Carmella rolled her eyes. ‘If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’
‘They should put that in big letters on the front of the station.’
Their laughter was disproportionate to the quality of the joke, but shit, Patrick thought, he needed a laugh. His whole body was taut with tension. After the meeting with Shawn, and the realisation that their only suspect was innocent, he’d come back to the station, hiding at his desk until he felt duty-bound to go home.
He didn’t want another discussion with Gill about their feelings. Even more than that, he didn’t want another awkward conversation in which they didn’t talk about their marriage. Fortunately, Gill had been asleep, and he’d slipped out early this morning before she or Bonnie woke up. He’d crept into his daughter’s room, kissing her warm head, aching with guilt as he’d barely seen her since they’d moved home last weekend.
At least when they were living with his parents he’d seen a lot of Bonnie. Now, though, it was too easy to be like so many other male cops: married to the job, their kids growing up without them. He was determined not to let that happen. He just needed to crack this investigation first.
Although, of course, then there would be another. And another. And . . .
He sighed heavily and Carmella came over and rubbed his upper arm.
‘So what next?’ she asked.
Patrick produced his Moleskine from his pocket and opened it to the page of notes he’d made when interviewing Shawn.
‘I was thinking, Shawn and Lana Vincent communicated using Snapchat. Wendy – DC Franklin – tells me that most teenagers use it. And we already know that Rose consumed data on her phone on the evening of her death, as did Jess’ – this was one of the first things they had checked after Jess’s murder – ‘maybe they were using Snapchat.’
‘To communicate with their killer?’
‘Seems the perfect method for a murderer, doesn’t it? A way of communicating without leaving any trace. Second only to actually chatting face to face.’
‘Technology. Friend of serial killers everywhere.’
Patrick smiled faintly, wondering what police work must have been like in the days before DNA and the Internet and CCTV. He would have quite liked to have operated in a Columbo-style world. Maybe, he mused, he should get himself a grubby raincoat like the TV detective.
‘Are you still with us?’ Carmella asked.
‘Just thinking about buying a mac.’
‘I thought you preferred Windows?’
He laughed so loudly that he worried Suzanne would hear him in her office and wonder what he found so amusing. That reminded him he needed to report to her and, as much as he enjoyed seeing her, he suddenly didn’t feel like laughing anymore.
Looking at him curiously, Carmella asked, ‘Are Snapchat pictures actually stored anywhere?’
‘Let’s find out.’
He called Peter Bell on the internal phone and, a few minutes later, the cyber-crime expert joined them in the incident room.
‘Before I start, any progress with our hotel key card?’
The older man smoothed down a wisp of flyaway hair. ‘I emailed a list of potential hackers to Gareth Batey earlier. Apologies. I’ve been under the cosh.’
‘OK. Well, let’s forget that for the moment. What do you know about Snapchat?’
‘Snapchat? Interestingly, I was just talking about this with someone in child protection.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because it’s a new preferred method for paedophiles to exchange images. Harder to trace than email or MMS. Or, at least, a lot of them think it is.’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, what Snapchat don’t make clear is that the images are saved into a folder on the user’s phone, and they’re easy to find if you know where to look.’
‘What if you don’t have the phone?’ Patrick asked. ‘Are they stored on a server somewhere?’
Bell cleared his throat. ‘According to Snapchat, they keep a log of the last two hundred images sent, but don’t save the actual images. Unless the image wasn’t viewed by the recipient. In that case, it remains on the company’s servers for thirty days.’
Patrick thought about this. It was most likely that Rose – and Jess, if the murderer had used the same method – had viewed the messages, possibly screenshot them for posterity. And the killer had taken the phones with him.
‘Hang on,’ Carmella said. ‘Could I log in as another user on my phone, if I knew their password, and view the images they’d received?’
‘No.’ Bell smiled patronisingly. ‘Because they disappear within seconds of being viewed.’
‘Shit.’
‘But if and when we arrest someone,’ Patrick said, ‘we’ll be able to look on their phone and, if they sent snaps to the two victims, they’ll still be there. Stored in a hidden folder.’
Bell nodded. ‘That’s right. Unless your murderer is tech savvy.’
‘We’d better hope he isn’t,’ Carmella said.
Patrick thanked Bell and watched him leave the room. He felt frustrated, like he was looking for a trail of breadcrumbs that had already been eaten by birds.
‘We’ll catch him,’ Carmella said. ‘He’s going to slip up at some point.’
Patrick stared into space. ‘Maybe. But how quickly? And who’s next on his list?’
Chapter 31
Day 10 – Kai
Kai slouched over to a corner table next to a massive poster reading ‘Home of the Whopper’, his laptop in one hand, and a plastic tray containing a box of cheeseburger and fries in the other. He dumped the items on the table and pulled back a red slatted chair, which made a loud metallic sound as it scraped across the tiled floor.
Opening the laptop with his right hand, he shovelled fries into his mouth with his left while looking around him to make sure nobody could see the screen. With greasy fingers he tapped in the Burger King Wi-Fi password and brought up the window of the OnTarget forum. He just needed to be sure about one or two things.
The thing that Kai feared more than anything was making Jade angry. She was angry a lot – he could just about deal with that – but the terror of one day making her so mad that she dumped him gave him a sick feeling in the pit of his belly that even half a burger in one big swallow couldn’t obliterate. His mates thought he was a total wuss – ‘pussy-whipped’, according to Ed – but he didn’t care. He loved her. And if this worked out like it should, Jade would be well pleased with him. He grinned to himself through the other half of the burger. He wasn’t going to let anybody upset his boo, no way.
He finished his meal and wiped his sleeve across his mouth before pushing the empty food box to one side. Hunched over the laptop, he laboriously typed a question with two fingers, then sat back and waited.
An answer flashed back in a minute. Kai tensed, read it silently to himself, lips moving, then relaxed and started typing again. It took less than five minutes to make the arrangements. Kai was dying to message Jade to tell her, but then decided not to, not until it was done. Then he reckoned she’d Snapchat him one of her special selfies – the kind that made him go soft and hard at the same time.
Leaving all his litter on the table, he pulled on his jacket and headed out on his mission. Pausing in the doorway under a blast of hot, stale air, he zipped up his laptop inside his jacket and smiled, a slow, smug smile.
Jade was gonna be proper pleased with him.
Chapter 32
Day 10 – Wendy
Wendy stood at the top of the escalators in the Rotunda, music from the PA system outside Frankie and Benny’s wafting over. Frank Sinatra. Her dad’s favourite. He liked that restaurant too, even if it was overpriced in his opinion. As a family they had eaten in places like this many times, before her dad had run off with the woman who was now her stepmother.