by Dane Cobain
Holy shit, she thought. Whoever this creep is, he’s watching us. Like, right now. Streamed live in 240p.
Maile shivered. Then she twisted the camera around so that it pointed at her face and slowly, calmly, deliberately raised a narrow middle finger. Then she put it back amongst the rubble where she found it.
She wandered over to Leipfold and Cholmondeley to tell the two men what she’d found. They were predictably delighted, and Cholmondeley shouted across to the forensic team to ask them to come over and take a look.
Good job I was wearing gloves, Maile thought. I’ve never been this grateful for winter weather.
Chapter Eighteen:
Jane Doe
THE RAIN GOT STEADILY WORSE throughout the night, and Leipfold and Maile gave in and headed home at 4:15 in the morning. Maile rode pillion while Leipfold meandered through the empty streets, guiding Camilla with a tender hand and a calm sense of mastery. Conditions were poor, and her tyres slipped on the concrete as though she was gliding across snow and ice. He didn’t dare take her above thirty, especially not with Maile riding behind him. He didn’t mind risking his own life, but he’d never forgive himself if something happened to her.
Leipfold dropped her outside her house and watched her walk to the door, calling after her to tell her to take the morning off. But she didn’t, and neither did he. They just drank more coffee than usual and walked a little sluggishly. Every time the phone rang, Leipfold winced and Maile swore. They both had the same tension headache that Leipfold had felt for five years straight when his business was going down the pan and he had no idea how to save it.
Cholmondeley called at 10:45, a half hour after Leipfold and Maile finished The Tribune’s crossword. Leipfold left her to man the office and hopped back on to Camilla. She needed refuelling, but she’d have to make do with a couple of litres from the Shell garage because that was as much as Leipfold’s empty wallet could stretch to. Then he hit the streets and cruised towards the Old Vic.
Cholmondeley met him at a diner around the corner from the police station. It was a strange place, a converted American schoolbus that served fries, burgers and coffee and invited customers to sit inside. The food was okay, but the coffee was good and both of them needed it after the night before. And it was private, more private than Cholmondeley’s office back at the station. As an added bonus, Camilla looked badass, propped up on her kickstand at the front of the vehicle.
Leipfold ordered a coffee and a plate of fries, and Cholmondeley took a quarter-pounder deal with extra pickles. They sat down in one of the booths and looked gloomily out of the windows. It looked like rain again.
“So how are things?” Leipfold asked. “Get much sleep?”
Cholmondeley laughed. “Fat chance,” he said. “How can I sleep with the Tower Hill Terror on the loose?”
“You sound just like The Tribune,” Leipfold murmured.
The two men ate on in a gloomy silence. Then Cholmondeley broke it to give Leipfold an update, but there was little news to report from the police force.
“We still have no suspects,” Cholmondeley said. “At least, none we can pin a case on. In the meantime, they’re free to kill again.”
“We’ll keep working on it,” Leipfold said. “Maile’s back at the office following up on a couple of things, and at least we know where and how they operate. It’s only a matter of time, Jack.”
“Yeah,” Cholmondeley murmured, “but that doesn’t help us to make an arrest. We’re still no closer to the killer’s true identity.”
“They’ll make a mistake.”
“Perhaps,” Cholmondeley grunted. He stuffed the last handful of chips into his mouth and swilled them down with a gulp of coffee.
“What about the victim?” Leipfold asked. “How’s she holding up?”
Cholmondeley whistled softly. “She’s not so hot,” he said. “They had to induce a coma. The bleeding’s stopped, but her condition’s critical.”
Leipfold sighed and shook his head. He pushed the rest of his food away from him, no longer in the mood to eat.
“Can I see her?” he asked.
* * *
Cholmondeley pulled a few strings so that Leipfold could visit Jane Doe—or Meg Jackson, if the killer’s notes were to be believed—in the hospital. It was a bitch to organise, and technically in breach of protocol, but he knew people who knew people. Besides, Superintendent Richards had his back. She had to because Leipfold had been allowed to attend one of her briefings. He’d even helped them to find the lockup.
Jackson was in a terrible state. Leipfold guessed she was in her twenties, but the damage to her body made it difficult to tell. He put her height and weight at around five foot four and one hundred and thirty pounds. She was a slight girl, even smaller than Maile, with long, blonde hair that was stained copper from the blood she’d lost. Leipfold’s armed escort gave him twenty minutes with the victim, but that was enough for him. He didn’t even know why he was there. He just felt a burning desire to see her with his own eyes, to look at what had happened and to boost his resolve to stop it from ever happening again. He’d hoped to find a clue of some sort, something that the police had missed or that they’d failed to recognise the true significance of.
He spent the first two minutes examining the victim as closely as he could under the constraints of the police supervision. He spent the remaining eighteen minutes staring thoughtfully at her while jotting down notes in his Moleskine.
Leipfold nearly wept as he left the hospital, but the tears just wouldn’t start coming. He remembered his old man, an often drunk, occasionally violent Jack the Lad type who’d threatened to beat him if he cried because “crying’s for girls.” And so Leipfold bit back the tears and did the only other thing he could do. He promised himself that he’d catch the Tower Hill Terror before they struck again.
