Deep Hurt - Eva Hudson Page 0,85
is it anything else, huh?”
“I really appreciate your help with this, Mike. I think maybe I’ve been forgetting to tell you that, I’ve been so caught up in the detail.”
“Hey, don’t mention it. I’ll call soon as I have more news.” He rang off, leaving Ingrid standing in the middle of a police parking lot feeling more than a little lost.
She walked unsteadily to a low brick wall that separated the lot from the back of the police station and sat down, reflecting on what Mike had just told her.
So many bodies.
The killer must have been adding to his collection for at least eighteen years. Ingrid wondered how long his victims had survived before they ended up buried in the yard or beneath the floor of the basement. How much they had suffered before that. She prayed Megan wasn’t one of them.
The door to the parking lot opened and Tyson stuck his head through the gap. He stared at her for a moment, a shocked expression on his face. “Are you OK?”
Ingrid stood up, relieved to discover her legs were strong enough to carry her weight. “I’m fine.” She swallowed. “Did you get a location for the store?”
“Better than that—Foster’s on the phone right now to your tall friend.”
Ingrid ran to the door and pushed Tyson aside in her hurry to get back to the incident room. “Can you get a trace on the call?” she said, striding down the corridor.
“We weren’t exactly set up for it—we’re trying to get something fixed up as quick as we can.”
Ingrid slowed to let Tyson catch up with her. “It’s OK—the base is monitoring all calls coming into Major Gurley’s phone. I’m guessing it was patched through from his landline at Freckenham?”
“No idea—Jack didn’t exactly get a chance to tell me.”
Tyson’s use of Gurley’s first name didn’t pass Ingrid by. The two of them were getting a little too pally for her liking.
A few moments later, she burst through the incident room door, with Tyson close behind. Gurley turned sharply and glared at her. A plain clothes cop Ingrid hadn’t seen before was sitting at the desk next to him with the handset of a landline pressed hard against her ear. She made a circling motion with an index finger, encouraging Gurley to keep Kyle Foster talking. But Foster knew what he was doing—he wouldn’t stay on the line for long.
“Sonofabitch!” Gurley exclaimed. “The bastard just hung up on me. Said he’d call back tomorrow.” He looked at the detective sitting at the desk. She was nodding and making approving noises into her phone.
“They traced the call to Tring,” she said when she’d put down the phone.
“Where the hell is that?” Gurley said.
“It’s a village just north of London,” the detective explained.
“So he’s maybe on his way back to London? To the hospital?” Gurley asked.
“He wouldn’t risk it,” Ingrid said. “Too many cops.”
“Then why come south at all?”
“What did he say to you?” Tyson asked.
“He was making demands again—that Tommy be put on a plane to the US. The guy’s got a screw loose.”
“What did you tell him?” Ingrid asked.
“What I did before,” Gurley said without looking at her. “To give himself up before he made things even worse for himself.”
“Why would he change his mind now?”
“I’m not giving in to him.”
“We need to at least pretend to agree to his demands—how else are we going to track him down?” Ingrid moved closer to Gurley until he had no choice but to look at her. “What else did he say?”
“He wanted to know how Molly was. I refused to tell him unless he put Tommy on the line.”
“You actually spoke to Tommy?”
“No. Foster went quiet after that. Then hung up.”
“Couldn’t you have given him the information first, then asked to speak to Tommy? The guy’s clearly concerned about his daughter.” Ingrid felt like shaking Gurley.
“How is that relevant? I kept him on the line long enough to trace the call to some village. How hard can it be to find him there?”
“Except that he’s probably already on the move.” Ingrid walked away, just in case the temptation to slap Gurley in the mouth became too overwhelming to resist.
She wheeled back around when the landline on the desk rang. Tyson grabbed it. He nodded a couple of times, thanked the caller and threw the handset back onto the cradle. “Unsurprisingly, we’ve just had confirmation the convenience store is also in Tring.”
“How quickly can we get there?” Gurley asked the detective sergeant.
“With blues and twos?