The Vault Page 11

  “They did and they do,” Mo said carefully. “It’s you Ellie.”

  The silence between them hung for a minute before Eleanor spoke. “There’s no damage to my throat.”

  Mo looked at her and shook his head. “There’s no scar tissue. Nothing.” She stared at the food in front of her, a pain radiating from the back of her neck around the crown and pulsing steadily between her eyes. Mo cleared his throat and turned the sheet of paper around. He pulled his glasses out of his breast pocket and slipped them onto the end of his nose. “‘Eleanor complains consistently about a tightening of her throat, which is making swallowing extremely difficult for her. Both CT and MRI scans have indicated that there is some slight residual swelling but no evidence of any pathology. Nasal Endoscopy and Laryngoscopy show no trauma to area. Results forwarded to Psych.’” He waited.

  “It’s in my head.”

  “They think so,” he replied.

  “Do you?” She studied Mo’s face carefully.

  He sighed deeply. “Based on this and the conversation I had with Dr Blackmore… Yes. I think it’s in your head but that doesn’t diminish any of the symptoms. You’re in pain and you’re making it a physical one and that’s why it won’t get better. You’re starving yourself to death because you can’t or won’t start your healing process. But” He pointed his finger at her. “You don’t have to do this on your own.”

  Eleanor turned away and let her eyes defocus. “I’m tired,” she said flatly.

  Mo slid his hand over hers. “You need to get yourself home. Start eating, so you have the strength to do this job.”

  There was a pause as Eleanor shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “I need a bath.”

  Mo smiled. “Well you have to go home to get one. After you’ve eaten.” Eleanor took a bite of the salad and grimaced. “You’ve gotta eat it all and in front of me so we can both suffer!” he snarled. “See how I share the misery!” Mo flung himself back into his seat. “I didn’t get chicken salad for dinner. I had tofu! Fucking tofu!” They sat in silence for a moment or two while she slowly ate.

  “You have paperwork,” she nodded at the stack of paper hidden from view by a manila wrap.

  “I do.”

  “It’s not my entire hospital records from birth is it?” she said drily.

  “It is not. It’s interesting information from Sue Cheung. But…” he slammed his hand on top of the file. “You don’t get it till I see you drive off in the direction of home.” Eleanor smiled and nodded, polishing off the food as Mo watched her with approval.

  As he saw her into her car, Mo handed her the file. “Minnie asked if you’d come and stay for a while.” Before Eleanor could answer, he put up his hand. “I know what you’re going to say but we’re here and there’s a room for you. Think about it.”

  She nodded. “Thank you.” She started the engine. “By the way why did Blackmore give you my file? Isn’t he liable under patient confidentiality?”

  “You named me as next of kin when you were admitted,” he replied quietly.

  Chapter Ten

  “Have you seen Toby yet?” asked Isabel Drake, poking her head round the door of his office.

  Enda made a show of looking round the ten by ten foot room speculatively, much to Isabel’s irritation. “Nooo,” he drawled slowly and ominously.

  “When he arrives would you ask him to page me please?” She withdrew quickly but Enda had managed to launch himself like a torpedo at the door giving her insufficient time to disappear from sight.

  “Is there a problem Isabel?”

  She could hear his feet paddling the floorboards as he hovered expectantly. “Just ask him to page me please. That’s all,” she replied without slowing down or turning around.

  The museum wouldn’t open for another hour and although she was grateful to every single patron who walked through the doors, she loved the echoing silence of the empty building before and after closing. Her heels clacked on the stone stairway as she made her way down from Admin on the third floor to the basement where Storage and Restoration were based. Below ground level and the temperature fell dramatically to somewhere between seven and twelve degrees Celsius, which necessitated the fleece that she’d flung over her shoulders. “Hello Jack,” she smiled as Jacqui Harper, Head of Conservation jumped at her arrival.

  “Good grief! I can’t even accuse you of sneaking,” she giggled, taking off her glasses and waving her hand in the direction of the chair on the other side of her neatly organised desk. “Social or business?”

  “Mainly business,” Isabel answered sitting down and placing a large canvas shopping bag on the desk between them.

