‘Why?’ Kim asked.
‘Slim chance he might be involved in the incident with Aisha Gupta,’ he said. ‘The girl who was pushed to the—’
‘I know who she is,’ Kim snapped. Her information retention rate was pretty good, and Bryant had not made the mistake of leaving her out of the loop twice.
Penn frowned. ‘You sure you asked her this morning?’ he asked Dawson.
‘Of course,’ he answered, tightly.
‘Well, your girl was paying a lot of attention to his Facebook page way before you asked her to.’
Dawson’s eyebrows almost met in the middle. ‘But how… I mean… his name hadn’t come up before yesterday?’
Penn shrugged his shoulders.
‘Guys?’ she said, looking to Bryant and Dawson. ‘What the hell has been going on?’
They both shook their heads. ‘She never mentioned him.’
‘So, why the interest? Did you two discuss him in front of her?’
‘Don’t think so,’ Dawson said. ‘There was nothing to discuss. We did our statements, clearly suicide. There was nothing there,’ Dawson said, defensively, even though he’d done nothing wrong.
‘Bryant, put in a welfare call to Mrs Reynolds. We need to rule this out, straight away.’
He nodded and stepped away.
‘Wow, your girl some kind of racist?’ Penn asked.
‘Absolutely not,’ Kim snapped. ‘Her parents are from Nigeria.’
‘Well, she set up a dummy Facebook account and posted all kinds of vile…’
‘Let me see that,’ Kim said, standing behind him.
He scrolled through a whole stream of offensive posts. Blacks, Asians, gays, Jews, the works. This Facebook profile hated everyone. Kim felt her mouth begin to dry up.
She knew these posts were not from her colleague.
‘Guv,’ Bryant said, ending his call. ‘Mrs Reynolds wants to know when she can get Justin’s laptop back.’
Kim staggered backwards and rested her behind on someone’s desk.
Real fear for her colleague surged through her. Stacey had clearly been conducting her own investigation prompting her to set up the profile of a cruel, hateful person online. She had hidden her curiosity behind the wall of anonymous security. Only it hadn’t stayed that way as demonstrated by the blood on her phone.
Kim knew without doubt that Stacey’s life was in danger.
And that they were running out of time.
EIGHTY-SIX
‘What the hell did you do that for?’ Gary asked for the third time.
He swallowed deeply and stretched his neck. It was bad enough being forced to live with his sister. He hadn’t liked her when they were kids, and he liked her even less now.
‘He was going to kill you,’ she said.
He stood. ‘Of course he wasn’t going to kill me, you stupid cow, he’s a police officer being watched by another police officer with you witnessing the whole fucking thing.’
‘You were turning a funny colour,’ she said, as the tremor entered her voice.
He continued to move towards her. She took a step backwards.
‘You gave them a name,’ he said, feeling the rage burn around his body.
‘I was trying to save you,’ she whined, angering him more.
Her foot caught the bin as her body came to a forced stop in the corner of the kitchen.
He advanced. ‘Do you realise what you’ve fucking done?’
His arm swept across the counter, sending plates, cups and a fruit bowl crashing to the ground.
She shook her head but her eyes didn’t leave his face.
She knew what was coming.
‘I said, do you realise what you’ve gone and done?’ he repeated.
‘What was I supposed to do, Gaz?’ she pleaded.
‘You could have jeopardised everything, you stupid bitch,’ he said, punching her in the mouth.
She cried out and raised her arms in front of her face. The second blow landed in her stomach; his hard, powerful fist driving through the softness of her flesh.
She made a retching sound as her hands lowered to protect her belly.
The third blow landed on the side of her temple as she started to crumple to the ground.
‘Please, Gaz, don’t—’
‘Shut up, you stupid cow. Do you think you won’t be found out?’
He clenched his fist again. The throbbing in his knuckles felt satisfying.
He should never have told her anything. Yes, his sister shared his views but he should have kept Floda his own secret.
