A longer chapter to get your teeth stuck into. Thanks as always to my reviewers Kara, Hollie and Georgie. Enjoy!
Nate was sat on his own in the dark changing rooms. As soon as they had left the Inspector's office, he had told the others he just needed to get some air. He wasn't normally one to cry, but he couldn't help it. Sally should have been enjoying herself with her sister Gemma and her mother, but instead she was missing and he had no idea what had happened to her. He wiped his face with his hand and sorted himself out. He had to ring Gemma. It would be hard, but she needed to know.
"Gem? It's Nate." he said quietly.
"Hiya. Has Sally even left yet? She was supposed to be here last night. I bet she couldn't bear leaving you could she. Tell her to get her ass in gear otherwise me and mum are going to start the treatments without her!" Gemma said with a laugh. She sounded a lot like Sally, and the pang in Nate's heart increased.
"Gemma, Sally isn't with me. I was hoping she was with you." he said, his heart dropping.
"No, no she's not. Wait, if she's not with you or me, where is she? Nate, what's going on?" Gemma asked, panic lacing her voice.
"She left ours yesterday, in the evening. She said she'd text me or ring me this morning to tell me she got there, but she didn't. I thought she'd just forgot, you know what she's like, but she wasn't answering her phone, it kept going to voicemail. And then Jess tried calling her, and someone picked up but it wasn't her. We tracked her mobile signal to an estate some miles away from here. We found her phone, her empty purse and her bag. We don't know where she is Gemma." Nate said, his voice cracking at the end.
"She's missing? Is that what you're saying?" Gemma confirmed quietly.
"At the minute it's looking that way. We're gonna find her, I promise." Nate said determinedly.
"Alive or dead though?" Gemma cried. Nate could hear her sobbing.
"Where's your mum?" he asked.
"She's having a bath before we have our treatments. What am I going to tell her?" Gemma sobbed.
"You tell her what's happened and that we're doing everything we can. We'll find her." Nate said with conviction.
"You better. I'll never forgive you if you don't." Gemma said harshly. Nate was taken aback; normally Gemma and him got on like a house on fire. Obviously the fear of losing her younger sister had got to her and she was looking for someone to blame, Nate being the easiest target.
"So she's missing? Is that what we're saying?" Stevie asked the Inspector as she leaned back in a chair in the CID briefing room.
"It's looking more and more that way. She's vanished seemingly without a trace." Gina explained.
"Ok, Mickey, you're with me. We'll check her credit card companies; see if any withdrawals have been made over the last twelve hours. If they have, we can find out where, and try and get footage from ATM's. We'll freeze her accounts as well to stop any more money going. Jess, Will, your job is to track down her car. Whoever took her purse, bag and phone are likely to have taken her car as well. Maybe this is a carjacking gone wrong. Find the car, track it on CCTV, you know the drill. Beth, go and find Nate, then take the things of Sally's that you found at the house to Eddie. I want them fingerprinted, the works. Tell him to make this his priority." Stevie ordered. The various officers went off to their assigned tasks, leaving the Inspector and the two sergeants in the room with Stevie.
"What do you want us to do?" Callum asked.
"I think you should let your team know what's happening. Tell them to keep a look out for her car, you know the drill. Keep their spirits up, it's not easy when one of our own goes missing, but we want a result on this, and to do that everyone needs to be focused." Stevie said with a grim smile. Callum nodded and left the room, followed by Gina.
"You ok?" Smithy asked softly, coming to stand in front of the petite blonde.
"I like Sally. I just hope that wherever she is, she's safe." Stevie said quietly. Smithy kissed her gently, pulling her close against him.
"Sally's a fighter; she won't take no crap from anyone, rest assured. Let me know if you need anything." Smithy said kindly, briefly kissing her again as he left the room.
"Moss, I got a hit." Mickey called across the room from his desk. Stevie got to her feet, hurrying across the small space.
"What? Has her card been used?" Stevie asked.
"Yep, look, the credit card company said that her cards were all used at this ATM one after the other, and they've taken out the maximum they can. They gave me the ATM location, it's here." Mickey said, pointing to a print out of a map with a red dot where the ATM was located. Stevie traced her finger along the map to where Sally's discarded items were found.
"Ok, what time were they used?" Stevie asked, perching on the desk.
"Early hours of the morning. The ATM operators are sending me the CCTV in the timeframe from the ATM itself. Hopefully we'll get a hit." Mickey said.
"Right, cancel her cards. I'm going to hazard a guess that they dumped her stuff in the house before carrying on to here." Stevie grabbed a pen off Mickey's desk, marking the possible routes the attackers could have taken to get from the house to the ATM. "I'll give this to Jess and Will, see if there's any CCTV of them or Sal's car on it that we can use. Good work Mickey."
