Текст книги "Scent of a Killer"

Автор книги: Kevin Lewis

Соавторы: Kevin Lewis
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

‘But I haven’t done anything,’ blurted Bevan. ‘I haven’t even touched her.’

Other officers helped Carter drag Bevan up to his feet, where he was immediately handcuffed. Carter plunged his hands into Bevan’s pockets and extracted his house keys, then gave the signal for the prisoner to be led to a waiting van.

Using the keys to gain entry, Carter led a group of officers into his house to examine his computer. The team had spent the last three months posing as a young girl online using the name DreamGirl99 and hoping to catch Carter in the act of grooming. When he ignored their most recent communications, they suspected he had found a genuine victim and knew they had to move fast.

Unable to intercept his communications, they had put him under surveillance and watched out for the warning signs, key among them being the departure of his wife and children.

In the attic room that served as Bevan’s office it took only a few minutes for one of the tech guys to call up that day’s internet activity.

‘Guv, he’s supposed to be meeting her this afternoon. We’ve got a record of the IR chats. Supposed to be there in half an hour. Gladstone Park. The bench by the rotunda.’

‘Okay, who can we spare?’

‘Got a whole bunch of uniforms to choose from.’

‘Nah, that’ll just scare her off. We need to send someone in plain clothes. Whoever she is, she’s obviously very vulnerable and delicate. I want this handled with care.’

‘All the plain clothes people are men. DC Lyons has been off this week. I could call the station and get them to send someone along.’

‘There’s no time. Send O’Neill. He’s got a kind face. That will have to do.’

15

It had taken Detective Sergeant Patrick O’Neill quite a while to find the right bench, the one where the girl who had been due to meet with Jason Bevan was supposed to be. It had been close to the car park, in the midst of a fenced-off area of flower beds, well shielded from the main road by trees and a pain in the arse to get to.

When he finally located it there was no one to be seen. For a while the young officer worried that he had got there too late, but then, off in the distance, he saw a young girl who seemed to be heading his way and tried his best to look as relaxed as possible. It was, he decided, important to get the balance right, If he looked too much like a pervert, she might be put off, but then again if he didn’t look like enough of one, she might not come over at all. But O’Neill needed to talk to her. Urgently. The inquiry team needed to ensure she was safe and understood the danger she had potentially placed herself in every bit as much as they needed to ensure that Bevan was out of circulation.

His heart began to beat a little faster as the girl came closer and closer, through the centre of the main tree-lined path that led to the gate. She was looking directly at him now, he was sure of it. Was she the one? It was too soon to tell. She looked a little older than a teenager, but he knew only too well that clever make-up could work wonders. He turned away for a few moments so as not to intimidate her. When he looked back she had turned off on to a smaller side track and was rapidly heading away from him. He didn’t know what to feel. Disappointment, relief? Was it her? Should he go after her or wait just in case it was someone else?

O’Neill was still weighing up his many options when he felt a sudden sharp pinch in the back of his shoulder.

‘Hey! What the …’

O’Neill spun around as quickly as he could, just in time to see light glinting off a syringe. He couldn’t take his eyes off it, the cloudy liquid in the chamber, the streaks of blood glistening at the end of the long silver needle. What the hell do you think you’re …’ He never managed to finished the sentence. After those first few words everything started to spin and his breathing began to get laboured. He could feel his eyes travelling up into the top of his head and knew he was going to pass out.

He came round some time later and found himself sitting in what appeared to be the passenger seat of a car. It was hard to tell for sure. He was looking straight ahead and slightly downwards, and could see his legs in the footwell, part of the seat and the bottom part of the glovebox. On the edge of his field of vision he could see that the door to his left was wide open.

When he tried to turn his head to look around, nothing happened. For some reason his body seemed to have stopped working. His legs, his arms, his hands, even his lips and tongue had all become useless. He couldn’t swing his legs out to escape. He couldn’t even blink. All he could do was sit there.

