by Daniel Cole
“I just wish we could have saved them,” she said.
As Rouche had said at the time, Arnolds had been their first and possibly only living suspect. He alone could have given them the information that they so desperately needed, and Curtis had lost them that advantage. He could tell from the look on her face that she was wondering whether they might have been able to reach the Bantham family in time had she chosen differently.
“We need to work as a team,” said Rouche.
Curtis followed his gaze back to Baxter, who looked to have thrown her phone over a locked fence in a temper and was struggling to retrieve it.
They both smiled.
“I’ve got orders,” she told him.
“Stupid orders.”
Curtis shrugged.
“It’s not practical to cut Baxter out of the investigation. Look what happened today,” said Rouche.
“Why don’t we look at today?” Curtis snapped back. “She knew to focus on the psychiatrist—how? It didn’t come from us. Perhaps she’s keeping things to herself as well. Did you ever think about that?”
Rouche sighed and regarded her for a moment:
“And what happens the day Lennox tells you to cut me out?”
Curtis looked a little uneasy. She hesitated: “I cut you out.”
She held his gaze and nodded as if unsure of herself yet refusing to apologize or back down.
“Simple as that?” asked Rouche.
“Simple as that.”
“I’m going to make this easy for you,” Rouche told her. “I’ll tell her about the meds. No one’s ordered me not to, and I’d ignore them if they had.”
“If you do, I will report it back to Lennox. I will document that you disregarded my express wishes. And she will have you removed from the case.”
Curtis couldn’t even meet his eye now. She turned around to find that another group had been allowed in and moved forward. They were almost at the entrance. After a few moments, she looked back at him.
“And now I feel bad,” she told him. “The chili cheese fries are on me.”
Rouche still looked a little hurt.
Curtis sighed: “And a milkshake.”
The good news was that Baxter had been reunited with her phone, courtesy of every swear word in her arsenal and a big stick. The bad news was that Edmunds still had not called back. She now couldn’t stop shivering, and the snow caking her boots had soaked through to her socks. She phoned his number again and waited for it to go to voicemail:
“It’s me. Bad day. Looks like you were right about the psychiatrist, but . . . it’s complicated. I’ll tell you about it later. There’s something else too: the CIA agent, Damien Rouche, I need you to look into him for me. And before you start, no. I’m not just being paranoid, and I know not everybody in the world’s out to get me, but I found something, and I need you to trust me on this. Just . . . just see what you can find out, OK? OK. Bye.”
“Chili cheese fries . . .” started Rouche, standing just a couple of meters away.
Baxter shrieked and slipped, landing heavily on the ground.
Rouche went to help her up.
“I’m fine,” she snapped as she got back to her feet, holding her painful rear end.
“I just wanted to let you know that our table’s ready and the chili cheese fries are on Curtis.”
“I’ll just be a minute.”
She composed herself as she watched him cross the street back toward the diner. How much had he heard? She supposed it didn’t matter.
He was hiding things from her.
And one way or another, she was going to find out why.
Chapter 17
Monday, 14 December 2015
8:39 A.M.
Just checked—he’s actually an evil super-villain who eats kittens. Good call! ; ) I’ll try phone at lunch x
Edmunds hit the “send” button, knowing that he would no doubt pay for it when Baxter woke up.
“On your phone again?” a nasal voice asked from the desk opposite as he slid his mobile back into his pocket.
Edmunds ignored the question and logged back in to his computer, which had locked him out while he had been otherwise engaged. He despised the sniveling, arse-kissing creature that he was forced to work alongside: Mark Smith. Incredibly, his name was probably the most interesting thing about him. Edmunds did not even have to look to know that the brush-haired thirty-year-old was wearing a suit two sizes too big for him with a yellowing, pit-stained shirt beneath. The man made the entire office smell like bed.
Mark cleared his throat: “I said, I see you’re on your phone, yet again,” he pushed when Edmunds failed to respond.
Channeling Baxter, Edmunds leaned around his computer and stuck his middle finger up at the petty little man:
“Can you see this?” he asked before returning to his screen.
Edmunds’s uncharacteristic hostility was completely justified. It was hard to imagine now, but there had been a time when he had allowed himself to feel intimidated by his colleagues, spurred on by this unimposing ringleader. It had built and built, until he had dreaded going into work each morning.
That had been a while ago, before he had transferred up to Homicide and Serious Crime Command for a brief spell to work on the Ragdoll murders, before he had met his persistently irritable, occasionally obnoxious, frequently volatile, and effortlessly inspiring mentor in Baxter.
Nobody ever talked down to her. She simply would not allow them to. She point-blank refused to take any shit off anybody, superior or not, whether they were in the right or not.
He smiled just thinking about his best friend’s pigheadedness. She could be an absolute nightmare at times.
He vividly remembered the day that he finally decided to apply for the transfer. He had always wanted to be a homicide detective. He had studied criminal psychology at university, but his natural aptitude for numbers and spotting patterns combined with his confidence issues had deposited him in a dependably secure position on the Fraud team. He had met Tia. They had moved in together, finding an ex-council maisonette that seemed resolutely impervious to any attempt to spruce or modernize. And then she had fallen pregnant.
