Deadly Cry: An absolutely gripping crime thriller packed with suspense (Detective Kim Stone Crime Thiller Book 13)

by Angela Marsons

  Kim glanced at Bryant. Thank goodness she hadn’t publicly berated him as she’d been instructed.

  ‘And this wide gap between the upstroke and the downstroke at the base of the letters T and D: he is stubborn.’

  ‘But you said he lacked determination,’ Kim said, frowning.

  He thought for a moment, taking time to find an example as Henrietta brought in a tray laden with coffee, mugs and delicately cut pieces of Battenburg cake.

  All three of them thanked her, and Bryant moved forward to pour from the cafetière.

  Reg held up his hand to signal no coffee for him. ‘Okay, look at it this way, determination is the ability to climb to the top of the tree for the best apple even though you’re tired. Stubbornness is the refusal to move out of the way so someone else can’t get past you and take the apple.’

  ‘Okay,’ Kim said, understanding the difference.

  ‘Do you see here where the T and D stems are carefully retraced all the way down?’

  Kim nodded.

  ‘That tells me he possesses a high level of dignity.’

  For a reason that Kim couldn’t fathom, this did not surprise her despite the fact he’d murdered three women and abducted a child.

  ‘His writing is without loops, which often shows a loner. But see here where the lines of writing run into each other. This demonstrates confusion. The absence of figure-eight formations shows there is little fluidity of thought.

  ‘As I’ve said before, handwriting will show a trait but doesn’t show if you use it.’

  Kim nodded.

  ‘And now, if you look at the lower case m and n, we can determine his thinking style. There are four: logical, investigative, keen comprehension and analytical. Our subject has rounded tops, which would indicate a logical thinking style, with a couple of worry loops on the m and n.’

  Kim was captivated by everything he had to say, and a picture was starting to build in her mind.

  ‘With the time given, that’s all I was able to deduce on stroke formations and individual personality traits.’

  Kim hid her disappointment, even though she had a feeling she was getting to know their killer well.

  ‘The rest of the time was spent gauging his emotional response, which is critical in knowing what kind of person you’re dealing with.’

  He produced another sheaf of papers.

  ‘And this is where it starts to get interesting.’

  Eighty-Six

  Penn pressed refresh on his email and, just as though he’d wished it, Keats’s name appeared at the top. At 11 a.m. he’d asked for the official post-mortem report to be sent through urgently and it had been the longest fifteen minutes of the day.

  He scrolled through to the attachments and stopped at the one marked ‘scratches’.

  He enlarged the photo and turned it around, looking at it from all four sides. There were curves and straight lines but nothing obviously legible.

  ‘There has to be,’ he said out loud. The scratches mattered. He knew it, but how was he to make sense of them?

  ‘Has to be what?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said, laying all the printed sheets in front of him on the desk.

  He moved from one to the other, turning the sheets around. He could feel his frustration growing. He couldn’t do it like this.

  Suddenly he had an idea. All the images of the scratches had been saved in the same folder.

  He clicked on each image individually, enlarged its size to where it could just fit on an A4 sheet of paper and then stood by the printer, tapping it impatiently as it printed them all one by one.

  ‘Stace, I’m borrowing the boss’s office for a minute…’

  ‘Yeah, whatever,’ she said, waving him away dismissively.

  ‘You okay?’ he asked.

  ‘Yeah, just got the content report in from the network provider for the burner phone.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘The text messages are short and all eight say the exact same thing.’

  ‘Which is?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Every single message says: “Tick”.’

  Eighty-Seven

  Reg handed both her and Bryant two sheets of paper as Henrietta entered with more coffee. Kim wasn’t going to complain. Full faculties or not the woman made great coffee.

  ‘So what are these?’ Kim asked. The sheets were the letters sent by Noah, but they were now covered in straight lines rising from the base of the word, drawn so that they brushed every letter like a thousand spikes pointing in all directions.

  ‘Emotional response. Do you see the letters at the end of each stick?’

  Kim nodded as he reached to the table and produced a plastic semi-circle with a gauge running around the edge.

  ‘Most people have a mixture of slants, so it’s a matter of working out an approximate percentage.’

  Kim took a look at the sequences of letters, wondering what they all meant.

  ‘There are seven measures on the gauge; however, we’re looking at five key emotional responses. The F’s and the FA’s show someone with little or no emotional response. They’re loners and have trouble relating to others. Your typical sociopath would score highly here.’

  ‘You can really see how someone responds emotionally from a plastic gauge?’ Kim asked doubtfully. Surely the science had to be more technical than a piece of flimsy plastic.

  Reg looked at Bryant. ‘And here was me thinking he was the doubting Thomas.’

  He reached to the side and passed a piece of paper to her colleague. ‘Once I’ve explained it, you tell me if it’s accurate, and then you can explain it to your boss.’

  Bryant smiled as he looked at the paper. She looked over, but he hid it from view like a child not wanting their answers copied.

  ‘So do you get many people who register up there in the F’s?’ Kim asked.

