The First Stella Cole Boxset

by Andy Maslen

  Stella removed the cable ties from her wrists then fetched the revolver from her daysack. She made a cup of coffee then sat in the single armchair facing the bed and waited for Lynne to come round.

  64

  In the Dark of the Night

  As a detective, Stella had worked a number of kidnapping cases. But as she sat guard over a gagged and retied Lynne Collier, she realised that in every case she and her colleagues had solved – and she was proud of the fact that they had solved them all – the kidnapper never worked alone. Two was a minimum, and depending on the victim it could be more. Yet here she was, trying to fly solo in an effort to lure Collier out of Chicago, away from his partner, far into the state whose motto the motel had borrowed. Star of the North. She pulled the curtain to one side.

  Well they’re certainly out tonight, she thought, swiping a clear circle on the pane and looking up at the pitch-black sky. She turned back to Lynne, who was lying on her side on the bed and watching her. Not struggling, not mmff-ing through the gag, which Stella had improvised using a strip cut from one of the towels. Just watching her. Time for the truth.

  “My name isn’t Jen. It’s Stella. Adam might have mentioned me. Did he?”

  Lynne nodded, her eyes wide now and staring. Breath whistling in and out through her nostrils.

  “I’m not going to kill you, Lynne, if that’s what you’re worried about. But I’m afraid I am going to kill Adam. You know why, right?”

  This time Lynne shook her head. She was trying to speak, huffing around the edges of the strip of towel. Stella decided to say her piece first.

  “He and his cronies murdered my husband and my baby daughter. Then they covered it up. When I started getting too close to the truth, they sent a man to kill me. His name was Peter Moxey. He was a convicted rapist and murderer. When that didn’t work, they sent a second man to kill me. Before he found me, he killed the godparents of a friend of mine. A journalist. I killed him instead. Then they had me sectioned. And while I was in the loony bin, your husband – because by then I had killed the rest – sent a Maltese woman built like a brick shithouse to do me in. She tried to throw me down a stairwell in the hospital. As you can see,” she held her arms wide, “she also failed. Do you have any idea what it’s like to lose a child, Lynne? Any idea of the pain? The incredible, disorienting grief? The funny thing was, it did drive me mad. Adam was perfectly within his rights to have me sectioned. He just didn’t know it at the time.”

  Stella noticed that tears were rolling down Lynne’s face. She went over to the bed and untied the gag, then stepped back and retrieved the revolver.

  “Scream and I’ll shoot you,” she said. Not harshly, but simply to state a fact and keep Lynne docile.

  Lynne coughed a couple of times and licked her lips, which the gag had dried.

  “You just asked me if I knew what it’s like to lose a child. Well, I do. Our son, Theo, was murdered when he was at university.”

  Stella was beyond being shocked by the misfortunes of others. So she asked a basic question.

  “What happened?”

  As Lynne retold the story of her son’s stabbing, Stella listened intently. Old instincts were kicking in and she couldn’t help starting to assess the way the investigation and subsequent court case had gone. When the story ended, “… he moved away, up to Leeds, and started a new life for himself. An opportunity he forever took from Theo,” Stella asked a question.

  “I bet you wish Pro Patria Mori could have killed the little shit, don’t you?”

  Lynne’s eyes flicked away from Stella’s, up to the ceiling. Her lips tensed as if she was trying to stop words emerging.

  “They did, didn’t they?” Stella said. “They killed your son’s murderer.”

  Lynne shook her head and spoke quietly.

  “Not them. Just Adam. He did it last summer, just before we flew to Chicago. I wanted him to.”

  “How did it make you feel?”

  “Good. Like we had avenged Theo.”

  Then her eyes grew wide. Her mouth fell open. Stella let the thought percolate for a while then spoke before Lynne could.

  “You should get some sleep. Tomorrow will be a hard day, and you’ll have a long drive back to Chicago.”

  Stella helped her decide by securing her wrists to the bed frame with more cable ties.

