by Tana French
Emma had actually been going to primary school, where the teachers said she had been a nice kid from a nice family: popular, well behaved, a people pleaser, no genius but well able to keep up. The floater had a list of teachers and friends. No suspicious knife wounds at the nearby A&E departments, no phone calls to us from the Spains. The door-to-door had turned up nothing: out of maybe two hundred fifty houses, fifty or sixty showed any signs of official occupation, about half of those had someone home, and no one in those couple of dozen knew much about the Spains. None of them thought they had seen or heard anything unusual, but they couldn’t be sure: there were always joyriders, always half-wild teenagers prowling around the empty streets, setting bonfires and finding things to smash.
Jenny’s shopping traced back to the supermarket in the nearest decent-sized town, where at about four o’clock the previous afternoon she had bought milk, mince, crisps and a few other things that the checkout girl didn’t remember—the shop was working on pulling the receipt, and the CCTV footage. Jenny had seemed fine, the girl said, hurried and a bit stressed, but polite; no one had been talking to the family, no one had followed them out, at least not that the girl had seen. She only remembered them because Jack had been bouncing up and down in the trolley, singing, and while she swiped their shopping he had told her he was going to be a big scary animal for Halloween.
The search tossed up small things, low-tide flotsam and jetsam. Photo albums, address books, cards congratulating the Spains on their engagement, their wedding, their babies; receipts from a dentist, a doctor, a pharmacist. Every name and every number went into my notebook. Slowly, the list of question marks was getting shorter and the list of possible contact points was getting longer.
Computer Crime rang me late in the afternoon, to say they had taken a preliminary look at what we had sent them. We were in Emma’s room: I had been going through her schoolbag (lots of pink-based crayon drawings, TODAY I AM A PRINCESS in careful, wobbly capitals), Richie had been down on his hunkers on the floor, flipping through the fairy tales on her bookshelf. With her gone and the bed stripped—the morgue boys had wrapped her sheets around her and taken the lot, in case our man had shed hairs or fibers while he did what he did—the room was so empty it sucked the breath out of you, as if she had been taken away a thousand years ago and no one had stepped in here since.
The techie was called Kieran or Cian or something. He was young and fast-talking, and he was enjoying himself: this was clearly a lot nearer to what he had signed on for than trawling hard drives for kiddie porn, or whatever he usually did with his day. Nothing that stood out on the phones and nothing interesting about the baby monitors, but the computer was a different story. Someone had wiped it.
“So I’m not going to turn the machine on and wreck all the access times on the files, right? Plus, for all I know, someone’s set a dead man’s switch to wipe the whole thing when it gets powered up. So first thing I do, I take a copy of the hard drive.”
I put him on speakerphone. Above us, the insistent, nasty drone of a helicopter was circling, too low—media; one of the floaters would have to find out who, and warn them off showing footage of the hide.
“I plug the copy into my own machine and go for the browser history—if there’s anything good in there, that’s where you’re going to find it. Except this computer doesn’t have a browser history. Like, nothing. Not one page.”
“So they only used the internet for e-mail.” I already knew I was wrong: Jenny’s online shopping.
“Bzzt, thanks for playing. Nobody uses the internet just for e-mail. Even my granny managed to find herself a Val Doonican fan site, and she only has a computer because I got it to stop her getting depressed after my granddad died. You can set your browser to delete your history every time you quit, but most people don’t: you see that setting on public computers, internet cafés or whatever, not home machines. I checked anyway, and nope, the browser’s not set to clear history. So I check for any deletions in the browser history and the temporary files, and voilà: four oh eight this morning, someone manually deleted the lot.”
Richie, still kneeling on the floor, caught my eye. We had been so focused on the lookout post and the break-in; it had never occurred to us that our man might have subtler ways of coming and going, less visible catflaps to let him wander through the Spains’ lives. I had to stop myself glancing over my shoulder, to make sure nothing was watching me from Emma’s wardrobe. “Good catch,” I said.
The techie was still going. “Now I want to know what else the dude did while he was messing around in there, right? So I do a scan for any other stuff that was deleted around the same time. And guess what pops up? The entire Outlook PST file. Nuked. At four eleven in the A.M.”
Richie had his notebook propped on the bed and was taking notes. I said, “That’s their e-mail?”
“Oh yeah. All their e-mail, like everything they’ve ever sent and received. E-mail addresses, too.”
“Anything else get deleted?”
“No, that’s it. There’s a bunch of other stuff on the machine—all your basics, like photos and documents and music—but none of it’s been accessed or modified in the last twenty-four hours. Your dude went in there, went straight for the online stuff, and got out.”
“‘Our dude,’” I said. “You’re sure the owners didn’t do it themselves?”
Kieran or Cian snorted. “No chance.”
“Why not?”
“Because they aren’t exactly computer geniuses. Do you know what’s on that machine, like right on the desktop? A file named, I couldn’t make this up, Passwords. In which are, you’ll never guess, all of these people’s passwords. E-mail, online banking, everything. But that’s not even the good part. They used the same password for a load of stuff, like a bunch of forums, eBay, the actual computer: EmmaJack. I get a bad feeling about this straightaway, but I’m all about giving people the benefit of the doubt, so before I actually start banging my head off my keyboard, I phone Larry and ask him if the owners have rug rats and what they’re called. He says—brace yourself—Emma and Jack.”
