by Daniel Cole
It was all just dead bodies and endless lies . . .
“I believe that this is going to escalate . . . Yes.”
As the room jumped to its feet, firing questions to the flash of cameras, Baxter sensed heads either side turn in her direction. Apparently she had been mistaken in thinking that the public would want the truth for once.
It was a depressing realization that they thrived on these empty promises and insincere reassurances. When it came down to it, perhaps the PR snakes were right: people would rather get stabbed in the back than ever see it coming.
“So this is what we’ve got so far.” Special Agent Kyle Hoppus directed them over to one of ten chaotic whiteboards lining the walls. “These are our killers.”
MARCUS TOWNSEND
EDUARDO MEDINA
DOMINIC “THE BOUNCER” BURRELL
Brooklyn Bridge
33rd Precinct
Belmarsh Prison
39yrs/White US
46yrs/Latino
28yrs/White British
Ex-financial trader
Chef Park-Stamford Hotel
Arrested 2011 for murder
Bankrupted when markets crashed ’08
Immigration problems: half of family still in Mexico
Incarcerated past 4 years
Periods of living rough
Vendetta against authorities?
How related to Ragdoll murders unless contacted while inside?
Financial links to victim?
Visitation records show sees psychiatrist once per week and family on birthdays
Investigated for insider trading ’07
Obvious vendetta against police
Vendetta against police?
The FBI’s New York Field Office was located on the twenty-third floor of a disappointingly mundane building off Broadway. With the exception of the standard New York exposed brickwork, Baxter could have been back in New Scotland Yard: the whitewashed high ceilings, the same fuzzy blue material decorating the partitions between desks, and an almost identical, not hard-wearing enough, hard-wearing carpet.
Hoppus gave them a minute to read through what little information had not been scribbled out or written over. Baxter thought him suspiciously amiable considering his position of seniority.
“As you can probably tell, having exhausted every possible link between the killers, between the victims, between the killers and the victims, and between all of them and the Ragdoll murders, we’re currently focusing on the fact that each of our killers had good reason to resent the police,” Hoppus explained.
“We’ve got a team still working through their financials, another going through their computers and phone records with a fine-tooth comb . . . obviously. But truth be told, we’re struggling here. No overwhelming religious or political views, with the possible exception of Medina, who’s a Catholic and strong Democrat supporter like the majority of Mexican immigrants. No prior history of violence apart from Burrell. Basically, as far as we can fathom, these people did not know and have never been in contact with one another,” he finished.
“Yet committed three undoubtedly coordinated murders within days of each other,” pondered Rouche out loud. “Creepy.”
Hoppus did not respond but did give Curtis a quizzical look as to why she had brought this strange man up to see him.
“Would I be able to get a copy of their files?” Baxter asked him. She decided not to mention that she planned to send them across the planet to a Fraud officer with no involvement in the case whatsoever.
“Of course,” said Hoppus a little shortly. He clearly considered it an insult that she thought she might find something that his entire team had overlooked.
Rouche moved closer to the board to study the three small photographs that had been affixed above the names. Burrell’s was the mugshot from his arrest. Townsend was wearing a T-shirt embellished with a familiar logo.
“Townsend was in the Streets to Success program?” asked Rouche.
“He was,” replied Hoppus, who had been speaking to Curtis and Baxter.
“Still?” asked Rouche.
Hoppus looked confused: “He’s dead.”
“I mean . . . at time of death. He hadn’t dropped out or anything?”
“No. Still enrolled.” Hoppus was unable to keep a tone of annoyance out of his voice.
“Hmmm.” Rouche turned his attention back to the board.
He had learned from a previous case that Streets to Success was a scheme intended to get the city’s escalating number of homeless back into employment and to a level of self-sufficiency. They provided mentorship, accommodation, education, counseling where required, and job opportunities to people the world had given up on. An admirable endeavor; however, it was difficult to imagine the gaunt and ghostly-looking man in the photograph ever finding his way back into society.
Rouche had seen enough addicts to know when a person was more addicted to a drug than to life.
He moved on to the photograph of Eduardo Medina. The top of someone’s head remained in the bottom corner where the picture had been roughly trimmed. From Medina’s positioning, Rouche could tell that he must have had his arms around this missing person; he looked happy.
“What’s going to happen to his family now?” blurted Rouche, interrupting Hoppus yet again.
“Whose?”
“Medina’s.”
“Well, considering that the asshole murdered a cop in cold blood, I’d be surprised if they did anything short of deport his son, who was over here with him, and block the rest of his family and relatives from ever entering the country again.”
“So he’s really screwed them over, then?” concluded Rouche.
“I’d say that’s an understatement,” said Hoppus, turning back to Curtis.
“But he was doing his very best for them up until the murder?”
Hoppus visibly flinched in annoyance and turned back to face Rouche.
“I suppose. He pulled long shifts at the hotel, sent money back to his family. He was in the process of getting his daughter over here.”
“Doesn’t sound like a baddy to me,” said Rouche.
The usually personable Hoppus reddened with anger.
“Christ,” Curtis whispered to herself, embarrassed.
