Be My Killer
A completely unputdownable crime thriller that will shock you to the core
Richard Parker
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95
Chapter 96
Chapter 97
Chapter 98
Chapter 99
Chapter 100
Chapter 101
Chapter 102
Chapter 103
Chapter 104
Chapter 105
Chapter 106
Chapter 107
Chapter 108
Chapter 109
Chapter 110
Chapter 111
Chapter 112
Chapter 113
Chapter 114
Chapter 115
Chapter 116
Chapter 117
Chapter 118
Chapter 119
Chapter 120
Chapter 121
Chapter 122
Chapter 123
Chapter 124
Chapter 125
Chapter 126
Chapter 127
Chapter 128
Chapter 129
Chapter 130
A Letter from Richard
Acknowledgments
Also by Richard Parker
To The Plump Duck
1
The only parts of her body Meredith Hickman could move were her eyelids. She could just blink them against the matted ends of her blood-soaked peroxide hair.
The barbed wire that tightly coiled her naked form to the cold stone pillar lacerated the bridge of her nose and held her head rigidly in place. It restrained every muscle and painfully secured her arms, which were crossed and pinned firmly to her chest.
Her teeth ground the taut metal that cut deeply across the corners of her mouth, and Meredith gagged as she tried to position her tongue against the sharp spikes. Dirty tears diluted and leaked dark mascara down her cheeks. She attempted to swallow but one of the barbs was already stabbing her throat.
The area beyond Fun Central’s derelict concrete walkway was in darkness. Perhaps she was going to be left here until one of the crackheads found her and let her go. Or did what they wanted to her. She prayed that’s what would happen.
She felt goosebumps prickle her pinioned shoulders but not from the freezing air. Meredith knew she was going to die. And in her twenty-six years she’d never left Broomfield.
The person who had taken her had been a shape at the periphery of her vision outside the bathroom of the fried chicken place before a sack that stank of paraffin had been put over her face. Then something heavy had slammed into her scalp. Meredith could feel the bruise pound under the raw and broken skin, still taste the vinegary Buffalo wings she’d been eating. She breathed out and flinched as the spiked metal pierced her stomach.
Movement behind her – whoever had stripped and bound Meredith was the other side of the pillar. She gasped as the wire cut deeper. They were pulling and tightening it. The tops of her arms throbbed as the blood was trapped and the steel points dragged and tore at her flesh.
Meredith struggled to shape her guttural pleas but agony squeezed them flat. Was it going to get any worse than this? She closed her eyes and kept them shut even after the wire had stopped contracting. Her wounds trickled warmth down the inside of her thigh.
‘Meredith,’ a calm voice whispered in front of her.
She cracked her eyes at the hooded person standing in the shadows. They took a step forward into the dim light, head bowed as they focussed on something in their gloved hands.
Meredith looked down and saw it was a tiny tube of glue. They unscrewed the cap and then moved the nib across the area under each of her eyebrows. She could only grunt incoherently and stare at their throat.
She could smell the cool solvent on her skin before the leather pads of their thumbs curled her false eyelashes against it and pressed them hard in place.
She couldn’t shake her forehead as they pushed it harshly against the pillar. A few moments later she was released. Meredith could feel the air on her exposed eyeballs and them quickly drying out as her lids fought to blink. Now she had no choice but to look at whatever they were going to do to her.
The hood spoke to Meredith through her tears and agonised begging, so she only heard some of what they said. But it was enough. They retreated back into the gloom when she understood. She couldn’t accept what they’d told her. How could she have brought this on herself?
Meredith waited for them to return but their footfalls faded before she heard a car door slam.
She was still going to die; nobody would find her and cut her down in time.
An engine started. They were leaving.
Her circulation coursed irregularly through her constricted limbs. Meredith sucked in air through her nose. Unconsciousness began to release her.
But the black haze was quickly bleached out.
Meredith Hickman was illuminated and couldn’t seal her eyes against a blinding set of headlig
hts turning square in her direction. The car accelerated, hurtled through the main entrance and rocketed straight at her.
2
Hazel Salter yanked on the frosted entrance door and breezed through the downstairs reception as quickly as she could. ‘Hey, Rena.’
The pink-haired, twenty-three-year-old intern looked up from her granola and magazine with barely concealed hostility. ‘Hey.’ Rena had the kind of indolent arrogance that stemmed from the belief she had so many years ahead of her she was bound to be spectacular at some point.