‘I can’t fucking trust—’
His hand stilled in the air as the doorbell rang.
‘You know who that is, don’t you?’ he asked, as a deathly calm stole over him.
‘It might be the neighbour or—’
‘Keep your damn mouth shut,’ he said, straightening his shirt and moving away.
The glass panel in the door told him the person who had knocked was a stranger.
But he already knew who it was.
EIGHTY-SEVEN
Kim sat on the edge of the table at the top of the room. The boards were almost complete.
‘Anybody managed to find Fiona Cowley yet?’
Gibbs shook his head. ‘Not been into work and no call either.’
Damn it.
‘Guv,’ Lewis said, quietly. ‘Why did Fiona Cowley authorise the dig in the first place?’
‘Bloody good question,’ Kim answered. ‘And one of the first ones we’ll ask her once we find her.’
‘And Jeff Cowley has just been released,’ Travis said, coming back into the squad room.
‘You’re kidding?’ Kim said.
He shook his head. ‘Time’s up. Not enough to charge him with anything. He won’t be going far with Billy still in hospital. We’ll get him back.’
Kim hoped so. He still had a lot of questions to answer.
‘Okay, folks, to recap; Stacey, for some reason, has taken an interest in the suicide of a teen named Justin Reynolds. She has visited his home, spoken to his mother and taken the boy’s laptop.
‘It appears that Justin’s accounts are full of racist posts, losing him most of his friends. Stacey has made a dummy account, which I can only assume is to get the attention of someone called Floda.
‘That same name has emerged in connection with a rush of hate crimes being investigated by Dawson and Bryant and one of our bodies from the Cowley site is Jamaican,’ she added, for the benefit of Dawson and Bryant. ‘Who also bore physical signs of being hunted.’
Those words would never come easily to her.
Penn held up Stacey’s phone. ‘The account for Floda no longer exists but I have a text message telling her the laptop is outside the station,’ he said. ‘And I’m just working through some photos she took of a racist website. There appears to be some kind of get together happening tonight.’
Damn it, Kim thought. Stacey had been lured outside by someone who had stolen Justin’s property and then promised it back. Unaware of the danger, she had foolishly gone looking. And someone had been waiting.
Lynda stood up slowly, and began walking towards the fourth board on the other side of the room.
‘It is the invitation,’ she said, to no one, as she picked up a red marker pen.
She silently began to fill in the gaps on the board.
The first line read ‘The Hunt’.
She ignored the second line, which they had already assumed to be a date.
She hesitated at the last line in small letters. She wrote backwards as though trying something out.
Two words. The last one ending in ‘ed’. She filled in the word ‘required’ and made a space leaving a five-letter word beginning with the letter ‘P’.
‘Photo,’ Dawson called out.
‘Proof,’ Kim said.
‘Hang on,’ Dawson said. ‘Remember our guy who beat up Henryk. He told Henryk to close his eyes. We saw footage of him messing with his phone.�
�� He turned towards her. ‘Maybe it’s both. Maybe a photo is proof,’ he said.
‘If it’s an event, it’s proof of entry,’ Kim said, as a wave of nausea circled in her stomach.
She saw Dawson’s deep swallow before speaking. ‘Aisha was accosted for one reason. To lie down and close her eyes.’
‘Fuck. To look dead,’ Kim cried out. ‘That’s the proof of entry. A dead body.’
‘But the note is more than twenty years old,’ Gibbs said. ‘There were no camera phones back in the…’
‘Polaroids,’ Bryant said. ‘Very popular in the eighties. I had…’
‘The abductions,’ Lynda suddenly cried out. ‘The attempted snatches this week. First victim was West African and the second from the traffic accident was Asian. And you say Stacey is…’ her words trailed away as every face in the room fell on her.
‘It’s a new one,’ Kim breathed. ‘It’s a new event. A fresh hunt.’
Kim felt the trembling start at her knees.