I said, “They probably assumed if the computer got nicked, it would be by someone who didn’t know the children’s names, so he wouldn’t be able to switch it on and read the file to begin with.”
The techie did a gusty sigh that said he had just dumped me in the same category as the Spains. “Um, not the point. My girlfriend’s called Adrienne, and I’d spork my own eyes out before I’d use that for a password to anything, because I have standards. Take it from me, right: anyone clueless enough to use his kids’ freaking names as a password can barely wipe his own arse, never mind his hard drive. Someone else did this.”
“Someone with computer knowledge.”
“Well, some, yeah. More than the owners, anyway. We don’t have to be talking about a professional, but he knew his way around a machine.”
“How long would it have taken?”
“The whole deal? Not long. He shut the machine down at four seventeen. In and out in less than ten minutes.”
Richie asked, “Would this fella have known you would work out what he’d done? Or would he figure he was after covering his tracks?”
The techie made a noncommittal noise. “Depends. Plenty of guys out there think we’re a bunch of muck savages with barely enough brains to find the on button. And plenty of guys are just about computer savvy enough to land themselves in the shit, specially if they’re in a hurry, which your dude could have been, right? If he was really serious about zapping the crap out of those files, or about covering his tracks so I’d never know anyone had touched the machine, there are ways—deletion software—but that takes more time and more smarts. Your dude was short on one or the other, or both. Overall, I’d bet he knew we’d be able to see the deletions.”
But he had made them anyway. There had been something crucial in the
re. I said, “Tell me you can get this stuff back.”
“Some of it, sure, probably. The question is how much. We’ve got recovery software that I’m gonna try, but if this dude overwrote the deleted files a few times—and I would’ve, if I was him—then they’re gonna be kind of munged. The damn things get corrupted enough anyway, just through normal use; throw in a little malicious deletion, and we could end up with soup. Leave it with me, though.”
He sounded like he was itching to get stuck in. “Give it everything you’ve got,” I said. “We’ll keep our fingers crossed.”
“Don’t bother. If I can’t beat some half-arsed amateur and his delete button, I might as well hang up the big-boy jockstrap and find myself a job in tech-support hell. I’ll get you something. Trust me.”
“‘Half-arsed amateur,’” Richie said, as I put my phone away. He was still kneeling on the floor, absently fingering a framed photo on the bookshelf: Fiona and a guy with floppy brown hair, holding up a tiny Emma swamped by her lace christening dress, all three of them smiling. “But he managed to get past the login password.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Either the computer was already on when he got here, in the middle of the night, or he knew the children’s names.”
* * *
“Scorcher,” Larry said happily, bouncing over from the kitchen windows, when he saw us in the doorway. “The very man I was thinking of. Come here, you, and bring that young fella with you. You’re going to be very, very happy with me.”
“I could do with being very happy with something right now. What’ve you got?”
“What would make your day?”
“Don’t be a tease, Lar. I don’t have the energy. What have you magicked up?”
“No magic about it. This was good old-fashioned luck. You know how your uniforms went charging through here like a herd of buffalo in mating season?”
I wagged a finger at him. “They’re not my uniforms, my friend. If I had uniforms, they’d sneak through scenes on their tippy toes. You’d never even know they’d been there.”
“Well, I knew this lot had been here, all right. Obviously they had to save the living victim, but honest to God, I think they lay down on the floor and wallowed, or something. Anyway. I thought we’d need a miracle to get anything that didn’t come from a great big clodhopping welly, but somehow, believe it or not, they managed not to wreck the entire scene. My lovely lads found handprints. Three of them. In blood.”
“You gems,” I said. A couple of the techs nodded to me. Their rhythm was starting to slow: they were getting near the end, gearing down to make sure they missed nothing. All of them looked tired.
“Keep your powder dry,” Larry told me. “That’s not the good bit. I hate to break it to you, but your fella wore gloves.”
“Shit,” I said. Even the most moronic criminal knows to wear gloves, these days, but you always pray for the exception, the one so carried away on his surge of desire that everything else gets washed out of his mind.
“Don’t be complaining, you. At least we’ve found you proof that someone else was in this house last night. Here was me thinking that counted for something.”
“It counts for a lot.” The memory of me upstairs in Pat’s bedroom, blithely dumping everything on his shoulders, slapped me with a rush of disgust. “We won’t hold the gloves against you, Lar. I’m sticking to my story: you’re a gem.”
“Well, of course I am. Come here and have a look.”
The first handprint was a palm and five fingertips, at shoulder-height on one of the plate-glass windows looking out over the back garden. Larry said, “See the texture to it, those little dots? Leather. Big hands, too. This wasn’t some little runt of a guy.”