From somewhere behind came the sound of footsteps. Solid shoes on a tiled floor. A steady clip, clip, clip, coming closer and closer. Then the sound of heavy machinery, a grinding of gears, a squeal of metal on metal. Then footsteps again coming closer still. O’Neill watched helplessly as something that looked a bit like a steel cable passed between his legs and tightened around both of his ankles. Pressure started to build up, as if the bones were being crushed. And then, almost inexplicably, he began to move.

He fell to the right first, his arm smashing into the gear lever, his head against the edge of the steering wheel. He felt both blows but any noises he made sounded only inside his head. He continued to move. It was as if his feet were being pulled out from underneath him, out through the door of the car with his body following, the motion completely unnatural. Within a few seconds his legs were high in the air and he was being hauled upwards, swinging upside down with the weight of his entire body supported by his ankles.

The pain was like nothing he had ever known. And he couldn’t even scream. He couldn’t even cry.

Once he reached some ten feet off the ground he stopped rising and instead began to move sideways. He looked around as much as the swinging motion of the cable would let him. He was in a cavernous warehouse building. He could feel cold air rushing past him, burning his cheeks and nose. The floor was tiled, and the walls were painted a dull grey and lined with shelves and bookcases.

A sudden slapping sound on the ground below was followed by a halt in his movements as the machinery controlling his journey was switched off. O’Neill knew at once what had happened. His warrant card had fallen out from his back pocket. The footsteps approached once more. O’Neill was still gently swinging and could see nothing. He didn’t need to. It was obvious what was happening. Whoever had attacked him had walked over to retrieve the wallet and was now opening and inspecting it.

It would, he felt certain, change everything. The card clearly identified him as a serving police office. Whoever had taken him, surely they had to let him go. Whatever sick game they were playing would, he assured himself, now come to an end.

There was a pause. A long pause during which time seemed to stand still. The room became very silent and O’Neill became acutely aware of his own racing heartbeat. Then another slapping sound, softer than before, and the machinery started up once more. O’Neill began to move again.

He felt a sick wave of horror pass through him when he realized in one bigger than usual swing that he was heading towards a large stainless-steel table in the centre of the room. Not only that: he also realized what the soft slapping sound had been – the sound of his warrant card being casually tossed aside. Whoever had taken him cared nothing for the fact that he was a police officer.

Sure enough, he continued moving until he was directly above the table and then was slowly lowered down until he was lying on it, flat on his back.

The dazzling overhead lights were painful to look at, like staring directly into the sun, but there was nothing he could do about it. He felt his clothes being removed from his body. Occasionally he saw the top of a head covered in a mop of brown hair at the bottom of his field of vision.

‘Don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right. You’re going to be just fine. There is nothing to worry about, Patrick. You’re going to be just fine.’

The voice had a beautifully mellow, almost hypnotic tone to it. But O’Neill didn’t trust it at all. He desperately wanted to stand up and fight his way out. Whatever was about to happen to him, he wanted no part of it. But he was rooted to the spot. He might just as well have been made of stone.

A clatter of metal against metal was followed by the return of the head and a warm sensation on O’Neill’s chest as a soft palm pressed down on to the space between his nipples.

Again he tried to speak, to scream, to shout, to pull away, anything, but it was no good. A face, half hidden by a surgical mask and cap, appeared above his. Only the eyes were visible. And they were as cold as ice. The pressure from the fingers increased. O’Neill felt something – most likely a thumb – sliding back and forth across his chest, seemingly searching for something.

Suddenly the hand pushed him down hard, the weight of an entire body behind it. He felt his shoulder blades push into the metal beneath him, his spine straighten out and the breath hiss out of his lungs.

Then a new pain, a terrible pain. A hot burning sensation in the middle of his chest that grew wider and deeper in an instant. He caught a glint of metal, of something red. For a moment he thought he had been stuck with the syringe again, but this was far deeper, far more deadly than any needle.

He could feel blood rising up inside his mouth, cold air sweeping over the inside of his body. He could feel the life force seeping out of him. By the time he felt hands pulling the two sides of his ribcage apart, he knew he had only a few moments left.

The voice that had once gently called his name was now breathless with excitement.

