Death Count: A Kat Munro Thriller (The Kat Munro Thrillers Book 1)

by SL Beaumont

  Adam pulled himself to his feet using the closest parked car for support. The shriek of the car’s alarm rang out. Kat swung her head around towards the noise. The racket was enough for their two attackers to abandon the fight and instead begin running towards the exit ramp.

  Kat started after them.

  “No, Kat. Let them go,” Adam shouted.

  She stopped running and turned back towards him. He was holding his arm across his ribs with a grin on his face. He held his mobile in his hand.

  “Hopefully, some of my colleagues will be waiting for them on the street.”

  “Are you okay?” she called above the din of the car alarm.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Where did you learn to do that?”

  The alarm stopped mid-sentence so that he shouted the last few words.

  “Learn what?” Kat shouted back, mimicking him.

  “I don’t know what I’d call it; it wasn’t like any martial art that I’ve ever seen.”

  “When you grow up with two brothers, you learn to defend yourself any way you can,” she said. “And thanks for your help, by the way."

  “You had it under control, I would have just been in the way,” Adam said.

  “Lame.” Kat laughed.

  Adam pulled a plastic evidence bag from deep in one pocket and handed it to Kat.

  “Can you reach under that car and collect the knife without touching it?”

  Kat crouched down and reached for the knife which had come to rest against the back tire of a black Mercedes coupé. She bagged it without touching the handle. She returned the sealed bag to Adam, who was on his phone, giving a detailed description of the attackers. He acknowledged her with a nod. He ended the call. “We have to wait here,” he said.

  “Do you think those guys were expecting us?”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure that was random,” Adam said. “I suspect someone followed us from Smyth’s apartment.”

  “But how did they know that we’d come down here?”

  “I’m not sure, but I suppose they guessed I’d want to check on Smyth’s movements on the night he died. Street CCTV footage has his car leaving by the ramp that leads down here.”

  Kat nodded and went to sit on the bottom step in the stairwell. She let out a breath and closed her eyes for a moment.

  “Are you okay?”

  She opened her eyes to find that Adam had followed her and was seated at her side.

  “Yeah.” She looked down at her trembling right hand.

  “Adrenaline rush wearing off?” he asked.

  Kat nodded. “I guess.”

  “Seriously, where did you learn self-defence like that?”

  “I do a couple of kickboxing classes most weeks, among other things. After the accident, I decided that I needed to be able to defend myself,” Kat said, waving her left hand in the air.

  “That makes no sense. If it was an accident, defending yourself wouldn’t have made any difference,” Adam said, looking sideways at her.

  Kat hesitated. “Well, ah… it made sense to me at the time.”

  “How…” Adam began. Footsteps thundered down the stairs behind them, and two uniformed police officers appeared.

  Kat leapt to her feet, and Adam somewhat gingerly climbed to his, hissing as a shooting pain wrapped around his middle.

  ***

  By the time a police car dropped Adam and Kat back at her office, it was mid-afternoon.

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving,” Adam said, getting out of the car.

  “Me too, but my priority is to freshen up,” Kat said.

  “Thanks, mate,” Adam said to the driver before they crossed the street.

  “The partners didn’t seem all that concerned that someone attacked us on their premises,” Kat said as they entered the building.

  “I know, although they did seem surprised. According to the receptionist, they’ve been having problems with people breaking into cars on that level. She seemed to think that we must have disturbed thieves.”

  Kat signed Adam in at the security desk and picked up a temporary pass for him. They took the stairs to the first floor. Kat strode across the office to join her team at their pod of desks, the heels of her shoes tapping on the wooden floor. Adam followed, nodding a polite greeting to a couple of Kat’s colleagues who looked up from their computer screens with undisguised interest as he passed.

  “Shamira, Nate, this is Detective Adam Jackson,” Kat said.

  Nathan jumped up from his desk and shook hands with Adam. “G'day, mate.”