  “Shoot!”

  Isabel sighed, “I think we may be mislaying some of our artefacts.”

  “Qualify ‘mislaying’?”

  Isabel carefully lifted out and opened a catalogue at a tabbed page and rotated it so that Jacqui could see. “Okay, why do you think this is missing?” Jacqui queried, placing her finger on a black and white thumbnail image of a piece of Mayan pottery.

  “I’m not sure that it is, which is why I’m running this past you unofficially first. Look at this.” Isabel extracted and opened a levered file filled with several hundred sheets of paper, each one covered in lists of catalogued items, accompanied by numerical identifiers. She located the corresponding tag line and presented it to her colleague. “What don’t you see?”

  Jacqui checked again and flipped through several other pages.

  “Try this one!” Using her index finger she slid it under the next tagged page of the catalogue and turned to it. Memorising the numerical ID and item description, Jacqui turned to the corresponding file and searched.

  “They’re not listed,” she said blankly and looked at the pile of catalogues that Isabel had brought. “How many?”

  Isabel opened her hands and sat further back in the chair. “Of these catalogues, which span the last two years, I’ve located thirty-four anomalies.”

  “Thirty-four? That’s impossible… surely?”

  “It’s not a calculating error for sure. I’d expect three, maybe five, at most but thirty-four items that were recorded and then disappeared from the computer log doesn’t make any sense to me. Unless…” she raised her eyebrows.

  “I’m going to need several days to check all of these,” said Jacqui heavily. “Can I recruit help?”

  Isabel slowly shook her head. “I’d rather you didn’t, just yet.”

  Jacqui widened her eyes and then nodded. “Is it just the one member of staff?” she asked quietly. Isabel nodded. “All of these were the responsibility of one person to catalogue.”

  “Who?” Her voice was scarcely above a whisper.

  “Enda Miller.”

  Eleanor arrived just as the paramedics were wheeling the gurney through the double doors of the main entrance. She spotted Andy Harrison encouraging members of the public to move back and clear some space and headed over. “What’s going on?” she asked him.

  “Marcus Baxton. He arrived about an hour ago, wanting to speak to either you or Whitefoot. He’d got himself pretty riled up. Next thing he was on the floor having a cardiac event. This is the result,” he replied in an exhausted tone.

  Eleanor headed over to the ambulance, just as the gurney was being prepared for transit. “Mr Baxton? It’s DI Raven,” she said to the grey, sunken face covered by an oxygen mask. Marcus Baxton’s eyes, which had been closed, opened and focused on hers. “It’s going to be alright. Tyler is going to be taken care of.”

  “Ma’am we’re leaving,” said a paramedic, lifting the gurney onto the vehicle.

  She watched his eyes as they clouded with a mixture of hatred and fear. The doors were secured and the engine started.

  “A day that starts with a crisis don’t get any better in my experience,” stated Andy darkly, as he retreated back into Police Headquarters.

  Johnson was clearing the murder board with his usual degree of methodical enthusiasm when Eleanor walke
d into Homicide. Timms and Wadesky were arranging photographs and maps on a desk, ready to visualise the current case.

  “You and Whitefoot need to brief in the next hour, ok?” said Timms, with barely concealed irritation. As he pushed photographs and papers around he managed to knock a pile onto the floor.

  “What the fuck!” he bellowed.

  “Right! Get yourself a coffee and pancakes in the canteen before I’m forced to shoot you for the good of mankind!” said Wadesky her hands firmly planted on her hips. Timms opened his mouth in protest. “I’m reaching,” she hissed. Throwing his hands up in a gesture of surrender, Timms backed away from the table. “You are outta my sight for twenty! Got that?”

  “Yes Ma’am,” he replied, contritely.

  “You come back fatter and happier!”

  “What’s happening?” asked Eleanor, helping retrieve the papers.

  “Joe’s hideous mother has told him he can’t be Tess’ godfather,” said Wadesky, angrily.

  “Was it the gun or the suit?”

  Wadesky smiled. “Timms tries so hard it breaks my heart. You know he’s set up a college fund for the two boys?”

