Heart of the Demon (D.S.Hunter Kerr) (17 page)

Josh: do u want me 2 cheer u up?

Kirsty: wat do u mean?

Josh: u r cute u kno. Do u want to meet up.

Kirsty: r u askin me out?

Josh: Of cors.

Kirsty: but I hardli kno u.

Josh: u do wev talkd for ages on this chat room. Uv seen my foto. Don’t u like me.

Selecting the right photograph and then altering it in his Adobe Photoshop programme had been another worthwhile project. He was quite proud of how physically good-looking he had made his character.

Kirsty: u luk nice. u sound nice.

Josh: well then lets meet.

Kirsty: ok but I can’t 4 a few days. ive been grounded. in fact im
supposed 2 b doin mi bedroom now instead of chattin wiv u. mum wil freak again if she catchs me.

Josh: wen can u get out then?

Kirsty: next satrday evenin. mums out wiv dad wiv frends. Wot about the park?

Josh: souns gud. c u then pretty face.

As he exited the chat room site he leaned back on his swivel chair, clasped his hands behind his head and grinned widely.

Another lamb to the slaughter.

- ooOoo -

DAY TWENTY-FOUR: 30
th
July.

The ringing of Grace Marshall’s desk phone disturbed the unusual concentrated silence in the MIT office. She answered it without looking up from her paperwork, clamping the handset between her neck and shoulder. But the nature of the call changed her demeanour. She lifted her eyes as she listened intently to the voice on the other end of the line. Picking up a pen she scribbled notes in her own form of shorthand, only answering occasionally with a one word clipped response. Two minutes later she set down the receiver.

Solemn faced, her eyes swept across four desks that had been recently fixed together into a square format.

The two opposite were occupied. Hunter and Barry Newstead were picking through the piles of documents spread across their surfaces.

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” she said.

Hunter looked up from his desk and pushed aside notes he had been making on the recent body find. For the last half hour he had been trying his best to make sense of it all. True he had worked on body count murders before, but it had been where members of the same family had been killed in one single event. He had never worked on multiple victim deaths, which were now being dubbed as the actions of a serial killer. His head felt woolly. A mixture of long hours of intense work, and a lack of sleep, from his lying awake night after night, mulling over the recent events, were taking their toll.

“Hit me with the good news first,” Hunter responded, placing an already well-chewed pen back into one corner of his mouth.

Barry Newstead dog-eared the page he had been perusing and peered over his reading spectacles at Grace. It was his first day with the Case Team, joining as a civilian investigator and he had been given the job of sending the profiles of the murdered girls, and the descriptions of how they had met their deaths, to Headquarters Public Protection Unit. In return they had faxed him the backgrounds and histories of the districts most violent and dangerous sex offenders. He had already said to Hunter ‘that he thought nothing could surprise him anymore, that was until he had ploughed through this lot’ and he had confessed ‘he was astonished at just how many paedophiles there were living in his area.’

“That was the forensics lab,” continued Grace. “They have found some traces on that grey cardigan belonging to Carol Siddons. But the bad news is none of it is human DNA. All they have found are lots of dog hairs, and some black woollen fibres which appear to have come from a duffel coat of some type.”

“Dog hairs?” interjected Barry. “Carol never had a dog, and neither Susan.”

“Sure about that Barry?” enquired Hunter, eyebrows raised, teeth clenching harder on the end of his pen.

“I’m positive. I can give Sue a quick ring, but all the time I was investigating Carol’s disappearance there was never any dog around. And I would have definitely known because I hate the bloody things, I’ve been bitten three times in my career, one of those times by a bloody police dog would you believe.”

Grace let out a chuckle, then clamped her lips firmly together, when she saw Barry’s not too impressed reaction.

“And she was living at a children’s home, where pets were not allowed. So more than likely those dog hairs will have come from her killer.” Barry paused, his eyes lighting up. “Just a minute,” he continued, “Steve Paynton used to have a couple of dogs; Staffordshire bull terriers if my memory serves me right. He used to keep them in the old outhouse at the bottom of his mum and dad’s garden. Rumours were that he trained them for fighting. That was a good few years’ back, they’ll more than likely be dead now. Knowing him though, they’ll probably be buried on his dad’s allotment, or somewhere like that. Can they tell the breed of dog if we find them?”

