A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two, Mark Hobson [notion reading list txt] 📗

tapped in a six-digit number into the small touchscreen keypad and popped open the lid.

Inside were a small laptop and an integrated 8-Antenna handheld 4G IMSI – catcher. The mobile-phone interceptor was an EU/UK P8-LG version, with a 30-metre radius, and would be perfect for the job.

An IMSI device acted like a fake mobile phone mast to intercept calls and texts. It could be used to listen in to phone conversations or to record them and play them back later from any targeted mobile phone. Incoming and outgoing calls could be tagged, likewise with text messages. A handy gadget, completely illegal, but easily purchased online.

Johan booted up the laptop and phone-catcher and ran the software to automatically scan the surrounding area within a 30 metre radius of where he was sitting, which easily included the tall canal house over the road. Five different phone numbers in the locale appeared on-screen. He typed in the target phone’s long IMSI number, and a few seconds later the words TARGET CAPTUREDpopped up and began to flash.

Satisfied that all was in order Johan sat back in his seat. Now all he had to do was wait.

Pieter made a stir-fry for dinner, and afterwards tried to watch a bit of TV, but he could find nothing interesting in the schedules and he wasn’t in the mood to watch anything on-demand, so after a half-hour, he switched it off. For a while he pottered about. Yet his mind kept returning to the case, unable to stop going over events and running through various scenarios. Eventually he decided to go up to the attic and switch on the old PC, to check his emails and any updates from work.

As he suspected, there was nothing yet from forensics or the post mortems, plus it was still too early to know what was in the syringe sticking out of Christiaan Bakker’s chest. Waiting on any results from the lab could be the worst part of the job, particularly when dealing with a murder case. If they were also looking at an abduction then time was of the essence, and considering that the missing person was a twelve year old girl gave things an added level of concern. The clock, therefore, was ticking.

Tomorrow afternoon a press conference had been scheduled to update everyone on the current state of affairs. His boss, Commissaris Dirk Huijbers, had decided to helm the media circus, and Pieter was grateful for small mercies. If Huijbers wanted all the limelight then that was fine by him. However, Pieter had received instructions to bring the Commissaris up to speed on where the investigation was, and their face-to-face meeting was scheduled for one hour before the press briefing was due to kick off, and this early in the case he had very little to report. Huijbers no doubt knew this. He was just happy to make Pieter squirm, especially after the fiasco of the Werewolf case. But whether he liked the idea of getting another rollicking or not was neither here nor there. He had to have something to give to Huijbers, some small scrap of progress, if only to see the smirk disappear off his face, so hence the reason for tonight’s bit of out-of-hours prepping.

Pieter once again considered the possible motives for a double murder and abduction. The latter part was self-explanatory: whenever a young child, especially a girl, was taken then the sexual element was always at the forefront of the list of reasons as to why a child was taken.

Most abductions tended to fall into two categories. Either the victim was known to the perpetrator, and he or she had held unhealthy thoughts about the victim for quite some time – perhaps a relative or close friend of the family. Or it was a stranger who, unable to control his desires any longer, grabbed the first opportunity to abduct a child to quickly satisfy his perverted desires. Yet with the second category – a stranger snatching a child – the vast majority of times these were unplanned, a quick grab and snatch of a child walking home from school for instance, and last night’s abduction didn’t feel like that. It was early days of course, but Pieter had the sense it had been carefully planned and prepared. In which case it most likely fell into the first category of child abductions - that the person who took Nina had actually known her.

However, once again that didn’t feel right. Why take the huge risk of taking her from home? Why not arrange to take her from a safer location? So much could have gone wrong last night for the kidnapper, there were so many unknowns. Also, committing a double-murder was a huge step-up from some sick paedophile with a liking for young girls.

So, was child abduction the real motive here, Pieter wondered? Was Nina even the real target? Taking her to hold for ransom seemed unlikely given the fact that her parents, who were both wealthy, had been murdered. If that were the motive – taking the child for financial gain – then why murder the parents?

Which brought him back to Christiaan and Elise Bakker.

The motive to most murder cases could nearly always be found by looking into the victim’s personal life or financial circumstances. His own thought from earlier came back to him, and tonight, sitting at the wooden desk up in the cramped attic room of his canal house, Pieter considered this.

Yes, first thing tomorrow he was determined to open a new element to the investigation.

Perhaps murder was the main motive, and the taking of the child was secondary.

Looking into the parents' private lives might be the key. Did they have marital problems, or issues at work, or money worries? The latter seemed unlikely given their apparent wealth, but of course appearances could be deceptive. Perhaps Christiaan Bakker had run up debts (the threats referred to such a possibility) and he was keeping this from his wife, a very common thing