by Ben Hopkin
Going down to the basement, Nicole realized that most of the traffic in the building had pretty much vanished down here. All of the occupants of the elevator had gotten off before her, and as she moved out into the hallway, it was empty.
That was both good and bad. If she didn’t run into anyone, it was great. But with the lack of people down here, her presence might be noted much more readily.
She’d just have to hope that didn’t happen. It was time for her to track down the severed corpse belonging to a serial killer’s victim.
Distractions were unwelcome at the moment.
* * *
“So why are we going to the Palace of Westminster instead of the old location for New Scotland Yard?” Kyra asked.
“There’s a walkway that connects them,” was Kent’s cryptic answer.
Kyra moved toward the entryway to the Palace, but Kent stopped her.
“But I thought…” she said, allowing her confusion to show on her face.
Kent grunted. “You plan on just walking in?”
“Um. Yes.”
Shaking his head at her, he pointed at the badge that rested against her breasts. “With that?”
What was Kent’s problem with…? Oh. All of the sudden, Kyra got it. If she went into the Palace in her official capacity, word would get back to Locroft. Possibly not for quite a while, but it would happen at some point.
“Fine,” she huffed, chagrined. “What’s your idea?”
“I told you. We go sightseeing.” He pointed over to the right where a tour group was forming up.
It was simple, Kyra had to admit. Get in with a crowd, find an opportune moment, then slip away down the back hallways. But Kyra was hazy on the details, so she decided to think it through on her own.
The walkway that connected the Palace to the buildings sat just to the north. And while there were tours that went through those buildings as well, they were far less often, and much smaller.
Easier for them to get caught.
Kent was a genius. And more than a little scary. Just how she liked it.
“Fine. But we don’t exactly look like tourists.”
Giving her a challenging glance, Kent did something to his posture and expression. It was subtle. Kyra wasn’t even sure what he had done. But in an instant, he had gone from being a smoldering hunk of stubbly hotness to a dullard of epic proportions.
How had he done that?
Kent must have seen the question in her eyes. “Imagine that you are an idiot and you’ll look like one. It doesn’t take much.”
Simple enough, but Kyra couldn’t quite buy it. That couldn’t be the entirety of the secret to Kent’s transformation. It was some kind of actor hoodoo guru routine.
But she did what she asked, and Kent did a double take.
“That’s good.” The profiler looked her over once or twice. “Very good.”
Was he mocking her? There was no way that it had worked that well. Kyra felt her spine stiffen at his statement, deciding that it could only be a joke.
But Kent turned her about so that she could catch a glimpse of herself in the shiny surface of a glass window in front of her. The woman she saw in the reflective surface had the outward appearance of the Kyra she knew from years of looking into the mirror.
However, the figure there was a moron. No spark of intelligence lurking beneath the surface of those black eyes.
Kent was right.
“All right,” she acceded. “Lead the way.”
Time for them to see the inner workings of the British government. Well, that, and a possible trail left by a turn-of-the-century madman that liked to kill prostitutes.
The leader of the tour group motioned for the huddled mass of tourists to follow him as they moved into the cool darkness of the old building.
This might just turn out to be the best tour Kyra would ever take. She glanced at her watch. 12:35.
Less than eleven hours before the Ripper copycat struck again.
* * *
Moving through the hallways, Nicole could see that a good portion of the bottom floor of the Norman Shaw North Building seemed to be dedicated to storage. There were only a couple of doors that had names on them, and the titles seemed to relate to maintenance.
Good. Maybe her being down here wasn’t going to be such an odd thing, after all. Anyone that saw her would see the cart first and possibly not look any closer.
The issue now was that she had to sort through all of the possible areas that might contain a corpse. Well, half of a corpse, anyway.
This could take hours. And Nicole didn’t have hours. She had perhaps thirty minutes at most. Then the crews would come back and notice one of the carts missing. It wouldn’t take a genius for someone to figure out what had happened at that point.
And if she was found inside a building where she wasn’t supposed to be, with a cart that she had borrowed… okay, stolen… then things would end badly for her. Very badly.
No. That wasn’t going to happen. She was going to see the Big Ben, the Globe Theatre and Buckingham Palace if it killed her.
Okay. Time to pull a rabbit out of her hat.
What did Kent always say? If you wanted to hone your perceptions to the point that you seemed psychic, you had to think in ways that no one else was willing to think. Go to places where others weren’t willing to go. That was both a mental and a physical discipline.
Kent did hours and hours of prep work on each case, tracking… some would say stalking… the possible victims, lurking about in corners, digging through trash. Once he had come home stinking of rotten Chinese food because he’d gone dumpster diving in a restaurant’s garbage. It had taken days to get rid of the smell.
Smell.
A corpse would start to stink within a day or so.
That meant that either the murder had taken place recently, which didn’t seem to match what Nicole had been able to ascertain from the severed limbs in the Thames, or that the odor should be pretty much overpowering at this point. And yet, that didn’t seem to be the case. That kind of scent gets noticed. Fast.