  It was 2.00 a.m. Stella had switched Lynne’s phone off after removing it from the kitchen counter back at the house in Lincoln Park. Now she turned it back on. While she waited for it to come to life, she looked across the darkened room at the hunched figure of Lynne Collier. Managing her in the cramped confines of the motel unit had been easier than she’d expected, as she could see the entire space, even the bathroom, from a single vantage point. She’d driven to a nearby pizza place and returned without incident, finding Lynne exactly where she’d left her. Police officers are at least as good as kidnappers at securing prisoners.

  The phone buzzed in her hand. She looked down. A dozen texts and voicemails from ‘Adam.’ She scrolled through the messages, which began calmly enough but by the end of the string had escalated to a frenzied tone of despair. He was pleading with her to get in touch, wherever she was and whatever she had done. She didn’t bother with the voicemails. Instead she called him.

  “Lynne?”

  “No. Stella.”

  “What have you done with my wife?”

  “Nothing. She’s sleeping.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Minnesota. I’ll send you the location in a minute or two.”

  “What do you want?” he said, in a low voice he presumably intended to be threatening.

  “Me? I think you know full well what I want. I want you, Adam. You killed Frankie, didn’t you? She had nothing to do with this, and you shot her anyway.”

  “She was putting the pieces together. I had no choice.”

  “That’s not true. You always had a choice. You could have chosen not to murder a police officer. Forget Freddie McTiernan for a moment. He’d done enough bad things in his life that every day for him was a bonus. But Frankie? She was a good cop. A great cop. She looked up to you, and you rewarded her for her loyalty with a bullet.”

  “How do you know I won’t turn up with a SWAT team?”

  “I don’t. Not really. But how do you know I won’t be up a tree with a sniper rifle? I’d splatter your brains all over the snow before your buddies with the assault rifles got anywhere near me. And if they killed me afterwards, that’s fine with me. I’m going to kill myself anyway when this is all over. That was always the plan.”

  “And if I don’t come at all?”

  “What? And leave the loving, loyal Lynne to be killed by an unknown assailant and dumped in a lake? I’d come back to Chicago and kill you anyway. At your desk if necessary. No. This is the deal. You come here. Alone. I let Lynne go, then you have a chance to kill me before I kill you. I know you’ll be armed. How about that? We’re the last two standing.”

  “Send me the location.”

  Stella finally fell asleep in the armchair around 4.00 a.m., wrapped in a spare duvet. She dreamt of Lola. A peaceful dream. No charred skin or crackling flames. No sardonic adult’s voice emerging from her little girl’s lips. No roaring car engines or smashing impacts. Just a mother and daughter, at peace in one another’s company. She woke, smiling, at 6.15 a.m. and checked Lynne. She was still sleeping. She seemed peaceful, too. That’s good, Stella thought. Maybe when this whole business is over she can start afresh. Meet someone new. Move away from London and rebuild her life. God knows, someone has to come out of this alive and well.

  65

  Wrap Up Warm

  Amateur dramatics had never been Stella’s thing. All those costumes turned her off. She’d never played dress-up as a child and didn’t intend to start as an adult. However, something inside her mind had told her to make the final confrontation with Adam Collier as dramatic as possible. The colour red seemed important. Red for all the blood spilled
. Red for the pillar box that had stolen Richard’s life from him. Red mist … red sky at night … avenger’s delight. So before taking Lynne from her comfortable middle-class home in one of Chicago’s most desirable neighbourhoods, she’d bought herself a thick, lined, woollen coat in a shade of red the assistant in Macy’s department store had described as “firetruck.”

  She was wearing the red coat as she drove out of the motel parking lot. Her movement was restricted thanks to the other garments beneath the coat, but at least she was warm, and the car’s surprisingly efficient heater was on full blast, too. Lynne, without protest, had climbed back into her nest of bedding in the trunk, wearing the down jacket Stella had bought at the same time as her own coat.

  Stella arrived at the unnamed lake at a little after 7.00 a.m., and was relieved to see that the entire area was deserted. The motel manager had said to her, in a broad Minnesotan accent, something that sounded like, “Uffda! We hadda big dumpa snow last week. Betcha never seen nothing like it in England. Bigger than they get up north, I think.” Stella had agreed. He’d gone on to inform her that it hadn’t snowed since, although, “It could easily reach the roofa ya house, dontcha know?”