“A ‘baddy’?” spat Hoppus, now turning all of his attention on the CIA agent, whose own attention was still occupied with the photograph. “This man strung a police officer to the front of his truck and drove it through a wall!”
“You misunderstand me,” replied Rouche pleasantly. “I didn’t say he hadn’t done a very bad thing. I’m just not convinced that he was a bad man.”
The office had gone eerily quiet as Hoppus’s colleagues picked up on their boss’s uncharacteristic outburst.
“I agree with Rouche.” Baxter shrugged, ignoring Curtis’s look of betrayal. “Medina’s your best bet at working out what’s going on. Burrell was a piece of shit anyway. Townsend was screwed up and in contact with God-knows-who on the streets. Medina was a hardworking man trying to do right by his family. An abrupt change in his life will be much more obvious than in the others.”
“That’s what I said,” mumbled Rouche.
“Point taken,” said Hoppus begrudgingly, still not looking particularly happy with any of them.
“Agent Hoppus was just explaining the other branch of the investigation to us,” Curtis told Rouche, trying to get them all back on the same page.
He tore himself away from the wall to join them.
“I was just saying that the tech team was plowing through recent Internet search traffic for words such as ‘Puppet,’ ‘Masse,’ ‘Ragdoll,’ and ‘Bait’ prior to this morning’s press conference when the search engines became saturated. They’ve also turned up forums and sites where people are already trying to find out how to get involved.”
“Sick bastards,” uttered Baxter.
“Couldn’t agree more,” said Hoppus. “We’re logging the IP addresses of any
one who visits and are continuing to monitor them in case they attract someone who’s actually involved.”
“As awful as it sounds,” started Curtis, “we’re basically waiting for another body, aren’t we?”
“I probably wouldn’t suggest we announce that to the public . . . but yeah, we’re completely in the dark here,” agreed Hoppus as one of his junior agents came over to join them.
“Apologies for the interruption, sir. Special Agent in Charge Lennox is downstairs with some reporters. She’s asked to borrow Chief Inspector Baxter.”
“Leave me alone!” sighed Baxter in frustration.
The junior agent looked momentarily afraid that he was to relay that message back down to Lennox.
“On the bright side, you can only improve on the last one,” Rouche told her cheerily.
Curtis nodded encouragingly.
“What was it? ‘We’re basically waiting for another body’?” asked Baxter. She turned to the young man: “OK, lead on.”
“She was joking . . . right?” Hoppus asked nervously as they watched her leave the office.
Baxter could feel her phone vibrating against her ribs as she recited the same generic answers to the same generic questions that she had been asked earlier in the day. Although not a fan of Wolf’s ex-wife, she had no doubt that the blandly unimaginative journalists whom she had encountered thus far on her trip could learn a trick or two from Andrea Hall’s school of shameless scaremongering.
Despite her irritation at being dragged away for yet another PR exercise, she realized that she was looking forward to rejoining Rouche and Curtis upstairs. The Ragdoll case had only lasted a little over a fortnight and yet, for more reasons than she would care to admit, it had left her feeling empty: unresolved. This unexpected continuation to the case had already reinvigorated her as a detective. She felt useful and part of a team. More, though, it made her realize just how much she regretted taking the DCI role.
The same young man who had come to collect Baxter attempted to interrupt the live interview:
“Special Agent in Charge,” he whispered nervously.
Lennox carried on with her spiel.
“Agent Lennox,” he tried again.
Baxter could see that the young man looked torn about what to do as his supervisor continued her perfectly delivered response.
“Lennox!” Baxter barked as the cameras continued to roll. “I think this bloke needs to talk to you.”
“And you, Chief Inspector,” he added, looking grateful.
“Duty calls.” Lennox smiled to the cameras.
They moved well away from the reporters, who were watching them carefully.
“What couldn’t possibly wait until I’d finished?” she whispered angrily at the young man.
“I didn’t think it would look good if you knew what was going on after the rest of the world did,” he explained.
“And what is going on?”
“There’s been another murder . . . a second cop.”
Chapter 10
Friday, 11 December 2015
5:34 P.M.
Detective Constable Aaron Blake had become separated from his partner in the chaos. Between them, they had managed to shut down half of London with their ad hoc traffic diversion, as six lanes were directed off the Mall in the hope that the vehicles might miraculously fit down the far narrower Marlborough Road. The situation wasn’t being helped by the blanket of freezing fog that had descended over the city. Blake had, at least, been able to see Buckingham Palace lit up against the dark sky when they had arrived on scene. Now, he couldn’t see more than five feet in front of him.
The opaque air was tinted an otherworldly blue by the lights of the emergency vehicles. The fog had drenched his dark hair and soaked through four layers of clothing. It muffled the sound of the stationary motorists as he groped blindly back toward the crime scene, guided by the spotlight blazing off the rear of the fire engine.
“Blake!” Saunders called to his colleague as he materialized out of the mist like a cheesy magician. He too was soaked through, his highlighted blond hair now an unnatural orange where it stuck to his sneering face.
