Believe No One Read online

  BELIEVE NO ONE

  Also by A. D. Garrett

  Everyone Lies

  BELIEVE NO ONE

  A. D. GARRETT

  Constable & Robinson Ltd

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK by C&R Crime,

  an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2014

  Copyright © A. D. Garrett 2014

  The right of A. D. Garrett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Quotations from Erich Fromm’s The Art of Being, Continuum, New York, pages 168, 253 and 283 © 1989 The Estate of Erich Fromm

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in

  Publication data is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978-1-78033-980-1 (hardback)

  IBSN 978-1-47211-393-1 (ebook)

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Printed and bound in the UK

  This book is dedicated to the investigators and volunteers around the world who strive to find missing children and bring them to safety.

  The Investigators

  Missouri

  St Louis Method Exchange Team

  Detective Greg Dunlap (East St Louis PD)

  Detective John Ellis (St Louis PD)

  Detective Valance (St Louis PD)

  Special Agent Dr Detmeyer (FBI)

  Detective Chief Inspector Kate Simms (Greater Manchester Police, UK)

  CSI Roper (St Louis PD)

  Oklahoma

  Williams County Sheriff’s Office

  Deputy Sheriff Abigail Hicks

  Sheriff Launer

  Professor Nick Fennimore (UK-based forensic scientist)

  Dr Janine Quint (Forensic Medical Examiner)

  Aberdeen, Scotland

  Josh Brown (doctoral student)

  Acknowledgements

  A lot of people helped to make this book. In Oklahoma, Mike Nance, co-founder of the International Association of Cold Case Investigators (check out their Facebook page), was guide, facilitator, host, historian and wise counsellor. His gracious presence gave access to a host of professionals in Oklahoma law enforcement. Thanks is due to the many departments and agencies who gave a warm welcome, interrupting their frenetic daily schedules to explain procedures and protocols, tolerating often bizarre questions, answering them patiently and with great good humour. Particular thanks to District Attorneys Pamela Hammers and Brian Keuster, ADA Nullonney, Judge Tom Gillert, CSI Margaret Loveall, OSBI Special Agent Vicky Lyons, and Forensic Anthropologist Angela Berg. The detectives in the Homicide Department of Tulsa PD provided two important elements: context and character. The stories you told could make a book in themselves – would that there had been more time to sit and listen.

  In St Louis, Bill Baker, Executive Director of the St Louis Major Case Squad, and Joe Burgoon, Godfather of Homicide, and now Investigator at St Louis County PD’s Cold Case Unit, gave valuable insights into homicide investigation, as well as the work of NCMEC and Team Adam which have informed and enriched this novel. Their rambunctious tales were tempered by stories of dedication, quiet humility and deep compassion that will resonate in this and future novels. For information, Dominic’s on the Hill is a real restaurant, and they really do serve the best Italian food in St Louis. Sincere thanks for advice given by St Louis Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Mary Case, in the USA, and Police Forensic Pathologist, Dr James Grieve, in the UK, which steered the storyline away from a couple of unlikely scenarios. Crush asphyxia was definitely the right way to go.

  A Hawick Word Book, by Douglas Scott, was extremely helpful in researching Borders Scottish. An illuminating email discussion (in multicoloured fonts) with Dr Caroline Logan on the psychopathology of serial killers was crucial in the creation of two very bad men; particularly useful was the exchange on haemochromatosis, which made sense of a number of disparate ideas.

  ‘Hard-bitten’ is an expression often used to describe those tasked with bringing killers to justice. But it was a constant surprise and joy to meet men and women whose compassion for the victims and their families was profound and affecting.

  Preface

  If there’s one thing an Oklahoma farmer values, it’s water.

  Lance Guffey’s grandfather had lived through Black Sunday, 14 April 1935. It was the day Lance’s father was born; it was also the day America came face to face with the great Dust Bowl. A hundred million acres of good topsoil stripped from farms in the West fell like volcano dust in towns and cities east of the Great Plains, clear to the Atlantic Ocean, a distance of 15,000 miles, blackening the skies over the nation’s capital.

  Oklahoma learned its lesson the hard way, but learned it well, creating more lakes, post-Dust Bowl, than any other state. In that one year alone, Lance’s grandfather dug two ponds for irrigation and by the time Lance himself was ten years old, they had five, each one up to an acre across. His father told Lance that for weeks, digging those ponds, his skin was the same rust red as the clay, from his fingertips all the way up to his elbows, and the iron in the clay smelled of blood, so you carried the stink of death with you.

  Just now the land smelled of sweet grass and sunshine; soon they would be taking the first cut of hay. They’d had some good spring rain, but nothing for two weeks past and with temperatures already in the eighties at the beginning of May, they would need every drop of water in those ponds. It was one of the smaller ponds he was headed to right now; a windstorm the night before had brought down an old cottonwood. It lay half across the shallow incline; his cattle used to get in there and wallow when it got real hot, and a cow could break a leg stumbling over branches hidden in the mud.

