Michael Fowler - Heart of the Demon

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.

DAY TWENTY-FOUR: 30th 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.”