Wanted (16 page)

‘Just news sites, OK?’

She didn’t answer, but he didn’t ask again. She already knew the score. Social networks. Facebook, Twitter, Bebo, Instagram and whatever the hell else was fashionable with kids her age right now: all of them were forbidden. Because that was all it would take: her popping up on one of those sites for a chat with her buddies. Anyone looking for Danny and her – cops, journalists, government agencies, maybe even the Kid and Glinka – would already have infiltrated those sites, and would have laid down spyware to hunt for either of them surfacing so they could trace them to whatever location she’d accessed the sites from.

‘And don’t spill any of that drink on it either, OK?’ he said. ‘There’s something important I need to do on it when I get back.’

Important. Damn right, he thought. He was going to pack up their stuff and get ready to go. And then he was going to contact Crane. And try to work out if he could still trust him, then see if Crane would be willing to help.

Ray Kincade checked his watch: time, he decided, to make his move.

He reached across the passenger seat into the footwell for the climber’s ice pick he’d bought. A ridiculous weapon, he was aware, but there hadn’t been a great deal of choice.

And, what with airport security being as tight as it was now on both sides of the Atlantic, it had been out of the question to bring along anything more powerful, like his usual weapon, an ACP single-action pistol, or a short-barrelled pump-action shotgun, which he’d have preferred to be packing tonight.

He got out of the car, quietly closing the door behind him, knowing from his own upbringing in rural Kentucky just how far sound could travel in the country at night. He walked halfway along the crunching, caked mud track towards the road, then set off into the woods, warily, without using his flashlight, choosing instead to use the light of the moon.

He worked his way slowly east, keeping parallel to the road until it turned into a dogleg bend, where he crossed out of sight of the house, then followed a thick, curving hedgerow to the right, until it brought him to a five-bar gate guarding a paddock at the back of the farm.

He could make out the shapes of what looked like oil drums and poles; a horse jump. He remembered from one of the articles he’d read that the older girl who’d died here had hoped to ride in the Olympics one day. Ray had a daughter of his own. Away at college now in New York. She was his life.

He stayed there in the shadows for five minutes, not moving, barely breathing, cold fingers of breeze stroking the back of his neck. His eyes kept scanning the farm buildings and the back of the house. Partly because he wanted to make sure that the locals, who were sure to be jumpy, and might even be keeping some kind of sporadic watch on the property themselves, weren’t anywhere near. But also because he was aware of the propensity of serial killers to return to their crime scenes in order to relive and even re-enact what they’d done. Some were drawn there by narcissism, trying to understand their own actions more deeply, others simply because of the feeling of power such places held for them.

Ray heard nothing but the scratching of some tiny creature in the hedgerow and the far-off cry of a night bird.

Ready to move, he gripped the ice pick that little bit tighter and checked the hunting knife already hooked into his belt, reassured by its weight, and picturing its wicked sharp edge.

The FBI’s policy on guns was that you didn’t pull them to threaten, you pulled them to kill. Ray believed the same went for blades. And the devil he was here to hunt would never come quietly. If their paths ever did cross, any chance Ray got to kill him, he’d have to snatch it with both hands. Or he’d wind up dead himself.

Not that he thought it would come to that tonight. And not that he’d want it to. Not without back-up.

The latch on the field gate was open – a sign in itself on any working farm like this that something had gone badly wrong. Ray slipped silently through and on past the jumps to another hedgerow and gate, then into the farmyard beyond, with its empty cowsheds and silent, dark machinery.

There was plenty of cow crap on the ground, he saw, but not an animal in sight. He guessed one of the neighbouring farmers must have taken the herd. Hadn’t been able to face milking them here. Not after what had happened.

Murders didn’t usually occur in backwaters such as this, he supposed. They were more likely confined to Edinburgh and Glasgow – urban rat runs full of drugs and thugs and killings – according to the well-thumbed crime novel he’d found and wryly leafed through in his hotel room.

But in the case of the PSS Killer, the remoteness of this place fitted. He got off on the sound of his victims’ screams. He liked to take his time.

