Tony Hill u Carol Jordan 08 - Cross and Burn

‘Kenton Vale. You don’t want to wait till the end of the school day? Or until his aunt gets here?’
    Fielding looked at her as if she was mad. ‘Paula, this is the twenty-first century. There’s no such thing as a hermetically sealed investigation any more. I don’t want this kid finding out his mother’s dead from Twitter or Facebook. As soon as we know for sure, we need to move on it. Line up an appropriate adult. What about the friend he’s staying with? Presumably there’s a parent in the picture?’
    Now she was in the shit. ‘Actually, the friends he’s staying with are me and Elinor. My partner.’
    Fielding surprised her again, given her child-minding jibe the day before. ‘Why didn’t you say so? It’s no big deal, as long as the family’s happy with that.’ She sounded more exasperated than angry. ‘Frankly, I’d rather he was safe under your roof than camping with some mate we know nothing about. Can you get your girlfriend to come and hold his hand?’
    ‘It depends on her schedule. She’s a registrar at Bradfield Cross; if she’s got a clinic or ward rounds, she can’t just walk away from it.’
    ‘When does the aunt arrive?’
    ‘Not until this afternoon.’
    ‘I don’t want you tied up till then. See what you can do.’ She glanced at the white-suited CSIs, lugging their boxes of kit across the bleak car park. ‘Looks like we’re getting some action.’
    She set off in their wake, but Paula’s phone rang and she hung back to answer it. The screen told her it was Dave Myers. ‘Hi, Dave. I hope you’re ringing me with some good news,’ she said. ‘We’ve got another body and it’s looking like the same killer. So any help would be really welcome right now.’
    ‘I’m sure it would,’ he said, sounding unusually downbeat. ‘Can you swing by the lab? There’s something I want to show you.’
    ‘That sounds intriguing. You want to give me a clue?’
    ‘Not on a mobile.’
    Paula wasn’t used to Dave in worried, cagey mode. ‘Will it take long? I’ve got to drive into Bradfield soon, but I won’t have much time to spare.’
    ‘It won’t take long. What might take longer is figuring out what to do about it.’

    Forty-five minutes later, Paula was climbing into a white paper suit at the forensics lab once more. Once they’d confirmed it was Bev’s body that had been abandoned in the moorland car park, Fielding had despatched Paula back to the city. On the way, she’d managed to get hold of Elinor and arranged to swing by for her after she’d seen Dave. The police car had dropped her at home so she could pick up her Toyota; she was running on her own clock again.
    When she walked in, Dave was in front of his laptop, pecking at the keys with two fingers. She placed the two polythene bags on the counter beside him. ‘A gift from West Yorkshire police. If there’s any issues of contamination, blame them.’
    Dave stood up and lifted the bags one by one, peering into them. ‘They’ve been out all night?’
    ‘We don’t know when they were dumped. The clothes and the handbag were shoved in a rubbish bin so they’ve been pretty well protected from the elements.’
    ‘But who can say what they’ve picked up from the contents of the bin.’ He sighed, prodding the clothes bag with a finger.
    ‘The victim is Beverley McAndrew. She was a friend of Elinor’s.’
    ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Tell her I’ll do everything I can.’
    ‘You always do, Dave. So, what’s this mysterious thing you want to show me that you can’t talk about on the phone?’ Paula said, perching on a stool.
    ‘The blood sample I recovered from Nadzieja Wilkowa’s jacket. I extracted DNA from it without any difficulty. And I ran it through the NDNAD. There was no hit. This sample belongs to someone who isn’t on the national database. But I didn’t stop there. I decided to run a familial DNA search. You know what that is?’
    ‘It tells you if there’s someone on the database who’s a close relative to the person whose sample you’re testing, right?’
    ‘Right. There have been some spectacular results since we started using it. Cold cases being solved. They’ve even caught serial killers with it in America. Some people bleat about human rights and privacy, but personally I think it’s my human right to live in a world where murderous bastards don’t get to roam unmolested in my community.’
    ‘Here endeth the sermon.’
    Dave conceded with a rueful smile. ‘Yes,