He used his phone to check his bank balance, cursed softly when he realised that a couple of bills had gone out and then set himself a reminder to chase up a couple of invoices. He wasn’t broke, but he did have a problem with cash flow. Money could buy a lot of things, and help was one of them.
Leipfold put in a couple of calls and hopped on his bike. Then he started her up and hit the streets again.
* * *
Back at the office, Maile’s research had finally started to pay off. After modifying the parameters of her search software and downloading vast swathes of information from a couple of different social networks, she’d built up enough of a database to start searching through it. She aggregated it all, filtered out some of the noise and then created a list of links ranked by how often they’d been posted.
That gave her a list of around 1,800 links to look through. Unfortunately, there was no real way to automate it, so she found herself manually checking every link, bookmarking a couple and discounting most as worse than useless. But she forced herself to keep going. It felt like a waste of time, but there was no way of knowing until she finished the job and took a look at where it led her.
Leipfold returned to the office when she was a hundred links in, and she got up to make a quick coffee when she was halfway to a thousand. Then she sat back down and continued the search.
Twenty minutes later, she had a hit. The link had hardly gone viral. It had been shared a couple dozen times at most by random accounts with no obvious ties to connect them. She realised, relieved at the sudden burst of knowledge, that Lukas White’s name was nowhere to be found.
Good, she thought. I guess he wasn’t involved. In Maile’s head, the kid was too young to have played a part in the brutality. He should never have been exposed to it in the first place.
The feed was password protected, but she dropped Mayhem a message and her hacker friend was more than happy to help break into it.
“Shouldn’t take long,” Mayhem had said, his fingers striking some keyboard somewhere and keeping her upd
ated on his progress. Maile had promised him a beer for his troubles, and he’d been only too happy to help. “Let me get back to you.”
He got back to her a half hour later, after he’d run the link through some brute force tools which tried to guess the login by repeatedly keying in credentials until they managed to get inside.
“It’s like the guy wanted us to crack it,” Mayhem said. “The username’s ‘administrator’ and the password is ‘Hebrews134.’ Dictionary words and a couple of numbers, pathetic. And that’s not all.”
“Go on,” Maile prompted, her own fingers hitting the keys so hard that Leipfold asked her to keep it down.
“Looks like the login is a new thing,” Mayhem said. “I did a little digging myself. My guess? The live stream was open to the public, and then it got locked down at the end of the broadcast. You’re going to want to take a look at it.”
“I sure am,” Maile replied. “BRB.”
Maile loaded up the link again and keyed in the credentials that Mayhem sent. It took a while for the site to load, but once she was in, she was in.
It was a sparse site, hosted on a Ukrainian server with a Japanese domain name, and it had been created for one purpose only. It was a simple video repository, and it housed a seemingly endless stream of videos, all around nine hours long. Maile clicked through them at random. It was pretty damn obvious what she was looking at.
Each of the files contained the footage from a different camera, including two different angles on the inside of the container. Maile laughed delightedly and shouted for Leipfold to come over.
He was halfway over to her desk when the intercom buzzed, breaking the tranquillity with a harsh, grating sound that always gave the two of them a headache.
Leipfold told Maile he’d be right with her and wandered over to answer the door.
* * *
It was five minutes later, and Maile was bustling around in the kitchen to make a round of drinks for Leipfold and his visitors. There were three of them, three men who looked like they’d fallen out of EastEnders and spilled into their messy office.
Leipfold introduced them all to her by name. The first man was a Craig. He stood about five foot eleven and looked like a former addict, with gaunt features, too-thin skin and bandy legs and arms. He was wearing a Burberry jacket and knock-off Levi’s, and the ends of his fingers were stained yellow with nicotine.
The second man was introduced as a Thom with a silent “h,” a greasy-looking youth of nineteen or so who was wearing a black tracksuit and an expensive pair of Nikes. The third man was Fletch, a flat-faced weasel of a man who looked like he’d rob his own mother for the change in her piggy bank. Maile shook hands with each of them in turn, out of politeness more than anything, then sat back down at her desk. She reached into her second drawer for a small, plastic bottle and then sanitised her hands surreptitiously while watching events unfold.
Leipfold sat the three men down in reception and then hurried over to his desk to pick up a sheaf of papers. Maile recognised the pages as the suspect profiles she’d developed as part of their case notes. Each profile contained a brief bio and description, a summary of their histories to date and a selection of recent photographs that Maile had swiped from search engines and social networking sites. Leipfold separated the piles into three and handed a stack out to each of his visitors.
“Take these,” Leipfold instructed, “and familiarise yourself with them. And no trading papers, understand? I’ve given each of you a different assignment. It’s nothing too difficult.”
“What’s the assignment?” This came from Fletch, who’d spun his chair around and was sitting with his legs spread and the back sticking up between them.
“I want you to follow them,” Leipfold said. “I’m not expecting it to be perfect, but I want you to do the best you can.”