Ray edged past the farm buildings, sticking like glue to the shadows wherever possible, wishing for cloud cover, shrinking from the pools of bright moonlight emblazoned on the ground. A horrible self-awareness was creeping over him, making him feel somehow absurd, like an actor in an escape movie, darting between searchlights, pretending his life depended on it, when it fact it was all just make-believe.

Because this could just be make-believe, he thought. Because no one might be watching at all.

But then he froze.

He’d felt something, a shift in texture, beneath the soles of his boots. He’d smelt something too. Burned ground. Ash. Looking down, he saw he was standing at the centre of a wide patch of charred earth.

The bodies of the family who’d lived here, Ray had read in his pilfered report, had been discovered in the main yard at the back of the house, twisted and blackened and burned, having previously been soaked in some kind of accelerant – most likely turpentine, the forensic investigator had said – then lit.

The UK police had found no evidence to suggest that the victims had been killed anywhere but right here where Ray was standing. The inside of the main house and the surrounding farm buildings had betrayed no signs of struggle or other forensic indicators that the murders had taken place there. Similarly, the surrounding gardens and countryside had been scoured, but nothing had been discovered to suggest that anything untoward had occurred there either.

He raised his eyes from the ground and stared up at the dark house. In spite of the complete lack of forensic evidence to suggest otherwise, he did not believe the victims had died out here.

The pathologist’s report, a copy of which he had also read, had stated that the husband and wife’s skulls had been smashed prior to death.

Stone.

The daughter’s actual cause of death had yet to be determined. Her body had been severely mutilated. She’d been cut from neck to waist, and her throat and lungs were missing.

Paper.

While the son had been decapitated and his skull left between his legs.

Scissors.

Several other body parts had been missing: fingers, a tongue, a heart. The pathologist had no way of telling if they had been eaten by wild animals either before or following the burning of the bodies, but some of the missing body parts appeared to have been chewed off. With one exception. The mother’s ear had been severed with the same blade, the pathologist had concluded, that had been used to decapitate the boy.

Parts of each of the PSS Killer’s American victims – all of whose case histories Ray knew so intimately that he might as well have been staring at them right now – had been missing. Danny Shanklin’s wife’s ear had been severed and never recovered.

That the murderer of this family had taken the throat and lungs of the daughter convinced Ray that this was the PSS Killer’s work. Because that removed any possibility of forensic investigators realizing that she would have been killed in the same way as many of the PSS Killer’s other victims: by having a magazine inserted in her throat, then hundreds of pieces of screwed-up paper forced down it until she’d choked.

Ray gazed up at the house. Every single one of the PSS Killer’s known victims had been murdered inside their own homes. Which was why Ray needed to get in there. He knew that, if this had been the PSS Killer’s doing, it was inside, not outside, he might find proof.

He backed into the nearest outbuilding, a chicken shed, as quiet and empty as all the other outbuildings he’d passed.

He took out his phone. You never could be too cautious, was the way he saw it. He scrolled down his contact list to an email address he’d not used since he’d first been given it, one he was only meant to use if he discovered firm evidence concerning the PSS Killer’s whereabouts.

The account belonged to Danny Shanklin. Ray started punching a message with his thumb. Just in case, he told himself. Just so someone at least knows that you’re here.

Still shivering after the freezing shower, Danny pulled on a jumper, sat down at the caravan kitchen table and took a slug of steaming tea.

Lexie was already in the car, wrapped in a sleeping-bag, with the light out, either asleep or feigning it. She was probably as keen to get away from here as he was.

He’d already checked her room, but she’d left it spotless. Nothing there that could help anyone trace them.

As well as his own belongings, he’d packed enough food and drink into the car to get them to where they were going next: a remote seaside town he’d picked out, in the opposite direction from the ferry ports and airports that anyone who tracked them here might imagine he’d go.

His phone was on the kitchen table where he’d left it, as though Lexie might not even have picked it up. As he cradled it now, he tried to resist the urge to check his web browser’s history to see whether she’d obeyed him or not, but failed.

