The Puppet Show (Washington Poe)

‘Gosh. How clever.’

It was. ‘And because GU have the north-west prisoner contract, they’re on our roads all day and well into the evenings. You get so used to seeing them, they blend into the background.’

The Immolation Man had been hiding in plain sight.

Flynn had left for her emergency meeting with Gamble. Hopefully a coherent strategy on how to trace the GU van would emerge.

But just in case it didn’t . . .

Poe glanced across at Bradshaw. She had begun to pack. She looked despondent. The excitement of the discovery had fizzled out once the information was passed to Gamble. The change in her was remarkable. A week ago, data was simply a puzzle to solve, and once she had, it had been passed to Flynn and forgotten about. Other than in the abstract, Poe knew she’d never had to think about the human cost behind the data she deciphered. And now she had, he knew she’d be a better analyst for it. Sometimes cold reason wasn’t enough; sometimes you needed skin in the game. Being personally involved forced you to go the extra mile.

‘You don’t think we’re done here, Tilly?’ Poe asked, smiling. ‘Get yourself comfortable, we have work to do.’

Bradshaw clapped. She opened her laptop, pushed up her glasses, and waited for instructions.

Poe sat beside her and said, ‘DCS Gamble’s going to start checking the sales of those vehicles, Tilly. He’ll need a warrant.’

She waited for him to make his point.

‘But if the Immolation Man is as intelligent as we think he is, the van purchases are going to be hidden. He won’t have paid for them with a credit card. And GU wouldn’t have sold them directly to the public themselves anyway: they’ll have sent them to one of those companies that buy cars in bulk. The van we want could have been bought through an auction, or through a subsidiary company of a subsidiary company of a . . . well, you get the point.’

‘I’m not sure I do, Poe.’

‘I’m saying we need to find a quicker way, Tilly. Let Gamble track the van through the paperwork. He’ll get there in the end, but while he’s doing that, I want you to think of another way to catch this prick . . .’

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Bradshaw smiled shyly. ‘Poe, what did I tell you a couple of days ago?’

It could have been anything. The topics of their recent conversations had been wide-ranging and varied; from the bowel habits of the elderly, to why he was called Washington.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, before taking a guess. ‘Something about the gaming industry now being bigger than the music industry?’

‘About data points,’ she prompted.

He remembered something about data points. It had been one of those discussions where Bradshaw missed all his non-verbal clues and had enthused at length about some technical point in chaos theory. He found it easier to let her finish than try to stop her. It hadn’t been long before his mind went into screensaver mode. ‘It’s possible I might have forgotten the salient details,’ he admitted.

‘I said that, with enough data points, I can find the pattern in anything.’

‘So?’

He got the impression his stupidity with statistics remained a source of intense frustration to her. Although part of him missed her unintentional rudeness, the fact she

was now keeping her comments to herself was testament to how much she’d changed.

‘So,’ she said, pointing at the photograph-covered wall, ‘when I downloaded all those photographs, all I was working on was the days of the murders.’

Realisation dawned on Poe.

Of course!

Now they knew the vehicle, they could get every ANPR record for it. Every time the Immolation Man’s mobile prison passed a camera, they’d know about it. ANPR records were kept for two years, and although they would end up with two records – there was still a GU van with legitimate plates working in the south-west – it should be easy enough to separate the two.

Bradshaw was already inside the ANPR database. Within minutes the printer was churning out sheet after sheet of information. She said, ‘This is a good example of Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect, isn’t it, Poe?’

‘Hmm,’ Poe muttered, his mind full of auction houses and other ways vehicle fleets could be sold.

‘The butterfly effect.’