"Dying light" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacBride Stuart)

15

Their new incident room – courtesy of the Chief Constable the minute this became a serial case – was huge, the walls covered with maps of Aberdeen and scribbled-on whiteboards. The middle of the room was taken up with phones and computers, the monitors flickering in the overhead light as uniformed officers took calls and entered the details into HOLMES. There was already a huge stack of automatically generated actions waiting for him, so Logan pulled up a chair and started working his way through the lot; sorting them into two piles he called 'To Do' and 'Bollocks'. The system's greatest strength was that it would churn its way through endless reams of data, automatically picking out connections and patterns. Its greatest weakness was that it frequently didn't have a sodding clue what it was doing. He was just finishing when DI Steel finally got back from speaking to Michelle Wood's father.

'How did it go?'

The inspector shrugged and started flicking half-heartedly through Logan's pile of 'Bollocks', turfing them one after the other into the bin. 'How do you think it went? Telling some poor bastard his daughter's been battered to death by a psycho, and her naked body was abandoned in the fucking woods for three days before someone fell over it in the fog … oh and by the way, your little girl was fucking strangers for money.' She sighed and ran a hand over her face. 'Sorry, been a shitty week.' Logan handed her the 'To Do' pile and she whittled that one down too; there weren't many actions left by the time she was finished. She palmed them off on the admin officer, telling him to get them cleared by the end of the day.

'Right,' she said, as the man grumbled away to get the personnel organized. 'Plan of action?'

'Well, what do you want to do about Jamie McKinnon?'

'Leave him where he is, we've still got plenty tying him to Rosie's murder.' Steel pulled out a packet of king-size cigarettes and started fiddling with the silver paper insert. 'If we get someone else in the frame for both tarts we'll do McKinnon for the fast-food jobs instead. But if anyone asks, we're dealing with the killings like they're part of the same pattern.'

'OK.' Logan grabbed a magic marker and started drawing up a rough map of the docks on one of the whiteboards.

'Rosie Williams was found here…' He drew a blue circle on Shore Lane. 'Do we know if Michelle Wood worked the docks?'

'Who knows?'

'If she did, then we've got a hunting ground. We put in some surveillance: unmarked cars…' He picked up a green pen and started putting 'X'es where a rusty Vauxhall could be parked without attracting too much attention.

'What bloody good are unmarked cars going to do us?' asked Steel, corkscrewing a finger into her ear. 'Dirty bastards pick up women down there the whole time. How're we going to spot our man: pull them all over and ask?' She dropped her voice an octave and put on a broad east London accent.

'"Excuse me, sir, 'ave you picked up this tart wiv the intention of beatin' 'er to death, or just givin' 'er a serious