by Michael Kerr
The dark side of dawn was his unwary ally, and he was soon crouched down close to the police vehicles with a view of the ghostly tent that seemed alive with the shadows of people flitting behind the lamp-lit canvas. And then Bowen and his sidekick had appeared, accompanied by a stranger to him.
“Stick to shadowing soap stars and pop singers, Holden.” Barney said. “Why try to be an ace crime reporter when all those shallow egos are parading around, just waiting for you pack rats to snap them up for the Sunday supplements?”
“That’s the bread and butter, chief,” Larry said. “This is what I’m best at, uncovering the news as it happens.”
“No comment, apart from bollocks. Do yourself a favour and vanish, before your camera ends up at the bottom of the Serpentine.”
Larry knew instinctively that the tall guy with Bowen was the main event. And as he brushed past him, he reached out grasped the sleeve of his windbreaker and said to Mark, “Who are you?”
Mark’s hand peeled the unshaven man’s fingers back, holding them and exerting enough pressure to cause the junk-food-fat little snoop to drop to his knees and grunt in surprise and pain. The gravel that topped the tarmac bit through his trousers and dug into the skin of his kneecaps.
“Look if you must, but don’t touch, buddy,” Mark said, letting go of the man physically, but holding him in place with a stare that could have soured cream. “Who I am is no concern of yours.”
Larry shuffled back, climbed to his feet and scurried off into the darkness of the shrubbery. Adrenaline burned in his muscles. The guy had a Yank accent, and his reluctance to be identified was fuel to Larry’s fire.
“That was a little over the top, Mark,” Amy said admonishingly. “He was only trying to do his job.”
Mark hiked his shoulders. “He’ll live. He should have kept his whisky breath out of my face.”
Larry, still within earshot, smiled. An American, first name Mark, who was in some way involved with the Park Murders. He was on to something that would put him one up over the dickheads he used to work with. They had ostracised him, but he was still a better investigative reporter than most of them put together would ever be. Even on the outside, without the official contacts and machinery, he would get the scoop.
Back at his flat, Larry made a call. “Janice, I need something really quick,” he said to WPC Janice Purvis.
“Use your hand and a Kleenex,” she said.
“Funny girl. I mean info.”
“Are you at home?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll call you back. Give me ten minutes or so,” she said, and disconnected.
Larry paced the room, sipping Scotch from a china mug that Annette had given him for a Christmas or birthday. He couldn’t remember which, or how long ago. The vessel sported the yellow face of Bart Simpson on its side; the cartoon character’s jaundiced appearance making his liver suspect in Larry’s red-rimmed eyes. “It takes one to know one,” he said aloud, having decided that Bart was a closet alcoholic.
The phone chirped and he snatched it up. “Janice?”
“Yeah. What is it you want?”
“The Park Murders. There’s a Yank involved, working with DCI Bowen. I need to know what his connection is. His first name is Mark.”
“That’ll cost you, Larry.”
“Double the usual if you come through today.”
“Deal. I know who he is.”
“You’re an angel. Shoot.”
“He’s a criminal psychologist. An ex-FBI profiler now living over here and working at some nuthatch in Kent. He’s a doctor of something or other, and his name is Mark Ross. He’s consulting on the case.”
“Anything else?”
“He’s tight with an ex-cop; Amy Egan.”
“Have they got any useful leads?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Thanks, Janice. The cash will be in the post today. Unless you want to come over to my place one evening and collect it personally.”
“Maybe when you’re the last man left alive on the planet, Larry. But even that’s doubtful.”
“Stop playing hard to get. You know you want my body.”
“In your wet dreams. Bye, Larry,” Janice said, chuckling as she racked the phone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Amy poured coffee as Mark took a pew in the breakfast nook and mentally recalled every detail of the murder scene, his eyes unfocused as he stared into the middle distance.
“Did seeing that poor dead girl help in any way?” Amy said, placing the steaming mugs on coasters before slipping on to the bench opposite him.
“Yeah,” he said, pulling his thoughts back to the kitchen, away from the carnage he had witnessed within the incident tent. “Being there gave me more insight and feeling for the killer than photos can convey. What did you feel and think?”
Amy closed her eyes and brought the scene back to mind with perfect, nauseating clarity. “The branch is phallic,” she said in a clear monotone, in the same way that she had given evidence in witness boxes throughout her police career. “I believe that it was employed as a substitute for the penis. I can’t understand why penetration isn’t made physically. Why not rape them?”
“It could be love gone bad,” Mark said. “That’s why the heart is taken. But I agree with you over the branch. It must be someone who can’t get it up.”
“Or a woman,” Amy said.
“What?”
“Just a thought.”
“But Caroline Sellars isn’t gay,” Mark said, his eyebrows dipping in consternation.
Amy shrugged. “She might swing both ways.”
“Jesus, Amy, you’re right. I’ve been out of the game too long,” he said, standing and pacing up and down the kitchen. “I got myself a fixed mindset on it being a male. In all probability it is, but I overlooked the alternative.”
“All the evidence points to it being a man,” Amy said.
