A Step Into The Dark

by Vince Vogel

  “Any name for this local detective?”

  “A DC Gregg. I’m afraid I don’t know his first name.”

  The three detectives walked into the woods, following a line of halogen lamps that dotted the pathway. Even without the electric illumination, the full moon made it a vivid night and there appeared to be a jittery life to the place. In the sky above their heads, the birds were restless, sparrows darting about and making noise in the air between the trees. Other birds, such as crows, squawked away too. Somewhere in the distance, a deer was barking, and several bats looped about the low hanging branches. It was clear that something had shaken the nature in this place.

  When they were a little further, they spotted the police tape draped across some trees. A man dressed in a shirt and tie stood to the side, smoking. He wore a complexion several shades paler than his usual one, and when they got closer, Jack observed that he was shaking.

  “DI Newman, Scotland Yard,” Alice said to him.

  “DC Gregg,” he muttered in half a voice.

  “Have you seen in there?” Alice added.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you make of it?”

  He shook his head and let out a sigh as though he’d been trying to answer that same question for the past ten minutes, and then replied.

  “Carnage. A bunch of kids come down here for a bit of fun. Camping. And then some nut shows up and kills them all. Shot them all in the face.”

  He placed his shivering cigarette back to his lips and pulled in hard. The smoke appeared to be the only thing that stopped him from falling down and he held onto it like a ledge.

  “Same weapon that was used on the kid in the carpark?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah. Handgun. But really powerful. It blew them apart.” He turned suddenly to the woods behind him, where the bodies laid. It was as though they’d called out to him. “I’ve got kids the same age,” he added, turning back to the others. “How could someone do that?”

  “How’d the call come in?” Alice wanted to know.

  “He left one alive. The poor kid spent an hour curled up in a bush before he was brave enough to come out and call us on his phone. When armed response got here, they found a nightmare.”

  “Has anyone spoken to him?”

  “Not really. We asked him a few questions and he gave us some disjointed answers. Stuff like, he didn’t recognize the guy and thought he heard him drive away. But he was too shaken. I couldn’t get much more out of him. I had to leave him with the paramedics.”

  “So it’s him in the ambulance?”

  “Yeah. I wanted to keep him here for when your lot turned up.”

  “Good.” Alice turned to Jack. “You go and speak with this survivor. See if he tells you anything.”

  “Will do.”

  Jack strolled off, back towards the carpark.

  Alice and Lange left Detective Constable Gregg to his cigarette and ventured into the trees. They passed under the police tape and soon began spotting the white coveralls of the operatives floating about like bright ghosts.

  When they were deeper in, they found an orb of white light. Lamps had been set up around a campsite of three tents and a recently extinguished campfire. Some more halogen lights went off into the woods in a row, casting the whole area in a ghostly white. Several operatives were videotaping everything. Others were busy laying flags near evidence. A few meters in front of the campsite, a lake glittered in the false light. At the end of a wooden bay, three operatives were liaising with a dive team, a manned dinghy and a frogman in the water. They were pulling what appeared to be a white female out of the lake, fully clothed. Several holes were torn through her bloodied, white T-shirt. The frogman lifted her limp body onto the jetty, where the others hauled her up. Her head had been shot several times and part of it was missing, blown away as she’d bobbed in the water.

  Alice and Lange stood before the tents for a moment. An operative was busy at the mouth of one of them. The canvas at the opposite end was covered in blood and Alice could guess that there were bodies in there. Turning to her left, she saw a group standing at the base of a tree ten meters off. They steadied a tall stepladder with one man at the top. When Alice gazed upwards, she saw that they were seeing to a body that had flopped over a large branch. It was male. Like the others, he was dressed in shorts and T-shirt. He’d been shot while trying to hide. A pool of sticky blood lay in the dirt beneath him. One of the operatives came beside them as the two detectives gazed up.

