No Smoke Without Fire (A DCI Warren Jones Novel - Book 2) Read Online Free

pick-up point in the side street behind Far and Away travel agents, where she worked.”
    It was eight-thirty a.m. and Warren was holding a team briefing in the conference room at Middlesbury’s small CID unit. Behind him a projector showed a close-up photograph of the body taken at the scene by Andy Harrison and beside it a much happier image, taken that summer on holiday. The victim had shoulder-length light brown hair; the smiling young woman in the holiday snap had longer, sun-kissed blonde hair, but it was clearly the same person.
    “We have a positive ID from the victim’s boyfriend, with whom she lived, and her mother and best friend. Family Liaison broke the news last night.”
    “The body is still in situ up at Beaconsfield Woods, where it was found by a group of dog-walkers at approximately six-thirty p.m. yesterday evening. The body will be moved to the morgue at midday and a PM is scheduled for early afternoon. Preliminary indications are that she may have been sexually assaulted; cause of death is unknown at this time, but her scarf was wrapped around her throat and may have served as a ligature. Her body was almost certainly carried to the woods, but we don’t know if she was dead or alive, or when and where any assault took place.”
    The atmosphere was sombre. Everybody in the room knew that the three days between Sally Evans’ disappearance and the discovery of her body could prove to be a major hindrance to the investigation. Valuable trace evidence from the site could have been lost, contaminated or destroyed; similarly the killer or killers had had over eighty hours to cover their tracks. The team couldn’t afford to lose any more time.
    Reading from the list he had prepared before the meeting, Warren started to assign jobs to the officers present. “DS Kent, can you set up an incident desk and get HOLMES up and running, please? I want you to start entering everything as it comes in, especially the particulars from the autopsy. I want to see if the MO matches any known cases. See if we can find links to any previous attacks. DC Hastings, I want you to assist.” The older sergeant was the unit’s expert on HOLMES2, the Home Office’s crime management database. Used across the country, the system employed a degree of computer intelligence to link cases together and manage all of the documents relating to a crime. Although all officers used the system to some extent, it was experts like Kent who could really make the system work for them.
    Working with him would be Detective Constable Gary Hastings. Newly returned from several months’ sick leave after being stabbed in the summer, the young officer was on light duties whilst he continued to recuperate. He was keen to learn and quick-thinking, and Warren had assigned him to the older sergeant’s care, having decided that putting the young man back into the heart of a major investigation was probably the best way to help him exorcise any demons remaining from the summer’s horrors. Besides which, it hadn’t escaped Warren’s notice that DS Kent was approaching retirement age. He had no idea what the older man’s plans were — and the new age-discrimination laws made him wary about asking — nevertheless, training up other officers seemed prudent to Warren.
    Of course, as with any system, HOLMES2 was only as good as the information put into it and the next stage was to gather that information.
    “DI Sutton, I want you and DS Khan to co-ordinate the interviewing of all of Ms Evans’ known associates. Start with her workmates, then her friends. Let’s see if we can find any witnesses. Use the missing person file as a jumping-off point, but remember it isn’t a crime for a twenty-something not to come home of an evening, so there probably won’t be much in there.”
    Sutton and Khan nodded, already casting their eyes around the room at the various other officers they would second to their teams.
    “DS Richardson, speak to Traffic and any