Page 42 of 36 Hours
‘So much so you’re upsetting the apple cart a bit, eh?’
The smile disappeared. ‘Eric Lane is a total knob.’
He hadn’t needed telling who she was talking about.
‘Neck and neck on the ratings, yet you do things very differently.’
‘The knob is a purist. Wants to keep the puzzles how they’ve always been. That’s had its day. People want something a bit more exciting. They want to follow clues to a crime, to a place where something terrible happened. They want horror, ghosts, gore, excitement.’
‘And you give them that?’
‘If you’re asking, you haven’t watched any of my videos. Wanna see?’ he asked, turning to his computer.
‘I’m good, thanks – just explain to me what you do.’
‘I film myself out at night in the woods, by lakes, in dark scary places finding bones, blood pools, disfigured dolls, crucifixes, nooses.’
He was growing more and more animated.
‘So, whose puzzle are you following?’ Kim asked.
He looked at her as though that was perfectly obvious. ‘My own.’
Although Kim hadn’t warmed to Eric Lane, she was beginning to see what offended him about this kid.
Eric Lane set puzzles and then followed puzzles laid by others. It was an exchange of people laying and following clues. Intelligence and cunning pitted against each other equally. But Jared Truss was a one-man band.
‘I’m an entertainer,’ he said as though reading her thoughts. ‘I’m not gonna lie. I want subscribers to my channel. I want followers. I want sponsors. And I can only get what I want if I’m the best at what I do.’
‘So, the competition between the two of you is very real?’
‘Absolutely. I’m not going to let some old man get in the way of my plans.’
There was a hardness to Jared’s words that hadn’t been there before.
A wave of frustration surged through her. She had now met two people who used the Seekers site for their own reasons. Both of them potential suspects and she couldn’t do a thing. She couldn’t get warrants and she couldn’t interrogate them because right now she couldn’t even prove that a crime had been committed. If she could, she would have been coming at this guy with a bit more force. His interest in the macabre could indicate that he might not be averse to a bit of torture to get the win against Eric Lane and also to generate publicity for himself. No question this guy wanted his fifteen minutes of fame.
She had just one more question to ask.
‘And what are you willing to do to get what you want, Jared?’
‘Anything it takes, Officer, anything at all.’
THIRTY-TWO
4.30P.M.
‘Will someone please take that pizza out of my sight?’ Stacey begged as a third piece began to wink at her.
When the boss ordered food, she sure knew how to take care of them. There were no supermarket meal deals or fast-food burgers. The pizzas, lasagne and cannelloni delivered by Luigi were all homemade, fresh and delicious.
‘I’ll put it with the rest,’ Penn said, lifting the box from the desk and taking it to the small kitchen area next door.
Thankfully the second segment of footage had arrived from Dudley Zoo while she’d been devouring the margherita.
Now she had a suspicion about who had planted the box, she wanted to get a better angle on what was under the pushchair, and more importantly, get an exact time that the woman had entered the zoo.
If she was honest, the figure she’d seen heading towards the reptile house was not what she’d expected, but if there was one thing this job had taught her, it was that appearances meant nothing. Some of the worst killers they’d come across wouldn’t stand out in a crowd.