Everything was pretty good in his life, he thought, finishing the rest of the cone.
Except for Cutter.
Lunch had been perfect, really, in every way. Well, except for the food.
Fortunately, Chloe Farrell and Andrew Montgomery had not been interested in the food. A newly retired couple sharing a muffin at the next table in the small cafe had wriggled closer on their bench seat while watching them. The man even moved his foot to touch his wife's shoe under the table. They'd been that way, once.
Andrew knew he was going to be late back, but he ordered a coffee anyway. Chloe had sparkling mineral water.
'Off the record,' Andrew said, watching her sip her drink through a straw.
'What is?' asked Chloe, ready for another joke, or flirtatious comment.
'A call came in late yesterday about the case.'
Chloe tucked her hair behind her ears. Sat forward.
'It could be nothing. Jane took it at the front desk. I was getting ready to knock off.'
'What was it?'
'Some woman. Anonymous. Gave the name of someone we should be looking at for these home invasions.'
'What was the name?' she asked, palms flat on the table, eyes serious, face angled up to his.
Andrew gave a laugh. 'You're a real little newshound, aren't you?'
'Come on, Andrew. It's my job.'
'Yeah, well, it'd be my job if anyone knew I even told you that much.'
'But you said it could be nothing. If I knew the name, I could dig around. Maybe I could help.'
'You digging around would not help, Chloe. If the tip was straight up, you would not want to go poking a stick into this guy's nest.'
'Is there anything I could say that would get you to give me the name?'
'Baby, I could think of a million things you could say to me that would make me give you anything. But that's not playing fair.'
'Okay,' she said, standing. 'Well, we'd better get back then.'
Andrew's expression was surprised, then hurt.
'I'll pay for lunch if you'll get dinner.' She smiled over her shoulder, as she walked to the cashier.
24
JILL STOOD IN the doorway after lunch, silently taking in the bank of audiovisual and computing equipment in Gabriel's second bedroom. It wrapped around three walls: PC monitors and TV screens, cameras and tripods, speakers and hard drives. Electrical cords and cables snaked across the floor, climbed walls, and trailed sinuously across most surfaces. A curtain was drawn across the single window, and the room was shadowy. Green and red LED lights blinked rhythmically in the gloom.
Gabriel cleared his throat behind her; she stepped aside. Smiling broadly, he wheeled a second chair into the room, bumping it four-wheel-drive-style over double-adaptors and a couple of magazines. Jill, flattening herself against the bookshelf next to the door, turned and read some of the titles. Crime Scene Investigation; Criminal Profiling; Forensic Interviewing and Interrogation; Serial Killer Typology.
'So what sort of cases were you on before this one?' she asked, pulling down a thick tome. She flicked through it before closing it on a page of corpses, a black and white photograph of a child's dead eyes the last image in her mind. She blinked it away.
'Oh, this and that. Same as you I suppose,' he answered, smashing the second chair into a space at one of the terminals. He couldn't quite get it to fit, so she walked over, and with her foot, nudged aside a book caught between the wheel and the desk. The chair bumped hard against the table with Gabriel's final shove, and some of the equipment atop it lurched. 'There!' he grinned delightedly and threw himself onto the seat.
Jill took the other chair as Gabriel pressed buttons and moved a mouse to wake some of the slumbering machines. She looked at the screen in front of Gabriel too late to identify the official-looking logo that preceded the program he had opened.
'Could you just access my email, Jill?' he said, pointing to the monitor in front of her. 'I sent myself the voice recording of the anonymous phone call. It should be in there somewhere.'
She opened his email program, surprised at his lack of concern for his privacy. Probably this isn't his only email account, she thought. She found the MPEG file near the top of his unopened mail and double-clicked. Under it were a couple of the pharmaceutical and penis-enlargement spam emails that also choked her mailbox every morning. It seemed not even all this technology could stop them getting through.
'So.' He pushed his chair back a little from his screen and looked at her. 'What did you think of Isobel Rymill?'
'She seemed even more nervous than her husband,' she said.
Gabriel pulled a USB flash device from his pocket and plugged it into his terminal, where it began downloading a large document. 'Anything else?' he asked, eyes back on his screen.
'Well, I noticed clusters of deception signals.' The words she'd learned from him yesterday seemed cumbersome.
'And they could mean…'
'She's hiding something. It could be guilty knowledge, something shameful, or the truth. She might be lying to us, or just holding something of importance back.' Jill felt half-curious and half-annoyed by this oral examination.
'Exactly.' He nodded and smiled slightly.
She waited for him to add something. He seemed delighted by their exchange, but as she had come to learn, he didn't always conclude his train of thoughts aloud.
She waited while he clicked on some icons on his screen, and a computerised drone started up from the terminal as it obeyed his commands. Suddenly he reached straight across her and used the mouse for her computer. His back touched her chest and her mouth was almost on his neck. She pushed her chair backwards, startled by his abrupt invasion of her space, but he continued what he was doing without heeding her movement.
'Just saved the audio MPEG to my machine,' he said, straightening up and turning to face her. 'Remember I told you that if I heard the anonymous caller again I was sure I would know her?'
Jill stared at him, the realisation raising the hairs on her arms. 'Isobel Rymill – she was the one who called and told us to investigate Henry Nguyen?'
He didn't answer, and she watched as he used the program he'd opened to compartmentalise parts of the recording they'd made of Rymill earlier that morning. He created a series of digitised sound bites and lined seven or eight of them up next to the file that held the recording of the anonymous tip-off. He then opened another program and opened two of the files with it. When he pressed 'Enter' the drone of the computer kicked up a notch. Almost immediately a coloured graph and readout appeared on the screen.
'Ninety per cent match,' he said, white teeth flashing. 'Not bad, considering the distortion from the phone call caused by her covering the receiver.'
'Wow,' said Jill, leaning close over Gabriel's shoulder. 'Where'd you get this voice recognition software? I don't think we've got anything that good at work.'
'I know. It's amateur hour in there. What are you gonna do?'
'So, we've got a clear new line of inquiry,' he continued, opening another program. 'We need to know everything about Joss Preston-Jones and Isobel Rymill, and we need to know why they so desperately want us to investigate Henry Nguyen.'
Joss had thought his day at work would never end, but he was surprised at how quickly he'd slipped into robot-mode and completed his chores for the day. He'd brushed aside the concerned comments about the fading bruises on his face, and left the office at 4.30 p.m. exactly. He called the house phone, knowing Isobel would not yet be there with Charlie – tonight Charlie had dancing lessons – and left a message indicating that he would not be home for dinner. Then he turned his mobile phone off and caught the lift down to the employees-only gym. He changed out of his work clothes and shoved them into his backpack. Imagining Isobel's face when she saw the clothes, he took the trousers out again and folded them neatly.