Read Online American Devil by Oliver Stark - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Oliver Stark
Tags: Fiction, General, Suspense, Thrillers, Action & Adventure, Mystery & Detective, Suspense fiction, Crime, Police, Police Procedural, Criminal profilers, Serial Murder Investigation
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Investigation Room
November 16, 11.15 p.m.
F or the first twenty-four hours of each homicide, the focus was on three main points of investigation - victim identification, witness search and forensic leads. Back at Blue Team, Tom Harper went straight from the gym to his old desk and started working on victim ID. He’d not been happy with the speed of ID on the previous victims. It took them eight hours to ID the Ward’s Island corpse as Grace Frazer and those eight hours were lost hours.
Harper insisted on going through the CCTV images himself. He knew two things for certain from his visit to the crime scene: one, the woman in the parking lot drove there in a car, and, two, that car had disappeared. Simple conclusion was that the killer didn’t use his own car. He’d gone to the lot on foot and after the murder he’d driven the victim’s car out of there. It was the only way he could’ve left in such a bloody state without being seen.
It only took an hour of searching the tape before he spotted the victim’s car arriving in the lot. He paused on a single frame and wrote down the licence plate on a brand new silver Mercedes SUV. He called it through and within a few minutes he was looking at the victim’s ID. She was called Amy Lloyd-Gardner, and she was twenty-four years old. A quick check on the various databases showed she was a PR executive married to a wealthy young banker.
Tom pulled up a photograph of Amy Lloyd-Gardner from a social networking website and leaned back into his seat. He stared at her face. She was another beauty with long blond hair, similar in looks to Mary-Jane and Grace. The killer was fixated on a certain kind of look and this was his trigger: a bright-eyed, blond-haired innocence.
Harper turned round to look at the room full of officers working methodically through the case details. Somewhere out in the city, Amy’s husband was waiting up for her, as yet unaware that his young wife was a murder victim.
She had been on a lazy afternoon shopping trip. She would’ve had no idea as she wandered around the shops that there was a killer tracking her and waiting for an opportunity. No idea at all. Her car, her clothes, her shopping had all disappeared. That meant that the killer had taken everything away in the silver Merc. But the killer didn’t take the body and he didn’t need to take the clothes. He wants to keep the clothes , Harper thought, and added it to a growing list of the killer’s predilections. He called across to one of the detectives and asked him to get the car details sent out to the team and called through to patrol. Within minutes, the car’s plate and description was radioed all across Manhattan and New York State. Finding the big shiny car was just a matter of time.
Harper walked through to Williamson to give him the heads-up on the ID. Williamson took the printout. ‘Thanks, Harper. Listen, I’ll take Garcia and go and see Mr Lloyd-Gardner myself. Shit, what a night call this is going to be.’
Harper was pleased that Williamson would take this one. He needed more time to go through the information from the crime scene. When he returned to his desk, his email blinked with a new arrival, from the guys at the crime scene lab. Harper had requested the photographs as soon as they’d been downloaded and categorized. He clicked through the images one by one. The story retold itself on his computer screen. A sad end to life in a grey concrete garage. The violence of the poor woman’s end was there before him in cold close-up. He felt the anger rising and took a moment to detach himself.
He clicked backwards and forwards through the pictures of the corpse. From a certain angle, the naked body with the skin stretched out either side of her torso looked like some kind of butterfly. Was that accident or design? He stared at the screen. Amy’s toenails were painted red, and there was a little black ace of spades on her left hip. Her eyebrows had been plucked thin
November 16, 11.15 p.m.
F or the first twenty-four hours of each homicide, the focus was on three main points of investigation - victim identification, witness search and forensic leads. Back at Blue Team, Tom Harper went straight from the gym to his old desk and started working on victim ID. He’d not been happy with the speed of ID on the previous victims. It took them eight hours to ID the Ward’s Island corpse as Grace Frazer and those eight hours were lost hours.
Harper insisted on going through the CCTV images himself. He knew two things for certain from his visit to the crime scene: one, the woman in the parking lot drove there in a car, and, two, that car had disappeared. Simple conclusion was that the killer didn’t use his own car. He’d gone to the lot on foot and after the murder he’d driven the victim’s car out of there. It was the only way he could’ve left in such a bloody state without being seen.
It only took an hour of searching the tape before he spotted the victim’s car arriving in the lot. He paused on a single frame and wrote down the licence plate on a brand new silver Mercedes SUV. He called it through and within a few minutes he was looking at the victim’s ID. She was called Amy Lloyd-Gardner, and she was twenty-four years old. A quick check on the various databases showed she was a PR executive married to a wealthy young banker.
Tom pulled up a photograph of Amy Lloyd-Gardner from a social networking website and leaned back into his seat. He stared at her face. She was another beauty with long blond hair, similar in looks to Mary-Jane and Grace. The killer was fixated on a certain kind of look and this was his trigger: a bright-eyed, blond-haired innocence.
Harper turned round to look at the room full of officers working methodically through the case details. Somewhere out in the city, Amy’s husband was waiting up for her, as yet unaware that his young wife was a murder victim.
She had been on a lazy afternoon shopping trip. She would’ve had no idea as she wandered around the shops that there was a killer tracking her and waiting for an opportunity. No idea at all. Her car, her clothes, her shopping had all disappeared. That meant that the killer had taken everything away in the silver Merc. But the killer didn’t take the body and he didn’t need to take the clothes. He wants to keep the clothes , Harper thought, and added it to a growing list of the killer’s predilections. He called across to one of the detectives and asked him to get the car details sent out to the team and called through to patrol. Within minutes, the car’s plate and description was radioed all across Manhattan and New York State. Finding the big shiny car was just a matter of time.
Harper walked through to Williamson to give him the heads-up on the ID. Williamson took the printout. ‘Thanks, Harper. Listen, I’ll take Garcia and go and see Mr Lloyd-Gardner myself. Shit, what a night call this is going to be.’
Harper was pleased that Williamson would take this one. He needed more time to go through the information from the crime scene. When he returned to his desk, his email blinked with a new arrival, from the guys at the crime scene lab. Harper had requested the photographs as soon as they’d been downloaded and categorized. He clicked through the images one by one. The story retold itself on his computer screen. A sad end to life in a grey concrete garage. The violence of the poor woman’s end was there before him in cold close-up. He felt the anger rising and took a moment to detach himself.
He clicked backwards and forwards through the pictures of the corpse. From a certain angle, the naked body with the skin stretched out either side of her torso looked like some kind of butterfly. Was that accident or design? He stared at the screen. Amy’s toenails were painted red, and there was a little black ace of spades on her left hip. Her eyebrows had been plucked thin
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