by Conrad Jones
Although the light was poor, all that she could see were smooth plastered walls and a concrete floor. She cursed and ran back to the table, turning to face each corner of the room, one at a time. Smooth plastered walls and a concrete floor. Although it was ridiculous, Tasha dashed to the trolley and pulled it violently away from the wall, desperately hoping that it was hiding a small door.
Nothing.
She kicked the chair over.
Nothing.
The table was made from stainless steel and despite its weight, she flipped it over.
Nothing.
She walked around the room at least four times before she had to accept that there was no door.
Chapter 10
“I don’t know what to think about Tibbs, Guv,” Stirling said, hunching his shoulders against the sea breeze. What little warmth the sun had offered was waning as it plummeted towards the horizon once again. The sea appeared to be dark green with hues of grey, as it advanced across the wide sandy beach towards the dunes. Foamy white rolls crashed onto the shoreline, creeping forward before slowly retreating beneath the next wave. The statues stood stoically as the tide engulfed them. It was a fascinating yet disturbing image. One hundred iron men in various stages of burial or submergence, or in some cases, both. “I had him down as a pervert, yet he’s some kind of war hero. It’s unbelievable how wrong we could be.”
“Not really,” Annie offered. “Given the facts that we had, what else were we to think? If it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck, then you can bet that it is a duck. Tibbs walked like a duck.”
“I suppose so, but maybe we should have dug deeper into his past before we dived in.”
“How could we?” Annie protested. Stirling was right but she was trying to offset her guilt by blaming their workload. “He was on the register and we discovered that he had approached a school. What else could we do?”
“I guess you’re right, but I can’t help but think we should have looked deeper first off.”
“If we had time to do that every time we sat down with an informer, then great, but we don’t. And if we had done an extended background check, we would have hit a brick wall at the MOD. We don’t have time to delve any deeper.”
“I think we should make time.”
“You think too much.”
“I don’t know about that.” Stirling laughed gruffly. “You said that I should think things through more carefully.”
“Did I?”
“You did.”
“That was a different set of circumstances.”
“Was it?”
“It was.”
“Fair enough, Guv,” he laughed. “I’m struggling to think straight on this one, Guv.”
“You and me both, Sergeant,” she muttered, as she looked across the car park to the dunes. Three K-9 units were tracking in a grid pattern, followed closely by CSI officers. Yellow tape billowed in the wind and a dozen uniformed officers ferried tools and evidence to and from the search site. There were four more gazebos erected since the last time she had seen the site, a dead body beneath each. More uniformed officers scurried towards the dunes with poles and canvas to erect another. “How many bodies do we have now?”
“Six more hits so far.” Stirling shivered, his expression grim. “We’ve got a headless body in the pond and seven women tortured and buried alive and we don’t know if any of the bodies are Lacey Taylor yet. We need another fifty detectives to put a dent in this, Guv.”
“It’s not as complicated as it seems.” Annie allowed herself a half smile. It was easy to feel overwhelmed by some cases but she knew how to see the woods behind the trees. “We’re looking for one serial killer,” she said convincingly. “The victim in the pond is a separate entity. I’m sure of it.”
“And Lacey Taylor?”
“She’s there somewhere.”
“I agree,” Stirling said. “The body in the pond looks gang related, whereas this lot here, Jesus only knows what is going on. We have one very sick individual on our hands.”
“There’s no doubt about that; we could really do with a break on the identities of the victims before we can get a grip on either investigation properly.”
“Kathy called five minutes before you got here,” Stirling sounded hopeful. “She’s working on our pond guy immediately before she gets back to the,” he hesitated mid sentence, “back to the others, Guv.” He corrected himself before he let slip.
“Okay, let’s leave the recovery teams to do their stuff and get back to the station. We can come back when the victims are uncovered. Until then, I want to hear every snippet of information as it comes in. When this gets going, our feet won’t touch the ground.”
“Have you seen the press arriving, Guv?” Stirling asked as he watched yet another van reaching the cordon before being turned away. A growing number of telescopic lenses were gathered waiting for the merest glimpse of a dead body.
“They can smell blood.” Annie sighed. “The more bodies that we find, the more interested they will be.”
Chapter 11
“He’s greying and his bone mass is thinning. From his teeth, I would say that he was in his forties,” Kathy Brooks said as she washed blood from her latex gloves. The smell of disinfectant mingled with rotting flesh was eye-watering and it was difficult to control the gag reflex. “He was about six feet tall, white European with dark hair and a managerial job.” She held up a dead hand. “His palms were soft, unhardened by manual labour. The nails on his left hand are well manicured, which isn’t cheap to maintain. The fingernails on the right were ripped out before he died.” She pointed to his wrists and ankles. “He was bound with plastic zip-ties, hands and feet and tortured. “His torso is badly bruised and he sustained four cracked ribs, bruised kidneys and a ruptured testicle. He was subjected to a sustained beating over an extended period of time. Obviously the head was removed before the body was dumped.”
