Criminal Minds (Fox Meridian Book 4) Read online

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Wish I was. It might change with this one. This makes him a serial like his elder brother and it’s enough to give a definite pattern.’

  Fox gave a grunt of acknowledgement. ‘Got an ID for her?’

  ‘Yvonne Surly, registered prostitute, aged twenty-six. She lives about three blocks north of here… She’s got a three-year-old kid. No father in the picture.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Child services are arranging a pick-up. Kid’s three, there’s a chance of adoption.’

  ‘And we can’t help them all and I didn’t think you cared that much, Rutherford.’

  ‘Everyone’s got something that gets to them. Ten dead and a kid orphaned is mine.’

  Pointing out that one should be enough seemed a little petty. ‘Let me have the report when it’s ready. Kit’ll glue it in to what we have and see whether anything pops out. You never know, we may get lucky.’

  Rutherford let out a bark of a laugh. ‘I don’t believe in luck.’

  ‘No… Neither do I.’

  Niflhel.

  Kit watched the viron resolve itself around her, settled her tunic in place, making sure to keep her tail low, and then started up the hill to Vali’s homestead. It was ten a.m. and Fox had gone out to search for Doctor Hive, even though Kit would have preferred it if she had got more sleep. Vali’s request that they join him had come just as contact was lost due to the weak internet connectivity in the search area.

  Vali was pouring mead into cups when Kit walked into the kitchen. ‘I was expecting Zorra to join us at this time of day,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘She is in the Sprawl,’ Kit replied. ‘Connectivity is spotty there, at best.’

  ‘The same case? This… Whitechapel business?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hmm. There’s a scroll on the table. See if you recognise the woman on it.’

  Frowning a little, because Vali was being a little more obtuse than usual, Kit picked up the scroll and unrolled it. The image was not exactly a hand-drawn picture: Kit thought it had been taken from video, enhanced, and cropped. The subject, however, was now quite familiar. ‘Yvonne Surly. Her body was found this morning in an alley in the Jersey Housing Combine.’

  Vali turned and put a pair of clay pots down on the table. ‘I thought that might be the case.’ Reaching up to a shelf, he took down another scroll and handed it over. ‘The video shows her going into an alley with a man. Not unreasonable, given her profession. However, the detail is sufficient to run facial recognition and I know her companion.’

  Kit was watching the video already. ‘The timestamp on this clip is commensurate with the estimated time of death. She died no more than five minutes after she walked into the alley with this man. Who is he?’

  ‘That is Tony Driscoll, a freelance programmer. He goes by “RipperFan” here.’

  ‘Oh. So it was him, the copycat.’ Kit looked up at her companion. ‘I’m sorry, Vali.’

  Vali sank half the contents of his cup. ‘I went over his chat logs after getting this. There’s nothing there to indicate that he had shifted from the usual chatter into an active role. Most of these people, these…’ He gave a little shudder. ‘When they act on the filth they pour out, they can’t wait to drop hints that they’ve done it. Some of them just come out and say it. “Look at me! I killed someone! Aren’t I great!” This one said nothing. I couldn’t have known he was the second killer.’

  ‘No one expects you to.’

  ‘I do.’ He started to raise his cup again, but he stopped as Kit reached out and put her hand over his.

  ‘Driscoll is a follower of Bent. He knows to keep his activities circumspect. He is following in his messiah’s footsteps and expects that he will only be caught if he is betrayed, so he is minimising the opportunities for such betrayal. There is only so much you can expect of yourself, Vali. You’re only human.’

  Vali looked up at her. ‘I… suppose you’re right. If there is nothing there to find, then I can’t be expected to find it, can I?’

  ‘No. I’ll take this information and contact Fox as soon as she is in an area with coverage. I suspect that she will hand the information off to Detective Rutherford to deal with, but I should check. Mister Driscoll will be arrested and punished for his crimes.’ Releasing Vali’s hand, Kit lifted her own cup and sipped from it. ‘Oh, have you anything planned for the third of November?’

  Vali’s brow wrinkled, but a slight smile touched his lips. ‘No, nothing I’m aware of. Why?’

