by Dane Cobain
* * *
A couple more hours passed. Leipfold spent the time thinking about the Thompson case and how Donna met her end beneath the wheels of a car with no one in it.
When the door to the cell opened up again, Detective Inspector Jack Cholmondeley was on the other side of it. He grinned ruefully and instructed his men to lead Leipfold through to an interrogation room. There, Leipfold was introduced to his public defender, a man whose name he immediately forgot.
Leipfold and Cholmondeley shook hands like gentlemen and had a quick, off-the-record chat before Constable Groves walked in and started up the recorder. They talked about the charity ball and the ongoing investigation. Cholmondeley said he no longer believed that Donna’s death was an accident, but he played fast and loose with the details. He didn’t mention the car, even though they both knew he had it, and he was quick to reiterate that they weren’t there to talk about Donna Thompson. They were there to talk about what Leipfold had been doing inside Marie Rieirson’s flat.
“But don’t you see?” Leipfold protested. “The two are interlinked. You must have looked at Marie as a possible suspect.”
“One of my men spoke to her,” Cholmondeley said. “But that’s about it. Why would Marie be a suspect?”
“She had motive,” Leipfold replied. “With Donna Thompson out of the way, she got a starring role in Townsend’s play.”
“Strange reason to kill someone,” Cholmondeley said. “Is that the best you’ve got?”
“I don’t suspect her of being a murderer,” Leipfold said. “But she’s connected to the case somehow. That’s why I went to her house. I wanted to talk to her.”
“And yet you didn’t ring the bell like a normal person,” Cholmondeley replied.
“I did ring the bell,” Leipfold said. “But no one answered. So I went round the back to look inside.”
Jack Cholmondeley smiled sadly. “I’d like to believe you, James,” he said. “I really would. I do believe you, as it goes. But I can’t let you out of here just yet. We need to ask a few more questions and get you to sign a statement.”
Leipfold looked across at his solicitor, who nodded his assent. “Okay,” he said.
The questions continued. Leipfold slowly told Cholmondeley everything he knew about the Thompson case, leaving out none of the details. He had to tell the truth because it was the only way to explain how he’d ended up at the Rieirson house.
“I had a feeling that something was wrong,” Leipfold explained.
“Something was wrong,” Cholmondeley replied. “Marie Rieirson is missing. That’s why Constable Hyneman was at the scene and why we brought you here in the first place. We’ve been trying to trace the girl.”
“Missing?” Leipfold echoed, sitting to attention. “You’ve got to let me out of here. I can help you to look for her.”
“Not so fast, old friend,” Cholmondeley said. “The paperwork, remember? Sergeant Mogford will take you through it.”
Cholmondeley stood up slowly, grunting as he rose. He walked over to the door and then turned back to look at Leipfold.
“By the way,” he added, smiling with his eyes but not his lips. “Thanks for the tip about the car. We’ll take a good look at it. You leave the Thompson case to us.”
* * *
Leipfold got back to the office in the early afternoon and was surprised to find that the place was empty. He walked over to his planner and checked the date. It was only six days since Donna Thompson had died. And yet, his office – his debt-ridden, inefficient office, which cost him more money than it made him – felt empty because Maile wasn’t there.
He grimaced. He’d always hated Sundays, ever since his parents used to take him to church with the neighbours’ kids. He tried to remember their names, but it was all so long ago. Now, as he reluctantly approached middle age, he still hated Sundays, but at least it explained why Maile wasn’t in the office. It meant he had to boil the kettle himself.
Once he’d brewed a coffee – in a record seventeen seconds from when he dropped the first sweetener to when he launched the spoon into the sink – he grabbed the Sunday papers and sat down at his desk. He started to fill out the crosswords, noting as he did so the subtle nuances between the different writers. They gave him his daily fix in a dose that picked him up in the morning and kept him going in the afternoon.
He wondered where Marie Rieirson was and debated visiting her house again. Then he remembered spending the night in a police cell and his hands wandered automatically down towards the third drawer on the left, the special drawer with the special lock where he kept his special bottle of whiskey. It had survived the crash and served as a constant reminder of why he still stuck to coffee and orange juice.
Leipfold couldn’t remember where the key was, so he picked the lock with his army knife – which the police had kindly returned to him – and pulled the bottle from the desk. It was an old, old bottle and the level of the liquid had decreased over time thanks to evaporation and inhalation. Leipfold liked to open it from time to time to give it a sniff. It was the real deal, with a kick that made his eyes water.
He went through the motions, opening up the bottle and pouring out a measure. He sniffed it again. Then he poured the liquid back into the bottle. He put the bottle back into the drawer and locked it. Then he sighed, put his head in his hands and wondered what in the hell had happened to Marie Rieirson.
Chapter Fourteen: Missing
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Leipfold woke at his desk with a parched throat and a dodgy stomach. It was almost as bad as a hangover, but it had nothing to do with alcohol. Leipfold had a stress headache and stomach pains. His liver, lungs and digestive system were at war with him, and he still didn’t have any answers for the Thompson case. All he had was a good idea of where to go next, but that was enough.