“What evidence? We hardly have anything. Let’s go over the murder book again,” he said, taking his coffee through to the lounge where he had left the files on the first two victims, now punched and securely held in a ring binder, along with copies of all other statements and the autopsy reports.
Amy followed him, pulled the binder across the coffee table, turned it around and flicked through the contents until she came to Caroline’s statement and said, “She gave a list of all her ex-lovers, going back to when she first got laid, aged sixteen. The squad have checked them out, and only Jason Tyler fits the bill.”
“I could be wrong, but I don’t think they’ll find he has any scratches, or that his DNA matches,” Mark said. “These murders are planned over a lengthy period. If he was the perp, he would’ve had the foresight to construct bullet-proof alibis, and he didn’t. We need to interview Caroline Sellars and eliminate any possibility of the killer being a heartbroken, homicidal dyke.”
“Dyke isn’t a very politically correct term these days,” Amy said.
“How about a lovelorn, Sapphic sadist, then? Is that better PC?”
Amy grinned. “On second thoughts, let’s stick with dyke.”
“I’ll go through it all again and allow for the possibility of it being a woman,” Mark said. “Will you phone Barney and set up a meet with Caroline?”
“Could be awkward, with her being stashed away under armed guard.”
“He’ll arrange it. We’re on a countdown again. If we’re lucky we’ve got till the first Friday of December. Unless our sicko decides to step up the action.”
“When do you want to see her?” Amy said.
“As soon as we’re finished up at the morgue.”
After reading through the files again, cover to cover, and allowing his mind to consider the hitherto overlooked concept of the killer being a scorned or jealous female, Mark went upstairs and changed into sweats and trainers. Back in the kitchen, he held Amy close for a long time, as she put her head on his chest and returned his embrace.
“I won’t
be long,” he said, finally breaking away and walking to the door.
It was cold. The air was hardly warmed by a watery sun that was little more than a pale, diffused glow, impotent against the barrier of windblown clouds that almost screened its rays from London and the southeast of the country.
He jogged to nearby Richmond Park, invigorated by the raw gusts that cut through his running suit to raise his skin in tight, pimpled gooseflesh. The bare, dark fingers of defoliated trees that lined his route seemed to reach out, as if they were clutching, gnarled hands, attempting to snag his clothing and stop his flight through their midst. As he ran, he locked on to the immediate problem, to recall all his past experiences of sexually motivated homicides. In the case of the three park murders, a foreign body in the shape of a sharpened stake had been forced into the victims’ vaginas, rather than a penis or fingers being employed. But everything pointed to the killer being male. White females made up the largest focus group for sexual predators’ attention, and the attacks and subsequent torture and killing usually followed a period of stalking. As in common with many repeaters, the Park Killer would have targeted his victims carefully, after being satisfied that they conformed to a critical criterion; in this case the colour of hair, approximate age, height and general physical appearance being paramount.
Mark came to a halt and settled on a bench that overlooked part of the golf course. He took deep breaths and felt the sweat quickly cool on his body and in his hair as his burning calf and thigh muscles chastised him for subjecting them to a level of exercise that he had not indulged in for over a year. As his heart rate slowed and his ragged breath became even, he gathered his thoughts and considered the pertinent facts, listing them in his mind:
1. The murderer is a man or woman fixated on Caroline Sellars.
2. The victims were killed instead of Caroline. They were substitutes.
3. In all probability the killer knew, or had known Caroline well, and is feasibly an ex-lover or work colleague.
4. Although apparently disorganised, the crime scenes were in fact highly organised. The ritual taking of the women in selected locations conform to a set pattern. The crimes show careful planning.
5. The victims were dominated, controlled, and made to suffer before being killed.
6. The weapons had been brought to the scene specifically to carry out a pre-planned assault. The tree branches had been fashioned for one purpose, and left imbedded for maximum shock/horror effect. The knife used to remove the hearts had been retained...For further use?
7. The bodies were left abandoned as a graphic warning to Caroline Sellars; an explicit personal message for her to expect the same fate. It was an obvious ploy to instil terror; the primary reason for the killings.
8. How many? Were three his/her magic number? Would Caroline be next? Or would the slaughter continue?
9. Caroline is the key. Only she could lead them to the person who had targeted her. Her killer had made only one mistake, contacting her, not satisfied to remain totally anonymous. He/she had needed the quarry to know; to initially dominate and control her from a distance.
10. How long could the killer deny him/herself the ultimate prize? There would have been a plan in place from the outset. All actions would be part of a preconceived scheme to eventually abduct Caroline, take her to a place that afforded privacy, and subject her to a protracted period of humiliation, torture, and ultimately death.