It sounded as though she was laughing. Laughing at him and his pain but in his dying moments he realized the truth was far, far worse. The voice was not laughing, it was not even speaking. It was moaning. Writhing, rocking backwards and forwards in ecstasy.

The sound of euphoric laughter was still ringing in O’Neill’s ears as the life seeped out of him and the bright lights slowly faded into absolute, eternal darkness.

He didn’t look like a paedophile – but then again they never do. There was something about the way he carried himself that screamed out ‘I don’t belong here’. Not for the delights of under-age sex anyway.

But then you can’t argue with the facts. He was at the bench – and that one’s a bugger to find. Nobody goes there by accident. He was in the right place at the right time, and there was only one way he could have known about the meeting. So he had to pay the price.

It took me quite a while to get him into the car – all that dead weight – but once he was inside it was plain sailing. I tied the cables round his ankles the way I always do and used the jig to lift him up into the air. It’s poetry in motion to watch and never gives any trouble. A machine that’s designed for lifting dead cows isn’t going to struggle with a full-grown man, no matter how overweight he might be.

It was while he was upside down, swinging his merry way along to the killing room, that the wallet fell out of his back pocket. It gave me quite a shock at first. A police warrant card. Had they been watching me? Were they going to burst through the door at any moment? I got a bit paranoid, I don’t mind admitting, but it didn’t last long. It was so unlikely anything was going to happen. He had been alone. He had been off his guard. If this had been some kind of major operation to find the killer, they would have jumped me there and then.

But if they weren’t after me, they must have been after Bevan. It didn’t take me too long to learn that he had been taken into custody.

I know that in reality the police don’t have a clue about me. They’re chasing the likes of Billy Moorwood. They’re wasting their time. I’ve been too clever. Too careful. The clues all point somewhere else. That made it all the more deliciously ironic. I love the attention.

Anyway, just because Patrick O’Neill is a police officer doesn’t mean he doesn’t deserve to die. And I must admit I am becoming incredibly excited at the prospect of my first killing of an innocent and I plan to make the most of it.

This will be even better than when I killed Chadwick. Not a lot of people knew about the fetish clubs he visited on a weekly basis, and even fewer knew about the awful things he did to some of the women he encountered there. Vulnerable women. Some of them little more than girls. Broken girls from broken homes. Lives shattered by abuse from an early age. He thought he could buy their silence and it worked to a degree. But then the smug bastard made the mistake of attacking the wrong person. A friend of mine. A good friend. She came round for a coffee and was trying to hold it together, then burst into tears and told me all about it, blurting out every sick, perverted and despicable thing he did to her. She was covered in bruises and whip marks from where he had beaten her to within an inch of her life for his sexual gratification. There had to be revenge.

I knew I was taking a risk when I dumped the bodies, but it had to be done. Chadwick’s victims had a right to know what had happened to him. They would know that he’d paid the ultimate price. I’ve now been doing this for so long without any recognition of all the effort I’ve put into clearing the streets. Until I dumped the bodies of the three stooges, not a word of my work had made it into the press. Chadwick had been a good kill. The others too. Righteous kills. I enjoyed every minute. I enjoyed all of them.

It took far longer to identify the other two than I thought it would have. The police can be so useless at times. You have to give them everything on a plate if you want to get anything done.

O’Neill had opened up easily enough, which is always the way when the body is warm, but there had been a surprising amount of fat around the internal organs. More than usual, and that was going to be difficult to dispose of. But the organs themselves, with the exception of the liver, turned out to be in remarkably healthy condition.

I continued the ‘work’ along the usual patterns with few variations. I am, however, particularly pleased with the level of mutilation I managed to achieve around the genital area. I was using a new combination of instruments that has proved highly effective. I will continue to do so.

I can’t deny it any more. It’s not about clearing the streets. It’s all about the killing. That was the real high. The sensations as the life force slipped out of him were more intense than any I have known. And I know why.

Killing the scum of the earth, doing the world a favour, has been fine up until now, but crossing that moral line has generated a massive new rush. I found myself masturbating once again. I have always been aroused by my work but having an innocent body has taken it to new ecstatic heights.