His entire life appeared to be etched in stone . . . and that had been the problem.
After one particularly bad day at the office, courtesy of Mark and his fellow mono-browed lackeys, Edmunds had excused himself from the meeting and finally submitted his application to follow his dream. His colleagues had laughed in his face when they found out. He and Tia had argued when he’d arrived home, and she had relegated him to the sofa for the first time in their relationship. But he had been determined, motivated into action by his hatred of his colleagues, the tedium of his job, and the undoubted waste of his abilities.
His decision to return to Fraud had been one of the hardest of his life, walking back in on that first day to take a seat at the same desk he had vacated less than half a year earlier. The entire department presumed that he had failed to make the grade, that he lacked what it took to make it in Homicide, unsurprised that he was more suited to spreadsheets than dead bodies. However, the truth was that he had thrived during his short time there. He had played an integral part in the resolution of the Ragdoll murders. Because of that, he had returned to Fraud with a chip on his shoulder. These people had no idea what he had accomplished while working on the biggest case in living memory.
Nobody did.
The pinnacle of his investigative achievements had been obscured under a cloud of secrecy from the public, raining down a torrent of half-truths contrived to protect the integrity of the Metropolitan Police and, as a by-product, Detective Fawkes. He was one of the few people who knew the Met’s shameful secret and the truth of what happened within that blood-soaked courtroom, but he had no choice except to remain silent for Baxter’s sake.
Bitterly, he had kept the official press statement relating to Wolf’s disappearance, reading it from time to time to remind himself that the grass w
asn’t always greener . . . In fact, he was finally coming to realize that it did not matter where you stood.
It was all burned:
. . . as such, Detective William Fawkes is wanted for questioning in relation to a number of issues arising during the Ragdoll investigation and the alleged assault of Lethaniel Masse at the time of his capture, which has led to lasting medical problems.
Anyone with information regarding his current whereabouts should contact the police immediately.
That had been it.
They wanted to ask him some questions.
It made Edmunds sick even to think about it. Wolf had tumbled quickly down the priority list, managing to evade their half-arsed attempts to locate him accordingly.
Edmunds had been tempted to conduct his own investigation, but his hands were tied: should he pursue Wolf, he risked exposing Baxter’s involvement in his escape. He could do nothing but obediently swallow the injustice of Wolf going free as he listened to the diluted version of events render his contribution to the case no more than water-cooler gossip.
That was why he held his colleagues, his job, his life in such contempt: everyone still thought he was nothing.
“You know we’re not allowed phones on in here,” Mark mumbled as he booted up his computer.
Edmunds had almost forgotten he was there:
“God, I hate you, Mark.”
He felt his phone buzz in his pocket and made a show of taking it out and replying to the text from Tia.
“So . . .” started Mark.
“Don’t talk to me.”
“. . . where did we go yesterday?” he asked, struggling to contain his excitement. “I couldn’t find you anywhere for a while in the afternoon. I needed to ask you something. I asked Gatiss if maybe he knew where you’d gone, but he didn’t know either.”
Edmunds could hear the smile in Mark’s voice. The smug little snake had slithered straight into the boss’s office the moment he stepped outside to speak to Baxter about things that actually mattered.
“I did mention to him that you were probably taking an important phone call,” continued Mark, “seeing as you’d felt the need to have your mobile on you and check it every few minutes throughout the day.”
Edmunds clenched his fists. He had never been a violent person, and was not built for it anyway, but somehow Mark always knew which buttons to push. He allowed himself a few moments to fantasize about shoving the man’s ugly head through his computer screen and then turned back to his own to find that it had locked him out again. It wasn’t even 9 A.M., which meant his day had not yet officially begun.
He sighed heavily.
Baxter dozed off for a split second. She sat up to discover that she hadn’t missed anything; the gibberish-spurting woman was still spurting gibberish.
She, Rouche, and Curtis had claimed three adjacent rooms at the NYPD’s 9th Precinct in order to get through the seventeen Streets to Success participants more quickly. Each of whom had accepted the charity’s well-intentioned but, in hindsight, possibly counterproductive offer of free “Life Coaching.”
It struck her that in this particular drug-addled woman’s case, it hadn’t really worked.
Of their five identified killers, only Glenn Arnolds had been a patient of Dr. Bantham and the prestigious Gramercy Practice. The budget option, a Phillip East, had provided services to both Eduardo Medina and, in the rather vague capacity as “life coach,” Marcus Townsend through the charity. They had already ascertained that Dominic Burrell had links to Dr. Alexei Green, whom Curtis had interviewed, and even flirted with, back at the prison, but they had found no record of Patrick Peter Fergus ever being in therapy.
Both the UK and the US teams’ repeated attempts to contact East and Green had proved fruitless, further confirmation of the counselors’ involvement, even if they could not see the whole picture yet. With no idea whether the two men were masterminding the murders or going to turn up in a similar state to Dr. Bantham, Curtis had suggested they begin working through the client lists. So far, though, it had been a complete waste of time.