Unless…
Nicole started scanning the signs on the door until she got to one that listed cleaning supplies. It was a room that looked to be dedicated to the storage of cleaning material. Caustic, antibacterial and…. deodorizing.
The perfect place to store a rotting corpse.
She checked the door handle. Locked.
Dammit.
Glancing over the cart, hoping against hope, Nicole looked for any left-behind keys. No luck. It had been a long shot, anyway.
Time to use the skills learned from her criminally-inclined new husband.
Pulling a couple of hairpins out of her pocket, Nicole glanced down the hallway to make sure that no one was coming. The floor was like a ghost town. She could almost imagine that she heard crickets chirping. No one would interrupt her.
Opening up the hairpins, Nicole inserted the first, pulling back the bar that covered the tumblers. Then, using the rough side of the pin on the other, she pulled back as she held pressure on the doorknob.
With a satisfying click, the handle turned. Sometimes it paid to have a partner who worked on the shady side of the rules.
As she entered the darkened room and groped for the light switch, Nicole felt a sense of failure. There was no whiff of decay, no indication of a rotting corpse in the air. Only the harsh scent of the chemicals used to keep the building nice and sanitary for the MPs that worked here.
She flicked on the light, regardless. After all, she’d spend precious moments picking the damn lock. Might as well see what was inside.
Nothing.
Shelves of fluids, powders, sprays. All in industrial sized bottles that made her cleaning closet back home look like a tiny little spice rack. Row upon row of chemicals that could probably peel the skin off her bones, given the chance.
Back toward the rear of the storage room, there was what appeared to be a recessed area that was just out of sight. Moving toward it
, Nicole was filled with a sense of foreboding. A prickling of the skin at the nape of her neck, combined with a feel of someone watching her.
But when she rounded the corner, there was nothing there but a faucet with a recessed drain underneath. Probably for the janitorial staff to fill up their mop buckets or something like that.
No body.
Somehow, after all the build-up, to find that there was nothing in here but cleaning materials was a real let down. It had seemed like such a good idea. Now Nicole was back at square one.
Or, she could just let it all go. Forget that she had ever seen the severed limb in the river. Let the authorities here handle it.
Who was she kidding?
If Kent ever found out that she had held out on him like this, he would never forgive her. She had to search until she had gone through all the possibilities, or just give in and call him already. And she knew exactly how that conversation would go.
No thank you.
So, time to get going. There was a two-thirds of a floor left for her to look through, and not much time in which to do it. If it was going to happen, she was going to have to get moving.
As she turned to move back toward the door, Nicole felt a sudden sense of disorientation. The room was unbalanced. The shelves on the right side of the room, the side where the alcove was, were closer to the door than the other.
That wasn’t the strangest thing she had ever seen before, but it was odd. The difference wasn’t enough to make sense as a deliberate choice. It was just enough space to…
Accommodate a body.
Rushing back around to the rear of the room, Nicole pushed herself back in close to the recessed sink. Sure enough, there was a gap between the shelves of cleaning supplies and the wall.
And in the gap was a form. It looked to be about the size of a woman’s torso.
So… if it was what Nicole thought it was, how was it not reeking to high heaven? There was no detectable scent.
She grabbed a flashlight… no, torch. The UK term was so much cooler than flashlight. The light from her torch shone back into the darkened space behind the shelving. The form was covered in all kinds of powders and even some fluids, all of which looked to be deodorizing agents of some kind or another.
But that alone wouldn’t keep the stench at bay. And while the form was about the size that Nicole would have expected, upon closer examination, the shape was distorted, as well as being a bit larger than she would have expected.
There was the shape of what could be the head, but again, it was lumpy and of a greater size that a human head should be. As Nicole shone the flashlight, something reflective caught the beam and bounced it back at her.
Plastic.
The body had been wrapped tightly in cling wrap, which was now bulging from the gasses trapped inside. The plastic covering had yet to burst, which was why there was no smell, and any residual decomp from anything on the outside of the plastic was taken care of by the chemicals.
Brilliant. Devious.
Disgusting.
Nicole’s stomach turned at the thought of someone having to deal with this crime scene. Then she stopped and groaned. She knew what this meant.
This meant she had to contact Kent. Except she didn’t have his cell number.
She sank down to the floor in the darkened alcove and cursed her new husband’s name.
* * *
Kent was having a tough go of it.
Pretending to be unintelligent could be enjoyable from time to time. It was always fun to mess with other’s perceptions. But pretending to be unintelligent while being led around by the world’s worst tour guide was excruciating.
He had already come up with fifteen retorts to Kenneth’s… as his tour guide badge proclaimed him to be… “facts” that were funny enough that he’d had to turn his own laughter into a cough. Twice. Kyra was staring at him like he had sprouted another head.
And worse than the held-in comments and near-laughter was the fact that every time he came up with something good, his posture changed. He was losing his common-man disguise, shedding the ignorance like a second skin.