The risks are going to be greater, of course. O’Neill’s death is going to give the police a real bee in their bonnet about trying to track me down. I obliterated the trail to the others but this new one will be almost impossible to destroy completely. The net is going to close in. It’s only a matter of time.

Killing O’Neill has been by far the most satisfying piece of ‘work’ to date in so many ways and has left me with a deep craving, a passionate longing, in its wake. Who would have thought that innocence could be such an aphrodisiac?

I can’t fight the urges any longer. What’s the point? I’ve started planning the next one already. It’s going to be the ultimate rush, it really will. Because at long last I’ve discovered the truth about what I do: the less deserving the target of my brutality, the better.

The excitement in the CEOP office following the arrest of Jason Bevan was so intense that it took several hours before anyone realized that Detective Sergeant Patrick O’Neill had failed to report in.

DI Carter had just emerged from the interview room after his first session with Bevan when he asked his DS to find out how Carter had got on with the girl he had been sent to look after.

‘Don’t know,’ the officer replied. ‘He hasn’t got back here yet and he hasn’t been in touch.’

DI Carter glanced at his watch and frowned deeply. ‘He’s been gone four hours. What the hell does he think he’s playing at? I’ve got to get back in with Bevan in a few minutes. Call him on his mobile. Find out what’s going on for me and report back later.’

It took only minutes to establish that O’Neill’s mobile had been switched off, that he was not answering his home phone and he hadn’t spoken to anyone else on the team since the arrest had been made.

He was a popular and solidly reliable officer who was in a long-term relationship with one of the team’s civilian support staff, so the fact that his girlfriend had not heard from him either quickly ensured the attitude of the officers searching for their missing colleague rapidly moved from bemusement to serious concern.

A trawl round O’Neill’s friends and family showed no signs of depression, no dissatisfaction with any aspect of his life, no clue whatsoever that he was planning to run away and leave it all behind. It became increasingly clear that, if O’Neill was missing, it was not by his own choice. Clues were thin on the ground, but, leaving the members of the inquiry team aside, the obvious place to start seemed to be with the person who had seen him last.

By the time DI Carter sat down opposite his interviewee for the third time that evening, the case he had spent so long working on had moved to the back burner.

Jason Bevan bit his nails nervously as DI Carter entered the room. He knew he was in trouble. He knew the police had all the evidence they needed not just to put him away for a very long time but also to change his life for ever. His darkest secret was about to be exposed. His marriage, his relationships with his children, with his friends and with his work colleagues – it was all about to come to an end.

He had been caught red-handed, so to speak, and strategies like refusing to speak, lying through his teeth or trying to put the blame on the girl were all pointless. He was in it up to his neck and there was no way out. No way out of it at all. Or at least that’s what he thought, right until the moment that DI Carter sat down and offered him the possibility of a deal.

Carter pushed a copy of the transcripts of his last internet conversation as sportsfan52 across the desk towards him. ‘One of my men is missing. I think they may have met up with the person you were communicating with. I need you to tell me everything you know about shygirl351. And I mean absolutely everything.’

The two sessions of morning prayers that followed the arrest of Moorwood had been glum affairs, with everyone on the team staring at their shoes and worried about being singled out because they simply had nothing new to add. No one wanted to be blamed for stalling the operation, and Anderson’s mood had become darker and darker; he barely seemed to leave his office at all. A second 36-hour extension on the custody time limit had been obtained and Anderson was preparing the paperwork for another, acutely aware that, unless hard evidence of a link to the murders could be found, Moorwood was unlikely to be their man.

Difficult as it was to believe, Moorwood’s story appeared to be true. His connection to the case and the fact he had been stalking one of the victims shortly before he had been murdered were nothing more than coincidence.

Charged with drugs offences, various breaches of the peace and weapons violations, Moorwood had been remanded in custody to await his day in court and the team at MIT had gone back to the drawing board.

Just before lunch on Friday a sandy-haired man arrived and was shown into Anderson’s office. The pair remained there for almost an hour before emerging side by side, causing a hush to sweep across the incident room.

