Chapter 36
Thirty-Six
Gina
No one spoke after Gina talked them all through what she’d found out last night.
Before, everyone had been fired up looking for Mindy and now all they had was her body.
The dark winter sky was barely getting light even though it was morning but they didn’t need light, they needed to find whoever had murdered Mindy.
DC Wyre started eating a plum but recoiled and threw it in the bin. Jacob sat at the back, arms folded, frowning and Kapoor kept biting her bottom lip. O’Connor sat at the main table with all their notes laid out, looking for links.
Gina cleared her throat. After a breakfast of two coffees in quick succession, her hands trembled a little as the caffeine coursed through her body.
‘We don’t have time to feel deflated. Episode two.
Lights, camera, action – we are told it’s video.
We need inroads to OpenMeSmiler, inroads we don’t have yet.
More than that, episode two means that someone else is next.
We have no idea who and we have no idea when.
Actually, yes, we do.’ She wanted to pull at her hair in frustration but that would look mad so she bit her lip for a second and continued.
‘Soon. Someone out there is in imminent danger and we don’t know who or when. ’
Jacob looked down at the scratches on the table. She felt how he looked, totally frustrated at not being able to intervene.
‘Right, we have to keep going so what do we have? We’ve identified Mindy as the victim from her social media photos and her birthmark. I’ve been informed that the post-mortem will take place later this afternoon. Could you and Wyre please attend and feed back to O’Connor and me?’ she asked Jacob.
He looked up from the table and nodded.
‘Is there any more information from Bernard’s team or Keith? They both started working the respective scenes last night. I do know that PC Benton interviewed the witness who found Mindy’s body, and she didn’t know anything else.’
‘I called Bernard,’ Jacob said. ‘He wanted to be here but said he’d only just left the scene not long ago. Obviously, he shared his preliminary findings but they won’t be backed up until after the post-mortem. We’re not likely to get the lab results back soon. We know how long those can take.’
‘I’ll take preliminary findings,’ she said.
‘The body hadn’t quite entered the rigor mortis stage on arrival. Lividity, the pooling of the blood showed that Mindy had been in that sitting position when she died. There was no blood leading up to the location of the victim from either the back of the fence or the park.’
‘It’s looking like she was stabbed in situ, and it can’t have been too long before.’
‘Given that it was so cold, anything up to about six hours but it’s more likely to be less, Bernard said.’ Jacob leaned back in his chair.
Gina stared at the board. ‘The perp could have walked her into position or again, transported her somehow. We have to consider that she might have already been drugged or injured but we also know that any toxicology results won’t come in for a long time so we need to do what we do best, detecting.’
‘We have Garth joining us at nine,’ Jacob said. ‘He’s been working all night, trying to find a way into OpenMeSmiler.’
A couple of them glanced at their watches.
It was five to nine, so Garth could appear at any time.
Briggs entered at the front, not catching Gina’s eye at all.
Behind him, her attention fell to a printout of the photo found in Mindy’s mouth.
It had been attached to the wall and another printout showed the message on the back in Times New Roman.
Briggs drank from his travel mug and set it down on the windowsill. He closed the blinds. ‘Press are out there. As always, don’t say anything. I’ll handle it with the press release at lunchtime. There’s already a lot of speculation online.’
Gina shuffled back in her chair, sick of being so closed in. ‘Has Mindy’s brother, Lonnie Carson been informed?’
Kapoor nodded. ‘Wyre and I visited last night. He’s understandably distraught.’
‘How did Abel’s alibis go?’ Gina asked.
Wyre sat forward and opened her notebook.
‘They all checked out but again, we can’t be sure that his friends are covering for him.
What we need is more evidence if we’re to bring him in.
His solicitor turned up and kicked up a stink.
As we can’t link him to Mindy’s kidnap, we’ve charged him with possession of class A drugs.
He’s recovering in hospital so once he’s discharged, he’ll be up at the magistrates’ court.
We also searched his place and found nothing that links him to Mindy. ’
‘He lied about alibis Brian Thurston and Curtis Dunton, who we spoke to,’ Gina replied. ‘I don’t trust any of his alibis and I can’t rule him out from being a part of all this. Which part, I don’t know yet.’
‘Ah,’ Wyre continued. ‘I asked him about Brian and Curtis. He said he got mixed up. He saw Curtis much earlier that day and he just assumed Brian was with him as they’re always hanging around together.
Abel claimed he was still a bit out of it so he didn’t really know.
I’m not convinced all that is true but it’s all I got from him. ’
‘We still have Curtis’s dad, Jackson Dunton, who is Mindy’s landlord. Anything new to add when it comes to him?’
A hum of noes bounced around the room. Gina looked at the suspect list and one stood out. ‘Spencer Grey. Is he still in custody?’
Jacob put his pen on the table. ‘Yes. We tried to question him about the blood, the underwear and the photo of him and Mindy in the motorhome, but he went no comment all the way.’