“And are you going to pay us?”
Leipfold frowned and crossed his arms. “What kind of man do you think I am?” he asked. “You’ll get paid when the job’s done.”
“Okay,” Fletch replied. “It’s just that last time, you—”
“This time is different,” Leipfold interrupted, holding up a hand to call for silence. “And work is work, take it or leave it. Have you boys got a better offer?”
Leipfold paused for a moment, waiting for a reply that never came.
“Good,” he said. “Now, you’ll find the information I have on each of your marks in the packs that I gave you, including photographs, approximate heights and weights and a list of known haunts. I want you to follow them, as much as possible, and report back to me on their movements.”
“What exactly are we looking for?”
“Good question, Thom,” Leipfold said. “And I’m afraid it’s a tricky one to answer. Just log their movements and send me updates. If something seems suspicious, there’s probably a reason for it. Okay?”
The three men nodded their assent.
“Okay,” Leipfold said. “Fletch, you’ll be following Lukas White. He’s just a kid, but he’s connected to a case that I’m working on and I want to rule him out as a suspect.”
“Got it.”
“Thom,” Leipfold continued, “I want you to tail Asif Shaktar. He works as a courier and so you’re going to have your work cut out for you. Speak to my assistant. She might be able to give you a bug or something to attach to his bike so at least we know where he is when he’s out on the job if you can’t keep up with him.”
“Will do,” Thom said.
Leipfold nodded and said, “Craig, I’ve saved the best for last. You’ll be following a man called Marc Allman. I want you to be careful with him. He’s already been interviewed by the police and to be blunt, we have no idea what he’s capable of. We don’t know much about him. That’s why I want you to follow him.”
“I can do that,” Craig said. It was the first time he’d said anything, and Maile noticed that his voice was low and raspy like Tom Waits or Leonard Cohen, born from too many bottles of whiskey. “Is there anything else?”
Leipfold shook his head. “Just that time is of the essence,” he said. “I need you to get started as soon as possible.”
“And what about the money?”
“Don’t worry about the money,” Leipfold said. “If you find something, I’ll make it worth your while.”
* * *
“So what have you got?”
It was ten minutes later and the afternoon was turning slowly into evening. Leipfold’s guests had left the office. He was leaning lazily against the wall beside Maile’s desk while she scrolled her mouse through the latest news. She pulled up the bookmark she’d saved of the video repository and started flicking through the footage.
“I found the feed for the cameras at the lock-up.”
“How?”
“Like Ringo Starr,” she said. “With a little help from my friends. I’ll send over the link. Log in with ‘administrator’ and ‘Hebrews134.’”
“Got it,” Leipfold said. Maile believed him. Her boss had an uncanny ability to remember things, not quite preternatural or eidetic but close enough to pass for it on a foggy day. In another life, she was sure he was counting cards in some backwater casino. “Like the Bible.”
“Like the what?”
“Like the Bible,” Leipfold repeated. “Look it up.”
So she did. Hebrews 13:4. Marriage should be honoured by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.
“Weird password,” Maile said, but she let it go. “It doesn’t matter, forget about that. That’s not important. This is.”
“What?”
Maile grinned and switched tabs, then blew up the footage until it took up the whole of one of her two screens.
“Look closer,” she said. She moved her pointer to the bottom left of the screen and spun it
around in little circles. Leipfold leaned in. “There. You see it?”
“What is it?”
“It’s hard to tell.” Maile shrugged and ran her hands across the keyboard again. It honed in on the square of pixels that they were looking at and ran through a couple of enhancements that she’d already worked on. They ran the same piece of footage in a loop, tweaking the brightness, the contrast and the sharpness.
“Looks like a piece of paper,” Leipfold said.
“That’s what I thought.” Maile gestured at the screen, tracing a finger along the contours on the footage. The inside of the lockup was built from corrugated sheets of metal and the camera was tucked against the floor, flattened tight against the curves.
“Wait,” Leipfold said, snatching Maile’s hand away from the mouse to stop her from cycling through the footage again. “That’s not just a piece of paper. It’s an envelope.”
Maile squinted at the screen again. Whatever it was, it had been overlooked by the armed response team. The video cut out shortly after forensics arrived, but they hadn’t found it in the ten minutes or so that they’d been caught on tape.
“I wonder what’s in it,” Maile murmured.
“I don’t know,” Leipfold said. “But I bet it’s addressed to Jack Cholmondeley. And whatever it is, I don’t think it’s going to be good news.”
Maile shrugged. “Is it ever?” she asked. “This guy’s smart, boss. He knew we were coming, but how?”
“I don’t know,” Leipfold said. “We’re going to have to be more careful. Maybe he has someone on the inside. Some connection to the case.”
“Is that possible?”
Leipfold sighed and shook his head. “At the moment, Maile,” he said, “anything’s possible.”
Chapter Nineteen:
A Bleak Sun Rises
LATER THAT EVENING, when Leipfold was alone in the office trying to catch up with his financials, he took a phone call. He glanced down at his second phone, the one which only Jack Cholmondeley had the number for, and picked it up.