False Witness (John Steel series Book 3)

by syron-jones, p s

  “Ouch!” Tony said in sympathy.

  “You don’t think he felt that, do you?” Cassandra said. “Not Mr colder-than-ice Steel!”

  McCall could almost relate to what she was saying: it was true, he never really showed emotion as such. Almost as if feelings like that got in the way.

  “You died!” Agent Lloyd went on. “I watched you die! You were in that plane when it crashed. So how did you get out, Steel?”

  He just shrugged and smiled as he made for the coffee machine.

  The three detectives sat open-mouthed, just wishing they had popcorn to complete the feel of watching a film.

  “There is always a way out.” Steel’s voice was calm and soft. “And I have never been a fan of dying. I did it once and I didn’t like it much. . It’s really good to see you again, Cassandra.”

  Lloyd rushed forwards and kissed him and held him tight. Steel could feel the whole world staring at them and pushed her away with some effort.

  “Maybe we should discuss this somewhere a bit more, er, private,” he said, turning and heading for his office via the far door of the refreshment room, with Lloyd close behind him.

  The three detectives waited, poised like alley cats for Steel and Lloyd to leave the room before they bolted after them.

  Steel opened the door and stood to the side, allowing Cassandra to enter, the smell of her perfume intoxicating as she moved past him slowly. But he never reacted, just stood firm, then let the door close by itself behind him.

  “Drink?” he asked, walking over to the drinks cabinet. She stood in the centre of the room for a moment, taking in the decor before moving to the captain’s chair she had spotted behind the desk.

  “You know we are working!” He lifted a bottle of water to prove he wasn’t trying to give her a real drink.

  “In that case, yes please.”

  They both looked over at the door as it burst open, and Tooms and Tony walked in, as if by accident.

  “Sorry, this isn’t the men’s room, is it?” Their wit was cut short as they suddenly noticed the office’s layout.

  “Oh my—”

  “—God.” Tooms finished Tony’s statement as they looked around the room, mouths open in amazement.

  “Come on, guys, it’s only an office,” McCall protested. “God, you would have thought they have never been here before.” She joked as if she had herself been there many times before. Tooms and Tony shot her a look of evil jealousy, then glared at Steel.

  “She’s just having you on, gents,” John explained. “She saw this for the first time the other day and had the same look of amazement on her face.” Tooms made a watching you gesture with his fingers at McCall, who was laughing at their expense.

  Steel gestured for everyone to sit down and walked to the smart-board on the wall.

  “So what happened, how did you get out?” Cassandra asked as she made herself comfortable in Steel’s chair.

  He just shook his head and touched the screen, thereby activating the ‘on’ switch.

  “That story will have to wait, we have bigger problems to deal with right now.” The screen showed several file icons on the large bright screen. Steel touched the one that was entitled Crash.

  The file opened to display a series of photographs. The device worked like a giant iPad, and moving his hand he enlarged one of them so that it filled the screen.

  The photograph was of the scene but taken from above. The whole area was captured from the corner with the delivery truck to the crash site.

  “You have a smart-board!” Tooms declared in shock. “We are using Stone-Age equipment and you have a smart-board!”

  McCall slapped Tooms on the back of the head to shut him up as she walked past.

  “Focus, will you?” McCall ordered, making Tony smile.

  “Okay, we have a bus that somehow crashed, my question is why did it crash?” Steel looked round at the thoughtful expressions of his colleagues.

  “Bad weather and bad driving?” Tony threw in.

  Steel thought for a second and then shook his head.

  “It was just bad luck, the will of the gods—who on earth knows, man? CSU will find that out,” Tooms barked at him, still pissed about the smart-board. “We find out the why, then we find out the who.”

  McCall nodded in agreement.

  “That’s great,” John Steel agreed, “but we are investigatingtwo murders, not the bus crash.”

  She could see he was leading to something: he always had a motive to do something.

  “You think they’re related, don’t you?” McCall asked. “You think they may have broken out to kill those people.” She could see the logic behind his thinking.

  Steel didn’t say anything he just turned to the others as he stood next to the smart-board. “Okay, so I took this not long after everyone had left so I could get a clear shot without the masses of cops and CSUs. Now what do you see?”

  Everyone looked puzzled at the question.

  “It’s the crash site, man, what more do you want?” Tooms offered.

  Steel shook his head and looked to the heavens for inspiration. “Look closely. What do you see? Mainly on the road.”

  Everyone got up and moved towards the screen for a closer look, each straining to be the first to find what Steel was talking about.

  “Nah, you got me, man, ain’t nothing there just the tyre tracks and the skid marks,” Tooms said, but Steel grinned at him, as if to tell him something.

  “What, the tread marks?” Tooms went on. “Are you serious?”

  Steel nodded and opened up the small bottle of water he had placed on the desk. “The reason the tread marks are still visible is because of a high concentration of oil. Did anyone check what the delivery van was carrying?”

  McCall shook her head. “No, but CSU still have it as part of the investigation.”

  The English detective pointed towards the board. “This was no accident. Someone planned this. That bus was meant to hit that van so the back door could be damaged. Whoever planned this had it down to a science.”

