‘We will call you 144002.’
‘No.’
He pushed her head back violently and she stopped speaking for a moment, but she needed to know. To know why.
‘What are you doing this for?’
‘144002 must be quiet. 144002 speaks again and I will cut out 144002’s tongue.’
The girl stared across. Her eyes fixed on the red and black insignia on his arm. He smiled. ‘You can’t believe it, can you? But it is real. It is very real. This is not a dream. You will not wake up. You will never wake up from this.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Harper and Kasper headed out of town. They pulled up at a hardware store off the Interstate. It was a vast warehouse structure, a rectangle of steel and plastic thrown up in what looked like a matter of days. The whole complex was a sprawling mass of similar buildings, all with their own large, bright signs.
Kasper parked close to the entrance. Harper was speaking on the phone to base, but no one had anything. Harper looked around. ‘Big.’
‘Sure is,’ said Eddie. ‘This isn’t going to be easy.’
They met the manager of the store, and followed him up a long, wide aisle of fencing, rails, pipes and tubes until they got to the barbed wire. It was sitting on huge wooden pallets, three different grades, and three different types: razor wire, barbed wire and galvanized barbed wire.
‘This the only place someone can get barbed wire in the store?’
‘Sure is.’
Harper looked up and down the aisle. ‘Okay. I want this aisle taped off and dusted for prints.’
‘I’m not closing an aisle. It’s a big sales day for us.’
‘I’m trying to stop a killer, Sunday or not. I could close the whole store if you’d prefer.’
The manager shook his head.
‘Eddie,’ said Harper, ‘I want this whole area dusted, then the cash register area. We know he’s been here.’
‘So have thousands of people,’ said Eddie.
‘We might get lucky.’
Eddie’s eyebrows rose slow and high. He took out his phone. ‘I’ll get Crime Scene across here.’
They spent an hour with the manager going through the sales data and receipts, picking out every sale of barbed wire. ‘We’ve got hundreds,’ said the manager. ‘No telling which one bought your roll.’
‘We’ll take all the names, and follow them all up.’
The manager handed a printout to Harper. ‘Impossible to tell which one. The digital readings are our own — they only have the product, price and date. No import number, no license. But the batch you’re after — it only came out of the back store nine days ago.’
‘Let’s try CCTV,’ said Harper. ‘You keep it?’
He nodded his head. ‘We keep one week of tape. If it was within the week, we might see someone.’
‘Eddie, try to find him.’
‘Will do.’
Within the hour, eight CSU detectives arrived. Their supervisor, Detective Ingleman, moved straight across to Harper. ‘What are we looking for?’ he asked.
‘Someone was in here in the last nine days buying a roll of barbed wire,’ said Harper. ‘I’ve got a guy here from the cleaning company, and he’s going to tell you where they wipe down. We know whoever bought it was over in the barbed-wire area, by the cash register, and at the door. We think the door and checkout counter get wiped. I just wonder if you guys can find a needle in a haystack.’
‘You’re kidding? You want us to dust a whole store?’
‘Not the whole store. The barbed-wire aisle to start with.’
Ingleman followed Harper to the aisle. He walked up to the pallet. ‘What’s he going to touch, apart from the roll he’s buying?’
Harper shrugged. ‘It’s a long shot. He may have touched other rolls, the price tags, I don’t know, but this killer is going to kill again. We’ve got to do something.’
The supervisor walked off, shaking his head. He had a team of top detectives and he was going to ask them to dust a store. He went outside to the vans and organized his teams, shaking his head so much that his jowls wobbled.
Harper sat down at the computer in the store’s back office. He called Denise. ‘You been getting on with our young profiler?’
‘He thinks this was a group attack. That’s going to go to the Captain and he’ll lap it up and pass it to the Chief of Detectives. I need to stop him.’
‘So what do you think?’
‘Single male, early- to mid-thirties, delusional fantasies, but nothing that would prevent him from operating successfully. You want your type, think controlled, obsessive, and this guy’s got hooked on a clean-up.’
‘Like a prostitute killer — a moral cleaner?’
‘There’s something in that, something of the cleaner, but it’s strange. Like a military operation, taking out numbered targets.’
‘Ex-military?’
‘Not possible to say right now. But could be. How’s it going up there?’
‘Time is short, the work is slow.’
‘Well, let’s hope for something.’
Harper hung up and wandered out of the small office and into the aisle. He walked up to the team, slowly taking prints off every surface. ‘How’s it looking?’
‘We’re getting so many prints, Harper, we’ll be here all day and then it’ll take all night to get them uploaded and checked.’
‘We haven’t got all night.’
‘There ain’t no short cut.’
Harper walked away. He sat down. Another hour slipped by, his mind going over the case, detail by detail.
Eddie came through at 6 p.m. He was nodding.
‘You got something?’ Harper asked.
‘Come see.’
Harper and Eddie sat together in the security room. Eddie pulled the tape back and then played it.
‘We’ve got a guy here coming out with a cart three days ago.’ He froze the tape. ‘Can you see it?’
The grainy still was difficult to read. Harper moved closer. At the edge of the man’s arm was a cross of wood. ‘That’s the barbed wire spool?’
‘Looks like it.’
They watched the man push the cart across the parking lot, until he was nearly out of sight behind two other cars.
‘Problem is,’ says Eddie, ‘we don’t see his face or his car.’
‘You looked back and forth?’
‘Sure have and it’s empty. Sorry.’
‘You must have quite a few guys buying barbed wire — why’d you focus on this guy?’
Eddie smiled and then pushed in another tape. ‘This is from the camera on the checkout.’
Harper watched. ‘He keeps his back to the camera, the whole time. Like he wanted to keep his identity
