Page 125 of Child's Play

And the bastards, all of them fifteen to sixteen years of age, hadn’t served ten years between them.

That she had survived such an ordeal just made Kim want to go find her again and shake her hand.

The external scars were completely obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes but Kim couldn’t help but wonder about the ones inside.

Ninety-Three

It was almost six when Kim entered the hotel room and she could swear that every time she left and returned someone had shrunk it.

With four people in the small sitting area, surrounded by wipe boards and laptops, the space was beginning to feel like a broom cupboard.

‘What you got, Stace?’ she asked, switching on the kettle.

‘The urge to find another job,’ she grumbled, as the portable printer kicked into life behind her.

‘What can I?…’

‘Nothing right now, boss, we got a system going and another pair of hands is just gonna confuse me,’ Stacey said, handing a printed sheet to Tiff. ‘Cross-reference that with what Bryant’s got.’

Bryant glanced at her in an ‘I’m in with the cool kids’ kind of way, and she burst out laughing. Everyone knew that Bryant and data mining were not great bedfellows.

She threw herself into the vacant chair fighting her frustration. She knew without a shadow of a doubt that their killer was here somewhere. After all the miles, all the probing, the interviews and following leads, she suspected the answer lay in the work being done by the rest of her team, and much as she wanted a name and description right now they couldn’t magic it out of thin air.

As she listened she realised the process was like panning gold. Each swill of the water washed away some dirt bringing them closer to the nuggets at the bottom. Every cross-reference they made weeded out unlikely suspects.

She trusted Stacey’s methods more than she resented being left out of the process.

She checked her emails, registering the only new message from Keats containing the toxicology reports from all three crime scenes. She opened the first one and began to scroll right through it. There was nothing unexpected except a note advising possible cross-contamination from a police officer’s boots which had recorded a high level of NaCl at the first crime scene at Haden Hill Park. A strange result, but nothing that could help her now. She’d ask Keats to check his results later. She closed it and scrolled to the second report.

‘Okay, I’m ready,’ Stacey said, sitting back in her chair.

‘Go,’ Kim said, closing her emails and turning to face her colleague.

‘Okay, I’ve got a total of seventeen kids who had contact with all three of our victims; Belinda Evans, Barry Nixon and Freddie Compton.’

‘Okay, let’s look at—’

‘Hang on, boss. Of these seventeen kids eight of them had siblings.’

‘Okay, great, let’s—’

‘Of these eight…’

‘Stace, at this rate will there be any kids left to investigate?’ Kim asked, folding her arms.

‘Of these eight,’ Stacey continued. ‘There are three that are of particular interest and we should look at first.’

Kim was tempted to disagree but she had learned to trust her colleague.

‘So, first we have a young girl named Carly Benz. Her brother Laurence was a star chess player who had contact with all the victims. She was four years younger than him and he died of a brain tumour when he was eighteen years old.’

‘Why relevant?’ Kim asked, wondering why this particular story had made Stacey’s top three.

‘Sister went off the rails after his death. Got in all kinds of trouble: stealing, violence, antisocial behaviour. But nothing since. I can find no trace of her since a court case when she was sixteen years old. No social media channels, nothing. It’s like she simply disappeared. She’d be mid-twenties now and could be punishing our victims for some perceived misdeed against her brother.’

‘Interesting, Stace,’ Kim acknowledged as Tiff noted the bullet points on the flip chart.

‘Oh, it gets better. Our runner-up is Mrs Beth Nixon herself, brought to the event by her grandmother. There’s not much about her visits to the event except a blog post about her younger brother heckling her performance in the final event. No name but he managed to disrupt the quiz.’