Leipfold’s phone went off, but he ignored it. His head was pounding and he needed water and coffee before he’d be ready to talk to anyone. He checked his watch. It read 7:17AM, which meant he had a good hour and a half before Maile arrived at the office. He planned to take advantage of that fact to get some work done.
The phone rang again. Leipfold cursed and answered the call. “James Leipfold speaking,” he said. “How can I help?”
“Stay away from the Thompson case.” The caller on the other end of the line was using a vocoder, and Leipfold knew without needing a comparison that it was the same one he’d heard on the recording. He checked his phone, but the caller’s number was withheld as he’d expected it would be.
“Who am I talking to?” Leipfold asked.
“A friend,” the caller replied. “You don’t need to know who I am. You just need to trust me. Stay away from the case.”
“Why?”
“Do you like breathing, Mr. Leipfold?” the caller asked. “And more to the point, would you like to keep on doing it?”
“Is that a threat?” Leipfold asked.
“I prefer to think of it as a warning.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. “Call it what you like. Just stay away from the case.”
“Right,” Leipfold said.
“I mean it, Mr. Leipfold,” the caller said. “Stay away from the case. If you don’t, you’ll be sorry. We wouldn’t want you to have an accident like poor little Donna Thompson. Remember, I’ve got my eye on you. I’ve got my eye on your assistant, too. It’d be a shame if something happened to her.”
“It won’t.”
“Well, that’s up to you,” the caller said. “It depends whether you listen to my warning. Remember what I said, Mr. Leipfold. Stay off the case.”
The caller cut the call and Leipfold put the phone down on his desk. He massaged his temples and felt the sweat that had started to bead there. Then he picked his phone up again and sent Maile a message to tell her to be on the lookout.
* * *
Maile go
t to work at ten past nine, a full ten minutes after her official start time. But then, as she pointed out to Leipfold, she didn’t have a contract. She could pick her own damn hours.
“You’re lucky I came in at all,” Maile said. “I could be racking up a kill streak right now.”
“Games?” Leipfold guessed. “I always found reality exciting enough.”
“Games are an extension of reality,” Maile insisted.
“Whatever,” Leipfold said. “What have you got for me? We’re due a catch-up.“
“You were at the police station,” Maile reminded him. “And I was playing Xbox.”
“Racking up kill streaks?”
“Right,” Maile said. “And catching up with Mayhem. He’s an internet friend, never met the guy. But we have a few things in common.”
“Oh yeah?” Leipfold said. “Like what?”
“Hacking. Programming. Cybersecurity.” Maile shrugged. “That sort of thing.”
“Another nerd?”
“I already told you,” Maile said. “No one says nerd anymore. Besides, you might want to be a little nicer. I got him to take a look at the car with me. Hooked up a video feed and sent him a link to the specs. It’s not as good as flying over here in person, but…”
“You did all that, huh?” Leipfold’s steely eyes gave nothing away. Maile couldn’t tell if he was angry or amused. “I don’t remember telling you to get someone else involved.”
“Mayhem is a good guy,” Maile said. “Limited social skills, perhaps, but he’s loyal. He said he wouldn’t talk and I believed him.”
“Does Mayhem have a name?”
“That is his name,” Maile replied. “He helped me to do some digging. We found some tech specs and manuals. Some stuff about the programming language. Info on how the vehicle’s AI makes its decisions. But it gave me a couple of ideas. Once I knew what I was doing, it was simple enough to modify the code. That’s what the guys at the car club are all about. They don’t just buy the cars and drive them. They learn to modify them, to create their own software to up their performance.”
“And?”
“Well that’s just it,” Maile said. “See, it’s not too difficult to fudge with the programming. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think Eleanor Thompson would be up to it, but your average geek on the street? If they can code, they can code. Any one language is as good as another. I picked up the basics in an hour or so.”
Maile paused to take a sip of water while Leipfold scribbled a few hasty lines in his notebook.
“Anyway,” she continued. “Here’s the crux of it. That car can be hacked, and it can be hacked remotely if you know what you’re doing. I only had two hours and it was enough to bypass the programming and run my own routine on it. And get this, I almost killed Kat.”
“You almost killed a cat?”
“Kat,” Maile said. “My housemate, remember? I called her up and told her to get her ass down here. Then I made her stand in the middle of the road while I tried to kill her.”
“That doesn’t sound safe,” Leipfold said.
“It wasn’t,” Maile replied. “But I proved my hypothesis. That car could easily be used as a murder weapon. It took me two hours to stop it from braking. In two days, I could’ve programmed it to hunt her down. Two weeks? I’d have that baby running MS-DOS.”
Leipfold glanced over at her. “Bingo,” he said. “Good work.”
Maile beamed. “Now we just have to find out who reprogrammed it,” she said.
“And why,” Leipfold murmured, but Maile didn’t hear him. She’d read her boss’s mind and wandered off to fetch the paper and put the kettle on.
* * *
Maile checked her emails while Leipfold finished the crossword. Then, when he told her he wanted to talk to her, she wandered over to sit down on the edge of his desk.
“What’s it about?” she asked. “The Thompson case?”
“Well, it’s not like we’ve got much else on,” Leipfold reminded her.
“There’s the Fisher case,” Maile said.