  Shamira followed suit. “My God, what happened to you two?” she screeched. “You look like you’ve been in a fight.”

  “That’s because we have. Two guys jumped us in the basement garage at Capital Investment Partners,” Kat explained.

  Nathan looked shocked. “I hope you kicked their arses.”

  “Yeah,” Adam and Kat answered together.

  “Are you going to claim that?” Kat said, looking at him open-mouthed.

  “Between us, we sent them packing.” Adam grinned.

  “Right, just as well you set off that car alarm when you did, cos it wasn’t like I had it under control or anything,” Kat replied. “Y’know, I read somewhere that people deliberately misremember events when it’s too embarrassing or to place themselves in the role of hero to liven up an otherwise boring life.”

  “Ouch.” Adam feigned hurt.

  Kat chuckled. “Now I need to freshen up. Excuse me for a moment.”

  She closed the bathroom door and leaned against it. She caught sight of herself in the mirror above the double sinks. She looked dishevelled. She pulled a brush from her bag, ran it through her messy hair, and retouched her makeup. She slipped her jacket off and changed the dressing on the graze above her elbow. She removed her hand and studied the dent between the index and middle finger. She turned it over and saw a long crack across the palm and sighed. She rubbed her stump. Her arm was a little tender after the fight.

  When she arrived back at her team’s pod, Adam had made himself comfortable at her desk and was chatting with Nathan and Shamira as though they were old friends.

  “Kat, look what just arrived,” Adam said, pointing to a box on her desk.

  “Is that?”

  “I assume it’s Smyth’s laptop and the other materials from his home office,” Adam replied.

  “That was fast. I would have thought that they’d have dragged their feet and taken an age. They seem keen to get us out of their hair. Let’s take a look,” Kat said, hunger forgotten.

  Nathan jumped up and opened the box, prizing a thin matte-silver laptop from inside. He opened the lid and powered it up. They all watched as the screen flickered to life. The wallpaper displayed a man dressed from head to toe in ski gear grinning at the camera from the top of a ski slope, the snow-covered valley below him sparkling the sun.

  “That would be our Mr. Smyth, I presume,” Nathan said.

  “Yup,” Adam agreed. “Now, what’s he got on here that was so sensitive that it required removing from his apartment?”

  “Password?” Nathan asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down. A rectangular box had appeared in the centre of the screen requesting a password.

  “Ah.”

  Kat rummaged around in the box and lifted out several files and books. She held out an envelope, addressed to ‘Ms. Munro.’ She opened it, sliding out a piece of paper with the words ‘Password: CapitalXI’. “Seems they are going out of their way to be helpful.” She held it out to Nathan, who typed it into the box on the screen.

  The words ‘Welcome Hooray Henry’ appeared on the screen. Nathan smirked at the pejorative term. He began moving his fingers across the keyboard at speed, pulling up a tree of directories. Adam leaned on the back of his chair and watched.

  “Try the CIP folder and work down,” he instructed.

  ***

  Nathan pushed the laptop away in frustration. “There’s nothing of interest here. If I were to
hazard a guess, it would be that it’s been cleaned of confidential CIP data. I’ve one further program that I can run to ensure that nothing is hidden behind an inaccessible firewall or in the system recycling bin. Still, I don’t expect that to reveal anything,” he said.

  “Explains why they were so keen to give us the laptop,” said Kat.

  “What else is in the box?” Adam asked.

  “Several finance books and some folders of quarterly performance reports for their various investment funds. Nothing commercially sensitive that I can see,” Kat replied.

  “That’s so frustrating, but not entirely unexpected. There’s nothing in the delete folder on the laptop?” Adam asked, turning back to Nathan.

  Nathan shook his head. “Nope, the trash has been emptied.”

  “Interesting,” Adam said. “If they’ve deleted files from Smyth’s laptop, then that is a criminal offence.”

  “Or maybe Smyth deleted them before he died?” Kat said.