“I asked the same question,” returned Grace. “They can. They’ll be able to confirm a match if we find the correct dog. Well done Barry,” Grace continued excitedly. “I’ll feed in to the HOLMES team what forensics have told me, and what you’ve just said and get a search team round to the Paynton’s. They are going to be thoroughly pissed off by the time we’ve finished.”

“That family’s had it coming for a long time,” added Hunter. “You set that in motion and muster up a search team, we’ve more officers joining us now that we have a serial killer on our hands.”

As Grace
raced out of the room Hunter pulled the pen from his mouth and leaned back in his seat thinking about the sheer volume of ongoing enquiries. They now had three separate crime scenes running, the most recent of which, was a hive of activity. Forensic Anthropologists were picking over every inch of ground, digging in several areas around the scrubland, following the path of the radar. In addition there was Peter Broughton and his dog Lady who had identified further ‘hot spots’ where other human remains might well be. He was just thankful that there hadn’t been anymore body finds.

Elsewhere house-to-house enquiries were being conducted around the area where Rebecca Morris had last been seen, and the HOLMES team were fully engaged in linking all this together. The work was slow and laborious, but it was necessary.

Thankfully Barry had already been a big help in the Carol Siddons case and Hunter was hoping that with his lifelong knowledge of villains and their families, together with his previous casework as a detective, he might be able to point them in the direction of their killer. Barry’s immediate task was to determine if the ‘modus operandi’ of the murders fitted the profiles of any of the district’s sex attackers. And to add to his workload he had also picked up where Grace had left off sifting through the dozens of ‘missing from home’ case files, which had been removed from the basement at Police Headquarters. Earlier that morning he had set to work on those and had already been able to dismiss a good quantity of those reports quite promptly. Many of the files still had photographs of the ‘missing’ girls stapled to the front sheets, and although they were now yellowing with age, by carefully studying the images, Barry had found that either because of hair colour, size of the individual, or clothing description, they could not possibly be the latest victim

“And how are the missing from home checks going Barry?” Hunter enquired returning back to his own mound of paperwork.

“Painful and tedious,” Barry responded, pushing his spectacles back onto the crown of his head. “I’ve managed to get a rough height and age of the bones together with colour of hair from the anthropologist, and the exhibits officer has managed to clean up the labels from the clothing to give me their size and original colour, for comparison with the reports. What is interesting however is the exhibit Professor McCormack found. Remember? The playing card inside the plastic bag. I can confirm it’s the three of hearts by the way. Well this was also inside the bag.” Barry held up a small section of paper. It appeared to have been torn from the top heading section of a newspaper and although yellowing and cracked at the edges the black print was still decipherable.

“Not all the headline print is there but it looks like it’s from our local weekly paper and it shows the date the sixth of October nineteen-ninety-nine. On a hunch I went through the ‘misper’ files, and using that date as guidance it’s helped me separate one girl’s folder - a Claire Fisher - but we’re slightly out of sync. She was reported missing on the first of October that year – five days before the newspaper cutting. She’s roughly the same height as the skeleton and had the same colour hair, but no clothing has been listed on her report.”

“Was the torn newspaper actually inside that plastic bag with the playing card?” asked Hunter, becoming alert to Barry’s information.

Barry nodded.

Hunter’s eyebrows raised and his blue eyes engaged with Barry’s. “This killer is one really twisted evil bastard Barry. He wants us to know this is his work. He placed that with the body so that we would know when she was killed, and I’m guessing that part of the paper will lead us in the direction of who she is.” Hunter pushed aside his notes. This find had his fullest attention. “We’ve been making enquiries and wondering why such a gap between the murder of Carol Siddons and Rebecca Morris, well it’s my bet that this will go some way to fill in those gaps. Contact the local paper and see what’s in the copy, and then get that exhibit to forensics and see if he’s left any DNA or prints. Let’s just hope he’s slipped up somewhere along the line.”

