TWENTY-EIGHT

3 P.M.

Stacey read the words she’d written down a couple of times before saying them out loud. She was happy to work on the next clue. She’d been searching any geocaching sites she could find in the hope of spotting some reference to the Jester, and she was still coming up blank. Penn had been kind enough to nip out and get some snacks before the supermarket closed.

‘“This might be folly. Ramble high b4 you see the blackened hill.”’

‘Say what now?’ Penn asked.

‘That’s our next clue, along with some crudely extracted teeth and another Dictaphone tape recording the torture.’

Stacey paused as she looked at Frost. ‘You okay?’ she asked. The woman appeared to have lost all colour.

‘Don’t,’ she said, waving her hand. ‘Total phobia of dentists. I can only go for a check-up under sedation.’

‘Oh, okay,’ Stacey said, fearing the reporter was going to head for the nearest bathroom to vomit if she said anything else. She tucked the info away, sure that the boss could use that little nugget for occasions when she really wanted to get the woman out of her face.

Stacey passed the words she’d written down over to Penn. ‘You wanna look at that while I contact the zoo about possible CCTV?’

‘Yeah, nothing more I can do on our victim anyway.’

‘Oh yeah, and Bryant seems to think he could hear someone on the tape with the hiccups. Boss told him he was?—’

‘Are you sure?’ Penn asked, cutting her off.

She shrugged. ‘That’s what he said. Why?’

‘That’s the nickname of the guy I’ve been chasing after all morning.’

‘But what more can you do?’ Stacey asked, seeing the tension creep into his face. ‘Maybe we know that’s who our sicko has, but getting anything about where he was taken from is going to be impossible. Your key sources aren’t very reliable.’

‘I know, but who the hell does this bastard think he is?’ Penn raged. ‘How does he think he can just take a person from the streets and do whatever he wants with them?’

‘Disposable,’ Frost offered. ‘He doesn’t see the man’s life as important or valuable, so it’s no great loss.’

‘But doesn’t that tell us something?’ Stacey asked, thinking of all the conversations she’d had with her buddy, Alison, the behaviourist.

Penn and Frost waited.

‘It might indicate he has a consideration for the bigger picture, that he doesn’t want to affect too many lives. I’m just rambling here, but I’m thinking that in his mind, he’s resolved that if he’s going to take a life, it’ll be one that hurts as few people possible. Also, he’s put the onus on us to find Hiccup before it’s too late. If anything happens to the man, it’ll be our fault not his.’

‘But what about the torture?’ Penn asked.

‘Hey, I’m not saying our sicko is a choirboy. I’m saying that I don’t think that killing is the primary motivation here. It’s about the game. He’s had to make the stakes high enough to engage us, and this is the only way he can do that.’ She paused. ‘I’d even say this man has never taken a life before.’

Penn shook his head. ‘I’m not convinced. Anyone who can pull out a defenceless man’s nails and teeth is capable of much more.’

Stacey opened her mouth to argue, but Penn reached for his headphones, indicating he’d left the conversation.

She sighed as she turned back to her screen.

Penn had better hope that she was right because if she was, at least Hiccup had a chance.