  The operative removed his mask to reveal the face of lead pathologist Shiva Patel. He was middle-aged, of Indian descent and wore a gray goatee around his thin lips.

  “He’s gone around afterwards and shot them all in the face,” he pointed out. “All except the ones he’d already shot in the face.”

  “He hated them,” Alice said. “It makes me think it was personal.”

  “Maybe,” Shiva replied. “But he could have hated them without knowing them.”

  “Could it be a terrorist attack?” George Lange asked.

  “No. This is too much of a personal attack for terrorists. The way he’s come back and shot them in the face to be certain that they’ll be forever disfigured in his mind. Terrorists wouldn’t do that. They’d merely see the victim as collateral damage in their jihad. They’d kill and move on to the next. And the setting is too private as well. They wouldn’t do it out the way in the woods. It’d be in the open and the killers wouldn’t count on getting away. No, this killer wanted to walk away from here and carry on.”

  “You any clue how it went down?” Lange asked.

  “Partially. The boys from ballistics have already determined the direction most of the shots came from. The early shots came from this direction.” He pointed out into the woods, along the line of halogen lights. “So we can gather the course he took. Follow me.”

  Shiva walked off with the two detectives following through the ferns. They soon came across a knot of forensics who were busy over something. When they made it closer, the detectives observed a young woman lying on her back. Her face was almost completely gone, several flies buzzing around the cavity.

  “She was running away,” Shiva began. “Approaching the camp from there.” He pointed forward into the trees. “We found a male body in a small clearing further along past a stream. It appears that the killer attacked them there first. The boy was struck in the head and the girl ran. He caught up with her here and then shot her three times in the back. Later on, he came back, causally flipped her over and shot her in the face.”

  “Where’s the boy?” Alice asked.

  “This way.”

  They walked off further into the woods. They came to a fallen tree. About two meters in front of it, a young man lay on his back with the typical gunshot wound to the face.

  “How’re the parents supposed to identify them?” Lange asked in a whisper.

  Alice ignored him and simply gazed at the dead boy.

  “He’s shot him from behind the trunk,” Shiva said.

  The pathologist once again led them off into the trees and they eventually made it out of the woods to a dirt track about fifty meters from the clearing. There were several forensics operatives scattered about. Two of them were making a cast from some tire tracks.

  “The witness claims he heard a car driving off from this direction,” Shiva said. “Could have been the killer. It appears he initially came from this direction.”

  Alice and Lange gazed up the dirt track. It disappeared into sightless night.

  “We got something!” a voice shouted from out of the trees behind them.

  The three headed back along the line of lights through the ghostly columns of the wood. It was near the body of the girl who’d been shot in the back and then flipped over. A forensics operative was holding something in his gloved fingers and several others had gathered around to see.

  Shiva pushed his way to their center.

  “What is it?” he wanted to know.

  The o
perative looked over at him and then held it out. On the rubber-gloved hand was a large bullet. Its tip was hollowed out in the middle.

  “Hollow-point .44 magnum round, if I’m not mistaken,” someone noted.

  Alice turned to see who’d spoken and saw one of the ballistics experts.

  “How likely is someone to get this type of ammo here in England?” Alice asked the man.

  “He’d need contacts to get something like that into the country. The right contacts and serious money. Those are hollow-point bullets. You can’t even get them in many of the states in America.”

  “It explains the damage the wounds have done,” Shiva observed.

  “How so?” George Lange asked innocently.

  “Hollow-point bullets expand on impact like an umbrella,” the pathologist explained. “As you can imagine, that means a larger area of damage.”

  “I suspected this was what he was using,” the ballistics guy remarked. “It’s the only way you can explain the terrible wounds these kids have.”

  5

  Jack had waited a little while before speaking to the survivor. The paramedics had informed him that the kid’s name was Micheal Burke. He was only sixteen. His frightened face looked odd when compared to the one Jack had just seen. The one that had been blown away.