‘He was in custody when the victim was murdered which means he couldn’t have killed Mindy.
’ Gina glanced at all the names on the board, wondering how the hell she was going to find the answers amongst all the information they had.
Spencer, Carmen, Abel, Jackson – all top-tier suspects, or were they?
Carmen had an alibi for when Mindy disappeared. She didn’t trust Abel.
Gina needed to think harder. Could Mindy have had issues with her brother?
She knew she was clutching at straws on that one.
‘We can’t rule out that Spencer or Carmen have been working with someone else but again, that’s a long shot given Spencer’s motive.
But could he have been the one to dox her as the relationship hadn’t been going well?
I know nothing was found on his phone that suggests he did but he wouldn’t be the first person to be able to hide his online life. ’
Garth burst in through the door, open laptop in hand, his battered leather jacket swamping him, and he plonked the gadget at the head of the table.
‘How are digitals going?’
‘Well, OpenMeSmiler isn’t easy to get into but I have an inroad.’
‘I’ll take the inroad, especially as we’re certain our perp or perps are going to strike again imminently.
’ All attention was on Garth and Gina couldn’t wait to hear what he had to say.
All she could think of was Mindy and the pain and fear she must have gone through in her final moments.
They weren’t going to fail Mindy by letting her murderer get away with it.
She wanted OpenMeSmiler in custody and fast, before episode two.
‘The inroad is that I’m in, but don’t get too excited. I’m being questioned over and over again. How do I know about OpenMeSmiler? Who introduced me?’
‘And?’
‘I found a mention of OpenMeSmiler in a men’s health online forum, one that got quite heated and angry, full of men who’d been wronged, mostly by partners but not always.
There was talk of never getting karma, never seeing the bad people suffer, and one of the users mentioned OpenMeSmiler.
I mentioned one of the names on there and that seemed to make whoever is behind OpenMeSmiler sit back and relax a little.
I explained that I searched the web but couldn’t find them so I went onto the dark web and there they were.
I gave them a story that I was sick of my wife cheating on me with our mechanic – classic – and I mentioned that I’d been recording her when she’s in her car and that I set up a camera at his workshop. They like recordings.’
‘Did they let you in?’
‘No. I’m pending but I had to click a secrecy agreement, which I did. On coming out of the site I noticed I was being tracked and I suspected that might happen.’
‘What?’ Garth forgot that they weren’t all on his wavelength.
‘They’ve infiltrated the laptop. They tried to gain access to the camera and speaker but I managed to block them. I look nothing like my fake profile.’
Gina stared at the laptop in front of him. ‘Is it turned off?’
‘No, but it’s not this laptop. This one just has my notes on it. The laptop in question is in a closed room but don’t worry, no one is listening or recording but I’m sure I won’t be trusted until they actually see me.’
‘Is there anything you can find out without going in?’
‘No, OpenMeSmiler is impossible to trace.’
‘What about the fake profile, the one you referenced to get onto OpenMeSmiler?’
‘The person behind that has used a VPN and their profile has been made to look like it belongs to someone in Venezuela. That forum is more like a social media site but a little more private and not even nearly as sophisticated in the way it works. The photos on the profile are mostly ripped from the internet, family, food pics and gym pics etcetera, and it’s a fairly new account but there is a breakthrough and it’s going to knock your socks off.
It’s almost as meaty as if I’d got into OpenMeSmiler. ’
Gina stared wide-eyed. ‘Hit us with it.’
‘I have a location of where two of the fake profile holder’s photos were taken and it was only last week, the meta data is embedded in the images.
It looks like our suspect didn’t keep their guard up all the time and it is the earlier uploads that have given them away. Maybe they got slack, who knows?’
‘Where are the locations?’
‘Chez Ursula’s. The photo is of a trodden over slice of pizza on the pavement and it’s dated Friday the sixteenth of January at nineteen fifteen.’
‘And the other one?’
‘Mindy’s address. It’s a photo of a bit of fence in the dark, dated Wednesday the fourteenth of January at twenty-two fifty-nine.’
‘The two places where Mindy would hang out the most,’ Gina said.
‘This isn’t all about Mindy. We have to think bigger.
We need to talk to Ursula again.’ Gina swallowed.
‘We can’t rule her out.’ Gina stared at the board.
‘The timing of the fence photo fits in with the neighbour seeing two men outside Mindy’s house, by the fence.
It has to be one of those men. The pizza photo was on the same evening that Mindy called her brother because she was scared.
It was a lot earlier but such a coincidence.
Ursula works quite late. We need to speak to her. ’
PC Ahmed stepped in from the back. ‘We’ve had a report of a missing man. He was going out to his car and no one has seen him since. His mother called.’
Gina shivered, knowing they’d have to delay seeing Ursula. Without confirmation, she knew that OpenMeSmiler had done as promised in that message and struck again. That man was going to end up stabbed in the back and left in some bushes unless they found him fast.