  Cassandra Lloyd looked closely at the photograph. Something she saw troubled her. “Whoever did this had massive resources,” she said. “They would have to get that delivery van, bribe a guard.”

  “Two guards,” Steel interrupted, making Cassandra look at him angrily.

  “How do you figure two guards?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest in a defiant gesture.

  “The bus driver. He changed route when there was no need to. Also, why was he driving so fast? Someone had gotten to him along with the guard who locked them down.”

  Cassandra smiled and turned back to the board—she had a sudden feeling like it was the old days.

  “So we need to check financials on both the bus driver and the missing guard, see if there is a money trail,” Cassandra said, looking at Tony and Tooms.

  Tony reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone to read the text he had just received. “CSU want us down there,” Tony said, reading out the message. “They say they may have found something.”

  “Well we have got to go see Tina,” McCall showed Steel the message, which made him cringe. “Apparently she has something for us as well.”

  “We’d better hurry up then,” John Steel answered. “I have had enough of crazy doctors with sharp objects for a while.”

  As he headed out, Lloyd cut him off and put her arms round his neck. Her look was full of passion. “You, sir, owe me dinner and an explanation.”

  Steel smiled and nodded slightly. “Fair enough, when this case is done.”

  Cassandra gently pressed her full lips up against his, feeling his warmth against her body. “Okay, after the case. So no going on any trips.”

  Steel pulled away from her and headed for the door, leaving Lloyd with a big smile on her face.

  “Hey, McCall,” she said. “Make sure he doesn’t go anywhere, will you?”

  Sam McCall turned to Lloyd. “Yeah well, I don’t th
ink public transport is his thing at the moment. It doesn’t seem to agree with him.” McCall laughed and left the room.

  *

  Steel and McCall hurried down the white-walled corridors of the morgue towards Tina Franks’s office. Tina’s message had sounded urgent: normally she wouldn’t request someone to come down unless it was absolutely necessary.

  Just a couple of lines on a text or a phone call would have been enough for ordinary information, but she wanted to tell them personally how this case had gotten weirder.

  As they neared the morgue, Steel stopped McCall by grabbing her arm. “Hang on a minute. Before we go in, did you tell Tina about what just happened?”

  McCall’s mouth fell open in a look of disgust. “John Steel, I do not believe you would think that I would do anything so—” And with that she broke away and slammed through the double doors. Steel shook his head and readjusted his sunglasses.

  Oh great, this will be interesting, he thought. As he pushed his way through the double swing doors he saw Tina Franks with her arms folded and a large grin on her face.

  “So, I heard someone had an interesting day!” Tina said.

  McCall just smiled and stood out of arm’s reach, near to Edward Gibbs’s body.

  “So you got any more ladies stashed away there?” Tina joked.

  Steel looked up as though he was trying to remember something and counted, using his fingers on both hands.

  “Yeah, yeah very funny,” McCall growled, making Steel crack the side of his mouth in a brief smile.

  “We ran some tests,” Tina went on, “on your first vic and found something unusual. Someone had dosed him with scopolamine.”

  John Steel looked confused for a second, then it dawned on him. “The truth serum! So he was interrogated before he was killed?”

  Tina shook her head. “In certain doses it has different effects. Its effect as a truth serum is one of them. But used in higher doses it can be used as a good suggestive tonic. It’s like a date-rape drug but the person is awake and has no memory of the event.”

  McCall looked at Tina in surprise. Sure, she had expected something to have been in his system, but not that.

  “And if the dose is too high?” McCall had already figured out the answer, but she felt she had to ask anyway.

  Tina just gave that look she had that needed no further explanation.

  “Well that explains why he wasn’t restrained, he was knocked out!” McCall said, looking over towards Steel excitedly. This is the first piece of a puzzle, she thought to herself.

  “It was also in your second vic’s system as well,” Tiny told them.

  Steel had figured as much. These killings were connected somehow. Someone wanted these guys out of the picture, but the question was why?

  They stood by the body of Edward Gibbs, who Tina had been working on before they came in.

  “Okay,” Tina continued, “so your boy here was sewn up like the first vic, and he too had a note shoved into his mouth.” She pointed to a clear evidence bag, and once again, inside was a note. McCall lifted the bag but the stomach juices had gone to work on the paper.

  “How come we can’t read this one?” McCall asked.

  “This fine fellow tried to throw up but the piece of paper stopped his vomit from going anywhere,” Steel said, nodding as if he could visualise the effect.

  “Don’t worry, I am sending it to the lab, to see if they can lift anything off of it,” Tina said with a less than hopeful tone.

  “So, in essence, he choked on his own puke?” Steel concluded.

  Tina nodded as she pulled the sheet back so that the detectives could get a better look. Steel saw something on the man’s left side near the ribs that made him move in closer.

  “What are these?” he asked, pointing out the twelve small round burn marks.

  “I don’t know,” Tina answered. “I took some photographs and sent them to trace to see if they had any idea.”