‘Okay, gather around everyone,’ said Anderson, pointing his open hand towards the man on his left. ‘We’ve had a development. A major development that, I’m afraid, may well prove that we’ve been chasing our own tails for the last few days. Now I know you’ve all been working extremely hard and I don’t want to take that away from you, but when you hear what I’m about to say you’re going to feel as if we’ve been sent back to square one.

‘This is Detective Inspector Michael Carter from the CEOP – Child Exploitation and Online Protection. I’m going to let him tell you what he’s just told me.’

Anderson perched on the edge of a nearby desk as Carter stepped forward. He slowly scanned the room, taking in the faces of the officers before he began to speak.

‘My unit has been involved in a series of long-term operations against paedophiles using the internet to groom victims. Our main tool is to use officers who hang around in online chatrooms using false identities that have been specially created with a view to attracting those involved in this kind of behaviour.

‘We recently moved in to arrest a man known as Jason Bevan who had been online using the alias sportsfan52. He engaged in conversation with one of our officers, who was pretending to be a fourteen-year-old girl. Bevan began to groom our officer and tried to arrange to meet but we quickly became aware that Bevan was also in touch with other youngsters on the net and that there was a huge danger he would attempt to meet up with one of them before he met up with our team.

‘We tried to bring forward our own meeting by making our responses to his messages more eager and offering him a mobile telephone number so that he would be able to send text messages or even call; however, this had the effect of making him extremely nervous and cautious. We feared that our operation may have been compromised.

‘Bevan was arrested yesterday and immediate examination of his computer showed that he had been in touch with a fourteen-year-old girl using the screen name shygirl351. A meeting had been arranged that very afternoon, so I sent one of my men along to meet with the potential victim and ensure that she was safe.

‘Detective Sergeant O’Neill never reported in after meeting up with shygirl351. He has now been missing for almost twenty hours and we’re all gravely concerned about his welfare. A more thorough analysis of Bevan’s computer, along with interviews with Bevan himself, has led me to believe that, far from being a genuine fourteen-year-old girl, shygirl351 is in fact an alias created by an adult male with a view to luring paedophiles out into the open.’

Woods cocked his head to one side. ‘Like a vigilante operation?’

‘Something along those lines.’ A murmur of nervous chatter spread throughout the members of the team. ‘When we looked back through the chat logs,’ Carter continued, ‘we realized the person was using the same techniques and methods that we do when our officers go undercover in order to make the potential paedophiles feel safe and comfortable. The irony is, whoever was behind this character managed to do a far better job than we did ourselves, and we’re supposed to be the experts.

‘That was when we started getting extremely worried. Our initial concern was that if O’Neill had been snatched by members of a vigilante gang, they may have acted before they realized he was a police officer, and not a paedophile. Or they may have discovered he was a police officer and realized that they couldn’t release him without exposing themselves.

‘But then when we entered details of what little intelligence we had into the HOLMES system, we became even more concerned. I’m aware that one of your lines of inquiry is following the notion that your triple killer has been targeting unconvicted sex offenders.

‘Although we have no hard evidence at this stage, our concern is that the person who snatched O’Neill, the person who engaged in conversation with Jason Bevan, may in fact be the person that your team are looking for.’

Collins felt a twitch in her stomach. Crimes involving fellow officers as victims were always hard to deal with. It was, for the most part, the random nature of the crimes that made them so difficult to handle. The beat bobby on a bicycle who knocks at a door to voice complaints from neighbours about the noise, only to be shot dead by a group of drug-crazed Yardies – there but for the grace of God they all went. It could have happened to any of them.

Carter reached into his briefcase and pulled out some sheaves of paper. ‘I have here copies of transcripts of all the conversations that we’ve been able to retrieve between Bevan and shygirl351. I’ll be passing them on to your profiler with a view to getting some more insights into our man’s mindset.

‘In the meantime I can tell you what I have learned – this person is extremely accomplished at what they are doing. During the time they were online with Bevan they were totally convincing, able to use slang and teenage language with ease. They also seem very comfortable with assuming the role of a female.

