by Hayton, Lee
“Here’s one,” he said and listened through headphones for a few seconds. “Nope,” was all he said as he disconnected and kept searching.
Victoria looked back out into the main office. There were two rows of desks, head to head, with short half-yard partitions the only things offering privacy. Whenever someone took a call, the other workers would keep an eye and ear on them, until it ended or they received their own. She watched as one listener raised his hand. A colleague was at his side in an instant, leaning forward to listen as he put it on speaker phone. Ray had an eye cocked out on the floor and pulled up a current file. He listened for a few seconds, nodded, then went back to his search.
“We don’t have anything,” he announced sadly a few minutes later. The same result as when Victoria had handed over Miranda Walsham’s home phone and mobile phone number.
“Are you sure?” she asked. It was more from irritation than belief Ray had got it wrong. She’d been sure this was the logical place for a killer—a copycat—to start again. Now her confused mind whirred out in a dozen different directions, trying to land somewhere on the continuum from possible to likely.
Ray shrugged his shoulders. “We don’t get many girls calling through. Most of our callers are middle-aged males.” He waved at the screens as though Victoria had a hope of understanding what was going on with any of them. “I can individually search through if you like. That’ll take a while, though. If the software hasn’t flagged it, then she must have been using some pretty sophisticated voice disguise technology.”
He tapped a few keys and turned to check on his colleague again, sensitive that his help might still be needed. The call had come to an end, though, and no one signaled for any further help. “I’d be more likely to be fooled, than the software.”
“Don’t worry, Ray. Thanks for your help. It was a long shot, I guess.”
He leaned forward and placed his hand on her forearm. His palm felt gentle and soft. “How are you doing? I’ve often thought about you, you know.”
She nodded and forced a smile. “It’s slow going, but I’ve been feeling better. This last case has thrown me for a loop.”
Ray nodded, even though Victoria hadn’t revealed any details to explain what her case was. That she’d shown up here and asked for a specific type of caller again would’ve told him everything he needed to know.
The screens in front of Ray started to light up as call after call came through. He frowned and turned to look out into the office. Victoria followed his gaze. Every person out there was now on a call, and there were lines waiting.
“Sorry, I have to jump in here,” Ray said, and Victoria nodded.
She mouthed, “I’ll see you later,” as he answered the phone and walked quickly across the room to open the door.
The lights in the outer office grew brighter and brighter, and Victoria looked up and frowned. They were fluorescents. Flickering, she could’ve understood, but they were specifically used to deliver the same level of lighting day in, day out. Maybe a dimmer switch had gone rogue?
“Will,” a woman shouted. Victoria turned, astonished at the noise. Even though every person was on a call, they’d all be talking quietly a moment ago.
“Jesus!” a man exclaimed and tore the headset off his head, rubbing at his ear. From where she stood, Victoria could hear the buzz of feedback on the line.
“Baby, I’m here,” the same woman yelled, her voice split between joy and anguish. “Tell me where you are. Will? I’m here, baby.”
The lights dimmed again, down to the level they’d been before. After the brightness, the air seemed murky. Overcast, even though there weren’t any windows.
There was a frightening popping sound, and Victoria turned to see the monitors in front of Ray were now all blank. He tapped furiously at his keys, his headset already off. Whatever call had come through had finished.
Another pop. This time Victoria also caught the motion of light in the corner of her eye as a screen brightened and then died. A fizzle of sparks came out of the back, where the monitor cord was plugged in, and she ran over to unplug it. A few sparks caught the hairs on the back of her hand, briefly burning until she damped them with her palm.
“Will, don’t go. Momma loves you,” the same woman sobbed. “Tell me where you are.” A female colleague stood beside her, hand outstretched as though to comfort her, but hesitantly frozen in place. The hand never making contact.
The lights shone stronger again. This time growing brighter and brighter until the bulbs couldn’t take it any longer, and they blew, one by one. The whole row went out, plunging the office into terrifying darkness.
“Will!” the woman shouted, her voice ragged. She sobbed and then screamed, tearing off her headphone as feedback spiraled out of her phone line loud enough that Victoria winced.
For a second there was just the darkness, the woman’s sobs. Then the phone panel in Ray’s office sprayed out a dazzling explosion of sparks. Victoria pulled her mobile phone out of her pocket, turning on the torch app, so there was some illumination. Ray was using a dry powder extinguisher on the control panel, and smoke poured from the unit. After a second, the fire alarms sounded.
Victoria waited by the exit door while the room evacuated, putting her phone away as the light from the stairwell illuminated the room. Ray came last, a frantic look of panic on his face.
“The whole board is gone,” he said in a strangled whisper as they hurried downstairs, the alarm whooping in the background. “No one’s going to be able to get through. I can’t even reroute it to another county.”
“Who provides the phone service?” Victoria asked. “Surely they can put a message on your number.”
He still looked distraught. “It’s a battle for most of our callers to phone in the first place. Most of them won’t redial if it comes down to it.”
“Watch out!” Victoria grabbed at his arm as he tried to walk across the road, straight in front of a vehicle. “Talk to the phone service, and they’ll be able to do something,” she reassured him. “Who’s Will?”
