Barbara Havers was in the midst of highlighting data sheets with a yellow marker when Lynley and Nkata walked in. At her elbow sat an opened package of Mr. Kipling strawberry jam tarts and a cup of coffee, which she drained with a grimace, and a "Bloody hell. Cold," after which she looked longingly at a packet of Players half-buried beneath a pile of printouts.
"Don't even think of it," Lynley told her. "What've you got from SO5?"
She set down her marker pen and worked the muscles of her shoulders. "You're going to want to keep this one away from the press."
"Now that's a fine beginning," Lynley commented. "Let's have it, then."
"Going back three months, Juvenile Index and Missing Persons together coughed up fifteen hundred and seventy-four names."
"Damn." Lynley took the data sheets from her and flipped through them impatiently. Across the room, DI Stewart rang off and finished his notes.
"You ask me," Havers said, "it looks like things haven't changed much since the last time SO5 faced the press about not keeping their systems up to date. You'd think they wouldn't want egg on their neckties again."
"You'd think so," Lynley agreed. As a matter of course, the names of children reported missing went into the system at once. But often, when the child was found, the name was not then removed from the system. Nor was it necessarily removed when children who might have started out missing ended up either incarcerated as youth offenders or placed in the care of Social Services. It was a case of the left and right hands not knowing, and more than once this sort of inefficiency on the part of Missing Persons had created a logjam in an investigation.
"I'm reading the news on your face," Havers said, "but no way can I do this alone, sir. More than fifteen hundred names? By the time I get through them all, this bloke"-with a jerk of her head towards the photographs posted on the china board-"he'll have his next seven victims dispatched."
"We'll get you some help," Lynley said. To Stewart, "John? Get some additional manpower for this. Put half on the phones checking to see if these kids have turned up since they went missing and have the other half go for a match: our four bodies to descriptions in the paperwork. Anything remotely possible that could allow us to tie a name to a corpse, run with it. And what've we heard from Vice on the most recent body? Has Theobald's Road given us anything on the boy in St. George's Gardens? Has King's Cross? What about Tolpuddle Street?"
DI Stewart took up a notebook. "According to Vice, the description doesn't fit any boy recently on the job anywhere. Among the regulars, no one's missing. So far."
"Get on to Vice where the other bodies were found as well," Lynley said to Havers. "See if you can make a match with anyone reported missing there." He went to the china board, where he gazed at the photos of the most recent victim. John Stewart joined him. As usual, the DI was nervous energy combined with an obsession for detail. The notebook he carried was open to an outline, which he'd done in various colours significant only to himself. Lynley said to him, "What've we got from across the river?"
"No reports yet," Stewart said. "I checked with Dee Harriman not ten minutes ago."
"We'll want them to test the makeup this boy's wearing, John. See if we can track down the manufacturer. Could be our victim didn't put it on himself. If that's the case and if the makeup's not something available at every Boots in town, the point of sale could move us in the right direction. In the meantime, run a check on recent releases from prison and from mental hospitals. Recent releases from every youth facility within one hundred miles as well. And this works in both directions, so keep that in mind."
"Both directions?" Stewart looked up from his furious writing.
"Our killer could come from one of them. But so could our victims. And until we have a positive identification on all four of these boys, we don't know exactly what we're dealing with, except the most obvious."
"One sick bastard."
"There's enough evidence on the last body to attest to that," Lynley agreed. His gaze went to that evidence even as he spoke, as if drawn there without his intention: the long postmortem incision on the torso, the blood-drawn symbol on