Hurt (DS Lucy Black) by Brian McGilloway Page B

puppets?’
    ‘A lot of the accounts either aren’t fully developed, or their content is repetitive, where the same message is being posted in fourteen or fifteen accounts almost in rotation. Look.’
    He showed her Paul Bradley’s page. He’d posted a status update the previous Saturday saying ‘Saturday lie-in =)’.
    ‘See this,’ Cooper said. ‘Watch.’
    He opened a second Facebook profile, this time for someone called ‘Liam Tyler’. ‘Look.’
    On the previous Saturday, ‘Tyler’ had posted the same status update. A girl named Annie Marsden had attached a comment with a smiley face of her own.
    ‘You think “Tyler” is actually Paul Bradley?’
    Cooper nodded. ‘If Paul Bradley is even his real name. That could simply be another alias.’
    ‘But one of his aliases has gone online?’
    Cooper nodded. ‘“Simon Harris” went on about ten minutes ago. Watch.’
    He pointed to a small pane in the lower half of the page, which listed online friends of Bradley’s. A green circle marked the name ‘Harris’. Suddenly the name vanished.
    ‘We’ve lost him again?’ Lucy asked.
    ‘Wait,’ Cooper said. ‘If I’m right, you’ll see one of these other names go live.’
    Sure enough, a moment later, a green dot appeared next to the name ‘Tom Gallagher’. Cooper pointed to the screen. ‘That’s another of them.’
    ‘How many does he have in total?’
    ‘I think about twenty,’ Cooper said. ‘We need him to log in as Paul Bradley though; I’ve got Facebook to agree to give us Bradley’s ISP address when he next logs in. But we can’t ask for that for all of these accounts too unless we can prove they’re all the same person.’
    ‘I’ll update Burns anyway,’ Lucy said, going out of the unit and phoning through to CID. As she was explaining to Burns what Cooper had told her, Cooper himself appeared, barely able to contain his excitement.
    ‘They’ve been in touch. Bradley’s just gone online. I’ve reverse-checked the ISP address they’ve given us. It’s a restaurant in the Foyleside shopping centre.’

Chapter Seventeen
    The Foyleside Centre was built in the early nineties, covering four floors and housing almost fifty different stores. Level four was little more than a central concourse with shops lining both sides. The two middle floors, however, were more open-plan, meaning that there were a variety of approaches and escape routes, should Bradley try to make a run for it. Fortunately for them, the Wi-Fi address they had been given belonged to the fast-food outlet on the uppermost floor.
    The difficulty was that, although they had a picture of Bradley from his account page, there was no guarantee that the man in question would even look like his picture. They did, though, have the description from the metal theft gang, who’d seen a man with grey hair in the area where Karen’s body had been found.
    All of this was explained to the team by Burns who briefed them in the back of the Land Rover on their way to the Foyleside. The rear of the Land Rover was stuffy, the benches on each side lined with members of one of the two Tactical Support Units accompanying the investigating team. The proximity of the bodies, and the vague smell of sweat generated by the boiler-suit type uniforms the officers wore made it difficult for Lucy to concentrate on what Burns was saying. She wanted to get out and get moving.
    ‘Lucy and Tara go in together first. Get something to eat, scope the place out. We’re probably looking for a man, on his own, using a phone. Grey-haired particularly. Obviously if you recognize anyone on the Offenders Register let us know immediately. We’ll hold back on a full entrance until we have a target,’ Burns said, before turning to Mickey and the DC sitting next to him. ‘You two hang around outside; be ready in case anything goes down. We’ll post one TS Unit outside the main entrance and a second at the bottom of the stairs to the fourth floor. If he makes a