  Micheal was tanned. Handsome. Athletic like the other guy. Wore the type of face that your teenage daughter would swoon over. One that wouldn’t look amiss in a boyband. Maybe that was what made them victims. That they were the beautiful people.

  Now, however, that innocence and beauty had been jarred and distorted by the abject fear this young man had been put through. Micheal Burke sat up in the back of the paramedic truck breathing heavily and sucking on an oxygen mask. He was still shivering, even though they must have sedated him, and was wrapped in a blanket.

  Jack spent a few minutes smoking outside and gazing into the trees. There was something spiteful in their appearance. Spiteful about the trees. Or at least that was what Jack himself had discovered over the years. Woods, it seemed, were macabre places where people were murdered and their bodies buried.

  He glanced up at the full moon hovering above it all and wondered if that had anything to do with it. Whether they had a ‘wolf-man’ on their hands.

  They’re all wolf-men, Jack remarked before stamping his cigarette out and entering the back of the ambulance. The paramedic left them to it as Jack sat down beside the boy, the latter studying him with terrified eyes.

  “I can’t imagine how shaken you are,” Jack said softly.

  “Why am I still here?” the boy asked in a shivering voice.

  “I want to ask you a couple of questions and then you can go.”

  “I already answered some. I just want to get out of here. Please.”

  His terrified, rabbit’s eyes implored Jack to get him away from there. Get him out of this dark wood.

  “Well, you haven’t answered mine yet,” the detective said. “And I won’t take no more than five minutes of your time. Just some basic questions. Take me through what happened tonight.”

  “Like I said before to the other guy. We were sitting around the fire, listening to music, when Jess came running into camp. She screamed for us to help and we didn’t understand.” Tears filled his eyes and he looked away. “We didn’t understand,” he continued in a sob, “and we just stood around. Then he shot her.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “No. He had a torch. It made it impossible to see him. I think it was attached to the gun, because the bullets seemed to fire out of the light.”

  “Did he say anything?”

  “Not then. Later he did.”

  “We’ll get to that then. Tell me what happened when he shot Jess.”

  Tears fell from Micheal’s blank eyes and slithered down his cheeks.

  “I’m not sure,” he eventually admitted. “There was chaos when we saw the light coming after her. The explosions coming out of it. The sound of the gun. Everything went blank. We forgot each other and ran. I headed into the woods with Charlie. We were headed for his car. Another shot rang out and I panicked. I just threw myself into a bush and curled up. Lay there while my mates got shot.”

  He looked Jack in the eyes and the latter recognized the expression on the teen’s face. He’d seen it looking back at him from a mirror many times. It was shame.

  “There was nothing you could have done,” Jack assured him.

  “Wasn’t there?”

  “You shouldn’t feel guilty just because you survived.”

  “But I do. It’ll shame me for the rest of my life that he left me.”

  The two gazed across the ambulance at each other. Jack wanted to reassure him. The kid looked like his life had ended along with his friends. As though the whole world had shriveled up and died two hours ago when they were massacred. If there was something he could have said to calm the kid, to let him know that this wasn’t so, then Jack would have said it to him. But he couldn’t think of anything and he had too much trouble with his own shame to start teaching others how to deal with theirs.

  “You said you heard his voice. When was this?” Jack asked instead.

  “After he shot Charlie and I think the rest, he came and found me. Shone the torch down on me and I thought I was dead. I closed my eyes and thought about Emma.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My girlfriend. She’s one of the girls back there.”

  He froze when he said this. Caught in some kind of morbid trance.

  “So what did he say?”

  “He shone the torch down on me and he… he said…” The kid’s tongue was tripping up and he was beginning to sob uncontrollably. “He told me not to worry… They were with him now… They are part of him… and would be with him forever.”

  “Did you open your eyes to take a look?”

  “Yeah. He shouted at me to. Told me to look at him. But all I saw was light. The shape of his head in the middle of it.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “That was it. He told me that they were with him. That they were whole and that he would leave me to tell others.”