“What?” Ray’s face was blank as he tried to grapple with a dozen different considerations.
“Who is Will? The woman answering the phone,” Victoria pointed to her, “she was shouting to someone called Will.”
“That’s Moira.” Ray shook his head. He was noticeably pale. “Her son was called Will, but it can’t be him.”
Victoria stared at him a moment longer, but he moved away. Busy checking that everyone from his office was safely out. Talking to the chief fire warden about what had happened. She walked over to another of the phone operators. The younger woman who had looked almost scared to touch Moira even though she’d started to offer comfort.
“That was frightening, wasn’t it?” Victoria said as an opener. “I’m Victoria.”
“Diane,” the woman said. She was trembling in fear. Her shoulders were shaking, and her teeth chattering even though it wasn’t cold. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I once worked a job in an old sewing factory,” Victoria said. Before she joined the force. So long ago she was surprised she could remember. “Once, when I was on the shop floor they overloaded the old wiring in the place. Everything seemed to blow out all at once.”
Not quite true; one machine had died, and the rest had tiredly followed suit. Inferior equipment making inferior goods. The floor manager had nodded at the woman closest to the mains. She’d quickly rewired a fuse and replaced it within minutes. Everything started up again. Victoria didn’t think the devastated call center would be up and running again today.
“You think it was the wiring?”
Victoria shrugged. “I don’t know much more about electricity than you plug something in, and it’s there. Who’s your friend?” she nodded at Moira, whose face was pinched with anxiety and running with tears.
Moira’s eyes were fixed on the building, about where the office would be if you could see it from the outside. She was so fixated sh
e didn’t even wipe the tears away.
Diane grimaced in dismay. “That’s Moira. She’s been here a few years.”
“Who is Will? Ray said she had a son called that.”
“Yeah.” Diane nodded. “She did. He died four months ago. Leukemia.” Her whole body rocked with an anxious shiver. “Terrible business. I don’t understand how she kept coming in after that. But she says it helps her out as much as our clients.”
“Why would she think her son was calling her?”
Diane turned a hard gaze on her and Victoria fought to meet it, not wanting to turn away. If she did that she’d lose the distant connection she’d just built. “You’re with the police, aren’t you?”
Victoria nodded. She didn’t speak, letting the silence string out between them.
“I worked with Gregory for years, did you know that? We all did.”
Victoria nodded again. She did know that. Apart from the students coming in for summer placements, most of the staff stayed in the role. They formed an addiction to it; an addiction to helping people. They also formed a close-knit family.
When she’d traced back calls from the original victims to the helpline, they’d banded together as a shield to hide the truth. Protecting one of their own. Ray had been the only one who’d rallied to her aid, horrified there could be a killer in the mix.
Herd mentality was the same, no matter where it occurred.
“I heard his mother launched a wrongful death suit,” Diane continued. Victoria withdrew a step. There’d be no information forthcoming from Diane now. “She came by the center, told everyone how a cop had ignored all the physical evidence they had and just went rogue.”
Victoria turned and walked away. Her eyes felt like they had sand lining her lids, carving small tracks through her corneas each time she tried to blink them clear. The blaze of the sun overhead intensified the sensation and even putting on her sunglasses couldn’t stop it altogether.
“She’s going to take you down,” Diane yelled out. Victoria could hear the shuffle as the assembled crowd turned to stare—at Diane, at her. “You killed an innocent man.”
CHAPTER TEN
“Jesus, Victoria, liven up. You’re starting to blend in,” Stanton complained when she reached the spot they were interviewing in.
“Ha-ha,” she said, too tired to think of a worthy retort. Leave that to tonight when she wasn’t sleeping. She’d be able to think up half a dozen zingers she couldn’t use. “What’ve you got so far?”
“Oh, a drug addict who can’t focus, a man who’s sipping red wine at—” he checked his watch, “—nine-thirty in the morning. And that lovely lady over there,” Stanton pointed at a pile of rags that suddenly moved and morphed into a human being. “She was telling us a perfectly coherent story that turned out to be entirely narrated by the voice that lives in her pocket. How was the help line?”
“Very unhelpful,” Victoria admitted, trying not to see the grin of I-told-you-so on Stanton’s face. “I had a lovely lady yelling at me that she hopes Gregory’s mother wins the lawsuit against me because I killed an innocent man but apart from that I learned fuck-all.”
“They gang up on you?”
“They didn’t need to. The whole office’s wiring blew out, and the building was evacuated. There weren’t any calls from the victim that Ray could find before that, and I doubt he’ll be able to find anything after.”
Stanton frowned. “You think it was sabotaged?”
Victoria thought of Moira yelling down the phone line for her dead son to tell her where he was. “I don’t think so. Something creepy weird was going on, though. This,” she waved her arm across the scene, “I can handle this level of weirdness.”
“You say that now,” Stanton called after her as she moved forward. Victoria guessed from the way people had been maneuvered that the folks on the side nearest the street were unprocessed and the folks by the train line were done with questioning.