He still remembered the brief encounter he’d had with her boyfriend the day he’d collected her from her school just before M15 had got there to snatch her. He remembered how Lexie had looked into the kid’s eyes and couldn’t help linking the yearning he’d witnessed then to the expression she’d been wearing when Danny had got here tonight.

But as his eyes scanned down the list of the URLs the phone had recently been used to visit, he saw she’d kept clear of social networks, sticking to news media sites, along with YouTube.

On Google, she’d typed in his name and hers, searches that would have resulted in next to nothing a few weeks ago, but which now led to entries that scrolled down seemingly indefinitely. Danny checked the first few pages, but there was nothing he hadn’t seen already. The only news was old news: the whole goddamn world still wanted his head.

He felt a pang of guilt because, on the surface, it didn’t look like Lexie had been trying to contact her boyfriend or any of her other friends. But he knew she was smart. So, just to be sure, he visited each URL she had and scanned any comment boxes beneath the articles she’d been reading, and even the tunes she’d been listening to on YouTube, just in case any were forums where she and her friends regularly hung out online.

He read the most recent comments on each, ignoring the quirky pseudonyms under which most people posted. He looked for recent dialogues between site visitors, searching for any sign that they might be coded messages from Lexie, revealing how, or even where, she was.

He found nothing. But instead of feeling relief, all he truly felt was an ache of disappointment. He should have trusted her. She’d done nothing wrong. He hated having become someone who snooped on his own child.

Only one thing left to do when you’re forced into a corner: fight back.

Danny had been seven years old the first time the chief combatives instructor of the United States Military Academy, a.k.a. his Old Man, had first stuck him in the ring to spar. As he’d goaded Danny on, he’d blocked his wild punches to begin with, hadn’t hit him back. But he’d cornered him against the ropes all the same.

Danny typed ‘InWorld™’ into the Google search box, as more than three hundred thousand other players would have done today. Normally, when Danny visited the online gaming site, he logged in as ‘F8’, the same avatar he’d been using until now. And normally when he visited InWorld™, it was to meet Crane.

But Danny’s F8 avatar was useless now. Prior to the assassination in London, the Kid had hacked Danny’s InWorld™ account to gain access to his contacts, then hijacked Crane’s avatar and used it to relay false instructions to Danny to manipulate him and eventually frame him for the terrorist attack in London. Pretending to be Crane, he’d tricked Danny into going to the meeting at the Ritz Hotel and had continued to run him, like a puppet, for the rest of that day. Danny couldn’t trust Crane’s old avatar any more than his own.

He set about creating a new avatar for himself. He decked it out in the free clothing made available to new players: grey shorts and a white T-shirt, non-logo sneakers and a non-affiliated baseball cap. He named it Jackal, after the Jack Russell dog his mother had bought him for his fifth birthday, an animal that had been more stubborn and determined than a mule. Then he pulled up the InWorld™ map and scanned it to choose a location to teleport into.

The InWorld™ playing area consisted of four virtual continents and twenty-eight diverse virtual cities. Each city contained many thousands of virtual streets and buildings for players to explore. In the guise of F8, Danny normally chose to visit the city of Noirlight, which was where Crane’s preferred hang-out, Harry’s Bar, was located. But Harry’s Bar had also been hacked by the Kid and was a no-go area now.

He zoomed in on the city of Steem on the onscreen map and homed in further on its most central point. He tapped the teleport icon and watched as the map faded to be replaced by a swirling digital vortex, which solidified into an image of Jackal in the middle of a computerized portrayal of a Victorian railway terminus.

Passengers in top hats, derbies and suits, bonnets and wide dresses bustled up and down the main concourse. Hansom cabs rolled by on the roads servicing the station. Danny popped his earphones into the iPhone’s socket and turned up the volume. A rich and diverse soundscape synched with the action on the screen. Street traders hustled and hawked their wares. All around he heard the clank and whirr of cogs and clockwork, hissing steam, occasional gunshots, screams and the clip-clop of hoofs.