The second print was wrapped around the top edge of the children’s bookcase, like our man had grabbed hold of it to keep his balance. The third one was flat on the yellow paint of the computer desk, next to the faint outline where the computer had stood, like he had rested a hand on there while he took his time reading what was on the screen.
I said, “And that’s what we came down to ask you about. That computer: did you pull any prints off it, before you sent it back to the lab?”
“We tried. You’d think a keyboard would be the dream surface, wouldn’t you? You’d be so wrong. People don’t use a whole fingertip to hit the key, just a tiny fraction of the surface, and then it gets hit over and over at slightly different angles . . . It’s like taking a piece of paper and printing a hundred different words on it, one on top of the other, and then expecting us to work out the sentence they came from. Your best bet is the mouse—we got a couple of partials that might be almost usable. Apart from that, nothing big enough or clear enough to hold up in court.”
“What about blood? On the keyboard or the mouse, specifically?”
Larry shook his head. “There was some spatter on the monitor, a couple of drops on the side of the keyboard. No smudges on the keys or the mouse, though. No one used them with blood on his fingers, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I said, “So it looks like the computer came before the murders—before the adults, anyway. That’s some nerve he’s got, if he sat here playing with their internet history while they were asleep upstairs.”
“The computer didn’t have to come first,” Richie said. “Those gloves—they were leather, they’d have been stiff, specially if they were all bloody. Maybe he couldn’t type in them, took them off; they’d kept the blood off his fingers . . .”
Most rookies on their first outings keep their mouths shut and nod at whatever I say. Usually this is the right call, but every once in a while, watching other partners argue and bat theories back and forth and call each other every shade of stupid gives me a flash of something that could be loneliness. It was starting to feel good, working with Richie. “Then he sat there playing with Pat and Jenny’s internet history while they were bleeding out four feet from him,” I said. “Some nerve, either way.”
“Hello?” Larry inquired, waving at us. “Remember me? Remember how I told you the handprints weren’t the good bit?”
“I like saving my dessert for last,” I said. “Whenever you’re ready, Larry, we would love the good bit.”
He got each of us by an elbow and turned us towards the sweep of congealing blood. “Here’s where the male victim was, amn’t I right? Face down, head towards the hall door, feet towards the window. According to your buffaloes, the female was to his left, lying on her left side facing him, propped against his body, with her head on his upper arm. And here, just about eighteen inches from where her back would have been, we have this.”
He pointed to the floor, to the Jackson Pollock gibber of blood that radiated out around the puddle. I said, “A shoeprint?”
“Actually, a couple of hundred shoeprints, God help us. But take a look at this one here.”
Richie and I bent closer. The print was so faint I could barely see it against the marbled pattern of the tiles, but Larry and his boys see things the rest of us don’t.
“This one,” Larry said, “is special. It’s a print from a man’s left runner, size ten or eleven, made in blood. And get this: it doesn’t belong to either of the uniforms, it doesn’t belong to either of the paramedics—some people have the brains to wear their shoe covers—and it doesn’t belong to either of your victims.”
The swell of satisfaction practically burst his boiler suit. He had every right to be pleased. “Larry,” I said, “I think I love you.”
“Take a number. I don’t want to get your hopes up too high, though. For one thing, it’s only half a print—one of your buffaloes obliterated the other half—and for another, unless your fella’s a total eejit, that shoe’s at the bottom of the Irish Sea by now. But if you should somehow get your hands on it, here’s where the luck comes in: this print is perfect. I couldn’t take a better one myself. When
we get the pics back to the lab, we’ll be able to tell you the size and, if you give us enough time, very possibly the make and model. Find me the actual shoe, and I’ll have it matched for you inside a minute.”
I said, “Thanks, Larry. You were right, as always: that’s a good bit.”
I had caught Richie’s eye and started moving towards the door, but Larry batted me on the arm. “Did I say I was done? Now this is preliminary, Scorch, you know the drill, don’t quote me on any of this or I may have to divorce you. But you said you wanted anything we could give you about what the struggle could have looked like.”
“Don’t I always? All contributions gratefully accepted.”
“It’s looking like the fight was confined to this room, just like you thought. In here, though, it was full-on. It went the whole width of the room—well, you can tell that yourselves from the way the place is wrecked, but I mean the part after the stabbing started. We’ve got a beanbag right over there at the far side that’s been slashed open by a bloody knife, we’ve got a big spray of blood spatter on the wall on this side, above the table, and we’ve counted at least nine separate sprays in between.” Larry pointed and the sprays leapt out from the wall at me, suddenly vivid as paint. “Some of those probably come from the male vic’s arm—you heard Cooper, it was bleeding all over the place; if he swings his arm to defend himself, he’s going to throw off blood—and some of them probably come from your boy swinging his weapon. Between the two of them, anyway, an awful lot of swinging went on. And the sprays are at different levels, different angles: your boy was stabbing while the vics were fighting back, while they were on the ground . . .”
Richie’s shoulder jumped; he tried to cover it by scratching like something had bitten him. Larry said, almost gently, “It’s actually a big plus. The messier the fight, the more evidence gets left behind: prints, hairs, fibers . . . Give me a nice bloody scene any day.”