And even if York had encountered anyone as he was pushing an unconscious Irving back along the trail, who would have thought anything of it? He’d just have looked like a carer taking an invalid out in the fresh air.
We went back into the kitchen. I saw Jacobsen looking at the half-full coffee percolator. Without asking I poured her a cup and topped up my own.
‘So what do you think?’ I asked, quietly, as I handed it to her.
‘It’s too soon to say…’ she began, then stopped. ‘You want me to be honest?’
No. I gave a nod.
‘I think we’ve been two steps behind York all along. He fooled us into thinking you were his target, and walked in here while we were looking the other way. Now Samantha Avery’s paid for our mistakes.’
‘You think there’s any chance of finding her in time?’
She looked into her coffee as though she could divine the answers there. ‘York won’t want to take long over this. He knows we’re looking for him, and he’ll be excited and eager. If he hasn’t killed her already, she’ll be dead before the night’s out.’
I put my cup down, feeling suddenly nauseous. ‘Why Sam?’ I asked, although I could guess.
‘York needed to reassert his ego after his failure with Dr Lieberman. We were right about that much, at least.’ Jacobsen sounded bitter. ‘Samantha Avery would’ve ticked all the boxes: the wife of Dr Lieberman’s probable successor, and nearly nine months pregnant. That’d make her doubly attractive. It guarantees headlines and, if we’re right about the photographs, it also feeds into York’s psychosis. He’s fixated on capturing the moment of death on film, believing that’ll somehow reveal the answers he’s looking for. So from his point of view, who could be a better victim than a pregnant woman, someone who’s literally full of life?’
Christ. It was insane, and yet the worst of it was there was a twisted logic behind it. Futile and obscene, but there all the same.
‘And what then? He isn’t going to find the answers he’s looking for by killing Sam.’
Jacobsen’s face held a bleakness I’d not seen before. ‘Then he’ll tell himself she wasn’t the right one after all and carry on. He’ll know time’s against him, no matter how much his pride says otherwise, and that’s going to make him desperate. Maybe next time he’ll go after another pregnant woman, or even a child. Either way, he won’t stop.’
I thought of the tortured faces in the photographs and had a sudden image of Sam going through the same ordeal. I rubbed my eyes, trying to banish it.
‘So what happens now?’
Jacobsen stared out of the window at the advancing night. ‘We hope we find them before morning.’
Before the next hour was out, the evening’s quiet had been rent apart. TBI agents descended on the sedate neighbourhood, knocking on every door in the hope of finding more witnesses. Plenty of people could recall seeing an ambulance that afternoon, but no one had noticed anything remarkable about it. Ambulances were self- explanatory. The sight of one might arouse morbid curiosity, but few people would question why it was there.
Certainly none of Sam and Paul’s neighbours.
Gardner hadn’t managed to learn anything more from Candy. All she could say for sure was that it had been a man of indeterminate age wearing a paramedic’s uniform. Well, it looked like a uniform, she thought: dark trousers and a shirt with badges on it. And some sort of hat or cap that hid most of his face. A big man, she’d added, more hesitantly. White. Or perhaps Hispanic. Not black, at any rate. At least, she didn’t think so…
It hadn’t even struck her as odd that the ambulance driver had been alone. And she’d been able to offer even less information about the ambulance itself. No, of course she hadn’t taken the licence number. Why should she? It was an ambulance.
‘There were no obvious restraints, so Samantha must have been stunned or unconscious,’ Gardner said, while Paul was on the phone to Sam’s mother. ‘It’s possible he used some sort of gas, but I think the oxygen mask was probably just a prop to dissuade any watching neighbours from intervening. Gas is too hit and miss, especially if someone’s struggling, and York would’ve wanted to put her out as soon as possible.’
‘He wouldn’t use brute force,’ Jacobsen said. ‘If you knock someone unconscious there’s a danger of concussion or brain damage, and York wouldn’t want that. He needs his victims fully aware when he kills them. He wouldn’t risk clubbing them over the head.’
‘He did Irving’s dog,’ Gardner reminded her.
‘The dog was incidental. He was after its owner.’
Gardner squeezed the bridge of his nose. He looked tired. ‘Whatever. The fact is he obviously knocked Samantha Avery out somehow. But at least if he has to wait till she comes round, that might give us more time.’
I hated dispelling even that slight hope. ‘Not necessarily. He only needs his victims unconscious long enough to get them into the ambulance. After that it doesn’t matter. However he does it, if they’re only unconscious for a few minutes it probably won’t take them long to recover.’
‘I didn’t realize you were an expert,’ Gardner said tartly.
I could have pointed out that I used to be a GP, or that I’d once been drugged myself. But there was no point. Everyone was feeling the strain, and Gardner more than most. No one had emerged from this with any credit, but as the Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the investigation, the final responsibility ultimately lay with him. I didn’t want to add to that burden.
Not with Sam’s life at stake.
Paul himself seemed to have crossed beyond fear and panic into a state of numb isolation. When he came back from phoning Sam’s parents he sat without speaking, staring into the impossible nightmare that had engulfed his life. Her parents would be flying out from Memphis the next day, but he hadn’t bothered calling anyone else. The only person he wanted now was Sam; everyone else was an irrelevance.
I felt torn over what to do. I wasn’t needed there, but I couldn’t simply leave Paul and go back to my hotel. So I sat with him in the lounge as coffee-breathed TBI officers went about their business, and the last hours and minutes of one day ticked inexorably towards the next.
It was just after eleven when Jacobsen came into the lounge. Paul quickly looked up, hope dying in his eyes as she gave a quick shake of her head.
‘No news. I just wanted to ask Dr Hunter a couple of things about his statement.’
He sank back into his lethargy as I went out with her. I saw she was carrying a folder in her hand, but it wasn’t until we were in the kitchen that she opened it.
‘I didn’t want to upset Dr Avery with this yet, but I thought you should know. We rechecked the footage from the hospital’s security cameras around the time York called Dr Lieberman from the payphone. You were right about the ambulance.’
She handed me a black and white photograph from the folder. It was the CCTV still I’d seen before, showing the shadowy figure of York crossing the road by the phone booth. The rear of the parked ambulance was visible at the left hand side of the frame. It was hard to say, but he could have been heading towards it.
‘The ambulance arrived ten minutes before York used the payphone and left seven minutes later,’ Jacobsen said. ‘We can’t see who was driving, but the timing fits.’
‘Why would he have waited ten minutes before making the call?’
‘Maybe he had to wait until there was no one around, or perhaps he wanted to savour the moment. Or gather his nerve. Either way, at ten o’clock he went to make the call, then came back out and waited. Dr Lieberman would’ve been in a hurry, so it should’ve only taken a few minutes for him to make it outside. When he didn’t show York would have waited awhile before realizing something was wrong and getting out of there.’
I played it through in my mind: York glancing anxiously at his watch, his confidence bleeding away when his victim didn’t appear. Just another minute; just one more… And then driving away, furious, to plan his next move.
Jacobsen pulled out another photograph from the folder. This one had been taken in a part of the hospital I didn’t recognize. An ambulance was caught in the centre of the frame, blurred by motion.
‘This was taken on a different stretch of road a few minutes before the ambulance pulled up outside the mortuary,’ she said. ‘We traced its route backwards on other security cameras. It’s definitely the same vehicle. This is the best shot we’ve been able to find.’
That wasn’t saying much. The photograph had been enlarged to the limits of useful magnification, and had