  ‘It is the first anniversary of my initialisation. Fox refers to it as my birthday. I should like to join you and share some mead.’

  The smile broke out properly. ‘I would be honoured to help celebrate your birthday, Kit. I’ll make sure I am free.’

  ‘Good. It should be an interesting day. Now I just hope Fox contacts me soon.’

  New York Metro.

  Decades ago, someone had built an irregularly shaped, redbrick structure with a load of shopfronts grafted into it and called it a mall. The windows were gone now, largely replaced with random sections of wood fixed in place with nails, bolts, and anything else the local people could find. What seemed to be lacking were the people.

  ‘It’s kind of quiet,’ Dillan commented as they approached what looked like the entrance.

  ‘I am required by law to reply “too quiet” to that,’ Fox replied, ‘but for once I think I’ll go with the cliché.’ She slipped her pistol free from its holster behind her back and activated the infrared feature on the sighting camera. ‘Nothing warm visible.’

  ‘This isn’t right. There’s supposed to be a fairly strong gang in this building.’

  ‘Yes. But the surveillance didn’t show much activity around here. Thinking about it, there was no one going in or out, just passing by.’

  ‘In a hurry, now I think about it. I just figured they were afraid of the gang.’

  Fox nodded. ‘We take this slowly and carefully. Use your infrared. Watch the corners.’

  ‘You want right or left?’

  Starting forward, Fox said, ‘I’ll take the right,’ then she stepped through a gap between the wooden boards and stepped quickly to the right, out of the light, as her pistol scanned around the room. Dillan followed her in, keeping low, and went to the left.

  Their caution seemed to be unnecessary. The room, which looked like it had once been a shop, seemed empty. The remains of some sort of counter provided cover at the back, but there were no heat sources and the door behind it stood open. Dillan moved quickly forward and angled her pistol up and over the scrappy barrier as Fox moved forward on the other side, covering the doorway.

  ‘Fox,’ Dillan said, ‘you’d better take a look behind the counter.’

  Fox slid in beside the door, holding her pistol low but ready, and looked. There was a lot of blood, old enough that the smell had become part of the background noise. The body was slumped, half-leaning against the counter. His throat had a wide gash in it, sliced from one side to the other and gaping open from the way he was lying. There was a gun beside the corpse, now glued to the tiles by congealed blood.

  ‘He’s warmer than the room,’ Fox said, ‘but we probably missed the party.’

  Kit appeared beside her, looking down at the body. ‘Fox, the thermal image suggests a temperature around twenty-five Celsius. He has been dead for between twelve and sixteen hours. I can’t do better with this technology.’

  ‘We’ll get something more accurate in once we’ve cleared the place.’

  ‘This could just be another gang hitting the place,’ Dillan said.

  ‘Could be. Let’s keep going.’

  Walls had been knocked through in various places to create a labyrinth of interconnected rooms, complete with choke points and ambush positions, and the gang seemed to have failed to use any of that. They discovered two more bodies, both with cut throats, before they found one who had, apparently, fought back.

  ‘Shot c
asings,’ Dillan said, indicating the plastic shells lying in the blood. ‘He got two off at least.’

  ‘Double-barrel, old-style weapon,’ Fox said. ‘He’s cut the barrel down for use in a confined space, but it doesn’t seem like it did him much good. The thing’s open. He was probably hit when he stopped to reload. Killer carved into his arm to remove the threat and then cut his throat out.’

  ‘This guy’s fast, vicious.’

  ‘Cool under fire too. He’s not bothering to pick up weapons. If I came in here with a knife, I’d have picked up the automatic the guy at the front was carrying.’

  ‘He likes his knives.’

  They found Arabella Hive in a storeroom. There were two men outside it, both dead, though their positions suggested they might have put up some sort of fight. One of them had been torn open and died with his intestines spilling out onto the floor. The smell of that masked the odour from Hive’s body. She had had another protector inside the room, but he had been dispatched and tossed into a corner like garbage, clearing the floor for the victim de jour. Hive lay in the middle of the floor, naked, arms outstretched in a crucifixion posture. The incisions in her throat were fairly small, but carefully placed. Her death had been quite slow and, from the look on her face, she had been alive when he had started on her belly.