  ‘Not many, but I do remember being asked some twenty years ago to analyse the handwriting of the staff of a medium-sized investment company. It had become clear to the owners that one member of staff was embezzling ever-increasing amounts of money and managing to hide their tracks electronically. One subject threw up flags immediately. The person concerned demonstrated predominant traits of greed, ego, ambition, ruthlessness. Their emotional responsiveness was the highest I’ve ever seen in the F range and signalled total emotional detachment.’

  ‘So this person could easily be deceitful without feeling any level of guilt?’ Kim asked.

  Reg nodded. ‘And wouldn’t show a shred of emotion while discussing the issue at director-level meetings.’

  ‘That takes a lot of neck,’ Bryant observed.

  ‘What happened?’ Kim asked, wanting to hear the rest of the story.

  ‘With the information they had, they were able to start isolating the activities of individuals. Given the ego, it was only a matter of time until she struck again.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘Yes, a forty-six-year-old woman who had been with the company for fifteen years. She’d been at it for pretty much the whole time. The amounts had started small but had grown with her ego and confidence.’

  ‘And?’ Kim asked.

  Reg laughed. ‘Yes, as a police officer I’m sure you want the rest. She was convicted of seventy-six charges and served eight years in prison. But, luckily, people like her don’t come along all the time.

  ‘The middle three sections of the gauge show the most common area into which people generally fall. AB dominant markers are cool, calm, collected, not sociopathic but very measured and reliable. You’d want an air-traffic controller to register here. BC offers more emotion: they’re quick to sympathise but still logical. Total middle ground and equally balanced. Great counsellors, as they can empathise but also remain objective. The CD slant shows someone who openly displays their feelings. They get overly emotional and don’t always make logical decisions. The final category is DE and E: these are people driven purely by emotion. They are warm, empathetic but they get
too involved; they are prone to emotional outbursts and offer little logic in their emotional response. They could cry from a single look. They could also attack from a single look.’

  He nodded towards Bryant. ‘So how am I doing so far, knowing what you know?’

  Bryant took a look at the piece of paper he was holding and smiled. ‘Yeah, you got me. I’m sold.’

  ‘What the?…’ Kim said, grabbing the piece of paper.

  She wasn’t surprised to see her own handwriting sample from the day before. She was even less surprised to see she was AB dominant.

  ‘A few more run-ins with Woody and you could always retrain as an air-traffic controller, guv,’ Bryant said, taking back the page and putting it in his pocket.

  Kim ignored him and looked at the two letters from Noah side by side with the knowledge of what she’d just learned. She’d make sure Bryant destroyed that page later.

  ‘These are both showing a majority of BC’s and CD’s,’ she noted.

  He nodded. ‘Absolutely, he shows emotion, he is logical, can tend to be overly emotional at times but has enough analytical ability to rein his emotions in when it matters.’

  ‘So given everything you’ve observed with your T bars, loops and this, can you draw me an overall picture?’ she asked, waving the two sheets around.

  ‘To perform a full character analysis, I’d want a week, but an outline sketch of your killer indicates that he, your determination not mine, is highly intelligent with reasonable ambitions. He is confident but not conceited. He is not dominant and does not procrastinate. He is not prone to quick temper but may be sensitive to criticism. He does not have a huge ego and is dignified. He is a bit of a loner; there is confusion and there is guilt. He is in touch with his emotions, considers them, but doesn’t allow them to shape his decisions.’

  He paused. ‘Basically, if you were to meet him in the street you’d probably call him a nice guy.’

  Yes, that was the picture Kim was starting to get, which made the one question on her mind all the more puzzling.

  Why was he murdering innocent women?

  Eighty-Eight

  Penn placed every printed sheet on the floor in the boss’s office. He knew she wouldn’t mind her desk and chair being pushed to the wall; he needed the space to get a clearer picture.

  He’d laid the pages out in date order with the oldest set of scratches first.

  He stood at the foot of the seven pieces of paper, one for each set of crimes.

  Immediately, he could see that they were not identical. Some had more curves and others had more straight lines. He moved around them and found commonalities in some but not all.

  He took a bandana from his pocket and tied back the curls that were already breaking free from the holding gel and falling over his eyes as he looked down.

  The more he observed, the more his brain became overwhelmed with data and possibilities. He moved position and looked again. Sometimes just glancing away from a situation for a few seconds was enough to offer a fresh perspective. Still nothing jumped out at him.

  He stroked his chin as he realised he was trying to solve seven different puzzles at the same time.

  He’d already scanned the images and googled them, trying to match them with any kind of ancient symbols or hieroglyphs, but nothing had shown as a match.

  It was too much, he realised, as his eyes darted from one sheet to another. It was overload, distracting.

  He gathered up the sheets and placed them on the desk, holding back the first from the burglary over ten years earlier.

  His cluttered brain breathed a sigh of relief as he stared at the single sheet, but something still wasn’t right. The scratches were separate but contained on one sheet of paper. There was no fluidity, no movement.

  He had an idea.

  ‘You got any scissors, Stace?’ he said, stepping out of the Bowl.

  ‘Life ain’t that bad,’ she said, reaching into her drawer. ‘And there are easier ways.’

  He took the scissors and stepped back into the Bowl.

  He sat on the floor and cut out the individual scratches and discarded the surplus white paper.