  Lance Guffey looked at the big old tree. The storm had ripped it out of the soil; it lay crushed and splintered over a hundred feet of grazing, its shimmering leaves already losing their shine. The roots were upturned, ten feet off the ground, a wide, flat disk – blood red, like an afterbirth – leaving a hole in the ground twenty feet in diameter. He scratched his head and walked left and then right in a semicircle, decided which limbs he needed to trim first and how many sections he would have to cut the trunk into to make it manageable. Finally, he reached in the cab of his tractor for his chainsaw. Three hours later, his small herd of black Angus cattle looking on, he had the accessible sections sawn into logs and was ready to drag what remained onto dry land.

  The woman had settled in the soft mud of the pond over winter. Wind-rock shifted the cottonwood in the October storm, sending drifts of fine silt and mud from the bank of the pond, protecting her from the attentions of predators, cocooning her in mud. Five months she had waited, which was not long in the great scheme of things, in the long years of for ever. Not long enough to ripen the first crop of wheat, nor even to c
arry a child to full term. The woman was a child herself when she bore a son; the boy with her at the end would have celebrated his tenth birthday in June, but he had seen too much and could not be allowed to live. He was gone, as she was gone, the woman hoping in her final moments of pain and fear and confusion that she was going to a gentler place than this earth had been for her.

  The jangle of chains and grappling hooks disturbed the mud, stirring up thin threads of red clay that rose like dark plumes of fresh blood. The red wisps reached the barrier between water and air, and spread and billowed like smoke under glass. A grappling hook snagged in the elbow of a branch and the massive trunk of the cottonwood, and the submerged brush of twigs and arrow-shaped leaves raked deep in the mud, ploughing up what had been planted where it could not grow.

  Lance Guffey smelled the sulphurous reek of rotting leaves and the blood-iron tang of the clay, and at last the smell of death rolled up and penetrated his farmer’s sensibilities. He looked around him in alarm, counted his cows as he killed the engine and climbed down from the cab, anxious to know if one of his heifers had already run foul of the reaching, grabbing branches of the downed tree. But the herd was accounted for, every one; they watched him still, thoughtfully regurgitating and chewing the tough prairie grass, waiting till he was done so they could cool off in the pond.

  He took a step closer, covering his mouth and nose with his shirt tail, and saw a glimpse of flesh, camouflaged in the tangle of branches. The body seemed clothed in leaves and waterweed, like a nymph in the old-time fairy tales he read to his daughters. Sunshine dazzled off the water that clung to the cottonwood’s waxy leaves, half blinding him, but he saw enough to be certain this was no water nymph.

  1

  Insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

  EINSTEIN

  Aberdeen, Scotland

  Nick Fennimore stared at the new mail in his inbox and his mouth dried. The subject line: ‘Is this your daughter?’

  His hand jerked involuntarily. He slowed his breathing, forcing himself to look closely at the email, to think like a scientist and not a father. There was an attachment. He’d had messages like this before – usually from sick, sadistic men for whom causing others pain was a release. Those messages had been posted on the Facebook page he’d created in his daughter’s name, but this was the first he’d had direct to his academic account. The sender was ‘anon67912’ – a Hotmail account.

  Fennimore ran the email and its attachment through his virus checker: no Trojans, spyware or viruses. He clicked to open the message envelope. There was no message – just the subject header and the attachment. He wiped cold sweat from his upper lip and double-clicked to view the attachment.

  It was a girl. Just a girl. She was slim, serious-looking; she walked alongside a man. He seemed older – mid-thirties, at a guess. Suited, stocky. Dark hair, full lips, otherwise unexceptional. His eye was drawn again to the girl. Could this be Suzie?

  He loaded an image file he had created: his daughter, aged up from ten to fifteen. It was already out of date – soon, Suzie would be sixteen years old. If she lived. The statistics said not: the statistics said that Suzie died five years ago, shortly before or after her mother was murdered, but on this matter, Fennimore had never been able to think like a scientist, only as a father.

  He looked again at the email, his fingers hovering over the keys. This is madness, he thought. It’s probably just another crazy. But he clicked the ‘reply’ icon anyway and typed in a few words. ‘Please, call me.’ He added his office and mobile-phone numbers and hit ‘send’.

  He resized his photoshopped image of his daughter and slid it next to the email attachment on the screen. His impression of Suzie at fifteen showed a face that brimmed with good health, a mouth that was always ready to smile. The girl in the attachment was sombre; she gazed ahead as though thinking of something else. Fennimore wondered what the man was saying to her. She looked about the same age as Suzie; she had dark hair and brown eyes – like Suzie’s. But she wore a knee-length dress in burnt orange and brown, cinched at the waist, a tiny clutch bag emphasizing her slim form, and she strode out in high heels. Fennimore shook his head absently – hard to imagine his tomboy daughter in this graceful young woman.

  A two-tone audio notification interrupted his scrutiny of the photograph. A new message in his inbox. Eagerly, Fennimore maximized the Outlook screen. But it was a bounce-back: anon67912 no longer existed.