"Leon, we got a shout. Come on." Callum shouted down the hall to where Leon was stood at the vending machine. He sighed, dumping his undrunk coffee into the bin. He jogged to his sergeant, following him out to the car.
"What's the shout?" Leon asked, buckling himself in as Callum tore away from the station.
"Car on fire on the Laksmere estate. An elderly resident called it in. Fire service has been called and is en route." Callum rattled off as he sped to the estate. It didn't take long to find. The smoke billowed out of the car, thick, dark smoke. The car had been parked haphazardly in the centre of the green, and by the looks of it had been on fire for quite a while. "Leon, ask all these people if anyone saw anything."
"I doubt they did." Leon said with a sigh.
"I know, but still ask. I'll see if I can pull the registration number, as long as it hasn't melted away that is." Callum said, exiting the car and jogging over to the burning car. "Can you all move back for your own safety." he shouted at the crowd who took no notice of him. He shook his head and inched towards the car. He could just about make out the registration plate. He quickly jotted it down, moving back away from the car. "Anything?"
"No, surprise surprise. Do you want me to go ask the woman who called it in? Maybe she saw something." Leon suggested.
"Sure. Get the address of the woman of Rog, and then go find out. Come back here once you're done." Callum ordered.
"Sarge." Leon confirmed, walking across the green to one of the blocks of flats that surrounded it.
"Sierra Oscar 30 to 275." Callum said into his radio.
"Go ahead sarge." Roger confirmed.
"Can you do a registration number check for me Rog. The number is Lima, Victor, 5, 1 – Charlie, Juliet, 0. Did you get that, over?" Callum checked.
"Yes sarge. Give me a minute, it's just searching. Ok sarge, got a hit..." Roger cut out.
"Rog? Who's it belong to over?" Callum asked, listening intently for Roger's reply.
"It belongs to Sally Armstrong sarge, over." Roger said clearly. Callum shut his eyes, a sigh escaping his lips.
"Right. Let DS Moss and the Inspector know Rog. Thanks, over." Callum said, calling off. That's all they needed.
"Jess, Will, Sally's car has been found on fire at the Laksmere estate. There's a few cameras dotted around the estate, check if any of them work, see if you can find the car. If you can, get the number of people in the car, any kind of characteristics, you know. Then work backwards, try and get some sort of trail of their movements." Smithy said quickly.
"Was there anyone in the car?" Will asked. Smithy shook his head.
"Where the hell is she?" Jess said in despair.
"Jess, maybe you should go home. You're shift is finished." Smithy suggested gently.
Jess widened her eyes, glaring at him, "You really think I'm going to leave halfway through this investigation when my best friend is missing? I don't think so. I'm fine."
Smithy exchanged a look with Will, as if to say "Keep an eye on her." Will nodded discreetly. "Fine, but you go home if you get tired or anything..."
"Sarge stop fussing. I am fine. Please, let me do my job." Jess begged. Smithy nodded and backed out the room.
Jess and Will burst through the doors to CID twenty minutes later, some print outs in their hands.
"What you got?" Mickey asked immediately. Jess laid the CCTV grabs on his desk.
"Only one of the cameras on the estate worked, but we managed to get some decent CCTV grabs. Here's Sally's car entering the estate, and you can clearly see two people in the car." Will said.
"Either of them Sally?" Stevie asked, joining them.
"No, both of them are IC1 males as far as we can tell. We tried working backwards through the CCTV and have identified a partial trail." Jess explained, placing the map that Stevie gave them earlier with the ATM location on it. "This is what we've got. They have obviously been driving round a bit before going onto the estate; this is the best we got." Jess said, placing more CCTV grabs on the desk.
"Right, all this needs to go on the board and I can add some more bits onto the timeline. Good work you two." Stevie said in praise, scooping up all the pieces of paper and starting to pin them to the incident board, adding in some of the times onto the practically empty timeline.
"Sarge." Mickey called over his shoulder.
"CCTV from the ATM's?" Stevie guessed.
"Yep, let's have a look then." Mickey said, opening the video. It wasn't very good quality, but it was enough to see that the two men, IC1, appeared to be the same as the guys in Sally's car, dressed in the same gear.
"No clear picture of their faces though. Damn hoodies!" Stevie said in exasperation.
"These can't be first timers. They're smart. They know that we'll be checking all of this, and they're making sure we can't identify them." Mickey said reasonably.
"Lucky us getting clever criminals for once." Stevie said sarcastically.
"What I meant was we know we're not looking for first timers. These people are going to be smart, but it's also more likely that they have a more extensive record." Mickey explained.
"I know what you meant. Sorry for snapping." Stevie apologised.
"It's alright, it's a tough case." Mickey said in understanding.