“Point taken,” Leipfold replied. “But business is slow. Too slow, Maile. I’m worried.”
“Give it time,” she replied. “You do your thing and I’ll do mine. You know, work a little magic. Get your website up and running, that sort of stuff. Maybe even start a blog.”
“Do what you’ve got to do,” Leipfold said. “But not the blog. We can’t risk leaking information.”
“Who said anything about that?” Maile asked. “You read the paper every day, right? Just talk to me about what you read in there. I’ll write it up and stick it on the net. Search engines will find it, people will start talking and before you know it, the clients will be rolling in.”
“Fine, fine,” Leipfold said. “You do that. But don’t let it distract you from the rest of your work. For now, I want to talk about the Thompson case.”
And so Leipfold told her about the call he’d received, culminating with his conclusion that the two robotic voices from the phone and from the recording were one and the same.
“I’ve been trying to work out who it was,” Leipfold said. “Best guess so far? Eleanor Thompson. That’s what Cholmondeley thinks.”
Maile shook her head. “I don’t think it was her, boss. What kind of old woman knows how to use a voice changer?”
“How hard are they to use?” Leipfold asked. “Don’t you just buy one, pick it up and use it? She’s a smart woman. She could have figured it out.”
“Maybe,” Maile replied.
“But perhaps you’re right,” Leipfold said. “After all, what about the car? I doubt it was Eleanor Thompson, but someone interfered with it. The problem is, we need to figure out who. Can you do that?”
“I can try,” Maile replied. “But no promises.”
“Do it,” Leipfold said. “I’ll work on it as well. I’ve got a few questions of my own. What did they have to gain from it? And why go to all of that effort? Seems like an elaborate way to kill someone.”
“Maybe they wanted to put on a show.”
“Hmm,” Leipfold murmured. “I wonder. Who do we know with a flair for the theatrical? And who would benefit if Donna was out of the way?”
* * *
Later that morning, Leipfold called the cop shop. He figured he owed his friend a favour.
“Let’s get down to business,” Leipfold said once the pleasantries were out of the way. “I’m guessing you know I haven’t called you to ask after your health. How are things going with the Thompson case?”
“I can’t talk to you about that, James,” Cholmondeley said. “Not anymore.”
“Are you sure about that, big man?” Leipfold laughed. “And what if I could help you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s like this,” Leipfold said. “I’m not a lone wolf anymore. Remember Maile? She can use computers, and I don’t just mean to make a spreadsheet. She can find things. She sees things that most people wouldn’t see. She’s a genius, even if sometimes it’s a little…misapplied. A useful girl to have around in my line of work.”
“I’ll bet,” Cholmondeley replied. “What do you want, James? Make it quick. Some of us have got a job to do.”
So Leipfold told Cholmondeley, as best as he could, what Maile had explained to him about the car. As promised, when she’d finished her tests and wiped it clean, she’d parked it a couple of miles away and then anonymously reported it on the police helpline. Cholmondeley listened with steadily growing interest as Leipfold explained how it was theoretically possible for someone to reprogram the car. He whistled, softly, once his old friend had finished.
“That’s quite the story,” he said. “I’ll get our tech guys to take a look to see if they can replicate the results.”
“There’s more,” Leipfold said. “I received a call from s
omeone who wanted to warn me off the case. Any idea who it might be from?”
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Cholmondeley said. “Are you trying to find out if we have a suspect?”
“Don’t need to,” Leipfold replied. “I have one of my own. But listen, Jack. They threatened me. Me and my assistant.”
“Did they threaten to kill you?”
Leipfold paused to think about it.
“No,” he said, eventually. “But he did threaten to hurt us, and I believed him. Or her. Who knows? I need you to look into it, to see what you can find out. It could be connected to the case.”
“Why should I do that?” Cholmondeley asked.
“It’s your job,” Leipfold replied. “And besides, you owe me one.”
“I do?” Cholmondeley paused, weighing up his options. He sighed. “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours, right, James? Okay, I’ll look into it. There’s something else as well. You told me about the car, so I’ll tell you about Marie Rieirson.”
“What about her?”
“Didn’t you hear the news?” Cholmondeley asked. “She’s been reported missing. We’ve opened up an investigation. Come to think of it, don’t be surprised if some of my guys pay you another visit.”
“Am I a suspect?”
“It’s not your style,” Cholmondeley said. “But it’s not always up to me. Sergeant Mogford doesn’t think much of you, for example. And I can’t allow old times to influence policy. Either way, Rieirson is missing and I wouldn’t be surprised if another body showed up.”
“Who reported her missing?” Leipfold asked.
“She gave her name as Jayne Lipton. Do you know her?”
Leipfold shook his head and then remembered that Cholmondeley couldn’t see him. “No,” he said. “Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.”
“Me neither,” Cholmondeley replied. “Not yet. But we’re hoping to get her to come to the station. I’ll let you know how that goes. You’ll keep me updated on your end, of course?”
“What’s the matter?” Leipfold laughed. “Worried I’ll solve the case before you?”
There was a pause. Leipfold could imagine Cholmondeley on the other end of the line, his face flushing like it always did when he was angry.