‘You’ve beaten me in again.’
Rena grinned inhospitably. ‘When don’t I?’
Hazel couldn’t blame her for being spiky. She was a UCLA graduate who had been employed by her for seven months and had been tucked downstairs since she’d started. She hit the button for the elevator and willed the doors to open.
‘Hazel?’
She turned and rapidly blinked at Rena as if startled from her thoughts.
‘Just wondered if you’ve interviewed for another receptionist yet.’ Rena knew Hazel hadn’t. She signed everyone in.
‘I’m still looking at applicants.’
Rena nodded but knew she was being fobbed off. ‘I have a friend who’s interested. Maybe then you could put me to better use.’
‘Great. Get her to email me her résumé.’
Rena knew it was another stalling tactic. ‘She’s in town today. I could get her to swing by, if you’re not too busy… ’ she said significantly.
Hazel had one solitary meeting that day, and Rena knew it. She’d orchestrated this perfectly.
‘Sorry, I’m locking myself in the office to work on some new proposals. But if she can leave her details with you, I’ll get back to her as soon as I can.’
Rena’s eyes instantly glazed. ‘Sure.’
‘Any messages?’
Rena shook her head once as if it was becoming a tiresome ritual. ‘Mail’s on your desk.’
The elevator doors parted, and Hazel stepped inside. She wouldn’t have to run the same gauntlet for much longer and had been half-expecting to find reception empty for the last couple of weeks.
The other floors of the office block were unoccupied so she’d had to put Rena there as sentry. Seven months ago she’d genuinely believed in the chemistry she’d felt when the girl with the bowl cut of pink hair had walked into her office fresh from campus. When Hazel had interviewed her, she’d said she needed a general factotum but that there’d be plenty of opportunities to gain valuable production and post-production experience. Now Rena was her only employee – today, at least.
The doors separated, and she echoed through the oversized second empty reception, past the six unoccupied desks on the production floor to her expansive office beyond. Hazel had no choice but to give up her Sunset Boulevard business address at the end of the month and go back to working from home. However long she owned that.
Hazel regarded the pile of envelopes on her desk and knew exactly what they were. She flicked through them, holding her breath as she did. A final rent reminder and demands for business utility bills with red stamps all over them. After spending her teenage years with her British mother in the UK, Hazel had lived in LA for just over a decade, but, wherever she lived, she’d always had a tendency to ignore everyday responsibilities.
She didn’t even look at the Emmy on the cherrywood wall unit any more. It had been her talisman when she’d moved Veracity Media to the next level, and now the golden angel with the atom within its grasp was a gilded joke.
Even though it was only the September before last, picking up the award for Isil Brides seemed like it had happened in somebody else’s lifetime. It coincided with her thirtieth birthday, and her agent at the time had told Hazel everyone was talking about her forthright interview technique and that she had to step up to the plate and capitalise on the exposure. Now her office was about to shut down, and the bank was going to foreclose on her house. She’d used it as collateral to start up Veracity Media.
She hadn’t got complacent. The number of meetings she’d had after Isil Brides picked up its award for best documentary had been dizzying – big studios, big talk. Seven months ago she had so many projects pending she wondered if her office space was going to be big enough to cope. Now even the secretaries of the execs had stopped returning her emails, and the only people still in touch with Hazel were her crew.
Isil Brides had been made with caffeine and goodwill. Most had worked for nothing and had stuck with the project above and beyond the point most professionals should have. She loved her crew but now she couldn’t make good on the promises she’d used to entice them on board in the first place.
Hazel knew she could do it again. Some of them would come back, if not all. But how could she replicate the optimism and belief that there was no limit to what they could achieve next that she’d engendered on the Syrian shoot?
She’d been here plenty of times before, but on her earlier projects she hadn’t been an award winner with overheads. Ironically, the industry now thought she was too big a producer/director for indie money, but not big enough to helm upscale projects for the majors.
Picking up the remote, she switched on the news channel, turned her back on it and took a jar of instant coffee out of her handbag. Moving into the galley kitchen she filled and switched on the kettle and waited while it strained and wheezed. Hazel wondered if she could get any money back on the cappuccino machine that had been installed. Jesus, had it really come down to this?