  His legs were formed into a v shape with the cut outs set before him.

  Now he had the fluidity to move them around. Place them against each other, upside down and back to front.

  He changed their position time and time again like a magician performing a hidden-object-under-a-cup trick.

  ‘Damn it, it’s still…’ his words ran out of steam as he put the first and last pieces together. The arcs of the two symbols together appeared to form a perfect zero.

  ‘Hang on one second,’ he said as the other pieces slid together in his mind’s eye.

  He looked at what the scratches had formed.

  ‘No bloody way,’ he said, shaking his head at the simplicity.

  He stood and reached for the rest of the sheets and began cutting as quickly as he could.

  Eighty-Nine

  ‘How long’s he been in there?’ Kim asked, peering through the glass into her office.

  Penn, sitting cross-legged on the floor, had acknowledged her presence with a wave before returning to his project.

  ‘About an hour,’ Stacey said. ‘Only came out for scissors and glue.’

  ‘What the bloody?…’

  ‘Boss, you know what he’s like trying to solve a puzzle.’

  Yes, she did. And that was the only thing stopping her from storming in and kicking both him and his art project out the window.

  Kim leaned against the printer cupboard at the top of the room.

  ‘Well, I hope once he collects his Blue Peter badge he can tell us how we find our guy Noah, who by all accounts, is a jolly nice chap.’

  ‘Who has no intention of stopping,’ Alison said, having read the response Kim had screen-shotted over to her.

  ‘But, boss,’ Stacey said, ‘there’s been a few developments here, and Alison and I think we might be dealing with—’

  ‘It’s a score card,’ Penn said, storming out of her office. ‘He’s keeping score with someone,’ he added, crossing the office with a sheaf of papers and sitting at his desk.

  ‘Penn, what the hell are?…’

  Alison nodded her agreement. ‘That would make perfect sense with the conclusion Stacey and I reached about five minutes ago.’

  ‘Which is?’ Kim asked, getting whiplash looking from one to the other.

  ‘That we’re dealing with two killers, not one.’

  Ninety

  Kim could feel the frown forming on her face.

  ‘You’re telling me I’ve been gone a few hours and we’ve gained a killer?’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Penn said, holding the sheaf of papers while he wrote something on the board.

  ‘Noah told us everything happens in pairs,’ Stacey offered, taking the lead on giving her an explanation.

  ‘Of those pairs on the board, the phone that contacted Nicola Southall yesterday sent a text message to another phone saying “tick”.’

  ‘Like a clock?’ Bryant asked.

  ‘Nope, I think it’s tick like the game?’ Stacey said. ‘Which basically means you’re on or it’s your turn. I played it with my cousins as a kid. That message is followed by a similar crime within a day. It’s like goading, a nudge. There’s never any return text or communication from the other phone.’

  ‘Okay, got that,’ Kim said. ‘But what about the scratches?’

  ‘They only happen on the first of the crimes as well, just like the text message. Never the second.’

  ‘And this is what the scratches mean,’ Penn said, handing around pages of his project.

  Kim looked at her page which said ‘2-1’.

  ‘The numbers follow,’ he said, pointing to the board. ‘The burglary said 1-0; the Peeping Tom says 2-1; the assault says 3-2, and on and on. The first killer is keeping score.’

  ‘But why isn’t the second doing the same?’ Kim asked.

  ‘I thin
k Noah is our second killer,’ Alison said. ‘Remember his letter came after the first murder. He didn’t kill Katrina Nock at the Shop N Save, but he knew his partner in crime had done it because he got the text message. When he posted the letter, he hadn’t killed yet and he was hoping you’d stop him before he killed too. He’s an unwilling killer. But there was no way we could find him in time; he responded with the murder of Louise Webb-Harvey at Stevens Park, taking little Archie with him.’

  ‘Boss,’ Stacey said, reclaiming her attention, ‘I spoke to both women who were allegedly raped by Sean Fellows, and though the crime was similar, the first rape was more brutal, more vicious, whereas Lesley said it felt like her attacker was going through the motions, that he didn’t really want to do it.’

  Kim was trying to get her head around everything she was being told. She had to admit that it was making a lot of sense. A lot but not all.

  ‘But what I don’t understand is why he doesn’t stop if he doesn’t want to kill people. Why does he allow himself to be goaded? That part makes no sense.’

  ‘But it does,’ Alison said. ‘Noah feels compelled, as though he has no choice. Somehow his will to fight back has been broken. There is no domestic abuse sufferer who wakes up praying for a beating or a put-down. They go to work, look after kids while hiding bruises. There is a door that they can use. There is no physical barrier to prevent them from leaving. They have been conditioned to stay, to accept the abuse. It doesn’t happen overnight. It’s gradual.’

  ‘You think it’s a domestic abuse situation, like husband and wife?’

  Alison shook her head. ‘It’s a rivalry situation. The similarity in victims, in crimes, the escalation. Each one is trying to do better than the other.’

  ‘So the game—’

  ‘It’s not a game,’ Alison interrupted. ‘It’s survival. It’s matching your opponent, showing strength, besting your rival. There’s no game here. It will only end when one of them dies.’