelogenin, a marker only found on the Y chromosome. That one simple measure meant that they could halve the number of necessary tests by homing in on the men. It was an educated gamble based on Elsie’s demonstration during which she’d made him pick up Matthews and walk back and forth for a-hundred-and-fifty feet. He’d only just managed it despite being a habitual gym monkey.

  Then Elsie had homed in on the samples which had been from the route between the killer’s chosen entrance on the eastern edge and the bench. That got rid of many of the samples belonging to the general public.

  All of that still left them with 242 distinct samples, and, in Stryker’s mind, it still rested on the assumption that the snagged thread was from the dress, that the killer didn’t plant the thread as a bit of misdirection, and that the killer had actually left the contact fibre evidence on the dress that they were assuming had been transferred from his clothing. If the killer were, it was entirely plausible that he could have staged the crime scene or worn gloves.

  Stryker didn’t know exactly how much it was all going to cost. He knew it was in the thousands rather than the hundreds despite Elsie’s careful planning. It was funny how numbers became ephemeral as they grew larger. He’d just as easily believe that a DNA test cost five hundred pounds as he would a thousand pounds. Both figures sounded plausible. How did they price up these sorts of things? The numbers appeared to have been plucked from the air.

  It wasn’t like there was an open market to compare the prices to. Commercial genealogy services existed and they were a hundred pounds or so. Stryker had made the mistake of buying a DIY genealogy kit last Christmas. His mum had turned as white as a sheet when he’d explained how they worked. Two awkward weeks later, he knew two things. First, he was of British descent. Quelle surprise. Second, he had a half-brother and a stepdad, not a brother and a father. He wasn’t looking forward to this year’s festivities and he couldn’t opt out of Christmas. There were festive lights and trees everywhere. Around nearly every street corner, carol singers not only got in his face to sing to him but expected him to pay for the inconvenience to boot.

  As he wended his way through the reception, he was reminded of this by plastic snowmen, a gaudy fake tree, and a huge tub of Celebrations chocolates sitting on the reception desk. He approached the receptionist and cleared his throat to try and get her attention.

  ‘Ahem! I’m here to enquire about the status of several DNA tests.’

  She finally looked up, listless and bored but clearly unhappy to have had her solitude interrupted. He forced himself to flash her a winning smile. Despite the approaching holidays, she looked as miserable as he felt. He could understand that. Christmas could be tough.

  ‘Name?’ she asked.

  ‘Sebastian Stryker.’

  ‘And, pray tell, Mr Stryker,
do you have an appointment?’ Her tone suggested she knew the answer.

  ‘Well, no, but—’

  ‘You’ve got to have an appointment.’ She handed him a business card. ‘Here, call this number and they’ll sort you out. I can’t do it from here.’

  ‘How long do you think it will take to get an appointment?’

  ‘This time of year? Hmm... four to six weeks.’

  He wanted to swear. That would mean no way to chase the DNA results until after Christmas. The secretary had already turned her attention back to her laptop. Stryker eyed the security gate ahead of him and the lift on the other side of it. The barrier was barely waist-high. Sod it, he thought. He spun on his heel and ran towards it.

  And promptly tripped. He landed face down on the marble floor and swore loudly. The thud he made as he landed drew the attention of the receptionist. She cracked a grin so wide that Stryker could see all of her back teeth.

  ‘That. Was. Epic.’

  Stryker grimaced, his lip curling upwards, raw and bloody. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and dabbed at the split lip. It came away stained red. ‘Uh, thanks.’

  ‘Hey, you’re the one that ran on a marble floor,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you see the sign?’

  Now that she mentioned it, he had noticed a wet floor sign on his way in.

  She walked around the desk to help hoist him up to his feet. ‘What did you think you’d achieve anyway? The lift needs a security badge, you daft ape.’

  ‘Oh,’ Stryker said.

  ‘Look, who’re you here to see? I’ll call and see if they can fit you in.’

  ‘Like I said, I need to chase some DNA evidence for a murder enquiry.’

  ‘Murder?’ she said. ‘Who do you think we are?’

  He was beginning to feel less sure about his trek. ‘Don’t you handle the DNA database?’

  ‘Yeah, we do, but we don’t process any evidence here. SCD 4 do all that. If we haven’t given you a match, it’s because the ERU hasn’t processed it.’