For a while her mind searched for a gear. The kettle boiled, and she made her drink on automatic pilot. As she stirred her coffee, the words of the male newsreader gradually filtered into her thoughts. He was talking about the ‘Be My Killer’ story.
Several people were dead after they’d responded to a dare to put their names into a Twitter stream supposedly for serial killers to select their victims. She sipped her coffee but it was piping hot, and she was just struggling to open a new milk carton when Hazel recognised a name he mentioned and walked quickly back into the office, her attention on the screen.
A twenty-six-year-old woman, Meredith Hickman, had been brutally murdered in Broomfield, Vermont.
Hazel examined the photograph on-screen and saw, behind the make-up and wear of twenty years, a girl whose shrieks and laughter and cherry lip-balm scent had mingled with her own as they’d chased and weaved through the broken benches of Blue Grove Park.
3
‘Yes?’ Detective Jared Bennett’s flat tone said he’d run out of excuses not to speak to Hazel.
She hadn’t been expecting him to pick up and tucked her short ash-blonde hair behind her ear as she sat down on her desk. ‘I’ve left a ton of messages for you.’
‘You always do. What can I help you with this time, Miss Salter?’
‘My crew are travelling to Broomfield tomorrow. Just wondered if you’d reconsidered.’ She already knew what his response would be.
‘I’ve got nothing to add since the January press release.’
‘It’s March now. No progress since then?’
‘I’ve got a bunch of other things on my plate.’
‘It’s been five months since Meredith’s death. Don’t you think participating in my documentary would be an opportunity to rekindle interest in the investigation?’
‘Why don’t you speak to the FBI? Since they assumed control I’ve probably had as much luck getting them to pick up the phone as you.’ Detective Bennett had been uncooperative since Meredith’s murder had been tied in with the ‘Be My Killer’ hysteria. That’s when it had become much bigger than just a small-town homicide and, after his department had been ridiculed for their handling of the case by the media, it had been swiftly wrestled from his hands.
‘I’m just asking you for an hour or so of your time.’
‘Yes, you and all the other TV people. Just let me get on with my job, Miss Salter. What I don’t need is you and your crew picking over a cold crime scene.’
‘We’ve got permission.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But we’ve only just seen the back of all the cameras and TV crews. Everyone here went crazy with that. Wait, I’ve got another call.’
Hazel’s eyes came to rest on the photo of Meredith Hickman stuck to her pinboard. ‘I promise I wouldn’t be pursuing this if I wasn’t wholly committed to this story.’
‘If you want to help the investigation, just keep your crew away from Broomfield.’ He hung up on her.
Hazel set her iPhone on the desk, stood and walked to the pinboard. Over the past months she’d immersed herself in the chain of events that had followed the ’Be My Killer’ Twitter craze.
The Twitter account @BeMyKiller was supposedly set up as a prank. Millions of people had responded to the dare and put their names forward using the hashtag #BeMyKiller and included a message goading their potential murderer.
Four people had died after using the hashtag. She examined their faces. Denise Needham was a pretty twenty-three-year-old nanny working for a wealthy family in Belle Meade, Tennessee, who, on Halloween, had baited her killer with the words
Take your best shot #BeMyKiller
Two days later, three armour-piercing bullets fired by a sniper through a kitchen window fatally wounded her.
One day later, in Clearwater, Florida, thirty-one-year-old Caleb Huber’s
Want a piece of me? #BeMyKiller
message was taken very literally. His younger sister, Eve, found his mutilated remains in their backyard. His pockmarked features sneered crookedly at Hazel from the wall.
She took in the gaunt expression of twenty-five-year-old Kristian O’Connell. A couple of hours after Caleb had died, he’d been stabbed thirty-six times in an alleyway in Cheyenne, Wyoming. He’d tweeted the @BeMyKiller account but was the only victim who didn’t include a message for his killer. Kristian was a heroin addict.
Three days later, Meredith Hickman had been murdered only two hours after her
Hit me up #BeMyKiller
invitation in Broomfield, Vermont.
Hazel’s eyes returned to her toothy smile. It was the photo they’d used on the news, and there was a doleful vulnerability in her regard that hadn’t changed since she’d first met her.
Be My Killer: A completely UNPUTDOWNABLE crime thriller with nail-biting mystery and suspense Page 1
