Page 116 of Killing Mind

Stacey was dividing her time between trying to find out more about Kane Drummond, Jake Black and identifying their third victim.

So far, she’d managed to find out that Kane was a director in three separate companies. All of their details had been sent to the printer while she waded through the next batch of missing persons’ reports.

The parameters were the most general she’d ever worked with. Male, five foot four, aged twenty-five to fifty-five, and in the water for between three months and three years. Any physical description further would have been a guess on his part, Keats had said, and so was not prepared to speculate.

A little speculation could be a good thing, Stacey thought, especially if it narrowed down the reports that fit within her criteria.

She sure wished Penn was here, she thought, as the next available record was for a man named Derek Noble, aged thirty-eight when he went missing eleven months ago.

Stacey began to read the detail of his case when her phone rang.

‘Hey, you psychic or something?’ she asked her colleague.

‘I bet I can predict that you’ll be having another cookie sometime soon.’

Damn him. She had been thinking about it.

‘You on your way back. Please say yes,’ she pleaded.

‘Will be in a minute. I’m just outside the office of the estate agent who sold Sheila Thorpe’s house. Spoke to a lady who wouldn’t give me any specifics, but seemed to remember mention of the money being transferred to a company that sounded like something to do with lager. You come across anything even remotely like Stella, Budweiser, Carlsberg or?…’

‘Charlsberg,’ Stacey said, suddenly, reaching around to the printer behind.

‘Stands a good chance, why?’ Penn asked, with dread in his voice.

‘It’s one of Kane Drummond’s companies.’

‘Damn it,’ Penn said. ‘That’s what I thought you were going to say.’

Ninety-Four

‘So, what did he say?’ Kim asked, as they drove towards the café and their third meeting with Kane. Bryant had called Travis as soon as they’d found Richard’s body. A team had arrived within ten minutes, and Bryant would need to go into Worcester later to provide a full statement.

‘I explained I’d been going there to get him to confess to the murder of Alice Lennox. He didn’t sound particularly pleased. I begged him to go over Drake’s confession and see for himself that the detail he offered was all in the press reports and that he’d offered nothing that only the murderer would know. I even mentioned the cigarette.’

Bryant had explained the significance of that to her earlier. Nowhere in his account of murdering Alice Lennox had Drake mentioned pausing to smoke a cigarette. He’d detailed everything else but not the one thing that had been withheld from the reports.

‘And that’s how I know Richard planned it,’ Bryant said. ‘We both stood and watched him smoke that cigarette outside the prison. I left before Richard so he must have gone and picked it up knowing exactly what he was going to do with it. But there were other things that didn’t feel right. Drake never used an object to sexually assault his victims, despite what he said about Alice being a prostitute, and he never admitted so readily to committing the crimes. When questioned about the murder of Wendy and the attempted murder of Tina Crossley he instructed a solicitor and never spoke a word. The only thing that matched were the injuries sustained to Alice, which were identical to Wendy’s wounds and which were completely familiar to Richard.’

‘But why didn’t he just kill Drake?’ Kim asked. That was the man he hated.

‘He couldn’t. He told me outside the prison that he was terrified that Drake would find Wendy in the afterlife and that he wouldn’t be there to protect her. Drake couldn’t die before he did. He couldn’t let her down again.’

Bryant glanced her way as though he expected her to argue or minimise the theory, but she couldn’t because she’d had similar thoughts about her mother.

Personally she didn’t believe in the afterlife but she lived with the fear that if she was wrong her mother would get the opportunity to torture her brother all over again, that he would be alone and powerless to protect himself.

She shook the thoughts away.

‘So, what did Travis say when you told him all this?’

‘He thanked me for my theory and said he’d give it some thought.’

‘Ooh, brush off,’ Kim noted.

‘He can’t ignore evidence.’

Kim wasn’t sure evidence was what Travis had been presented with. She got the feeling it wasn’t over for Bryant quite yet.