She walked up to a young man who wore a dirty sweater vest with his arms exposed to the elements. When he moved closer to her, she could hear a faint crackle and guessed that he’d wrapped his body with an undershirt of newspapers to try to keep out the cold. There was an open scab on his elbow that he kept picking at while they talked; when she sent him into the processed pile of bodies, it was bleeding.
“Sir,” she gestured to an older man—middle-aged by the looks—and moved to meet him halfway. They were under the overhang of a traffic bridge, and the noise here echoed, her voice sometimes lost in the rumble of traffic overhead.
“Has anybody told you why we’re here?”
“About the girl,” he said, his gaze fixed on his shoes. There were sized too big for his feet, and there was the white flash of packaging peanuts sticking out along the sides.
“That’s right. About the girl. Did you see her last week?”
The man shook his head, the movement pulling his whole body into a sway. Even breathing through her mouth, Victoria could feel the mixed scents of his body crawling into her nostrils. She was standing too close. It had been too long since she’d been involved in a homeless sweep, but it would be rude if she stepped farther away now. She could see the miasma of his body odor wafting into the fibers of her clothing. The waves were so strong, she blinked her eyes to clear them.
“Did you see anything suspicious a couple of mornings ago, on Waters Street?”
He shook his head again, and Victoria waved him aside, taking a large step back.
“Saw her this morning,” he said. “Down on Lyle Avenue. Poor thing.”
Victoria nodded and kept an empty smile plastered on her face. What most of these abandoned people needed wasn’t a home. It was a medical regimen that didn’t cost an arm and a leg, and regular check-ins to help them lead a normal life.
“Wrapped in a blanket,” he added.
The man put an arm out to touch the wall of the underpass, and his body stopped its gentle sway. He pulled his shoulders back proudly and looked her in the eye. “It’s a pity. First, that girl was found down on Waters Street and now a new one.”
Victoria felt cold chills worm up her body. Anxiety tightened her chest. Her ears began to buzz gently, then louder, more piercing.
“And you saw this girl, this morning?” she clarified. When he nodded again, she asked, “Do you remember the shop doorway she was in?”
“No,” he said. “Are we finished? There’s coffee on.”
One of the women had placed a pot of water on a camping stove. She was spooning large helpings of coffee grounds into the heating water.
“Which corner was she near?”
The man’s head tipped to the side. His wandering eyes caught her urgency, and he frowned deeply. “You ain’t found her yet?”
Victoria bit her lip and shook her head.
His eyes looked hungrily at the stove, and Victoria placed a hand on his arm, so he faced her again. “There’s a Starbucks at the corner of Ashleigh Street. That’s on the way, right?”
He nodded.
“I’ll shout you a coffee on the way back if you can take me to her.”
“Shout me on the way there,” he countered. “I’m just about dead on my feet.”
#
“Well, shit,” Stanton said. His voice was hollow as he stared at the girl in the doorway.
Frank—the homeless man, no surname—stood off to one side, his facial hair grappling with the slotted lid of his coffee.
He’d pointed to the girl, then stepped aside for Victoria to get in closer. The doorway to the empty shop was halfway down the street. A row of abandoned establishments sat alongside. The girl could have been sitting there for days.
When Victoria got closer, she knew the girl hadn’t been. Her face was the mottled blue of death, but there was no horrific stench of decay. There were more foul odors emitting from the blanket tucked up to her chin.
As Victoria peered closer, heart aching with sympathy, the blanket dropped from one shoulder. It revealed
a pair of flashy black heels hooked around the girl’s forefinger. She wore a short dress with sequins patterned around the hem. On her wrist was a friendship bracelet made from feathers and elastic.
Victoria turned and walked away, taking deep breaths. Anxiety made her fight a battle for each one. Arbeck was taping off the scene and having difficulty getting it to stick on the grime of the far shop’s window. A more carefree distraction. She walked over and helped him to loop it around a hook left in the brickwork on the front.
“We looking at the same killer?” Arbeck asked in a quiet voice. His eyes squinted with worry.
“Yeah.”
He shot her a troubled glance that Victoria had no trouble interpreting. The Birdman had killed thirteen women—fourteen if she counted Shelly, which nobody else ever did—but it had taken him a dozen years to do it. The most ever in a twelve-month period had been three victims, followed by a gap of eighteen months. The pause lasted so long they’d started to hope he’d topped himself or moved to another state.
Now there were two victims in less than a week. Victoria was too overwhelmed to even begin to process that.
Stanton was looking up and down the street, noting down the shop fronts that seemed to be occupied. They were so far away from the main street here that houses started to dot themselves among the businesses. Dual zoning. Most of them set so far back from the street that Victoria doubted anybody would have seen anything.
“Streetlight’s out,” Arbeck said, looking up at the lamppost nearest the shop. “Looks like it exploded.” He bent over, hands on knees, and scoured the ground in front of him. Moved a step further along when his visual search didn’t yield anything.
“Can’t see a casing,” he announced, straightening back up. “It may be worth seeing if there’s a record of gunshots.”
“Doubt anyone would notice, along here,” Stanton said. At Victoria’s raised eyebrows he explained, “There was a shootout along here a few months back. No one heard anything. A boy was gunned down over there,” he pointed. “Lived but only just.”