Believe No One (30 page)

This isn't the way it's supposed to go down. It isn't the way it's supposed to end.

One of his throwaway mobiles rings on the coffee table a few feet from him. He launches himself at it. The laptop slips and he tries to catch it, succeeds, but the lid smacks against the sharp edge of the table. Cursing, he shoves it onto the table and sweeps up the phone.

‘You ruined her!' he screams. ‘You stupid
bastard
.'

‘It's hard to see the light die in this one's eyes, huh?'

The response feels like a slap. Destroying Sharla Jane's eyes was an act of defiance – a personal attack on him.

‘You forget who you're talking to,' he warns.

‘No, I just remembered. You're nothing but a gutless
Jessie
who gets other people to do his dirty work. It's always been about what
you
want. You held me back all these years,' Will continues in that irritating, affected drawl. ‘Well, not any more – things have changed.'

‘Nothing's changed – you're still the brainless fuck-up you always were. I made all of this possible.
I
laid the ground rules,
I
did the planning.'

‘
Planning
? This isn't about planning, it's about
action.
You lived your life through me. You see the world through
my
eyes. You have no idea what it's like to be in the room, to smell the fear, feel the heat coming off them. You think you're some kinda mastermind, but you know what you really are? You're a peeping Tom, watching all those women die through an electronic keyhole.'

He hears the tumbling notes that mean he's been cut off, and stares in disbelief at the mobile phone in his hand.

Moments later, he realizes he has had an actual conversation at his home with a man who's sought by police in two American states, as well as by the FBI. Horrified, he breaks open the phone, strips out the SIM card and bends it backwards and forwards till it breaks. Then he tosses it on the fire and watches the flames turn green for an instant before it is consumed. He picks up his laptop to log off the web page. The monitor is cracked. He paces the room, Will's insults going round and round in his head –
Peeping Tom. Gutless Jessie –
until he feels choked with rage.

He has to get out. He packs a sports bag and slams out the front door, crunches across the gravel to his SUV and throws the kit onto the passenger seat. Inside, netting; a roll of plastic wrap; nylon rope; duct tape; a hunting knife.

We cannot bear to look away from what we cannot bear to see.

O
RIGIN UNKNOWN

Incident Command Post, Westfield,
Williams County, Oklahoma
Sunday morning

At 5.47 a.m., ‘spider' 'bots deployed by Team Adam's techs found a URL that showed a digital video recording on a continuous loop.

The Task Force assembled at six thirty.

‘The web address was probably posted first in an Internet relay chat room,' CSI Roper explained; even sitting still, Roper seemed constantly on the move. ‘Old technology, but it's still used by hackers, crackers and anyone else who wants to swap illegal information anonymously.

‘By six a.m., the link was on three S&M forums,' Roper said. ‘By five after, links were popping up all over the web: Twitter, Facebook, newsfeeds – someone even put a section of it on YouTube. It's gone viral.'

The recording showed Sharla Jane, strapped to a pallet. Her eyes were bound with duct tape, and a concrete weight was pressing on her chest. She was struggling to breathe. The weight was attached via a rope to a simple block and tackle. A faceless killer stood over her.

Fennimore's mobile phone rang. Josh Brown. He rejected the call, apologizing to the hushed gathering. Nobody even glanced at him. They were all staring at the scene playing out on the screen.

His phone rang again. Josh again.

‘Not
now,
Josh.'

‘Don't hang up,' the student urged. ‘I found a website. Sharla Jane's on it.'

‘We're looking at it now,' Fennimore says. ‘How the hell did you—'

‘Same way you did – spiders, web crawlers. They don't call it the World Wide Web for nothing.'

‘For God's sake, Josh, if he finds out you've been tracking him—'

‘He'll think I am just another sad, sick bastard wanting to join his fan club. Anyway, he'd have to be monitoring site traffic, and I doubt he'd do that. He put the link out there because he
wanted
it to be found, Nick.'