  The car slithered like a first-time ice skater, but she gently fed the wheel through her gloved hands and kept the nose pointing more or less forward until she reached the spot she’d chosen to confront Collier. A track led away from the road towards a sweep of birch trees that screened the complex of lakes. She eased the car onto the track, listening to the crump of the hard-packed snow beneath the winter tyres. She pulled up in a clear space between the edge of the birch trees and the lake. The surface was white, but she knew that beneath the covering of snow, thick ice would have formed. One ambitious fisherman had already towed a grey-and-blue wooden ice house into the centre. It stood like a sentry post in utter isolation among the white.

  She checked her watch. She’d told Collier to be at the lake at 8.00 a.m. She wanted him to be tired from driving through the night. It was now 7.10 a.m. Leaving the engine running and the heater on, she got out, slammed the door behind her and released Lynne from the confines of the trunk.

  “I need to pee,” was the first thing Lynne said.

  Stella swept her arm wide.

  “Take your pick, but I’d be quick if I were you. You could literally freeze your arse off out here. Or worse. Don’t think of running. We’re miles from anywhere.”

  Lynne looked away from Stella and trudged off towards the nearest group of trees, her boots leaving crisp prints in the snow.

  When she returned, she pointed at the front seats.

  “Can we get in, please?”

  Stella blipped the fob and Lynne climbed inside.

  Shoulder to shoulder in their bulky coats, the women stared at each other. Both bereaved mothers. One a widow, one hoping not to be. One hoping for life. One for death.

  “He’ll kill you,” Lynne said.

  “He’ll try,” Stella answered.

  “You said it yourself, he’s already killed people.”

  “So have I. Including some very nasty individuals he sent to kill me.”

  “Can’t you just walk away? Go back to England? Haven’t you had enough vengeance?”

  “I was asking myself that very question last night. Well, earlier this morning. For a while, the answer was definitely no. A side of me just wanted to wipe every trace of PPM from the face of the earth. Not just the members, but anyone, everyone, connected to them. You, for instance.”

  Lynne’s eyes widened.

  “Me? But I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “I know that. And luckily for you, I’m not using the ‘ignorance is no defence’ line. I know you were innocent in all this, and that’s why I’m going to send you home. You can take Adam’s car. Alone or, if you’re right and I’m wrong, together.”

  “You seem so calm. Can’t you see that, rationally, this is madness? Why are you so hell bent on killing?”

  “Why? I’ll tell you why. And it’s very, very simple. Because I have nothing left to live for. Literally nothing. They killed my family. And that nearly destroyed me. I’m still grieving for my husband and baby daughter. But they also took away my faith in the law. I joined the police because – and forgive me, I know this is such a cliché – but because I believed in the rule of law. I believed in justice. I used to belong to Amnesty International. I read about places where no such thing existed. Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Chile under Pinochet, Cuba under Castro, East Europe under the Communists … all of them. They had no respect for the law and none for human lives, either. I wanted to work for the law in a country where it was a beacon for others. Jury trials, however often they got it wrong. Habeas corpus. Free speech. Parliamentary sovereignty. A free press. All of it, Lynne. It was my creed. And they shat all over it. Your husband and his cronies behaved as if they were the law. It broke something inside me.”

  Stella heaved a sigh before continuing.

  “I am breaking the cycle of violence they started. I am returning Britain to a state of grace.”

  “Jesus! You sound like you have some kind of messiah complex. ‘State of grace’? That’s a bit high-flown for a serial killer isn’t it?”

  “And that’s a bit self-righteous for the wife of one. Look, he’s here.”

  Stella pointed out through the windscreen. Five hundred yards away, an SUV was approaching, slowly, across the snow. She pulled the Model 38 from her jacket pocket and thumbed the cylinder release switch. Five brass percussion caps faced her, their centres as yet un-dented. Though that would all change very, very soon. Following an impulse, she spun the cylinder with her fingers before snapping it back into place with a clack. She turned to Lynne.

