by Michael Kerr
She rolled the lubricated sheath onto his turgid member, and then lay back on the bed and opened her legs.
The sudden thrust startled her. She looked up into eyes that were as devoid of emotion as a reptile’s. This wasn’t lovemaking. He was using his penis as though it was a knife, to stab her repeatedly. She put her arms around his back, rose up to match his jerky movements, and gasped: “Yes...Oh God, yes! Don’t stop!”
Almost there. Her words were bringing him to a climax. And then sudden, terrible pain disrupted his thoughts and actions.
As he screamed, Dawn rolled off the bed and bolted for the door.
It took more courage than she had known she possessed. She had let the memory of being raped by her drunken stepfather fill her mind. Allowed the shame and anger of just lying there stiffly and letting him take her, flood back. She had now done what she should have done as a teenager.
It was like a golfer visualising the shot he was about to make. She saw herself grasping his testicles, to squeeze them unmercifully as she tried to wrench them from between his legs. She found the courage to do it, and rose up, faking a moan, to slip her hand under him and grip his bulging scrotum. Their faces were close together. She clenched her fist and twisted and pulled as hard as she could, simultaneously taking his nose into her mouth and biting down.
He couldn’t see or think. It was as if gin traps had snapped shut on his nose and balls. He reared up, felt her wriggle out from beneath him, but was too consumed with pain to react. He fell back, one hand to his bloody, ripped nose, the other cradling his compressed testicles. He had never suffered such acute agony. The forks of pain from his groin shot up into his stomach, and he was physically sick on the bedclothes. His nose was alive with screaming nerve endings. He reached inward to a well of strength that he had never had to plumb so deeply before. The fucking bitch had suckered him in, led him on, and then launched an unwarranted attack when he was at his most vulnerable. Now, naked and hurting, he had to react or all would be lost.
Dawn could hear a low, keening sound, and was unaware that it was escaping from her lips. She ran through the apartment, tried to side-step Nick’s corpse, but lost her balance as the bare soles of her feet slipped in a slick pool of blood. She fell back and her head cracked against Nick’s. She was dazed and winded. For long seconds she lay and looked into the dead man’s dull and unseeing eyes.
With gritted teeth, she turned over, pushed herself up on to her knees, regained her feet and staggered to the door, to open it and step out into the hallway. She took a deep breath. Planned to scream all the way down the stairs, and to keep on screaming as she ran out into the middle of the well-lit road. The more people she alerted to her plight, the better.
The scream died in her throat as she was jerked by the hair, back into the apartment. She tried to pull free, lashed out with her arms and legs, but was swung into the wall, for all the fight to be knocked out of her as her head slammed against the unyielding surface.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
PC Karl Hirst couldn’t raise Mal Murray on the radio. He tried three times. Maybe Mal was taking a leak. The operational way to do that was for Mal to stay in the van and use the bottle provided. Karl grinned. Maybe he’d found some bushes to take a dump in. He’d try again in five minutes. He stopped grinning when neither Nick nor Jay responded to his test call. Something was seriously wrong.
Within six minutes, four units were converging on Ogilvy House. They found Mal dead in the Ford Transit van, slumped across the front seats with a bullet wound in his right temple.
DS Ron Clayton hit every button on the panel outside the main entrance door, until a tinny woman’s voice answered and asked who was there.
“Police,” Ron said. “Open the door, and stay in your apartment.”
There was a buzz, the lock disengaged, and operating by hand signals, all but one armed officer – who trained his rifle on the lift door – went into the stairwell, covering each other up to the first floor landing.
They kicked open the door, satisfied themselves that the apartment was secure, and then called in what they had found, which was bodies and a lot of blood.
The plan was simple enough. They would leave at first light and drive up to York. Jack wanted to see Danny for a couple of hours; maybe have a meal with him and Sharon while Lisa went to the Park Inn; the riverside hotel they had booked ahead. One night away wouldn’t rock any boats. They had no new leads to follow up, and Mike would give him a bell if anything unforeseen reared its ugly head.