  Eleanor shook her head, surprised. Wadesky nodded. “He adores the boys. Takes them to ice hockey every other Friday, even goes to their school plays, which is more than I do.”

  “What does Joe say?”

  “Joe doesn’t want to disagree with the old witch.”

  “But you could…”

  Wadesky nodded. “I could make a stand and tell Joe what to do but have you any idea how much shit Joe takes from me?”

  Eleanor tried unsuccessfully to conceal her mystification at that concept.

  “Exactly! He doesn’t make a decision without running it past me first. I suspect he married someone like his Mama but don’t quote me on that,” she mused, re-organising the papers. “Just about the only goddamned decision I leave entirely up to Joe, is that he chooses who is godparent to the kids. Hell, he raises ’em. I just show up for the birth! So, if I bully him into choosing Timms against his Mama’s wishes, I leave him without a shred of autonomy,” she scowled.

  “Who does Joe want to be godfather to Tess?” asked Eleanor.

  “I think he’s too scared to offer an opinion,” chuckled Wadesky. “You wanna take the left?” she nodded to the board, pinning two photographs of Parminder Kaur in the middle, one ante the other post mortem.

  “Look who shared my pancakes!” said a noticeably more relaxed Timms as he walked in, Monster and Whitefoot at his side. The dog sported a plastic collar the size and shape of a giant lampshade and had a large swathe of missing fur over his eye.

  “I’m assuming Monster, rather than Whitefoot,” quipped Wadesky.

  “You bet your ass the puppy!” chirped Timms, rubbing Monster’s back vigorously. “Ok what have we got?” he said running his eyes over the board, which was now busy with photographs of Giselle and Parminder both in life and death, a mug shot of Tara, a map with highlighted locations and a tentative timeline linking the three events.

  “We’re sure we are dealing with one perp?” asked Timms skeptically.

  Eleanor nodded. “I think so. Giselle and Parminder were room-mates. When Whitefoot and I approached Ms. Kaur on Monday evening she seemed genuinely not to have known about the murder. She went to work on Wednesday and was murdered in Tommy Thompson Park later on that evening. So far we’ve got no sightings or information from her workplace or apartment that she was meeting up with anyone. What we haven’t got is her missing bike, which may have been used by her killer to leave the park and what we need to find out is whether she contacted her killer or vice versa.”

  Timms shook his head. “Nothing on her cell phone records that was out of the ordinary. Calls to and from mom, work, her room-mate and aunt over the past week and to her dentist, which we are looking into. Still checking the workplace landline but patrol have covered about sixty per cent, which all appear genuine so far. Mainly suppliers and people making reservations.”

  “Any reservations not kept?” asked Whitefoot.

  “Yup and being checked out but seems genuine. So what is the thinking?” Timms said leaning back into his chair and looking pointedly at Eleanor. “How many perps we got here?”

  Eleanor paused. “There’s just the one.” There was a palpable groan from everyone around the board. “I’ve got Ruby Delaware coming in any minute to take notes.” All eyes turned to Timms, whose vocal opinions on the art and competence of profiling were well known to anyone who’d had the misfortune to sit in on a meeting attended by a member of the psych team and him.

  “What?” he said. “Let it not be said that I will not listen and inwardly digest all of the bullshit put out by profilers. In fact, I feel that now we’ve got the likes of Doctor Delaware on board, the case is in the bag.”

  “Well I’m glad to hear that,” said Ruby Delaware primly, as she sat herself down at the table and began to arrange her stationery.

  “All ears,” said Timms affably. “What are your thoughts doctor?”

  “Well, firstly can I say how lovely it is to be working with you all again,” her eyes frostily planted on Timms’ face.

  “Uh-huh! Great for us too doc,” said Timms.

  Wadesky had also focused her glare onto Timms.