  Adam straightened up and groaned, holding a hand to his ribs. “Well, I’ll head back to the incident room and let you get on with the review. Great to meet you all. I will see you again soon.”

  Kat walked with him to the reception area at the top of the stairs. “Are your ribs a bit sore? You might need to get them checked out.”

  “I’ve had worse. Nothing a good night’s sleep won’t fix.” He reached out and took hold of her left hand, running his thumb over the dent between her fingers that the knife attack had caused. A hairline crack ran across the palm and disappeared beneath the cuff of her jacket. Kat flinched and started to pull her hand away, but Adam held on, studying it.

  “Will you be able to get that fixed?” he asked.

  Kat nodded, swallowing hard. She didn’t usually allow anyone, apart from her doctors and close family, to touch her prosthesis.

  “It’s got great functionality, Kat. I have a mate who lost an arm in Afghanistan, and his artificial limb is nowhere near as functional as yours.”

  Kat swallowed again. “It depends where he got it from, mine’s a new model, a prototype, using myoelectric technology.”

  Adam let her hand go and looked her in the eye, registering her discomfort. “Sorry, I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “It’s okay, I just don’t normally discuss it with strangers,” she said.

  Adam grinned. “I think we shot past that stage when I saved you from those attackers today.”

  Kat raised her eyebrows. “Really? Surely you’re not so insecure that you can’t admit that a woman had to defend you?”

  “No, it’s just a new experience for me,” he said. “And those guys were not messing about; they were the real deal. It wasn’t some spotty teen trying to snatch a bag. I was impressed.”

  Kat felt an unwanted blush creep up her neck and face.

  “Can I buy you a drink after work to say thank you?”

  Kat’s smile disappeared. “No. That’s not necessary.”

  Adam’s phone rang. He answered as Kat backed away to join her colleagues.

  “I think you won yourself a new admirer, girl,” Shamira said as she approached her desk.

  “Nah,” Kat said.

  Shamira looked across at Nathan, who pulled a face. “Yeah, it would take more than a few stupid kickboxing moves to impress a man like that,” he said.

  Kat opened her mouth to retort when she realised that they were teasing her. “Ha, ha, very funny.”

  “Kat,” Adam called, striding back across the office. “That was the pathologist. The toxicology report on Henry Smyth has just come back. He had ingested enough heroin to kill an elephant, and there was a large amount of BZP, you know, the date rape drug, in his system. Why would you sedate yourself if you were trying to end it all? We’re now looking at murder.”

  Chapter 5

  “If I have to look at one more set of financial statements, I swear I will go cross-eyed. We really should get a boredom allowance for days like these,” Nathan said.

  Kat and Shamira smirked.

  “Seriously, there is nothing here. These guys appear to be running a great business,” Nathan said.

  “I have to agree,” Kat replied. “Let’s distil our findings; I have to report back later on today.” She rubbed her aching arm.

  “Is your arm sore after yesterday?” Shamira asked, noticing her friend’s discomfort.

  “Yeah, a little bruised. Although not as bad as I hope those thugs are feeling. I got a couple of great kicks in.”

  “You had quite a day. Did you damage your hand?”

  “Yeah, unfortunately, this one needs repairing. I’ll drop it off after work. I should probably have used my spare today, but it’s not as comfortable as this one,” Kat said, holding up her arm, turning her prosthesis over and flexing the fingers.

  Kat was putting the final touches to her report for the meeting with Stephenson, DI Greenwood, and Adam, when Nathan pushed back from his desk with an emphatic, “Yes, you little beauty.”

  Kat looked over at him. “What?”

  “There was something else on Smyth’s laptop that CIP’s techies didn’t erase. I’ve run a program that replicates the deleted files in a certain way, and bingo.”

  “Is that even legal?” Shamira asked.

  Nathan shrugged. “Yeah?”