The mobile broke the silence at two a.m. Jack groaned, reached out and searched the top of the bedside cabinet with his fingers. Lisa was still asleep, her arm across his stomach.
“Ryder. Make this worth your career.”
“S’Mike, boss. You aren’t going to like this.”
“Shoot.”
“Dawn Turner’s flat was hit. Nick Reece and Jay Cox were both shot dead. And so was Mal Murray.”
“The girl?”
“Missing.”
“Meet me there. Who else is on duty?”
“It’s Christmas morning, boss. The rest of the team are on standby. Who do you want me to call?”
“Nobody, Mike. The two of us can evaluate the scene.”
Lisa woke. Propped herself up, elbow on the pillow, yawned and then said, “What makes me think we won’t be going up north, Ryder?”
He quickly relayed what Mike had told him. They got up and dressed quickly.
“Who else but a police officer would they have opened the door to?” Lisa said after trying to think of an alternative and not being able to.
“It is a cop,” Jack said. “He knew that there was an officer in the car park, and had to be known to the two in the apartment or he wouldn’t have gained access. They were pros. If they hadn’t recognised him, he wouldn’t have got inside the building.”
“Which leaves us with the probability that one of your officers is the Mimic?”
“You know the team, Lisa. Do any of them come across as being more than what they seem to be? Because I don’t see it being anyone I work alongside.”
Lisa pursed her lips. “That’s not a safe assumption,” she said. “He hides behind a personality that makes him undetectable. Don’t discount the fact that it could be somebody who you’d trust with your life. What he does is separate to and apart from his other persona. Remember that he’s an obsessional type; a freak driven by the need to control and manipulate people and events. He leads a secret life, and will be able to portray ordinariness with conviction. He’s probably a good cop who enjoys his work and is highly thought of. The most successful human hunters are like chameleons, and have jobs, friends and family. Their most powerful aid is being able to blend, and to be the last person you would suspect.”
“Give me an instance,” Jack said.
“I could give you dozens.”
“One’ll do.”
“Okay. Robert Hansen comes to mind. A short, slight, mild-mannered man with a pronounced stammer. He was a baker in Anchorage, Alaska. Hunted game and then progressed to women; mainly prostitutes and topless dancers. He would act like a punter, then abduct them and fly them out into the wilderness and set them free, to hunt down and shoot. He combined sexual gratification and his love of the hunt. Ultimate control, maximum thrill.”
“What made him what he was?”
“Best that they could figure, a lack of self-esteem, and a hatred for women. He regarded prostitutes as fair game; women of less worth than decent people. ‘You can’t rape a prostitute, can you?’ he said to police. He also stated that the excitement was in the stalking. The killing itself became anticlimactic. This was a guy who had been shunned by girls during his teenage years. And even though he was to marry, twice, it left a need within him that he could not dismiss or contain. He was punishing women, and getting his rocks off at the same time.”
“And you think the Mimic is motivated by a hatred for women?”
“The old saying:
‘Can’t live with them, can’t live without them’, comes to mind. His warped delusional fantasy was that Dawn Turner loved him. When he first contacted her and wasn’t welcomed with open arms into her life, he reassessed, kept up the unwanted contact, but diversified and stalked other women. They were used to offset a need he couldn’t bottle-up. He redirected the anger and frustration and used other physically similar women as fill-ins. As for hating women, that might be one aspect. But it’s oversimplification. It’s more likely he sees them as a usable and disposable commodity. I’ve looked at each crime, at what took place and might be behaviourally significant, and why it happened the way it did, taking into account the degradation aspect of sodomy, the escalating mutilation, and all other factors. That just leaves the small matter of whom? And we now know he’s a cop. Having a penchant for violence and not respecting other people’s rights or having any regard for their feelings, I wouldn’t be surprised if he is heavy-handed in his work. He’ll be the type who would have complaints of police brutality made against him. At heart he’s a thug; a bully boy who will abuse his authority when the chance presents itself.”
