Page 104 of First Blood

‘You know, Bryant, I reckon between us we could have this down in…’

‘Guv, you might not value your job but I’ve still got a few years left on my mortgage.’

‘I’d say it was an accident.’

‘What? We leaned against it and it fell open?’ He shook his head. ‘We’ve got no grounds to enter. We don’t believe anyone is in danger and…’

‘Okay, teacher’s pet. I get your point, but with as many murders in as many…’

She stopped speaking as a sudden thought occurred to her.

‘Bryant, did Keats say he thought Lockwood had been murdered on Wednesday?’

‘Yep,’ he said, following her back to the car.

The relief on his face that they were leaving was evident. But if she was right in what she was thinking, there was no way Carl Wickes was at home.

‘Bryant, by my calculations we’ve had one victim every day this week. Fenton on Monday, Hayley Smart on Tuesday, Lockwood on Wednesday. We don’t know exactly when Lester Jackson was murdered but it looks like our killer is on a roll.’

She turned an apologetic smile on him. ‘Looks like the shift isn’t quite over yet.’

The inner groan was written all over his face.

But no one was going home yet.

If the killer remained true to form there was going to be another murder this very night.

Chapter Ninety-Five

Stacey had no idea what had caused the sour expression on her colleague’s face but it had altered when he’d got off the phone with the boss.

Had she liked him more she would have taken the time to ask.

Would he ask her? She suspected not.

She glanced again at the clock wondering when this shift was going to end. So far this week each night the boss had given them the nod to go home. There’d been no nodding yet and Stacey was beginning to have visions of the boss and Bryant having gone home without telling them.

From what she could gather her colleague didn’t have a home to go to, but she did. Admittedly all that was waiting for her was a pizza and a couple of hours onWarcraftbut it was more than he had.

In the absence of the go-home nod she returned to the phone register of the killer. She already knew it was a pay-and-go phone topped up with vouchers.

The register appeared to have days in between uses and the only numbers called belonged to Luke Fenton, Lester Jackson and Hayley Smart. There were no calls to Charles Lockwood, but he had not been lured from his home. The killer had taken the crime scene to him.

Just ten minutes ago she’d received the mobile phone tower information from the phone network. Stacey knew that whenever a mobile phone made a call it emitted electromagnetic radio waves, also known as radio frequency or RF energy. Once those radio waves were emitted, the antenna from the nearest tower received them.

She pulled up a map of the Black Country and took a screenshot of it.

Next, she plotted the locations of the phone towers in the area with a red dot.

As she began to place green dots at approximate locations a pattern began to form.

She added another overlay to the document and plotted yellow dots for the shelters owned by Marianne Forbes and realised that the killer’s phone was never very far away.

Chapter Ninety-Six

‘How the hell are we going to predict who comes next?’ Bryant asked.

That was exactly what Kim was trying to work out when her phone rang.