The Infirmary (DCI Ryan Mysteries prequel)(23)

“If I knew the answer to that, we’d all be out of a job,” he said. “Let’s start by considering the puncture mark on her neck.”

“Just one puncture wound?” MacKenzie queried.

Ryan nodded and thought, not for the first time, that she was a quick study.

“There were six or seven found on Isobel Harris’s body,” he said, pre-empting her next question. “What do you think that tells us?”

“He needed more sedative to take her out or maybe he misjudged the dosage?” Lowerson offered.

“Both plausible,” Ryan said. “But it could be simpler than that. What if Cooper didn’t interest him enough to prolong the execution? We don’t have the toxicology report back yet, but I’ll hazard a guess it will contain plenty of lorazepam but no adrenaline, unlike what we found in Isobel Harris’s bloodstream.”

“He had no interest in keeping Cooper alive for longer than the time it would take to set the scene,” MacKenzie concluded.

“Why?” Lowerson asked. “Why is the adrenaline important?”

Ryan ran a hand over the back of his neck and stood up to ease out the kinks.

“He gave Isobel Harris a shot of adrenaline whenever she was about to go into cardiac arrest,” he said. “It meant he could play with her for longer.”

Lowerson fell silent, struggling to comprehend the kind of deviant mentality they were searching for. Ryan wished he could tell Jack Lowerson the world consisted of good people who sometimes did bad things.

But he couldn’t.

Evil walked in human form. It hid in plain sight, walked amongst them, talked to them, deceiving them all. The sooner Lowerson came to terms with it, the better.

“It ties in with our theory about Cooper being a trophy kill, used to send a message,” Phillips was saying. “That doesn’t help us to figure out who he, or she,” he added swiftly, feeling MacKenzie’s eyes boring into the side of his head, “is going to target next.”

There was no question of whether there would be another target or of how they would die; only a question of when and who.

Ryan looked across the room to Tom Faulkner, who nodded awkwardly and stood up to face the crowd.

“Ah, well. Actually, it’s likely that you are looking for a man,” he told them. “We already had a partial DNA profile from the samples we picked up from Isobel Harris. As of this afternoon, we isolated a match from a similar sample we found at DCI Cooper’s house yesterday. There’s no match on the DNA database but I can tell you it’s definitely male.”

“Where’d he slip up?” Phillips asked. “Was it the curtains?”

“Nope, it was the gate at the end of the pathway leading up to her front door. It’s possible he forgot to wear gloves on the way in, or he peeled them off after posting the door keys back through her letterbox and then forgot about the gate as he headed out. Easy mistake to make.”

“It’s not exactly a smoking gun,” Ryan said. “A decent defence barrister would have a field day ripping it to shreds, but beggars can’t be choosers. The chances of isolating the same DNA profile at the scene of two murders has to be off the chart and, besides, it’s all we’ve got.”

He headed over to the murder board, took a marker pen and drew a single black line through the centre of it. Then, he drew another one right beneath it.

“Ah, y’ know, there are computer programs that can do all the charts for you,” Phillips pointed out.

“Uh huh,” Ryan said, and continued scribbling pertinent events on the timeline for each woman.

Phillips pursed his lips but privately agreed there was no substitute for the visual impact of a murder board.

After a minute, Ryan replaced the cap on his pen and considered the graffiti-covered wall in front of him.

“If we assume we’re looking for one man and that his motivations for murdering Isobel Harris and Sharon Cooper were different, I think we’ll learn much more by understanding his reasons for killing Harris.” He looked at each person in the room, lingering on those he had identified as being potentially difficult. “Most of you worked on the case under Cooper, so you think you know all there is to know about Isobel Harris.”

He saw the complacent looks, heard a couple of muffled laughs from the back of the room and came to an instant decision.

“The fact is, we need fresh eyes on this,” he said. “We need to go back over everything, right back to the start. It’s impossible for some of you to do that without being influenced by what has gone before. That being the case, Hitchins, Jessop, Clayton, Adowu, Umber and Lee will be re-assigned. Thank you for all your work so far, please go home and get some rest.”

He reached down for a stack of papers, preparing himself for the backlash.

He didn’t have to wait long.

“Are you kidding me?” Jessop burst out, his voice clattering around the room like old tin. “If you think I’m going to let you swan in here like King Dick and tell me where to get off—”

“Lower your voice and moderate your language,” Ryan’s voice cracked like a whip. “If you have any objections to raise about how I choose to manage this investigation, you can use the appropriate channels.”

“You’re not fobbing me off! I deserve to stay on the team, and I want my name on the charge sheet when we bring him in.”