Time for them to ditch the group and find their way over to the Norman Shaw buildings via the walkway. There was a security checkpoint off to their left here, with two guards stationed. One was there to wand anyone that caused the metal detector to sound. The other to hit the button that opened the gate.
Kent leaned in to Kyra. “I need a distraction,” he whispered.
To her credit, she didn’t even hesitate. His protégé walked up to a woman standing in front of her, where there was a man close by. Reaching around, Kyra grabbed the woman’s breast, then quickly slunk out of the way.
The shocked and accosted woman turned to the man at her side and began whaling on him, beating him about the head and shoulders. Screaming at the top of her lungs, the groping victim continued her tirade while doing her best to turn the man black and blue. Kent almost felt sorry for the guy.
“How dare you?” the woman cried. “Didn’t your mummy teach you proper respect for a lady?”
The “lady” assignation was perhaps debatable, but the man receiving the beating was hardly much better. After a streak of swear words that would blister paint, there was finally something intelligible from his mouth in the way of a coherent protest.
“Woman, geroff me! I didn’t do nuffink!”
Kent’s attention was drawn to the checkpoint, where both of the guards had been drawn toward the altercation. They were working to try to separate the two combatants, and with any luck they’d be busy sorting out that mess for a few minutes at the least.
“Good job,” he murmured to Kyra, whose face lit up with the compliment. “But next time try to draw them further away from the checkpoint.”
Her face fell, and the pleased expression was replaced with a frown. Okay. That wasn’t exactly fair, seeing as he hadn’t specifically told her the objective of the distraction. But she should have been able to ascertain what the objective had been.
Plus, Kyra unbalanced and unsure of herself was that much more likely to work harder on the case to win his approval. He wasn’t above using her daddy issues to his advantage. After all, his advantage was hers right now.
Win-win.
Kent moved over to the gate, all pretense at lower-class dullness shed. Glancing over at the altercation, he made sure that no one was looking his way, then reached around behind the desk and pushed the button he had observed the guard depressing earlier.
There was a click, and the gate unlocked, letting Kyra and himself through. They were on their way through when Kyra’s cell phone rang. Motioning furiously at her to turn the damn thing to silent, Kent glanced up at the group behind them.
Neither of the guards had looked over, but one of the tourists had. There was a dawning realization on the man’s face, and he was turning toward the guards.
That wasn’t good.
Kent started to look for a place to hide, or maybe to find a way to get back on the other side of the gate. But before he could do more than think about it, Kyra’s form was pressed up against him, her face inches from his, her hands moving with urgency over his body.
This was unexpected.
Her action so disarmed him, that all Kent could think for a moment was that maybe she really was a sociopath. But then it dawned on him what she was doing.
Taking a peek at the man in the tour group, Kent could see the man’s shoulders relaxing. Kent gave the man a shrug, and the man turned away, after giving Kent a co-conspirator’s grin.
The second that the tourist’s attention was elsewhere, Kent broke off the contact with Kyra, pushing back to arm’s distance. He scanned her face, but there was no sign of anything but calculation there.
“What?” she asked. “We needed a distraction.”
And that was it. No guilt. No shame. Possibly a hint of flushed cheeks, but that was more than likely from the exertion. If it weren’t for the issue of Kent having to explain
this to Nicole somewhere down the line, he would have been so proud of his protégé right now.
“Forget it,” he grunted. “Let’s go.”
“Hold on,” Kyra responded, pulling out her cell phone and checking the screen. She held up the device to her ear, more than likely checking her voicemail.
Kent walked away from her, headed toward the building that used to house London’s Metropolitan Police. Seconds later, he heard an exasperated exhalation from Kyra, as she realized she was being left behind.
Time for her to learn that being on a case with him didn’t leave much room for checking her messages. He had things to get done before 11 o’clock.
“It was the Baron,” Kyra said as she came even with Kent. “Wants to know what’s happening with the case.”
“And that is why you never give your number to the suits,” Kent shot back.
Kyra seemed to struggle with herself for a moment before she gave an answer. “My business requires that I keep clients happy.”
“Oh, is that how it works? Good to know.” Kent upped the pace again, forcing Kyra into a trot to keep up. He forced himself not to grin.
“What do you mean by that?” Kyra demanded, glancing around to make sure there was no one nearby. As if Kent didn’t have a handle on that mundane a detail. Besides, the more you drew attention to yourself by checking, the more likely it was that someone would attempt to listen in. Psychology 101.
Rather than replying, Kent just looked at Kyra and allowed her to think her statement through on her own. It didn’t take long before she got it.
“Fine. You don’t seem to have any trouble. But it’s not the same for you. I have a team to think about.”
“Whatever,” Kent said with an airy wave of his hand. “You clearly have things under control.” He pointed at her cell. “Better check in with your client.”
To be honest, her speaking with the Baron would allow Kent to take care of something himself. Wouldn’t do to have Kyra listening in on what he was about to do. She might get the wrong idea. Think Kent was a hypocrite or something.
He pulled out Paggie’s phone. First, it was time to check in on his wife. Second, they had to track down a hidden cache of Ripper evidence.