They left the cottage, and Jack paused at the side of his car. “Most of my team have the capacity to bend rules and be a tad excessive if the occasion merits it. Being nice to shitheads doesn’t get the job done. They confuse fair treatment with weakness. All most of them understand is force and aggression. There are a lot of grey areas, Lisa. We aren’t country Bobbies or community coppers. We don’t work on image, or give a fuck what the general public think. We do whatever it takes to close cases.”
Lisa thumbed the remote, and the lock buttons of the Lexus popped up. It had become their normal practise to take both cars. Lisa knew that Jack might be tied up for many hours, or even days.
“That sounds as if you walk over suspects’ rights.”
A phantom ache from where Jack’s little finger had been reminded him that he was not above being over zealous in the way he operated.
“Offenders have more rights than they deserve.”
“What happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’, Ryder?”
“It’s a crock of shit, for the most part. We see rapists, paedophiles, murderers and lowlife worse than you’d find under any rock walking free on technicalities, or because a jury was fixed or just plain dumb. Reasonable doubt can be stretched until it breaks like an over wound watch spring.”
“You sound bitter.”
“I just don’t like to see society being sold short. Example: I helped put a paedophile, Terence Duran, away for fifteen years. He’d been buggering minors since he was a teenager. He knew he wouldn’t stop, and so did we, the prison authorities and every other interested party. Within a week of being released, after only serving half of his sentence, he lifted Davey Watson, a six-year-old, and took him to a derelict factory. When he’d finished with him, he strangled Davey and threw him in a canal. It was as if he’d eaten a chocolate bar and just dumped the wrapper. The little boy’s body was litter to him.”
“The moral of the story being...?”
“That the public, and in particular Davey’s parents, had not been given the protection they deserved and were entitled to. Duran was known to be an incorrigible threat. He should have been put out of his own and everyone else’s misery decades ago.”
“I take it he got life.”
“Yeah. But he did the only good thing he’d ever done in his life, ended it. Bit down to the artery in his wrist. By the time a screw looked through the spy hole and saw blood dripping through the mattress, he’d just about bled out.”
Lisa couldn’t think of any response. They got in her car and she drove Jack to where he had parked his nearby, and then followed him to Fulham.
Jack wished he was able to modify his abrasive attitude, at least in his conversations with Lisa. She was more practical than him, looked at a far bigger and different picture, and was able to stay on the outside like a spectator, and look in. He was more emotive in his response to the vile acts that people perpetrated. His job was to intervene, disrupt and negate the threat, not study, write about or theorise on what makes for antisocial behaviour. If the Mimic was a police officer, then he wanted to be the one who made the arrest, and to hopefully have to use force to overwhelm him; maybe even be put in a position whereby he could justify shooting the bastard.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
JANE Keating had finished up her initial on-scene examination of Nick Reece’s body and was now hunkered down next to Jay Cox’s.
DCI Cal Prowse from Witness Protection was standing to one side, just looking from one grisly body to the other, slowly shaking his head. They and Mal Murray had been his officers, and it would be his heartbreaking job to tell the next of kin that they were dead. Five officers had now been murdered in the line of duty within a two week period. That was more than the total of the previous twenty-five years.
Cal stepped around the tacky patch of blood on the carpet and almost imperceptibly nodded to Jack.
“What do you think, Jack. Another pro hit like at the clinic?”
“No, Cal. What I think is, that your officers let a cop in here, who came for the Turner girl.”
“A cop?”
Jack said nothing. Let Cal put it together for himself.
“You’re saying that the serial killer who is stalking Dawn Turner is one of ours?”
“That’s how it’s shaping up. Who else would your boys have opened the door to? They knew him. Hadn’t even drawn their guns.”