  He called up the original email and a few mouse clicks later he was scrolling through the email’s ‘properties’; it would surely have been routed through an anonymous server – only an amateur would send an email like that from a naked IP – but he had to try. Astonishingly, the IP address was there, in amongst the jumble of letters and numbers. The IP could give him a physical location. Excitement building, he traced the IP number using WHOIS, and found the service provider.

  He cursed, softly: it was blocked as private. The service provider could give him the sender’s location, but wouldn’t – not without a warrant. He thought of Kate Simms, stationed for the next few months half a world away in the United States. But even she wouldn’t be able to obtain a warrant on such slim grounds.

  He looked at the picture again. Just a teenage girl walking along a sunny street with an older man. They walked about a foot apart, the girl to the right, next to a sheer wall. No windows that he could see. The man’s left hand was raised to waist height as if he was gesturing to emphasize a point; the girl seemed distracted. Nothing wrong in that; nothing sinister. So why did he find himself searching her young face for signs of distress? And even if it was there, couldn’t there be an innocent explanation – an exam to take, a dreaded dental appointment?

  That being the case, why did somebody watch those two and photograph them and send you the image? And whoever sent the image had taken the trouble to find out Fennimore’s academic address; this was personal.

  He stared at the image for so long that when he glanced away he could see the silhouette of the girl and the man ghosted on the grey sky outside his office window. He blinked to clear the after-image and took a fresh look at the photograph. A hard line of shadow ran between the man and the girl so that they might almost be walking on different pavements at different times of day.

  Later he would compare ratios for the girl’s face: distance between the eyes; position of the ears relative to the eyeline; size and shape and position of the nose and mouth. It would only ever be an approximation – he wouldn’t be able to use facial-recognition software, not with the already approximated aged-up image of Suzie he had constructed. For an accurate comparison he would need to know the distance from which the photograph had been taken, and the angle. It seemed to be from slightly above – a bridge, maybe? He looked for a clue, and found a small circular segment of something, tight to the wall. He opened the image in Photoshop and zoomed in on that section of the photograph. It looked like a metal dome attached to a bracket – a street lamp, maybe – in racing green. A bridge, then – or maybe the street sloped uphill while the pathway continued on the flat. In the distance, behind the two figures, the number plate obscured by a section of wall, the back of a white box van with a squiggle of black spray paint at the top of the roller door.

  His eyes were drawn again to the girl’s face. Suzie, or a perfect stranger? Impossible to say. The dress, the well-styled hair were hard to reconcile with Suzie zipping around on a skateboard. He felt a sharp spike of excitement – the accident: Suzie had fallen trying a new stunt on her board and cut her head badly. The scar – a small diamond-shaped patch of red on her left temple – had just begun to heal when she disappeared. Would it remain, after all these years? He snatched up the mouse and zoomed in on the girl’s face. At high magnification he could see that portion of the image was slightly blurred – camera shake, or perhaps a breeze had ruffled her hair at the moment the photographer pressed the shutter. The girl’s hair was feathered over her forehead and
combed right to left. Was that deliberate – to hide the scar? The shadow cast by the strands of hair, together with the blurring, made it difficult to tell if they were hiding anything. Fennimore brightened the image and played with the contrast. It took an hour, but at last he thought he saw it – a small diamond-shaped imperfection. He needed to trace the email back to source. He checked his watch; it was 7 p.m. The IT team would be long gone; his inquiry would have to wait until morning. The heating had clicked off a couple of hours since and the temperature in the life sciences building plummeted – early May in Aberdeen could feel like February. He should go back to his flat and relax for the evening, but rest was impossible.

  Coffee, he thought. Then he would get to work on those ratios.

  2

  East St Louis, Illinois

  Detective Chief Inspector Kate Simms stared out of an SUV onto mile after mile of burned-out houses, boarded-up apartment buildings, empty factory units and vacant lots, crowded with saplings and trees, competing for space. Rubble was strewn across the vacant lots. Rubbish littered the streets and piled up in ragged heaps against chain-link fences and corrugated-iron hoardings. This was East St Louis, Illinois – a city in its own right – though it was only a two-minute drive across the Mississippi River from St Louis, Missouri.

  Simms was on a three-month method exchange with St Louis PD; her assignment, to undertake case reviews and share UK investigation protocols, processes and skills. The UK’s Association of Chief Police Officers was funding her and a CSI, as well as paying consultant fees to Professor Varley, a forensic psychologist she had worked with the previous year. The American contingent of the Method Exchange Team included, from St Louis PD: Detective Ellis, a granite-faced man with a buzz cut and a blunt manner; a soft-featured young detective named Valance; and Roper, a tall, hyperactive CSI. FBI Special Agent Dr Detmeyer, on loan from the Bureau’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, would give the American psychological perspective. The last member of the team was Detective Dunlap, a grey-haired African American in his early fifties, on assignment from East St Louis Homicide. As he put it, ‘The Two State area shares crime freely, so we figured why can’t the good guys share resources, too?’