“So he was either tortured as a punishment or interrogated,” Annie grimaced. “Nothing there to give us a name?” she asked Stirling.
“His prints are being run now, Guv,” he checked his watch as he spoke. “We’ll have an answer in the next half an hour.”
“If he’s in the system” Annie said doubtfully. “Look at him. He has no tattoos, no scars on his hands or body. He doesn’t look like our average gang related torture victim.”
“He could be higher up the food chain.”
“If he is, then he’ll be reported missing,” Annie agreed. “Have we got people checking with missing persons outside the county?”
“Yes, Guv.” Stirling checked his mobile as he spoke. “They’re aware of what’s going on. Smithy is crosschecking all missing males that fit this description. I’ve told him to contact me as soon as anything comes in.”
“Good. Do you know what killed him?” Annie turned back to Kathy.
“The cause of death is exsanguination,” Kathy added. “I think that he was still alive when they began to cut off his head.”
“That’s enough to ruin your day,” Stirling mumbled. “Poor bastard.”
“Save the sympathy until we know who he is,” Annie grinned. “I thought you were going to look deeper into things in the future.”
“I am,” Stirling shrugged. “Even if he’s a scrotum, you’ve got to have a twinge of sympathy for him.”
“This was a punishment killing,” Annie sounded sure.
“If it was, we have to assume that he has a connection to Lacey Taylor and the prawns are nothing to do with this,” Stirling said.
“Prawns?” Annie repeated shocked. She raised her eyebrows. She looked at the dead women in various states of decay. They all had antenna like tubes glued to their faces. “Will you stop calling them prawns. That’s out of order.”
“Sorry, Guv,” he blushed. “It’s what we’ve been calling the victims. You know with the tubes and such like.”
“I know where it came from; who said it first?” Annie was half amused and half annoy
ed.
“Actually it was me,” Kathy shrugged. “We don’t have a name for them yet so I made one up for now. Sorry, but I was thinking aloud and someone must have picked up on it.”
“I’m surprised at you, Kathy,” Annie said briskly. “If the press gets hold of that, I’ll be toast. Anyhow, what have you got on our other victims?” She understood the mirth in the prawn tag but she couldn’t endorse it by using the term. Kathy walked to the next trolley.
“We’ve extracted three victims so far.” Kathy pulled back a spotlight. “They’re all the same as the first woman. The teeth were removed, lips and eyelids stitched closed and the arms and hands fastened to the body with adhesive and fishing twine. The legs and feet are glued together too. The tubing was glued into the nostrils of all the victims before they were buried upright in the sand.”
“Can you give us a description of all the victims and I need a chronology of when you estimate their burial took place. If we’re to have any chance of identifying them, we need to know when they went missing.”
Kathy pointed to the victim’s arm. “She’s about the same age as the first, homemade tattoos on her arms and shoulders. I’ll get pictures of them over to you. These look like track marks to me. She was an addict but the tattoos will help you.”
“Which brings us back to the working girl theory,” Annie nodded. “That’s why no one has noticed them disappearing.”
“We’ve put pressure on vice to speak to all the active street walkers to see if we can identify anyone who has fallen off the radar recently.” Stirling frowned. “I’ll chase up the DI over there and see what he’s got for us, but I’m sure that if they had anything, they’d have given it to us by now.”
“I know that you’ll have your hands full, Kathy,” Annie said smiling. “But I need every detail sent over as you get it. You have whatever authority you need to get me the results back as soon as you can. If you need more technicians, you have my go ahead.”
“And the costs?”
“Not an issue.”
“I’ll draft in the labs from Cheshire and Cumbria,” Kathy turned away and peeled off her gloves. She took out her mobile and held it up. “With their people on board, I can get everything to you in forty-eight hours.”
“I need it today, Kathy.”
“Impossible,” she shook her head. “You’ll have postmortem results by tomorrow but the tox-screens and DNA will take time. I’m sorry, but I’m a scientist not a magician.”
“I know,” Annie muttered. “Although if you have got any tricks up your sleeve, now’s the time to use them.”
“Leave it with me. We’ll be as quick as we can.”
Annie nodded and turned to walk out of the lab. She glanced back at the body on the trolley and couldn’t help but agree that there was indeed a resemblance to a giant prawn.
Chapter 12
John Ryder was angry, very angry. He had spent ten years climbing to the top of the organised crime ladder without being prosecuted for so much as a parking ticket. The other crime families dubbed him as ‘Teflon John’ because nothing stuck to him. It hadn’t been an accident either; his success was due to a razor sharp intellect and a ruthless intolerance of mistakes. Business was good and he had only a few enemies. His problems were much closer to home.
