Page 33 of The Trap by Catherine
It was obvious from her tone that the answer wasno.
But why? Angela sensed she should at least attempt to come up with a reason.
“I, ah, I don’t know,” she said. “But I suppose... Well... The phones were all found discarded in public places, right? So isn’t it possible that there’s a missing woman whose phone we just didn’t find? Like one that ended up slipping down a drain or getting flattened by a truck or picked up by someone who didn’t realize its significance?”
Denise nodded, encouraging her.
“And then there’s the fact,” Angela went on, “that thousands of adults are reported missing by their family or friends every year who have actuallydecidedto leave, for whatever reason, and if you wanted to disappear, surely the first thing you’d do is get rid of your phone. Or one of the first things, anyway. So how do you differentiate between a phone thrown away by its owner and a phone that someone potentiallytookoff its owner and threw away because he was bundling her into the back of his van or whatever and didn’t want to be tracked?”
“Do you know Superintendent Colin Hall?” Denise asked.
Angela was thrown by the sudden change in direction and before she could answerno, Denise had carried on.
“You’d recognize him if you saw him, because he’s never met a camera lens he didn’t love. Well, Jennifer Gold went missing from his jurisdiction and her uncle is one of his golfing buddies. Hall is at least partly responsible for the circus that followed Jennifer’s disappearance—and he’s wholly responsible for the establishment of Operation Tide. Which he thought he should lead, needless to say. Have you ever readJurassic Park??”
Angela blinked at Denise. “Have I...?”
“And I do meanread. Seeing the film doesn’t count. It’s not just about dinosaurs, you know.”
“I didn’t say it w—”
“There’s a scene in the book,” Denise said, “where they realize that their computer program, the system that runs the park, isn’t doing what it’s supposed to do. It isn’t counting all the dinosaurs. They have it set up so that, say, there’s supposed to be ten raptors or whatever, and every so often it checks that there’s still ten raptors, that none of them have escaped. But Ian Malcolm—that’s Jeff Goldblum in the film—realizes that the system has a fatal flaw. If you tell it to look for ten raptors, it’ll look for ten raptors. But then it’ll stop. It won’t let you know if there’s eleven, although it will alert you if there’s nine. Once it finds what it expects, it’s satisfied. So it’s not really counting the animals in the park at all.”
Angela wondered if there’d been some kind of hallucinogen in her salad, or perhaps salmonella in the chicken. Was she really sitting in Detective Denise Pope’s car parked just off the M11, eating McDonald’s and talking about counting the dinosaurs inJurassic Park?
And if so, where the hell was Denise going with this?
“That’sOperation Tide,” Denise said. “Hall wanted his little glory op. He needed enough missing women to justify it, so he went and found them. There’s no question that Jennifer Gold was abducted, but one missing woman does not a high-profile operation make. He needed more. But heonlyneeded two more, and he stopped once he had them. And look, maybe I’d have done the same. It’s no bad thing that everyone is now looking for two women who no one was looking for before. The problem is, there could be more raptors out there. And the three he has might not even be raptors at all. One of them might be a T-Rex. One of them might not even be a dinosaur, but a cow or a sheep or something. And if he proves that, what happens to his op? It gets junked. So you’d have to ask, how thoroughly has he checked?”
Angela was too busy trying to track the metaphor to answer.
“Do you like Don?” Denise asked then. “Like working with him?”
“Yeah,” Angela said. “He’s great.”
This conversation was giving her whiplash.
“Well, he vouched for you, so if you repeat any of what I’m about to tell you to anyone else, it’s him that’ll get in trouble.” Denise met her eye. “Do you understand that?”
Angela nodded vigorously. “Yeah.”
Denise gave her one last lingering glare.
“I have a list,” she said then. “Disappearances that I think could possibly—shouldpossibly—be under the remit of Operation Tide. All it was before today was a list of guesses. Possibilities. Because I can’t go reinvestigating cases, and I can’t go to the Super and tell him I think him and his Tidies should do it. And I’m only tangentially on Tide, because I happened to be the FLO for both Tana and Nicki’s families. When Kearns started looking shady, they put me on him too. Figured it was no harm to have a detective around him. But Hall could kick me off at any moment, and then I can’t do anything. So I have to tread very carefully and move quickly, before anyone starts asking why I’m helping a paper-pusher in the MPU”—Angela tried not to react to this—“chase down something we can’t use in court anyway on a three-year-old missing person report that not even the family want to keep active.”
“So Kerry Long was on your list?” she asked.
Denise nodded. “She was at the top of my list, actually. I didn’t really have anything tangible on her one way or another, but I don’t know... I just had a feeling. Sometimes that’s all you have, and you have to trust that that’s enough of a reason to do a little more digging. That’s why Don called me about it—about what you found.”
“And now her phone being in the front garden—”
“—confirms my suspicions, yes. Her mother said Kerry would get a bus out of Enniscorthy but she’d have to walk the last bit of her route home. In January, she’d have been doing that in the dark. She could’ve been snatched off the road by someone who took her phone and threw it over a hedge, not realizing it washerhedge. Not realizing that he’d taken her from right outside her own house.”
“It’s just like Jennifer Gold,” Angela said. “It could be just like her.”
“Only in this case, we have physical evidence. Nothing that we could use in court, of course—our continuity of evidence is completely fucked—but we might be able to use it for something all the same.”
“January 2019, though.”