‘All right.' Fennimore exhaled, trying to control the nervous jitter at the top of his sternum. He glanced at the screen, not wanting to, but knowing that this recording gave them more on the killer than they had gleaned so far in hundreds of hours of investigation. The killer was inserting a laryngoscope into Sharla Jane's throat.

‘I have to go,' Fennimore said.

They watched the killing through to the end, though few could keep their eyes on the screen when the man, dressed from head to foot in black, picked up the box cutter a second time.

Detmeyer was the first to break the stunned silence. ‘We'll need a recording of this,' he said. ‘We should study it.' He sounded pragmatic and emotionless, while Fennimore's arms and face burned like they were being swarmed over by fire ants.

A few minutes later, word came in that the video had been uploaded through a server in Westfield.

‘He's here – in town?' Reflexively, Launer touched the gun in his holster.

CSI Roper shook his head. ‘The accuracy of a geographic location for an IP address depends on the number of local nodes—'

‘Can we get that again, in American?' Sheriff Launer said.

Roper thought about it for a moment. ‘Okay, comparable systems … Let's say … General Post Office – every sizeable town's got one of those, right?'

Launer gave him a hard stare as if he was waiting for a punchline he wouldn't like.

The CSI went on, regardless: ‘Mail can be routed through it by the US Postal Service and then out to small communities and individual farms for what – thirty miles?'

‘Fifty or more,' the Sheriff said.

‘Okay, fifty. So a package comes into Westfield, doesn't mean the person named on the package lives in town, does it?'

‘Not necessarily …'

‘So, the Internet works on the same principle. Stuff gets routed through a server somewhere in Westfield – it acts as a hub where packages of electronic information get sorted and sent on.'

‘I can look at a postal package and find an address that would take me to Joe Blow's front yard,' Launer said. ‘Can your “IP” address do that?'

‘In a big city, maybe. Out here, best we can do is say he's still somewhere in Williams County.' Roper dipped his head, regretful.

They took a break to give everyone a chance to get the phantom smell of blood from their nostrils, the sound of Sharla Jane's screams out of their heads. The smokers escaped outside, not caring about the heat and humidity. Fennimore began making notes. He looked up and saw Abigail Hicks watching him; she looked haunted by what she'd seen. He set down his pen and went over to where she was standing.

‘Okay?' he said.

‘When he was resuscitating her, I kept willing her to breathe.' She spoke low and fast, as if she was afraid someone might overhear. ‘Crazy, huh?'

He shook his head. ‘No,' he said. ‘Not crazy. Human.'

At that moment, Dunlap appeared at the double doors. ‘Ready?'

The majority of the team would go on with what they had been doing before the link came in, while a small group reviewed the recording elsewhere. Since the Task Force had allocated the inn as their command post, the owners had experienced a reversal of their fortunes, and were more than happy to hire out additional accommodation to the investigation.

Fennimore picked up his sheets of notepaper and laptop, and Hicks followed suit.

‘Did you see Sheriff Launer?' Dunlap asked Hicks.

‘Said he'd seen enough.' Hicks's expression revealed nothing. ‘Said he'll talk to you when he gets back.'

Dunlap nodded as if to say,
That figures.
He disappeared onto the landing and Fennimore turned to Hicks.

‘Did he say where he was going?'

‘Said he was headed out to Lambert Woods to organize the search for Riley.'

‘The woods?' Launer had refused to even consider the woods at the back of the trailer park the day before. ‘Didn't he tell Kent Whitmore they needed to complete the search of Cupke Lake first?'

‘He changed his mind after the news people found out that the skeeters down at the lake were real hungry. Some of those guys already packed up and headed back to the city.'

‘Did he speak to Whitmore?' Fennimore asked.

‘He took Mr Whitmore with him.'

Fennimore narrowed his eyes. ‘What's he up to?'

Her remarkable eyes fixed on his, and he was struck again by the dark rims that bounded the irises. ‘His campaign rival gained two percentage points in two days. He had no choice – he strapped on his six-gun and saddled up for the campaign trail.'