  “What have you found?” Kat asked, wheeling her chair over to his desk, using her feet to propel her across the floor.

  “A client list by the looks of it, dated one month ago and some other files that I’ll need to clean up,” Nathan said.

  “Show me after my meeting.”

  Nathan nodded. “I probably won’t have them cleaned until tomorrow.”

  “Okay, let’s keep it between us for now, it may contain nothing useful.”

  ***

  Kat joined Stephenson, DI Greenwood, and Adam in the large meeting room at Forensic Accounting Associates. Kat looked through the floor-to-ceiling windows and watched the Union Jack flag fluttering on top of a building across the river for a moment before sliding into a chair at the conference table. She tapped her iPad, sharing her report to the screen on the wall at the end of the conference table.

  “I will email you a copy of the report so you can read the detail later. We have reviewed all of the publically available material for CIP, annual reports, press releases, Companies House material, social media, and short dossiers on the key personnel,” she began.

  DI Greenwood nodded. “Good.”

  “The business has been running for four years; it appears to be operating efficiently with low overheads, at least compared to other industry players. It’s been profitable from day one. Their taxes are all filed and paid, no employment disputes on record, and it even has a good record of corporate charitable giving,” Kat said.

  “That’s what our team concluded also,” DI Greenwood said. “So, what are we missing?”

  “It’s almost too good to be true. Start-ups usually have an issue somewhere, whether with cash flow or disgruntled employees who thought they were getting share options, or itchy investors wanting an immediate return, but there’s not even a hint of that,” Kat said.

  “Yet, the partners were evasive, sent you a cleaned laptop, and probably had those guys waiting in the basement for us,” Adam said.

  “Can you prove any of that?” DI Greenwood asked.

  “No.”

  DI Greenwood stroked his chin. “Kat, can you take a deeper look at each of the partners? Start with Smyth, because we have access to his financial records, and I’ll try to get you as much financial information as I can on the other three.”

  “Okay,” Kat said.

  “I’ve sent the crime scene team back to secure the apartment,” Adam said. “But I’m not expecting them to find anything, as the Smyths had already started tidying.”

  “There’s something else in play here,” DI Greenwood mused. “Why would someone send thugs to see off a police officer?”

  “Smyth’s murder…” Ada
m began.

  “Suspicious death,” DI Greenwood interrupted.

  “Very suspicious death,” Adam continued. “Are we sure that his demise is related to something at CIP? It could be something else entirely, jealous lover, money, family dispute?”

  “Who benefits from his death?” Kat asked.

  “We’ve yet to see a will, but I have people back in the incident room digging into all aspects of his life,” Adam said.

  “I agree that we need to look at this from all angles, but the fact that he was at CIP removing files and his laptop the same night that he and a security guard died, points to something at the firm,” DI Greenwood said.

  Stephenson had been quiet throughout the discussion and now spoke up. “Can we get access to their client records, internal and external audit reports?” he asked. “See if there are any anomalies there.”

  “Leave that with me,” DI Greenwood said.

  Chapter 6

  Adam glanced at his watch; 12:45 p.m., the perfect time to blend in with the lunchtime crowd. When the traffic lights changed to red, he crossed Whitehall, turned the corner at the next block, and jogged up the front steps of a grey brick six-storey office building. It was no different from any other historic buildings on the street, all housing various government agencies, except that this one was home to a secret department within the Ministry of Defence. He showed his warrant card to the soldier operating the tiny reception area. A flicker of recognition crossed the man’s face as he nodded and indicated that Adam could pass through the metal detector.

  “Weapons?” he asked almost as an afterthought.

  “No, just me,” Adam replied, emptying his keys and wallet from his pockets into a plastic tray and walking through the scanning unit. The light on the top of the machine flashed green. Adam gathered his things and continued towards the wide curving staircase at the rear of the lobby. Taking the stairs two at a time, he arrived on the first floor and followed a wood-panelled corridor to the far end and knocked on a closed door.