Stacey was the prey.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
‘Okay,’ Kim said. ‘Somehow, everything we’ve all been working on brings us back to the same place. We’re all agreed that the rush of hate crimes is somehow linked to a live hunt, some kind of entrance into the actual event.’
She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat. Indulging her rage and disgust would not help her find Stacey.
‘It’s likely that Justin Reynolds was responsible for the assault of Henryk Kowalski and that Aisha Gupta was his first attempt. He was trying to get his entrance fee but he just couldn’t finish the job.’
Despite her best efforts, she could not keep the bitterness from her tone. Any human life valued so poorly was horrific to her but the choice being made on the colour of someone’s skin or sexuality made her want to hit something, hard.
‘I still think—’
She stopped speaking as her phone rang.
‘Go ahead, Doctor A,’ she answered.
‘I have the results of the soil samples,’ she said.
‘And?’ Kim prayed this was going to give her something.
‘Different levels of magnesium, potassium and—’
‘Doc, anything that can help us?’ Kim asked, urgently. Those bones had been moved like they were leftover scraps.
‘Higher moisture content in the second—’
‘The field,’ Kim cried out as everyone turned and looked at her. ‘Thanks, Doc,’ she said, ending the call.
At least one of the mysteries had been solved. The bones had been moved when the camping field had flooded a few years earlier.
She explained the lab results to the others as, once again, it seemed everything brought them back to the Cowley family.
‘I still think Fiona Cowley is the key to this,’ Kim said. ‘I don’t know why. Dale Preece is lying about Fiona not visiting their property, and I want to find her.
‘I need someone to check the CCTV around the Preece home to see if we can establish a direction of travel when she left.’
Johnson raised his hand and picked up the phone.
She turned to Lynda.
‘We need to look into all property currently owned by the Preece family. The Cowleys may well have access to a list and are exploiting it. We need to know where this fucking event is going to take place.’
No way she could use the word ‘hunt’ when her colleague, Stacey Wood, was involved.
EIGHTY-NINE
Stacey opened her eyes and groaned. Her head felt as though it was being pounded with a jackhammer. She could feel the nausea biting at the back of her throat.
She blinked her eyes twice to make sure they were open. The dense blackness around her was unyielding. She blinked again to try to adjust her eyes to the light. Tried to make out a shape, a form, a silhouette; but there was nothing.
She felt the trembling begin in her legs. The blackness all around her was stifling, suffocating, as though she was being held down beneath a blanket. She took huge gulps of air.
A wave of dizziness threatened to engulf her. She opened her eyes wide and fought through it.
She tentatively lowered her hand from her lap to the ground beneath her and felt around, furtively. Neither her hands nor her feet were chained. Therefore there must be no chance of escape.
She fought to keep her centre of gravity. The darkness was disorienting.
She remembered a film where the prisoner had been perched on a ledge. A foot or two in any direction and they would have fallen to certain death.
With her eyes out of action, she tried to employ her other senses. She listened keenly but the silence thundered in her ears.
The darkness was swallowing her, cloying, clawing at her hair, enveloping her.
The ground beneath was cold to her touch. Bare concrete with a light dust covering that she could feel on her fingertips.
She inhaled deeply, causing another rush of dizziness. Her eyes closed to ward off the pain. There was a faint smell of something stale in the air.
But despite the fog in her brain she could sense something. She couldn’t see, hear, feel or smell anything but there was a presence. Something else in the room.
She tried to remember any detail of her journey but the last memory she had was of bending down to retrieve the laptop.
She suddenly thought of her colleagues, her boss, and the emotion surged up inside her.
She could taste the regret of keeping her activities to herself.
A small voice questioned whether any of them had even missed her, but she knew it wasn’t true. It was the voice of the child that had felt left out, abandoned. The adult police officer knew they had already noted her absence. That same realistic adult also knew there was nothing they could do.
She had told them nothing, shared nothing in her attempts to prove herself, and she had proved nothing ‒ except she couldn’t be trusted alone.