Alemoor Loch, Scotland

Gordon checked the dive computer on his wrist; he'd lost count of how many times he had checked it in the last ten minutes. They were at thirty-two metres, and not a glimmer of light from the surface could penetrate to that depth. His integrated compass told him they had reached the deepest section of the loch, which meant another twenty-three metres of dark, cold water beneath them. They would dive for another ten metres, the deepest he'd ever been. He had practised the routine, memorized the dive plan, read the contour maps until he felt he could do the dive blindfold.

Gordon felt a tug on the buddy-line; their divemaster, John, giving the signal to descend. Forty metres. This was the big one; the one Gordon had been building towards for two years. He felt a trickle of anxiety, and stilled it; he was buddied up with John – there was nothing to be anxious about. Together they tilted heads down and began the final descent, allowing gravity and the power of their legs to take them.

At thirty-five metres, his dive light reflected back at him and he slowed. They had prepared for this; it was a rocky outcrop of black shale, and was featured on the dive map he had studied in such minute detail. The overhang went back about three metres, then the cliff continued down. There were jagged rocks here, and they would need to be careful not to snag their gear, but they wouldn't be diving much deeper, so it wasn't a major issue.

Head down, he felt his way along the jagged surface of the rock, using his dive meter and the tracery of bubbles from his mask to reassure him which way was up, because he always got a bit freaked – a bit claustrophobic – when he met hard surfaces in the dark. ‘In a bad situation, anxiety quickly turns to panic,' John had told them. ‘When panic sets in, all you can fall back on is your training, because panic is a wuss screaming in your ear. It will not listen to reason, and it
will
ruin your day.'

He glanced sideways and saw John's light, four metres away, and told himself everything was fine. They would work their way down another three metres to the edge of the overhang, drop a few more metres to get past the forty-metre mark, then make a controlled ascent. Nothing to it.

Resisting the urge to get closer to the reassuring presence of the divemaster, he checked his dive computer and continued the descent. At thirty-eight metres, his hand plunged into nothingness and he felt a stab of alarm, gasped, stopped, got himself under control.

‘Stop-Breathe-Think-Act,' he chanted silently, repeating the club mantra until he was calm.

It would be a bit scary looking into blackness under the overhang, but he challenged himself to do it. He swung to the vertical, gripping the edge of the rock with his fingertips, hanging upside down.
You can do this,
he told himself. He held onto the rock with one hand and, with the torch in the other, he shone the light into the abyss.

‘
Jesus
!' He screamed, shoved away from the rock face, bubbles rising frantically from his mask. He kicked wildly, catching his foot against a sharp ridge of rock, felt pain explode in his ankle. He kept kicking. He needed to get up, up and out.

A sharp tug on his wrist sent another shaft of pain radiating through the joints of his arm into the muscles of his shoulder. Still he screamed, sending air boiling from around the regulator in his mouth. He kicked and panted, but couldn't get away, was too panicked to realize he'd reached the limits of the buddy-line.

John hauled him in like a fish, grabbed both arms, shoved him against the rock face and looked into his eyes, holding him fast. He went limp. The divemaster switched his grip, placing his left hand on Gordon's chest to steady him, and signalled with his right. Vertical, palm flat, then two fingers tapped to his temple.
Stop,
it said.
Think.

Gordon nodded, though tears were misting his mask and his nose was blocked with snot, so he felt he was drowning, and he had to resist the impulse to spit out the regulator. It took a minute, but he got himself under control and John gingerly released his grip. He tapped his own dive computer, held up three fingers, pointed down. Three more metres, he would achieve his goal, surpass it, if he did that extra metre.

He shook his head.
You don't understand.

John repeated the gesture.

Again, Gordon shook his head. He pointed to his eyes with his first two fingers, used one hand to indicate the rock overhang, then dipped the other under and shook his head again.

John pointed to Gordon's chest and signalled again:
Stop.
Then he pointed to his own chest, then to his eyes. He was going to take a look.