  “Get out.”

  By the time Lynne struggled out of the car, Stella was waiting for her, revolver held steady at her hip, pointing at Lynne’s midriff. Lynne looked away, at her husband’s car, which was now pulling to a halt a hundred yards away. She turned back to Stella, her forehead creased with anxiety.

  “I’m begging you. Please, don’t do this.”

  “I have to. I have no choice.”

  She grabbed the hood of Lynne’s jacket, twisting it around in her gloved left fist. Then she stepped behind Lynne and pushed her forward, walking behind her and using her as a shield. Her own movements were awkward under the thickness and weight of her clothes. When they were halfway to the SUV, Stella tugged lightly on the hood. Lynne stumbled and stopped. Despite the bulk of her clothes, she was shaking. Stella could feel the trembling muscles as she held her hand down in the nape of Lynne’s neck.

  Collier climbed out of the SUV. He was wearing a heavy, brown leather jacket and a scarf wrapped round his neck. He pulled a black trapper hat on and smoothed the flaps down to cover his ears. Without coming closer, he shouted across the fifty yards that separated them.

  “Let her go, Stella. She has nothing to do with this.”

  “Come closer, then I will.”

  To emphasise her point, Stella withdrew the muzzle of the little revolver from Lynne’s back and held it to the side of her head.

  Collier started walking. Stella watched him as he grew closer, saw the features that had earned him the nickname “The Model” gradually resolve themselves into clarity. The air was perfectly still and she could hear the creaks as his boot soles crushed the snow down. His hands were shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket. No way were they big enough to conceal a pistol, she thought. Or not the type he’d have been issued by the FBI, anyway.

  When he was twenty feet away, he stopped. Pulled his hands out and held them wide.

  “Let her go, Stella. Please. At least let one of us survive this.”

  His voice was only pitched at conversational volume but the cold, clean air relayed it to her as clearly as if he had been speaking right into her ear.

  “That was always the plan,” she said. Then she untwisted her hand from Lynne’s hood.

  “Go,” she said
, and gave her a little nudge in the back.

  As Lynne slid forwards by half a step, Stella readied herself. Once Lynne was out of danger, she’d kill Collier. She’d use every bullet the little gun could spit at him. She thumbed the hammer back and curled her finger round the trigger. She looked down, checking the safety was off, then mentally kicked herself. Fool! It’s the stress. Revolvers don’t have them. Remember what Ken told you.

  Stella looked up to see Lynne running, slipping, stumbling in a direct line between her and Collier, obscuring the target, she thought. She gripped the revolver tighter and prepared to fire.

  66

  Till Death Do Us Part

  The noise of the gunshot was immense. Lynne staggered to a stop. Stella gasped. She hadn’t meant to kill Lynne. Wait! I didn’t shoot. The gun hadn’t bucked in her hand like it had when she was practising with Ken.

  As Lynne fell face forward into the snow, blood flowing from her head wound to stain it scarlet, Stella stared at Collier. He had a black pistol in his bare hand, pointed at her. Instinctively, she pulled the trigger and dived to her left, rolling in the snow before scrambling to her feet.

  He was firing now, groups of three shots. Stella fired twice then ran, zig-zagging erratically, for the cover of the birch trees that ringed the lake. No, no, no, no, this wasn’t supposed to happen. She raced away, grateful for the months and years of running she’d done, the hundreds or was it thousands of miles – oh, what does it matter, Stel? – she’d racked up running in the night through the streets of north west London as she fought to shake off the crushing depression that had descended on her like a wet, charcoal-grey blanket after the hit and run and she heard the bullets singing past her to hit the birch trees, gouging pale-wheat coloured wounds beneath their silvery grey skin, and a searing pain in her left shoulder made her scream out, and she kept running but looked left to see blood darkening the red wool of the coat, where a rip had opened up over her deltoid muscle and she thought flesh wound keep running adrenaline’s your friend that’s what the instructors at Hendon told us. She had to be faster than Collier. Had to be. She was younger, fitter and more motivated. She dived behind a thicker tree trunk and swung round it before firing two more shots. He’d disappeared.