Stacey blinked back the tears as the gravity of her situation wove itself into the blackness around her.
She hitched forward on her bottom, feeling around her as she went. The effort of the movement brought fresh pounding to her head.
The stars swam in the darkness. She swayed to the left and felt herself falling sideways to the ground.
She knew she was losing consciousness when the sound of the key in the lock startled her awake.
She heard a man’s voice, pleading, begging.
‘Please, I won’t say anything, I swear. Just let me go and—’
His words were cut off abruptly as she heard him being thrown to the ground.
The door slammed shut and a gust of air whistled around her body.
‘Hello…’ she said, tentatively. Whoever it was, they were in here together.
‘Stay the fuck away from me,’ he growled.
Her eyes were wide open in the darkness as she realised that she knew who it was. She hadn’t recognised the begging tone but she remembered the aggression.
What the hell was Gary Flint doing here?
NINETY
Every person in the room was either tapping furiously or speaking on the phone.
‘Stone,’ Travis said, ending a call. ‘Just checked with the hospital. Jeff Cowley signed Billy Cowley out of the hospital twenty-five minutes ago.’
‘Damn it,’ she said.
‘Tried both their mobile phones. Switched off,’ he added.
Oh yeah, she just bet they were. That family was in this up to their lying, deceiving eyeballs.
‘Got her,’ Gibbs shouted.
Kim stood behind him. He pointed to the screen and zoomed in on the number plate of the red Jaguar as it pulled in behind a blue transit van.
‘Two thirty driving through the centre of Hagley. What time did you see her enter the Preece house?’ he asked.
‘About one thirty,’ Travis answered.
‘And this is about six miles away in lunchtime traffic so she couldn’t have been there long.’
‘Keep going,’ Kim said, tapping
him on the shoulder and walking away.
‘Bryant, contact Stacey’s mum. I want to know if she discussed anything with her over the last few days. Dawson, anything on the CCTV in Halesowen yet?’
Dawson didn’t turn but shook his head.
There was a petrol station camera at the top of the road that ran in front of the police station. A council camera covered the traffic island at the other end. Dawson was trying to crossmatch vehicles that passed one camera but didn’t pass the second, meaning they had pulled in somewhere. The travel time along the 40 mph stretch was seven seconds. It was a thankless, laborious task that would most likely yield nothing but Dawson had offered to do it anyway.
She stole a glance at the window and felt the anxiety kick up a gear.
‘Guys, it’s getting dark out there.’
A wave of acknowledgment travelled around the room.
She could feel the panic building in all of them.
She hit Woody’s number on her phone.
‘Anything, sir?’ she asked.
He had dispatched teams to both the Cowley farmhouse and Fiona’s home in case she turned up suddenly.
‘No, Stone, both places are in darkness. She’s not been there.’
‘Okay, thank—’
‘Stone, how’s it going?’
‘We’re making progress,’ she said, ignoring the empty feeling in her stomach.
‘How are you holding?…’
‘I’ll speak to you soon, sir,’ she said, ending the call.
‘I’ve got four properties,’ Gibbs called out. ‘All of them have been in the Preece family for over twenty years,’ he said, as the printer spluttered into life.
‘A manor house in Bromsgrove. An old hospital site in Staffordshire. An army training ground in Wolverley, and a derelict trading estate in Walsall.’
‘Any links to the Cowleys?’
‘Still checking,’ he said.
‘Guv, got a sec?’ Bryant said.
She moved away from the others and joined him by the door to Travis’s office.
‘It’s not gonna help us to find her, but I think I know why she couldn’t let this go.’
‘Go on,’ she said.
‘Her mum was just very honest with me after I told her about the case Stacey had been working on. Apparently our Stace contemplated suicide in her teens. Her mother walked in on her, thank God, but it does explain why she went looking for answers.’
Dead Souls: A gripping serial killer thriller with a shocking twist (Detective Kim Stone Crime Thriller Series Book 6) Page 27