  “Did you recognize the voice?”

  “No.”

  “Male? Female?”

  “It was a man’s voice. He sounded really angry. It was like he was distorting it. Trying to make himself sound tougher. I don’t know. It was really angry.”

  “What about an accent?”

  “He sounded London. From around here.”

  “And he just left after saying that they were with him?”

  “Yeah. I heard some more shots and then a car engine on the other side of the camp and that was it. I lay there frozen. Couldn’t move. I thought that he was maybe still there. That the car was either a ruse or someone else. I’m such a coward…”

  He broke down after that.

  Rather than think of something to say, Jack merely placed his hand on the weeping kid’s shoulder and stood up. When he left the van, he informed the paramedics to take him to hospital. They’d ask him further questions in the morning.

  As he watched the ambulance roll onto the road, Alice called to Jack and he turned to see her and Lange emerging from the dirt track.

  “He give you any description?” she asked.

  “Not really. The killer was shining a torch at them the whole time. Plus, the kid’s so terrified, even if he did recall something, he’s too shaken up to mention it now. I think he’ll be more lucid by tomorrow. One thing he did mention, however, was that the guy told him that his friends were with him now. A part of him.”

  “Sounds like a whacko,” Lange remarked.

  “That your scientific term for it?” Jack asked him.

  “Did he recognize the voice?” Alice inquired next.

  “No. Said it was male. Local accent. But trying to put on a voice to make himself sound tougher, the kid said. But like I say, he was really shook up.”

  “Okay.” Alice tutted to herself. �
�You still friends with Harry Dunn?”

  Jack took on an abashed look and frowned at her.

  “Don’t take the piss, Alice. You know it’s not like that.”

  “Well, can you get some information off of him?”

  “Maybe. What is it you’re after?”

  “I need you to get ahold of him and ask if he knows anyone that would own or distribute hollow-point .44 caliber rounds. Apparently they’re not the sort of thing you pick up easily.”

  “I’d say. I’ll get onto him now. See if he knows of any arms dealers that can get hold of stuff like that.”

  Just then, their attention was taken when they heard screaming at the police barricade. Turning to face it, they saw several cars had pulled up and the occupants had gotten out and approached the line. By the looks on their frantic faces and the sounds of their yelps, they were the parents.

  6

  The room felt smaller every time Jonny Cockburn looked up and scanned its bare, piss-colored walls. Strip lighting buzzed over his head and illuminated the dusty air. Towards the tops of the thick walls, small, rectangular windows were set deep within the brickwork. So deeply that there was no hope of natural light ever reaching into the room even if it wasn’t pitch black outside already.

  The journalist sat at a table going over his notes for the forthcoming interview, an empty chair sitting opposite, the musty stench of damp concrete in his nostrils. It would be an interview with a man who was known as the ‘Prowler’ before people ever knew him simply as Robert Kline.

  Between 1981 and 1995, Robert broke into the homes of elderly women and raped them. Then, when rape was no longer sufficient, he moved on to killing. In total, he killed five of his last eight victims with his bare hands. Vulnerable women living on their own. Awoken in the night by a man standing at the end of the bed. Bound, gagged and hurt in sadistic ways.

  The door opened behind him and Jonny turned.

  In came a prison guard followed by a huge West Indian man in a blue jumpsuit. Though Robert Kline was much older, he was still well-built. Jonny had covered the investigation back in the eighties and nineties. He’d sat in the public gallery when they’d sentenced Kline. Six foot five inches tall. Two hundred and fifty pounds. He’d been in his fifties back then. Now he was seventy-seven and though he’d lost some of the shape, he still appeared a formidable man. His short hair was now completely white. It had been a dark gray back in ’96 at the time of sentencing. A wide forehead overhung his beady eyes, which studied Jonny as though the journalist was a dog and he was a bear.