  Steel looked at the small marks and tried to work out their pattern. Each was almost the size of a mark from a ballpoint pen, and around an inch apart. John looked up and faced the two women. “I know what this is. He has been tasered.”

  Tina looked confused for a moment. “No can’t be. Those marks don’t match any taser we know of.” Her words rang with assurance.

  The English detective used his thumb and index finger to measure them. “It would fit if he had been zapped several times.”

  McCall’s face screwed up in disgust at the thought. “So someone really wanted him to suffer!”

  Steel nodded in agreement. These were not just random killings, these killings were personal, very personal.

  “Did you take any pictures of the hallway leading to Edward Gibbs’s office?” Steel asked.

  McCall took out her little camera and flicked through the latest pictures, thinking how convenient it was that she had forgotten to upload them onto her computer. “Uhm. Wait a minute.”

  Steel looked on impatiently as she sifted through her shots from the crime scene.

  “Okay, here they are, why?” Her question was short-lived as Steel snatched the camera away from her and tried to make any detail out on the inch-square monitor on the back of the small device.

  “Damn it, you can’t see anything,” he snapped. “We will just have to go there, come on. You’re driving.”

  Sam McCall scowled as he left the room, leaving the double doors swinging after him.

  “Oh, bye then,” Tina shouted after him with a blank expression on her face.

  As McCall left, she turned to say her goodbyes to her friend before running after Steel.

  SEVENTEEN

  Agent Lloyd had gone back to the comfort of her office downtown, leaving Tony and Tooms to dig up as much as they could find on the men on the bus. If Steel had been right the bus crash had been planned, and someone on that vehicle knew about it. Tooms looked round to see where McCall and Steel had gone.

  “Hey, man, where’s McCall and Steel? Thought they would be back from the ME’s by now.” Joshua Tooms groaned as he looked at the mountain of files on the inmates who had travelled on the crashed bus.

  “McCall and Steel are on their way to Edward Gibbs’s apartment to work on a hunch—she phoned it through earlier,” Tony said, smiling as he felt his partner’s frustration.

  This case had been more a paperwork exercise than anything else—checking phone records and eventually financials once they had gotten through their backlog. Tooms preferred the field work of the job to riding a desk, and Tony was the same. But this case was all about finding out who these people knew and who had the means to pull it off.

  *

  When McCall and Steel arrived at the floor where Edward Gibbs had lived and ultimately died, all they saw was the yellow police tape over the door warning people not to pass. The uniforms at the door had left as soon as CSU were clear from the site and had secured it.

  McCall took out the key she had gotten from the super and unlocked it. With a gentle push the door swung open freely. The smell of chemicals and dried blood filled their nostrils, the suddenness of the stench making them back off.

  They climbed through the tape and Steel immediately headed for the hallway.

  “Now I saw it before but didn’t really pay it much notice,” he commented, leading McCall to a picture that was hanging wrongly: one side of it was tilted, as though it had been moved.

  “Wow. So you think the killer knocked this in a struggle?” McCall asked. She was tired and she could tell he was having a ‘head full of theories’ moment.

  Steel shook his head and knelt on the ground next to the skirting board. “If you look you can see scuff marks on the wall, which in itself does not say anything, I will grant you that.” John Steel pointed to six marks on the wall: all of them were straight-lined and vertical.

  McCall looked puzzled as she examined the fresh evidence, if indeed that was what it was. “Oh come on. How do you know it was made by our vic? Surely the
y would be horizontal if he was kicking while he was been attacked?”

  The English detective smiled and lay down on the floor and raised his own boot to the area. “Who said he was standing?”

  Sam reached down and helped Steel to his feet with a yeah, yeah sort of look on her face.

  “The first hit would have put Gibbs down and the others were, well the killer thought they were necessary,” Steel said. “Look if you’re going to taser someone you are not going to be holding them.”

  Steel dusted himself off as McCall looked back at the marks.

  “But why move him?” she asked. “We found our first vic exactly where we found him.”

  Steel raised a curious eyebrow. “Yes but that then tells us something about the killer or killers. He, she or they have very little in the way of strength.” Steel thought for a moment, thinking back at the size of Andy Carlson. He was a big man and it would take some strength to move him, but it was possible. “The killer never brings anything that can be traced back to him, that’s why he used Andy Carlson’s own dental floss to sew his mouth shut.” Steel quickly headed for the bathroom. Moments later noises of things been emptied into the washbasin told McCall he was having ‘one of his moments’.

  She was just about to follow him when he came out, so quickly that he almost frightened her to death, holding a case of dental floss.

  “He did the same thing here,” Steel declared. “He used Edward Gibbs’s floss to sew him up.” Steel place the container into one of the special evidence ‘baggies’ that McCall held out for him.

  Steel then stopped and slowly took in the layout before him, his brain processing everything as he looked around the sitting room.

  “What’s wrong?” McCall asked. She knew that look all too well: it was one of those expressions that someone has when they are doing a jigsaw puzzle with no diagram to start you off. Steel looked over to McCall, and she could see he was working out the series of events in his head before he stood and stared at her.

  “We need to know what was on that note,” he told her.

  EIGHTEEN