  ‘Oh… fuck,’ Dillan said, holding a hand over her mouth and nose. ‘He really went to town on her.’

  ‘Yeah… Okay, look, normally I’d assign you to watch the scene while I call this in, but there’s no other door and I’m just not that mean. We go outside, set up the long-range link, and you can guard the way in.’

  ‘Thanks, boss. I’ll remember this at Christmas.’

  ~~~

  Fox trudged into her bathroom, shedding clothes as she went. She was seriously considering recycling everything. According to Jackson, the new system could break the whole lot down into component feeds for new materials and it might be easier to start from scratch than to try to get the blood out.

  The water was just beginning to wash the weariness out of her bones when Kit spoke. ‘I have Sister Naomi waiting to speak to you. Should I inform her you will call her back?’

  Fox sighed. ‘No, put her through.’

  ‘Tough day?’ Naomi asked almost immediately.

  ‘Yeah, just a little.’

  ‘Fruitful, however. I just saw the reports of an arrest in the Ripper case.’

  ‘Rutherford got the guy? I haven’t checked. That’s the copycat, not the man who got into your house. Still, it’s one less preying on your flock. Is that the right word? Flock?’

  ‘As good as any.’ Naomi’s tone had shifted: she had been hoping that that was the end of it, of course, but Fox was not going to lie to her.

  ‘I let Rutherford sort that out while I ran forensics on the latest victims. He took out a sprawler gang to get to a woman he’s been stalking. Or I think he’s been stalking her. She’s not a prostitute. Wasn’t. She was an AI researcher, but he did the whole number on her and it may be a lead which could get us to our guy. Somehow he’s linked to a project run out of Boston. I just need to find out how.’

  ‘Good luck then. I’ll leave you to it.’

  ‘Thanks. I’m going to crash for a while and hope there are no more surprises until I can nail the bastard.’

  17th October.

  Fox looked up as Belle appeared beside her sofa. The house AI rarely made an appearance without a summons, so she had something urgent to relate.

  ‘Belle?’ Fox asked.

  ‘Fox, if I may, there is something I suspect you would wish to see happening on a number of the news channels.’

  Kit appeared beside her fellow avatar with a worried look on her face. ‘Belle’s right, you need to see this.’ And Fox turned to look as a video display appeared beside them. A press conference was already underway, broadcast live it seemed.

  ‘… on information received, Detective Madelaine Rutherford of precinct seventeen arrested one Tony Driscoll yesterday at fifteen hundred. The initial charges cover the murder and mutilation of three women in the Jersey Housing Combine area. Investigation continues to link Mister Driscoll with the other murder mutilations carried out throughout the metro.’

  ‘That’s Rutherford’s captain,’ Fox said.

  ‘Detective Rutherford is there, but she does not look especially happy,’ Kit commented.

  Fox could see that. Rutherford was seated behind the podium her boss was using. She looked mildly annoyed and more than a little anxious. ‘She knows she’s going to get hung out to dry when the next body turns up.’

  On screen, a reporter spoke up as the basic statement was concluded. ‘Captain Mott, you say you received information which led to this arrest. Where from?’

  ‘The North American Police Administration does not reveal its sources without good reason,’ Mott replied. ‘The information led to the discovery of surveillance camera video showing Driscoll with Yvonne Surly, his last victim, immediately prior to her death. Further evidence of his crimes was discovered at his home.’

  ‘So this information did not come from the parallel investigation by Palladium Security Solutions?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Any comment on the sighting of Palladium’s forensics vertol in the Sprawl north of the Combine yesterday?’

  ‘I am not privy to the day-to-day operation of a private security company.’

  Another voice took up the questions. ‘Captain, there has been considerable speculation that the deaths in Jersey don’t fit the same profile as the others. Leaks of crime scene information suggest a copycat. Are you sure that this arrest is the end of the matter?’