Mark was shivering. Standing up, he stretched his tightening muscles, and then jogged back to Amy’s house. He was sure that he could sense the crazed asshole’s state of mind; love gone bad like rotten fruit mouldering in a bowl. This was not a serial killer with an uncontrollable urge to kill and kill again. This was an obsessional hatred for one specific person. Dark forces had been unleashed in a disturbed individual who was highly motivated by a need for retribution. And yet armed with all his profiling skills, Mark had no firm idea of the age, status, or even the gender of the person he was trying to mind hunt. Amy had thrown a spanner in the works, causing his mental cogwheels to be derailed from their tracks and grind to a halt. His theory of a single lone wolf male offender was now pie in the sky. The killer could just as easily be a disenchanted, middle-aged, married family man who had reached a crisis point in life and had anchored onto a past relationship with Caroline, however tenuous, and now blamed her for his present sensitivities. Or it could be – as Amy had observed – a woman who, not being able to possess Caroline within normal parameters, had determined to destroy her.
Back at the house, Mark showered and dressed and then made cheese, mushroom and chive omelettes for them both, which they washed down with what seemed mandatory mugs of coffee. After washing up, they went through to the lounge and looked out through the large picture window, entranced by the antics of two squirrels commandeering the bird table; one perched on the apex of the roof, as though a lookout, while the other used its sharp incisors as wire cutters and tried to bite through the mesh of the feeder that held a bounty of peanuts.
“I got hold of Barney. He’ll meet us at the morgue and drive us to the safe house,” Amy said, taking the empty mugs through to the kitchen and dumping them in the sink.
“Good,” Mark said. “She’s the only real lead in this case. You can talk to her first and see if she has any past girlfriends that were more than just friends.”
“You think she would admit it?”
“She’ll tell us anything and everything to get her life back and not be living in a world of fear. She’s under sentence of death, and she knows it.”
“So, you do think that it might be a woman?”
“I’m open to exploring all avenues. I see it as being a possibility we need to check out.”
Mark pulled into the rear entrance of the mortuary in Holborn and parked in a slot near a ramp that led up to a grey metal door. He ignored the flaking remains of white painted letters, barely legible on the dark, cracked concrete that read: RE ERV D.
“Names, please,” a metallic voice crackled over the intercom after Mark thumbed the bell push and looked up into the solitary black eye of the CCTV camera that was angled down from a wall bracket to capture all visitors and relay their images to monitors somewhere within the featureless and ugly building.
“Dr Mark Ross and Ms Amy Egan to see Dr Beatty,” he said. And after a long pause there was a loud click and accompanying buzz to announce that the lock had been disengaged.
They entered the cold confines of the repository for the dead, which Amy thought of as being just a temporary stop on death’s railway; a way station for the refrigerated travellers, before they were delivered to the terminus of dank grave or consumption by fire.
Jane met them in a small side room that was no less depressing for the bright prints that graced the walls, or the modern, inexpensive furniture. It reminded Amy of her dentist’s waiting room.
Greeting them with a terse nod, Jane beckoned them to accompany her.
“I’ll sit this part out,” Amy said, picking up a year-old copy of Country Life from a neat, squared-off stack on an occasional table, noting that all the magazines were in mint condition, having probably never been read.
Mark followed the pathologist along a corridor and through swing doors into a large autopsy suite. He could smell death beneath the astringent layer of antiseptic that assaulted him, or imagined that he could.
“Well, Dr Ross, I think you’re familiar with the procedure,” Jane said. “I flipped through your book at lunch time, just to give me an insight as to where you were coming from.”
“Please drop the title,” he said. “I prefer just Mark.”
“Okay, Just Mark. I’m Just Jane”, she said, her mood lightening as she snapped on a fresh pair of latex gloves.
They both smiled, reaching an unspoken understanding, knowing that their individual, diverse talents might help to uncover the identity of the unknown killer. Mark sensed that his book had impressed her to a degree, judging by her current demeanour to
wards him. She had obviously decided that he had a more than decent track record in his field of expertise.
He had written Missing Conscience after leaving the bureau. A publishing house had approached him, having had commercial success with the work biographies of other ex-profilers. The mechanics of the hunt for serial killers had cornered a market that was in no small way thanks to such fiction novels as Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris, that had also been made into movies and elevated the subject to a mass marketable level. The public obviously saw all FBI officers as being Will Graham and Clarice Starling types, and were hungry for the details of an occupation that pitted men and women against human monsters.
The advance on the book – though by no means large – had been a welcome supplementary windfall, coming at a time when his pension was only just enough to cover the basics of life. The decision to write the abridged memoirs was not wholly profit-based, though. In laying out his experiences on paper, one tortuous word after another, Mark had purged himself of certain events, diluting the terrible reality by giving it an outlet and flushing it from his system. The book was in its third reprint, and although there was no lack of encouragement for him to write a follow-up, he had declined. The project had been valid at the time, but was now behind him. He had, until now, put that part of his life into stasis, not realising that it was still an integral part of him; an ember glowing in the darkness, waiting for a cold draught to ignite it, and once ablaze, become a raging inferno within his soul.
The naked body of Judy Prescott, which had initially been recognised and identified at the scene by a local PC, was lying atop a stainless-steel table on her right side with approximately twelve inches of the branch still protruding rudely from between the cheeks of her buttocks.
“All external features have been noted and photographed,” Jane said. “And due to the foreign body, I also had X-rays taken. Before proceeding with the internal examination in the orthodox way, I will now have to remove the object.”