Baxter’s very first decision after becoming chief had been to pair together the two detectives that nobody wanted to work with. Neither had been enamored with the news. Saunders was known for being the mouthiest, crudest, and most chauvinistic man still clinging, somehow, to a job at Homicide and Serious Crime Command, whereas Blake had gained his reputation by being a gutless, backstabbing, conniving shit.
“Didn’t come across the forensics guys on your travels, then?” asked Saunders in his Cockney tones.
“You gotta be jokin’,” replied Blake. “I lost the bloody road back there for a few minutes.”
“Shittin’ Christ, this is an absolute cack-up.”
Blake was distracted when a gold shape floated by, several feet above Saunders’s head, accompanied by the clacking of hooves on concrete.
“What now?” huffed Saunders, taking out his ringing phone. “Chief?”
Baxter had phoned Vanita on her way back up to the field office. She was surprised to hear her commander sounding so calm and decisive, now en route to assume control of an actual crime scene instead of hiding behind her desk. Vanita had passed on the few sketchy details that she had, and informed Baxter of the personnel already on scene, which had done nothing to ease her concerns.
“Saunders, can you give me a sitrep?” Baxter asked him from across the Atlantic.
She found herself a vacant desk and helped herself to a pen and paper.
“Absolute shit-fest,” was his concise answer. “’Av you seen what the weather’s like in London? Ridiculous. We can’t see our hands in front of our faces. I got men on horses sneaking up on me, rearing up from out of the mist; it’s like bloody Sleepy Hollow here.”
“Have you secured the crime scene?” Baxter asked.
A piercing siren buzzed out of her phone.
“Sorry, hold on . . .” Saunders’s voice became distant: “Oh, fantastic! Another police car! And just what do you think you’re gonna achieve that the other two dozen units couldn’t? . . . Yeah, right back at you!”
“Saunders!”
“Yeah, sorry.”
“Have you secured the crime scene?”
“Well, the fire boys were first ones ’ere and they did their bit. But yeah, we’ve strung up some tape nobody can see.”
“What resources have you got there with you?”
“All the bastards. The lot: two fire engines, at least three ambulances. I lost count of police cars somewhere in double figures. I spoke to some bloke from MI5, the royal horsey-men; even some bloke from the RSPCA was running about for a while. Forensics are apparently somewhere, but we ain’t found ’em yet.”
“Just keep the scene secure. Vanita will be there shortly,” Baxter told him. “Have you got Blake with you?”
She disliked the two men equally but, as a general rule, tended to get more sense out of Blake.
“Yeah, give us a sec . . . Blake! Chief wants to speak to you . . . Yes, you. What you doing your hair for? She can’t see you . . . I can’t even see you!”
There was a crackle on the other end of the line.
“Chief?” said Blake, feeling the moisture on the cold screen pressing into his cheek as he stared up at the clear night sky. He was overcome with a surreal feeling, as if he had climbed far above the mess below and poked his head up through the top of a cloud.
“I need you to walk over to the crime scene and tell me exactly what you see.”
Illusion ruined, Blake followed the instructions and ducked beneath the tape that they had set up around the vehicle’s charred skeleton. He switched on his flashlight, the diffused beam emphasizing the dark smoke still escaping the wreck, entangling itself in strands of white fog as it rose up to pollute the bitter night.
“OK. I’m on the Mall, palace end. Got one completely burned-out police car pretty much in the dead center o
f the road.” Broken glass and plastic trim crunched and snapped beneath his feet as he moved in closer. “We’ve got two bodies in the driver and passenger seats. Witness saw smoke coming from inside the car as it pulled away from Trafalgar Square. Seconds later, it was an inferno.”
At this point Blake normally would have made some tasteless joke or inappropriate comment, but the combination of the eerie atmosphere, the significance of this fourth murder by an unknown entity, and the grotesque scene before him had encouraged a rare moment of professionalism. He just wanted to do his job well.
“How close did it get to the palace?” asked Baxter.
“Not that close. I’d say we’re about two-thirds of the way down, but it’s a long old road. I think we’ve got to assume that was their intention, though, if the fire hadn’t spread so quickly.”
“Tell me about the bodies.”
He had known this was coming. All the doors were wide open from when the firefighters had searched for anybody else inside. Blake covered his nose and kneeled down beside the blackened remains.
“They’re, um . . . they’re in a bad way.” He gagged but didn’t bring anything up. “Jesus. The smell is . . .” He could feel himself gagging again.
“I know,” said Baxter sympathetically. “What do you see?”
Soot-stained water was still dripping off the exposed chassis and freezing into tar-like puddles around his feet. He shone his Maglite around the interior of the car.
“I can definitely smell petrol, lots of petrol. Could just be the tank, but going off what the witnesses said, my guess is the interior was soaked in it. Got a male in the driver’s seat. Christ, I can’t even tell what color his skin was.”
He ran the light all the way up the charred body, the beam hovering nervously over the chest area before illuminating the now skeletal face.
“A little under six foot, thin, naked from the waist up. The whole body’s completely burned away apart from an area on his chest, which looks almost untouched.”