* * * * *

At the same time as Grace Marshall was organising the warrant, and search team with the local Task Force, to raid Steve Paynton’s old family home and allotment, Barry Newstead was entering the local history room at Barnwell library. Following a

phone call to the local weekly newspaper, The Barnwell Chronicle, he had discovered that old archive editions were no longer kept at the newspaper office, but had in fact been put onto microfiche and were held in trust by the local history group.

Within ten minutes of entering the small history room Barry was seated before a large microfiche reader, receiving instructions in its use by the female supervisor, who was at the same time loading the roll of microfiche containing all 1999’s editions of the weekly local newspaper onto the machine’s spool. As she leaned over him he couldn’t help but take in the alluring smell of her perfume. Quite an expensive one he thought, as he sneaked his gaze to her face only a few inches from his. It made him realise how much he had missed the smell of a woman since the sudden death of his wife from a stroke three years ago. Although heavily made-up he guessed she was in her mid fifties, roughly the same age as he, and he found himself being distracted from the task in hand.

“Right Mr Newstead,” she said straightening up.

She had taken him by surprise. He hoped she hadn’t caught him staring at her. He could feel his cheeks flushing.

“You just turn those handles at the side of the machine until you find the edition you want, then when you’ve found what you want you hit the print button, which will copy what you see on the screen. Understand all that?” she checked with him and smiled.

A very attractive smile he thought.

“If you need anything else just give me a call” she finished, then turned on her low heels and clicked her way back towards her desk.

He turned the spool slowly at first, watching the blown up images of the past editions of his local paper float across the screen. He was soon getting a feel for the movement, which he quickened as he became used to the momentum of the apparatus, and in less than a minute he was soon spinning past the editions until he hit mid-September’s pages and then began to slow until he settled on the 6th October’s front sheet. He took out the torn section, now secured inside a police exhibit bag, which had been discovered beside the female skeleton. He manoeuvred it around and held it in front of the reading screen for comparison. Confirming it was from the same paper he set it down to begin scanning the newssheet. He didn’t need to go far down the page. Within seconds he knew that what he had been looking for was contained in the front-page headlines. He began to pore over the print.

POLICE SEARCH FOR MISSING TEENAGER

Detectives leading the enquiry into the surprise disappearance of 15 year old Claire Louise Fisher from Barnwell are urging the public to help them with information.

Claire was reported missing five days ago on October 1st.

The last reported sighting of Claire was by her boyfriend at 9.30pm that night.

There was more to the report. The journalist had filled the remainder of the story with Claire’s background, plus interviews with her parents and friends, which he quickly scanned. And he recognised the photograph of Claire that the paper had used. It was a clear replica of the one from the front of her missing from home file back on his desk.

He slapped the table excitedly. He knew in his mind that having read this that Claire Louise Fisher was their latest corpse.

He looked for the print key on the microfiche reader, hovered his index finger over and stabbed at it. Almost instantaneously the copier below the microfiche reader spurred into action and within seconds a facsimile of the front page of the
6
th
October 1999 edition had been printed onto an A4 sheet.

Barry sat back in his chair and perused the story again. He found himself shaking his head and muttering to himself as he read it a second time, whilst thinking of the ramifications of what he had just uncovered.

Claire Fisher went missing on the first of October ninety-ninety-nine, he said to himself, and the edition of this newspaper didn’t go on sale until the sixth. That means the killer didn’t bury her straightaway. Claire was either alive and held somewhere, or killed and kept somewhere for the best part of a week until the paper came out, and then she was finally buried.

“This is one twisted bastard.” He said. From the corner of his eye he caught movement from the desk, and he glanced up to see the faired-haired local history Supervisor looking in his direction.

“Sorry about that” he whispered loudly towards her, and apologetically raised a hand. “Talking to myself. A sign of age eh?”

She smiled back.

Quite a nice smile; a welcoming smile, he thought. There was something about it, which conjured up the image of Susan Siddons. It seemed perverse that such a painful event as this should bring them back together again after all these years. It made him realise just how much he had missed her. This has to be fate he thought. And he was a great believer in fate. He wondered about giving her a call.