The Night Stalker (Detective Erika Foster 2)

‘Okay, so the paps outside got him going indoors,’ said Moss. ‘The time stamp on this last photo is… 12.57 a.m.’

She flicked through photos, and the perspective changed to the back garden of Jack Hart’s house. She stopped at a photo taken at a low angle, looking up to the back bedroom window, where the light was on.

‘Jesus. That bloody photographer was in the back garden before Jack Hart was murdered,’ said Erika.

The view then jumped forward to pictures taken on the flat roof directly outside the bedroom window. The curtain was open and there was a view of the bed from the side. Then, again like animation, the naked figure of Jack Hart walked in. He held a towel in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. He moved to the nightstand over by the opposite window at the front of the house, put the bottle down and sat on the edge of the bed.

‘Stop! What’s that!’ cried Erika. ‘Go back, two pictures.’

‘Shit, look! There, under the bed,’ said Peterson.

Jack was sitting on the bed with his naked back to the camera. A clear silhouette of a figure could be made out, crouching under the bed.

‘Hang on, I can zoom the image in,’ said Moss, rapidly clicking and pushing the mouse across the mouse pad. The picture enlarged and shifted so the whiteboard was filled with the dark grainy image of a figure crouching under the bed. Two hands could just be made out, fingers splayed on the carpet, and the bottom half of the face had been caught in the light, showing the tip of a nose and the mouth.

It was the mouth that disturbed Erika the most. It was grinning widely and the teeth were on show.

‘Jesus Christ. He was already inside the house, waiting for him,’ said Erika.

Breaking the silence that followed in the incident room, a phone began to ring. Crane snatched it up and began to talk in a low voice.

‘Can you make it any bigger, Moss?’ asked Erika. The photo zoomed in on the figure under the bed, but the image was too blurred and grainy.

‘I’ll get it over to the cyber crime guys and see if they can enhance it any more,’ said Moss.

‘Boss, you’re going to want to hear this,’ said Crane, excitedly, having just put the phone down.

‘Please tell me it’s something – some kind of evidence about the man who is doing this?’ said Erika.

‘It is evidence. But it’s not a bloke.’

‘What?’

‘Nils Åkerman has been working on the small amount of DNA he swabbed from the ear print on the back door of Jack Hart’s house, and some samples of skin cells found on the outside of the suicide bag used to kill him. It’s a woman.’

‘What?’

‘It’s from a white woman. Nils ran the DNA through the national crime database, and there’s no match, no previous convictions – but the DNA is female. It’s a woman who’s doing this.’

A murmur went round the incident room.

‘But what about the fact that we’ve linked the two murders?’ asked Peterson.

‘We have linked the two murders,’ said Erika. ‘What? The link is now thrown into doubt because it's a woman?’

‘Shit. Whoever she is, she’s got a good lead on us. We’ve been looking for a bloke,’ said Moss.

They let that sink in for a moment. Erika went back to the whiteboard and looked at the figure under the bed, the bottom half of the face emerging from the shadows with a row of grinning teeth.

‘Okay. So we go back to the beginning. We re-examine every piece of evidence. We revisit interviews with local residents. And bring that bloody photographer back in for questioning. We’re looking for a woman. A female serial killer.’

39

Simone arrived home after a long shift at work and closed the front door, drinking in the silence in the gloomy hallway. Sloughing off her coat, she went to her computer, which was tucked into the nook under the stairs. She booted it up, logged into the chat room and started to type:

NIGHT OWL: Hey, Duke. U there?

A few moments passed, and DUKE began to type.

DUKE: Hey, Night Owl. What’s up?

NIGHT OWL: I saw him again. Stan. My husband.

DUKE: Yeah? You okay?

NIGHT OWL: Not really. I knew he wasn’t real, but he was there, as real as anything.

DUKE: Did you start the new meds?

NIGHT OWL: Yeah.

DUKE: Which one?

NIGHT OWL: Halcion.

DUKE: What’s ur dosage? 0.125 mg?

NIGHT OWL: Yeah.

DUKE: Visual disturbances are a side effect.

NIGHT OWL: Tell me about it!

DUKE: I’ve been there, done that. They took me up to 0.5 mg and it still did nothing: endless days of no sleep… So what u up 2?