Baxter dismissed her interviewee and got up to make herself a coffee. Rouche was deep in conversation in the neighboring room. She watched him suspiciously for a moment as he joked and laughed with someone sitting out of view but then realized that she still had not informed Edmunds of what they had discovered at the Bantham family home.
There had been one further development. Overnight, the Canine Unit had followed a scent from the house to a turnout a few hundred meters beyond the brook. One of the neighbors had noticed a blue or green van parked there on the morning of the murder, although the rural nature of the roads in the area made the chances of picking anything up on the traffic cameras slim to none.
She needed to bring Edmunds up to speed.
She walked past the assorted people waiting to be interviewed and stepped out onto East 5th Street. Taking a seat on one of the benches opposite the precinct, she settled into the former occupant’s bum imprint. She regarded the buildings adjacent to the police station: typically New York. Renovation work was being carried out on one of them; tunnels hung from empty windows, past the customary snow-covered fire escapes and down to the dumpsters below. It looked like a giant game of snakes and ladders.
Depressed by the thought, she took out her phone and called Edmunds.
One step forward. Two steps back.
Edmunds waited for his supervisor to leave the office before loading up Thomas’s financial activity for the previous week. After a quick glance to make sure the printer was free, he clicked the “print” button and got up from his desk. It spat the warm pages out and he collected them up, noting that it was longer than usual, presumably because of Christmas fast approaching.
He felt his phone go off in his pocket and looked down at the screen as subtly as he could. He felt Mark’s eyes burning into his back as he stuffed the printout into his jacket pocket and rushed outside to take the call.
The moment Edmunds was out of sight, Mark leaned over to his station and knocked the mouse to prevent the screen from locking him out. He got up and walked around to take a seat at Edmunds’s terminal.
“What are you up to?” he whispered to himself as he flicked through the open pages: BBC News, a map of Manhattan, work email.
Mark’s eyes lit up when he saw a tab for Edmunds’s personal email account; however, to his disappointment, when he clicked on it, it was on the “sign out” page. It didn’t matter, though. He had what he needed: the personal financial records of a Mr. Thomas Alcock on-screen and no paperwork to support the invasion of privacy anywhere on his desk. An illegal search on a civilian was a very serious offense.
Mark could hardly contain his excitement as he printed off his own copy of Thomas’s records to present to Gatiss as evidence.
At long last he had him.
Chapter 18
Monday, 14 December 2015
10:43 A.M.
Baxter shivered.
Her spur-of-the-moment decision to call Edmunds had left her insufficiently attired for a lengthy conversation out in the cold. He listened in silence as she told him about the Bantham family, about the suspicious vehicle spotted close to the scene, and about the bloodwork printout that had been stuffed into Rouche’s pocket.
“Something’s off,” she continued. “I’m not just being paranoid. He’s always on his phone, allegedly to his wife, and I mean all the time. You turn around at a crime scene and he’ll just be gone, talking to this mystery person instead of doing his job.”
“What are you meant to be doing right now? Probably not speaking to me,” Edmunds pointed out, playing devil’s advocate.
“It’s different.”
“Maybe he is talking to his wife.”
“Oh, come on. No one talks to their wife that much. Plus, he doesn’t like her enough to live on the same continent, so doesn’t really strike me as the needy type,” said Baxter through chattering teeth. She had brought her legs u
p to make herself as ball-like as possible. “He’s quite . . . secretive, in a weird way, and now I know he’s keeping important pieces of evidence from me. Would you please just look into it for me?”
Edmunds hesitated, positive that no good could come from poking around in her colleague’s business:
“Fine, but I—”
“Hold on,” Baxter interrupted as Rouche and Curtis came rushing out of the precinct’s main entrance. She got to her feet.
“They’ve found Phillip East!” Curtis called across the street to her.
“Gotta go,” Baxter told Edmunds.
She hung up and rushed toward the car. As she caught up with them, Rouche thrust her coat and bag into her arms.
“Ta, but you forgot my hat,” said Baxter, so as not to appear too grateful to the man she had just asked her friend to investigate.
They climbed into the car. Curtis reversed out onto the street and wheelspun as she pulled away. As Baxter put on her coat, her woolly hat and gloves landed in her lap.
Edmunds returned to the office, his mood buoyed slightly by the sight of Mark’s empty desk. He logged back in to his computer and was about to continue work on the mind-numbing task that he had been dipping in and out of all day when he realized he was being watched. Mark was looking out from Gatiss’s office but diverted his gaze when Edmunds met his eye.
A little disconcerted, he closed down all of his extracurricular tabs and then tucked Thomas’s financial records away at the bottom of his bag, just in case.
Disappointingly, Phillip East’s attorney had beaten them to the field office and was already inside the interview room, no doubt advising his client not to answer any of their questions.
Lennox had been awaiting Curtis’s arrival. She handed one of her team a mobile phone and then greeted them by getting straight to the point:
“He’s lawyered up. Find out what you can while we have him, but I sincerely doubt we’ll be able to keep him more than another half hour based on the encyclopedia of threats his attorney just reeled off at me.”
“Who’s the lawyer?” Curtis asked as they all walked across the office.