He sipped an expensive Merlot from a crystal wine glass as he struggled to keep his temper from boiling over. His laptop screen showed the female DI of the city’s Major Investigation Team holding a press conference and in front of him, a copy of the evening edition of the Echo lay folded on a marble coffee table. Both the newspaper and the detective carried the news of a decapitated male found near Crosby Beach. He shifted uncomfortably on a brown leather captain’s chair while he listened to his stepson making one excuse after another. He ran his hand over his closely cropped hair, salt and pepper patches had crept backwards from above the ears. The spread of grey had quickened in the last few years aging him, yet his pale green eyes and chiselled jaw ensured that he could still turn a woman’s head when he walked into a room. He was wide at the shoulder and narrow at the hip and his dress sense was second to none, unlike his wayward stepson who looked like an extra from a cheap sportswear catalogue.
“Charlie Keegan had it coming to him. He was a twat,” Brendon Ryder moaned. “It’s his fault that bitch got onto us in the first place. He was lining his pockets with government grants and when he was investigated my name was thrown into the hat. I couldn’t have that kind of exposure from the law. Lacey Taylor actually called my mobile and told me that she was going to have me arrested.”
“She did,” Bren’s sidekick piped up. He was dressed in almost identical sportswear to Brendon. “She actually called his mobile. What a fucking cheek.”
“Shut up, Gary,” Bren snapped.
“I’m just backing you up mate,” Gary said offended. “You know like you said to.”
“Shut up.”
“Both of you shut up! What exactly did she find out from Keegan?” John asked impatiently.
“We were shifting some gear through some of the girls at the youth clubs in Toxteth,” Bren bragged. “We were clearing a grand a week and we never went near the place. There was no way she could have bubbled me.”
“A grand a week?” John rolled his eyes. “You’ve brought the police down on yourself for a measly grand a week?”
“Oh, it’s on just ‘myself’ is it?” Bren felt the distance John had put between them and it rankled. “It’s not just me the police are sniffing around though is it?”
“No it isn’t,” John replied angrily. “Thanks to you, we’ll all have a microscope shoved up our arse!”
“If Keegan hadn’t been robbing from the council, none of this would have happened. He was your contact, not mine.”
“That’s the only reason that I’m listening to a word you say. I should have dealt with him earlier.” John relented slightly. “If he turned on us, then that’s unforgivable.”
“Exactly what I thought all along,” Bren said encouraged.
“Exactly what we thought all along, John,” Gary repeated. “It was unforgivable.”
“All we did was what you would have done, but you weren’t here,” Brendon said excitedly.
“He’s right,” Gary agreed enthusiastically. “You weren’t here.”
“Gary!” John snapped
“What?”
“Shut your face!” John turned to his stepson. “No you didn’t do what I would have done. You fucked things up. That’s what you did.”
“We were rushed into acting.”
“It was a rush,” Gary agreed. “We said at the time that it was a rush.”
John shot him a withering glance which silenced him. “So you thought that killing him and dumping his body into a pond which is three feet deep was the best way of handling it?” John asked sarcastically. He sipped the rich red and savoured the fruity flavour on his tongue. Under different circumstances, he might have enjoyed it. “You’ve got the brains of a breeze-block and that’s pushing it to the limit.”
“It was supposed to be temporary,” Bren said. He opened the top button of his Ralph Lauren polo shirt. His stepfather frightened him. Although he had brought him up from the age of six, he didn’t love or respect him. He never had. John Ryder had tolerated him all his life because he married his mother. Bren was the price he had to pay to love his mother. Although he had tried to make the great John Ryder proud, he had failed at every turn. “Matrix were all over me like a rash. I knew that if they lifted Keegan, he would turn us in. I had to get rid of him. I was going to move his body as soon as the pressure was off. They only found him because of the other murders there!”
“That’s true,” Gary mumbled. “They never would have found him if it wasn’t for the other murders, John.”
“You’re a fucking retard and so is your friend.” John snapped.
“Thanks, Dad,” Bren retorted sarcastically.
“Where is Lacey Taylor?” John igno
red the slight. “Please don’t tell me that she’s in the pond too?”
“Of course not,” Bren said.
“That would be silly,” Gary added.
“You’re really not helping,” Bren turned to his friend. “Shut up.”
“Where is she?”
“I did a real number on her.” Bren sniggered, his immaturity and lack of intelligence plain for all in the room to see. “She was cocky at first until I started on the dog. Then she told me everything that she had on us.” His chest inflated proudly although nobody else seemed to be impressed. The other men in the room were older, wiser and infinitely more battle-hardened than the crowing Ryder junior. “When I started to cut Keegan’s head off, she crapped in her pants and screamed like a baby but I made sure she couldn’t say anything to the police. She can’t talk now, I made sure of that.”
John Ryder had an expression of disgust on his face. He shook his head slowly and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t need the sordid details, Brendon. I asked you where she was.”
“I buried her.”
“By yourself?”
“Yes.”
“So nobody but you knows where she is?”
“Nobody.”
“Who dumped Keegan in the pond?”
“We did.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“Gary and I,” Bren smiled nervously. His face turned crimson and his lips twitched. “We hired a van and dumped him and the dog. Didn’t we, Gary?” His partner in crime was an overweight man with a head shaped like a pumpkin. He shuffled uncomfortably, scratched at a colony of puss filled pimples on the back of his neck and looked down at his oversized Reeboks.