Cal knew that Jack was right. Jay and Nick had been a formidable double act, and Mal ‘Eyes’ Murray was like a ghost. He blended into his surroundings. He’d been locked inside a Transit with black tinted windows. No one knew he was in the car park. Apart from...
“You knew the set-up,” Cal said with a slightly accusatory edge to his voice.
Jack stiffened. “Meaning?”
“That I told you there’d be two officers inside with the woman, and another in the car park.”
“The killer sent Ricky Lane in on a test run. He would have been watching, monitoring the response. I didn’t broadcast any of your team’s positions, or how many of them were guarding Dawn. All my men knew was that she was being protected.”
“Sorry, Jack. I just―”
“I know. It’s a complete fuck-up.”
Jane Keating got to her feet, peeled off her bloody gloves and slipped them into a cellophane packet which she placed into the top of her bulky aluminium case and then snapped the catches shut.
“I’m all done here,” Jane said, addressing Jack, Cal, Lisa and Mike. “The COD to all three victims was gunshot wounds. Victim A in the car park died as a result of a single shot to the head, through his right ear. Victim B,” – and she inclined her head to where Jay Cox lay in a crumpled heap ‒ “was shot from behind. The entry wound is in the back of his head. The slug exited above his left eye. And Victim C was shot in the throat. His larynx is shattered, and his trachea severed.”
Jack looked down into the wide-open eyes of Nick Reece. Christmas fucking day! Death in all its many guises didn’t take a holiday, ever.
Jane gave Lisa a small smile as she picked up her case and headed for the door. She wasn’t hanging around to wait for the crime scene team to finish up, or for the victims to be bagged. Jane was into a new and heavy relationship with a morgue attendant nine years her junior. He was at her home in bed, and she wanted to be back there with him, doing what came naturally. Christ, he couldn’t get enough of her, and she wasn’t complaining. Errol Branston was big, black, and had the stamina of a bull. He was just what she needed, for the time being. Trouble with Errol was, he read comics and listened to Gangsta Rap. His only asset was a beautiful, well-honed body that was a perfect machine for doing what hit her spot. Everyone had secrets. Jane was a nymphomaniac. She treated most anything in pants – or preferably with them off – as fair game. It was a known fact at the mortuary that Jane was there for the taking. She had a
thing about making-out in the autopsy suites. The vast majority of the male staff had at one time or another screwed her on the cold metal surface of a dissecting table. It was even rumoured that she’d taken full advantage of a cadaver with a hard on. Jane had, in fact, not done the deed, but had ogled the tumescent member and wished that the body it was sprouting from had possessed a pulse.
They searched the apartment. There was fresh blood on one of the pillows.
“You think he killed her?” Lisa said to Jack.
“No. If he had, her body would be here. He’s abducted her.”
Lisa pulled a face. She might have been sucking a lemon.
“You think that’s bad?” Jack said.
“Yes. He wants to take his time with her. She’ll be his...his masterpiece. What he did to the others will pale by comparison to what Dawn will have to endure.”
“I was under the impression he loved her,” Mike said. “He might just want to keep her, own her, and try to make her feel the same way towards him.”
Lisa shook her head. “I don’t think so. She contacted the police. In his mind she betrayed him. And by having armed protection, she was sending out a message, loud and clear. He will have crossed the thin line that separates love and hate. I can imagine him feeling humiliated, full of rage, and intent on making an example of her. The more she begs to live, the more powerful and in control of her he will feel. He’s going to take her apart, physically and mentally; reduce her to something less than human. And he won’t rush it. You have to find out who he is, and quickly, or the next time we see Dawn Turner, she’ll be...”
They could well imagine.
Jack arranged for the head of the security company that had the contract with the owners of Ogilvy House to attend. The external guard – who had replaced Derek Bell – was of no help. He didn’t admit to it, but had been asleep in the small room next to the boiler house at the side of the block. Jack mused that if he’d been doing his job properly, then he would have almost certainly become another fatality.