‘This person has an extremely advanced level of knowledge when it comes to computing. Our attempts to track down the computer shygirl351 has been using have got us nowhere. The results say the computer is based somewhere in Kazakhstan. We know from the conversations and the arrangements to meet that they are based in London, but the signals we receive are being bounced around and diverted. I have spoken to our computer experts and this is extremely difficult to do.’

The volume of the chatter intensified. Carter looked across at Anderson, who silenced the room with a wave of his hand and stepped forward.

‘Now I can see that some of you are a little sceptical,’ said Anderson. ‘An hour ago I was too, but DI Carter and I have spent the morning comparing notes and I’m afraid to say that the more we look into this, the stronger the links seem to get. What really sold it for me is that, if you take away the fact that Bevan has a couple of kids, his profile is almost identical to Miller’s.

‘Although we have yet to find the link in the case of Chadwick, it seems pretty certain that our killer has been actively targeting paedophiles. At the time someone like Miller was killed, the internet was still in a relative state of infancy and people with those kinds of interests had a limited number of ways to meet up and swap information. We know that Miller made use of contact magazines and lonely hearts, which were a precursor to the modern-day chatroom. It makes perfect sense that if someone was targeting paedophiles today, they would do it online.

‘There is, of course, a whole separate team looking into O’Neill’s disappearance and trying to track him down. It’s a multi-level operation, attacking from all sides, and we are now a key part of it. What we plan to do, along with DI Carter’s help, is see if we can set up some kind of a sting operation, draw shygirl351 out into the open. In order to do this, instead of posing as a vulnerable young girl, we are going to pose as an online predator.’

Collins shook her head. ‘There is another possibility with all this, isn’t there?’

All eyes turned to Collins and she half shrugged her shoulders before continuing. ‘Sorry if I’m speaking out of turn, I don’t believe in holding back.’

‘No. I appreciate you speaking your mind, Collins. It’s always good to get another perspective on a case. What have you got?’

‘Well, I don’t know O’Neill at all, but we have to accept the possibility that the reason he may have been targeted is that he too is an unconvicted paedophile. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time an officer with those duties was found to have that kind of weakness.’

Around the room all the officers nodded gently to themselves. It was an uncomfortable truth that, in more cases than any of them cared to recall, officers with paedophile tendencies had worked their way into child pornography units. That way they could spend their days viewing thousands of images without fear of prosecution. Psychological screening was supposed to weed out the worst cases – the same way it was supposed to weed out gun fanatics from the armed response teams – but a few always managed to slip through.

Carter and Anderson looked at one another before Carter spoke. ‘That is something I’ve considered but I believe the chances of that being the case are pretty negligible. O’Neill was one of four DCs on the job that day. I picked him at random to go and meet this contact. The chances of him turning out to be a paedophile and our killer knowing about it are just too high to be taken wholly seriously. I know Patrick. I’ve known him for a while. You can never say never, but I’m sure he’s clean.’

Collins nodded in agreement but after only a few seconds began shaking her head again. ‘Then what are we wasting time for? It’s going to take days, maybe even weeks to build up a relationship with shygirl351. There’s no way this guy doesn’t know that O’Neill is a copper. Either O’Neill would have told him or the killer would have found his warrant card or something. The idea that he’s going to be up for an online conversation is just ludicrous. He’ll be on his guard. Dr Bernard talked about the fact that these people often have an intimate knowledge of police procedure. You said he’s already displayed knowledge of the techniques used by undercover officers working online. Surely he’ll be expecting something like this.’ She looked across at Woods and her fellow officers for moral support.

‘That’s a chance we have to take,’ said Anderson. ‘It could go either way. Now that a policeman has become directly involved it could send him underground but he may also be thinking that he has nothing to lose. Dr Bernard also talked about some of these people being on some kind of mission. Our man may now think he’s running out of time. Or he may be planning to use O’Neill as some kind of bargaining chip, but wondering how to get in touch with us. The only way to find out is go online. That’s our best hope of tracking this person down.’