Nate and Beth were grabbing a quick bite to eat while waiting for Eddie's initial assessment of the Sally's items when Nate's phone rang.
"PC Roberts." he said, quickly swallowing the food in his mouth.
"Hi, this is Dr Trueman; we met earlier about your Jane Doe?" Adam said.
"Oh hi, how can I help?" Nate asked.
"We were just going through her clothes when we found an address on a piece of paper. I don't know if you want to come down here and get it with the rest of her clothes. We've bagged them up for you." the doctor said.
"Uh, yeah that'd be brilliant. We'll be down soon. Thanks." Nate said hanging up.
"Who was that?" Beth asked.
"The Dr from the hospital about our Jane Doe. He found an address in her pocket, thought we could check it out. We can get her clothes as well while we're at it." Nate said.
"Yeah, it will keep us focused." Beth said with a nod.
"But I want to be looking for Sally!" Nate cried in exasperation.
"Nate, there's nothing for us to do at the minute. We have to wait on Eddie. We need to help Jane Doe as well as Sally. Come on, I'll drive." Beth said gently.
After picking up Jane Doe's ripped up clothes, well, they were more shreds of fabric rather than clothes, they returned to the station with the clothes and address. Neither Beth nor Nate recognised the address. They dropped the clothes in on Eddie before heading to a computer to find this address and work out what it meant in relation to Jane Doe.
Eddie was cranky. Not only had he been given so many things to fingerprint and do DNA swabs off, he had received no thanks for his hard work. It wasn't easy getting finger prints off of things! He huffed as Nate and Beth dumped another load of "priority" stuff on him to analyse. They would have to wait. He had finally managed to get a partial fingerprint off of Sally's phone, and running it through the system had come up with a number of names. He had called Stevie in and given her the list of three men and two women to go through and eradicate those names which weren't correct. While she was doing that in the corner of his lab, he managed to get a full fingerprint off of Sally's bag. Running that through his computer had come up with the name Jack Mackenzie. Eddie gave the name to Stevie, who cross referenced it with the names from the phone, coming up with a known associate named Steve Smith, previous for ABH. Mackenzie had previous for battery and intimidation. This wasn't looking good for Sally, but at least they know had the two names of the men who might have taken her. As Stevie was about to thank Eddie and tell Mickey their findings, Eddie stopped her.
"There's a separate print on her purse, different from the other two." Eddie muttered. He put it through the system, coming up with Liam O'Brien, a known associate of Mackenzie and Smith.
"But there were only two people at the ATM and in her car." Stevie said in confusion.
"Well, you've got your names and your prints now. I can start on everything else that's been marked as priority." Eddie mumbled.
"Thanks Eddie, you've been brilliant." Stevie said, flashing him a quick smile. She felt like they were getting somewhere now. Eddie blushed.
"Anything for you DS Moss." he said.
Stevie shared the findings of the suspects for Sally's disappearance with the Inspector and the two sergeants.
"I think we should contact the media, get them to circulate these men's photos, provide a direct number to the incident room. We need to make sure no-one else falls victim to these men, and we need to find Sally." Stevie suggested.
"Stevie's right, the media could be a big help in this. And if we can circulate both Sally's picture and the suspect's, we might get a hit." Smithy agreed.
"We should circulate this to the other boroughs as well; tell them to be on the lookout." Callum added.
"I agree with all of you. Ring the news stations, ring the other boroughs, and tell them these men are wanted in the disappearance of PC Sally Armstrong." Gina said with a nod.
"Nate? Beth? I've had a hit on your Jane Doe's leather belt." Eddie called to the two officers.
"Eddie? What is it?" Beth asked hurriedly, noting the sombre look on the normally cheerful CSE's face.
"The fingerprint belongs to Liam O'Brien." Eddie said.
"Right, thanks Eddie, we'll get on it." Nate said, turning to exit the lab.
"Wait. Liam O'Brien's fingerprints were also found on Sally's purse." Eddie said quietly.
"What? No that can't be right, cause then that would mean..."Nate began, his mind working overtime. He fumbled in his pocket for the address found in the Jane Doe's jean pocket. He rushed to one of Eddie's computers, typing the address in, misspelling it a number of times before finally getting it right. "No no no no..."
"Nate what is it?" Beth asked.
"The Black Sparrow Hotel and Spa." Nate whispered, printing it off.
"What? That's where Jane Doe was heading?" Beth asked, not quite seeing where Nate was going with all this.
"That's where Sally was going." Nate said quietly, his voice shaky.
"But that would mean..."Beth began.
"That our Jane Doe is Sally." Nate whispered. Sally, his Sally Armstrong. He hadn't given a second though for the Jane Doe in the hospital, hadn't recognised her for who she really was. The guilt nearly suffocated him as he sprinted out of the station and sped off to the hospital.