‘Good morning, Detectives. Or is it . . . afternoon? I’m Detective Cally O’Neill and this is my partner, Detective Bryan Salgado. Thank you for taking the time to talk to us today.’
‘It’s afternoon for us. I’m Detective Inspector Rachel Narey and this is Detective Sergeant Rico Giannandrea. Also in the room is Detective Chief Inspector Derek Addison, although he’s here—’
‘Under protest,’ came the voice from the side of the room. ‘Just ignore me and do your jobs. These two don’t need me babysitting them and I’m sure you don’t either. I’m only here because I have to be, so only refer to me if you really have to.’
O’Neill seemed taken aback by the interruption, but shrugged it off.
‘Okay, sure thing, sir. Listen, I don’t know how much you guys know about what we’ve been working on or why we need your help, so I thought it would make sense to run through it, so we all know where we are. That work?’
‘It works for me,’ Narey told her. ‘We have your list and have some answers to that but some more context would definitely help.’
She saw O’Neill and Salgado swap glances at that, sensing their anxiety to know what she had for them. They’d made their offer though and would have to stick to it.
‘Okay, Detective, I’ll make it quick.’ Salgado took over. ‘A couple of minutes ago, we emailed a full report on everything we have, but here’s the highlights. We are investigating the activities of a fifty-eight-year-old white male named Ethan Garland. He was found dead in his home here in Los Angeles two days ago. Death was natural causes, but it’s opened up a major investigation. We believe Garland was a serial killer, active over a number of years and responsible for a large number of murders. We’re working those of course but, crazy as it sounds, that’s not our priority. Garland left one unfinished.’
‘Unfinished?’
‘Officers, why don’t we show you what we’re dealing with?’
It was O’Neill’s tone rather than what she said. The tone of someone who knew she held the winning argument. She turned the camera on whatever computer they were using until it pointed at another screen.
‘The quality won’t be great, because of not coming to you direct, but we’ll fix that and get you a feed you can use. This will let you see what we’re dealing with, though.’
She adjusted the angle again until the second screen filled the one in Glasgow. It flickered once then snapped into focus.
It took Narey and Giannandrea a few moments to fully realise what they were seeing. It was a room, barely lit, an object in the middle, something else behind it. It took closer inspection and a little deduction to reveal it to be a person, the humanity initially disguised by the head slumped forward and dark hair obscuring the face. The chinos, the shirt and the build told them it was a man.
As they watched, his right arm shook briefly, perhaps uncontrollably, and the tremor ran through his body to his right foot and it too moved.
‘He’s alive?’
‘Yes. Just. We can’t be sure when he last ate or last had water, so medics can’t give us a time on how long he’ll survive if we don’t find him. He wakes occasionally but he seems to be sleeping more and more in the time we’ve had access to the feed. We think a lot of the movement is the body reacting to the changes. How much cognitive brain activity is still going on is anyone’s guess.’
The man’s body shook again, this time his head falling to the side, held in place only by the chain that Narey could now see attached to the old iron radiator behind him. Christ, his face. The skin was a deathly shade of yellow, the cheeks hollowed and eye sockets like craters. A large blister was obvious on his left cheek.
His eyes were open, staring blankly at the floor. His mouth was open too, perhaps more by gravity than choice, slackly yawning at the wooden floorboards.
‘We think he’s in his early to mid-twenties,’ Salgado said. ‘We’ve run the description against missing persons and have around a dozen possible hits. None of them give us a whole lot of hope, though. It may be he hasn’t been reported missing yet. Our bosses are making a decision as to whether we release a photograph of him. A positive ID might narrow down search areas but LA is a big city and he could be anywhere. We’re racing the clock here.’
The two Scots stared at the young man on the screen, five thousand miles away, seeing him die before their eyes and aware that they, somehow, had to play their part in saving him. It was surreal and a little unnerving.
‘Okay, whatever help we can be, you’ve got it,’ Narey told them. ‘But where do we fit into this? We’ve worked our way through your list, so we know there’s a link, but we don’t know how or why.’
One of the Americans swung the camera back away from the young man and back onto them, their faces awash with tension.
‘We need to get to this,’ Salgado insisted. ‘We’re dancing when we need to be running.’
‘You start,’ Narey shot back. ‘We’ll do our best to keep up.’
‘Do that. Garland used a Tor connection that hid his internet history and his general computer usage. Our tech guys are chipping away at that as we speak but all we have for now is a very limited search history. Most of it is general – news sites, some alt-right sites, plus Facebook, Twitter and some general Google searches. Almost all of those searches were focused on Glasgow.’
‘This gets weirder and weirder. What were the searches?’
‘He looked for bars, restaurants, places of interest, local transit. We don’t think he was planning any kind of trip to Scotland, since he’d no flights booked and he didn’t have a passport. We know he had an accomplice of sorts, a man known to us as Matthew Marr. He is the Glasgow connection. That’s about all we know, and we need you guys to help us change that.’
‘Which brings us to your list.’
‘I was really hoping it would. The suspense is killing me here, Detective Narey.’
She smiled. ‘I’m not trying to piss you off, Detective Salgado, or to delay this. We are all wondering what the hell we’re in the middle of and I needed a clear picture. Okay, the reason that I personally am sitting here is that one of the names on your list is the victim in a case that I’m actively working on. Eloise Gray. She disappeared five months ago, and her body was found this week. Given that happened just a couple of days before your list was sent to us, it’s a coincidence I’m not very comfortable with. A fragment of clothing was found beside the body and DNA tests showed a match to our prime suspect. However,’ she breathed deep, ‘I don’t believe our suspect is guilty and this list just convinces me of it.’
‘What? Oh for fuck’s sake, Rachel,’ Addison exploded from stage right. ‘Why the fuck am I just hearing this now? Why am I hearing it at all?’
She grimaced, eyebrows raised to the Americans away from Addison’s view, and directed her response to them. ‘I think he’s been set up. I’ve no idea by whom or why but I’m guessing the answer to that will answer some of your other questions too.’
Salgado and O’Neill nodded at her from the other side of the Atlantic. ‘We’re hoping so. What about the other names on the list?’