Page 12 of Killing Mind

He did so and she, without giving it too much thought, placed the ruler inside his fist. Her hand then closed his palm around the ruler; her own fingers splaying as they curved around the knuckles, revealing the blood spatter on the skin. She removed her hand beneath which there were no red marks.

Without revealing anything she beckoned Stacey over.

‘Do what I just did without thinking about it.’

Stacey took the ruler and placed it into Penn’s hand. The same thing happened. Her fingers splayed to contain the fist.

Stacey removed her hand to reveal the unmarked skin.

‘So?’ Kim asked, folding her arms and asking her team what this experiment had taught them.

Stacey was first to answer.

‘Samantha’s hand wasn’t the only hand holding the knife.’

Thirteen

Bryant was tempted to head back to the station but resisted. He’d booked the afternoon off fair and square and it was almost the end of shift.

The parole hearing had gone just like the others. Richard had spoken from the heart and had fought back the tears as he’d explained that his own life sentence could not be paroled; that his daughter was not going to reappear, a grown woman with children of her own. He explained how he still saw every single injury inflicted on her body when he closed his eyes at night. Richard had been no less passionate than the first parole hearing they’d attended. They had then left the room, shook hands outside and Richard had left, secure that enough had been done and said to keep the man behind bars.

Bryant was not so sure.

As he’d sat beside Richard he’d watched the board members carefully. At other hearings they had listened intently their full attention on Richard as he spoke, empathy and emotion gathering in their eyes, but today he had seen something else. At one point one of the members of the board had checked her watch. The two others had shared a glance or two. He had detected impatience as the still-broken man had pleaded his case.

He had said nothing of his observations to Richard for fear he was looking so hard at the demeanours of the people in the room he had seen something that wasn’t there.

And here he was, he realised, as he brought the car to a stop at a pull-in on the west side of the Clent Hills. At the exact spot where he had been the first officer to lay eyes on the ravaged body of Wendy Harrison. He turned off the engine and allowed the horrific images to play in his head. The viciousness of the assault; the knife wounds that had stretched from her inner thigh to her ankle; the broken bones; the blood; the violation. No man who could do that was capable of rehabilitation whether they’d found God or not.

The sound of his phone in the silence startled him even though he was expecting the call.

He answered, listened and then ended the call that confirmed what he had felt from the moment he’d opened his eyes that morning.

Peter Drake had got parole.

Fourteen

As Kim filled the coffee pot two things happened. Neither of which surprised her.

She answered the phone to Keats as she opened her front door to Bryant.

‘Hey,’ she said, serving as a greeting to both. She turned away from Bryant and focussed her attention on the pathologist, while her colleague gave a waiting Barney an apple.

‘You really think this is murder, Stone?’ Keats asked.

She ignored the inflection in his voice that her theory was some kind of slight on his judgement.

‘We both called it, Keats,’ she said, to disabuse him of that thought. She was glad that Woody had been quick to start the process with the coroner for reclassifying Samantha’s death, which would have commenced with a courtesy call to Keats.

From her point of view Woody had asked her to inform the family first thing in the morning. The flat had been sealed off awaiting the arrival of forensics, but Kim wasn’t going to wait for their findings.

A dozen people or more had traipsed in and out of that property with little regard for evidential value. The killer could have left their name and address and it would never see the inside of a courtroom. And Kim wasn’t sure what more Samantha could tell them herself. Yes, she had been in very close contact with her killer but her body had now been moved and cleaned without consideration of it being a crime scene.

Kim explained the results of her experiment with Penn on the desk.

‘Scientific study, then?’ he mocked.

‘Simple but effective,’ she said, about to end the call.