  “These are only my preliminary ideas and I will need more information if I am to proceed with any degree of accuracy. Firstly, I agree with Detective Inspector Raven that the killer of Richard Leslie Baker, also known as Giselle, is likely to have murdered before and is likely to kill again in the foreseeable future. The murder and subsequent preservation of the corpse is not unknown to forensic science but it’s certainly unknown to me. This is a very unusual crime and requires intelligence, meticulous planning and strength of character. The murderer is a white male, probably of age range thirty-five to fifty-five, who lives alone and has done for some considerable time. He will most likely be a single child of older parents and have an above average IQ.” Ruby paused and consulted her notes.

  Timms opened his mouth but Wadesky shot him a ferocious look and it snapped closed again. A gesture not lost on Ruby Delaware, who lifted one eyebrow and pursed her lips.

  “He is a collector…”

  “What do you mean?” asked Eleanor, intrigued.

  “He will place a great deal of value on possessions, particularly objects that are considered so by other people.”

  “An antiques collector maybe?” suggested Whitefoot.

  “Possibly but I doubt he leaves much of a trail behind him. He will buy things for cash or steal things but not in an adventurous manner.”

  “So, it’s unlikely that he’s been picked up for burglary then?” asked Wadesky.

  “Very unlikely. He’s private, psychopathic, but most likely functioning within some form of social setting. I doubt it will be manual work though.”

  There was a pause. “I’m afraid until you have uncovered more evidence there’s not a lot more I can add, apart from my belief – perhaps that’s not the right word – my suspicion that he will look slightly out of place. His clothing and demeanour will be unfashionable. He will consider himself to be cultivated and sophisticated, which will be at odds with his appearance. I think it very unlikely that he surrounds himself with modernity or the trappings of. He won’t have a mobile phone or a television but will be computer literate.”

  “Do you think it likely that he murdered Parminder Kaur?” asked Eleanor.

  “Oh, I have no idea. That’s one for you to link. It’s certainly feasible but I’m a little surprised that he threw away the body. If he kills he will want to have the victims nearby. Possibly within his home.”

  “What sort of house would he live in?” asked Wadesky making notes as she spoke.

  Big, probably inherited from his parents. He’s very likely to have an obsession with security. No one will have access to this house, so it may need some work doing to it. He’s likely to have rerouted his post to a maili
ng box,” she added confidently.

  “Perhaps,” said Timms, pushing forward a sheet of blank paper. “You could jot down the address for us.”

  Ruby Delaware’s lips pursed with irritation. “Of course,” she said, pulling the piece of paper towards her and smiling. She wrote a couple of words and folded it in two. “I’m going to get my thoughts written up and sent to you as soon as possible. Thank you for photocopying the material and I shall be available whenever you need me. Tapping her finger on the paper and staring at Timms, she collected her belongings and made for the exit. Timms reached for it and slid it towards him, smirking. He unfolded it, read it and let out a bellow of laughter.

  “You know I’m beginning to like the doc much more than I thought I would,” he said pinning the paper with the words, ‘Fuck You’ written in Dr Delaware’s delicate handwriting, onto the murder board.

  Samuelson stared at the board. His eyes flicked from Giselle to Tara and then to Parminder. “What the fuck have we got here?” he said quietly. “You see a connection between these three vics?”

  “Yes sir,” replied Eleanor, getting to her feet and moving towards the photographs. “Richard Baker lived as a transsexual prostitute known as Giselle and disappeared approximately eighteen months ago. He was believed to have had a wealthy boyfriend, who was willing to set up home with him as his female partner. Parminder Kaur was his room-mate and after learning from us that his burnt remains were found on the Westex Landfill, was found murdered in Tommy Thompson Park.”

  Samuelson screwed up his forehead and sighed. “Where does Tara Roques come into this?”

  “Tara Roques disappeared three nights ago, leaving her toddler with a fellow prostitute,” she replied. “It’s my belief that the same killer, after disposing of Giselle probably due to escalating decomposition, replaced her with Tara.”

  Samuelson rubbed his forehead vigorously. “Based on what?”

  “She could be Giselle’s twin and appeared to solicit in the same area,” she offered, with more confidence than Samuelson’s expression merited.

  “That’s tenuous on a good day,” he said shaking his head. “What about Tyler Baxton? I’ve heard he’s a shoo-in for perp.”