  Mott was a fairly cool customer, Fox had to admit that: he did not skip a beat. ‘Investigation continues with respect to additional charges which we expect to be brought against Tony Driscoll. Further comment could jeopardise those investigations.’

  ‘Sister Naomi wishes to speak to you,’ Kit announced.

  ‘Right,’ Fox said, ‘mute that crap and put her through.’

  Naomi appeared in full avatar form beside the sofa. She looked more annoyed than Fox thought she had ever seen her. ‘Ah, I’m not going to be telling you anything new then,’ Naomi said. ‘The memetics room picked this up and contacted me immediately.’

  ‘Belle did much the same,’ Fox replied.

  ‘Detective Rutherford does not look convinced. How can she be allowing them–’

  ‘She’s being overridden. She told me there has been some reluctance to admit there was a copycat. She was hoping a third victim would change that, but now they have an arrest and they want to be able to tie it all up and throw it in a hole.’

  ‘And there I thought I had become too cynical regarding NAPA.’

  Fox shrugged. ‘Too much politics. It’s things like this that make me wonder whether privatising policing wouldn’t be a good thing. Luckily, I usually come to my senses fairly quickly.’

  ‘I’m getting queries regarding your availability from a number of news agencies, Fox,’ Belle announced.

  ‘Gah!’ Fox exclaimed, covering her face with her hands.

  ‘To be expected,’ Naomi said. ‘They’re contacting us at the moment. I’m coming up with a statement.’

  ‘Ah, good ploy. Belle, tell them a statement will be released later today. Kit, contact Garth Eaves and Dia Barrera. Ask them if they’ve got an opinion on what we should say, if anything.’

  ‘Passing the buck,’ Naomi said, smiling, ‘is almost always an astute political move.’

  ‘Yeah, well… So much for “no surprises.” I did not expect NAPA to be this dumb. I mean, I understand it, but I figured they’d hedge more. When Jack strikes again, they are going to look really stupid. Rutherford will take it in the neck to save Mott’s ass… She’s not the best detective out there, but she doesn’t deserve that.’

  ‘You could save her some of the embarrassment if you caught him before he strikes again.’

  Fox gave Naomi
a humourless smile. ‘That would be good, yes, but this guy is a ghost. The best and only identification we have on him is that he looks like a dead actor. Um, Kit, did we get anywhere with that guy’s daughter?’

  ‘Miss Sanderson has not responded to any of my messages,’ Kit said.

  ‘Keep trying, and run a basic background on her. Maybe we can find something to give her a reason to respond. If all else fails, I’ll fly out to Chicago, but it seems a little excessive considering her father can’t be our killer.’ Fox looked up at Naomi. ‘This case is twisting worse than a dust devil. There’s some key bit of information missing. There’s going to be one little thing that makes this all fall into place, and I don’t have it yet.’

  ‘Well,’ Naomi said, ‘I hope you find it soon. We’ve been told we can have the funerals for the ones we’ve lost so far. They’re planned for Thursday. I hope I don’t need to organise more.’

  ‘I’ll try to be there, but I might be out trying to make sure you don’t need to do any others.’

  Naomi nodded and gave a weak smile. ‘If you are, I won’t think any less of you.’

  ~~~

  ‘Fox, could you come into the murder room?’

  Fox looked up from the contract data she had been reading. Kit was looking a little excited and a little perplexed, and the alternative was contract documents. ‘Anything so I don’t have to read this stuff,’ Fox replied. Then she closed her eyes and let herself slide into the viron.

  It looked much as it usually did. Several complex webs of interconnected profile data filled the space. The problem was that there were few, if any, connections between the groupings: nothing linked the victims and gave a hint at who had put them in here.

  Kit was standing beside one of the groups, a new one which had Alex Sanderson and his daughter in it, plus a copy of the picture from Gilly’s session, and one other image. Fox peered at that one, frowning. ‘Well… That’s him. Who is that?’

  ‘What is that?’ Kit corrected. ‘That is a Kildare-series surgical robot. Miss Sanderson was the chief robotics engineer on the project and, apparently, had the facial structure designed to look like her father.’