Page 97 of Twisted Lies

‘Given the state of both bodies, I think you could be right.’

Kim paused for a moment, trying to process the fact that their murderer had walked back and forth between the two people he was torturing, leaving one in horrific pain to go inflict more on the other. How did a person have all that thinking time and carry on anyway?

She shuddered and turned back to the body, where Keats was extracting the liver probe for the second time.

‘Stop making a meal out of it, Keats. This ain’t your first rodeo,’ she called out.

He ignored her and didn’t even look her way.

She approached him. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Time of death.’

‘Yeah, I’m not expecting it to the minute,’ she said, frowning at his pensive expression.

‘Twelve hours,’ he said and waited for the penny to drop.

It didn’t take long.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ she growled, understanding the reason for his distress.

As they’d all pored over victim number three earlier that day, victim four had still been alive.

Eighty-Four

The news was no more palatable when Kim delivered it to her team the following morning, and her words were met with stunned silence as they all tried to digest what she’d said.

In the few hours they’d been away, the investigation had claimed a fourth victim along with the knowledge she could have been saved. All three members of Kim’s team were staring at the photo she’d placed on the board amongst the others.

The silence of her team matched the stunned mood present the night before at the crime scene, broken only by Keats’s half-hearted and not really truthful reassurances to Mitch that even if they’d found her, it was unlikely she could have been saved. The words had fallen on deaf ears because they all knew one thing to be true: where there was life, there was hope. Mitch would always wonder what would have happened if he’d set his perimeter forty metres further out, or if he’d inspected the area earlier.

Mitch had done nothing wrong. Establishing a crime scene perimeter was not an exact science, especially outdoors. The priorities would have been to protect the immediate area in which the crime had taken place, all places where the killer had interaction with the victim, and routes in and out of that area. The path from the car park to the scene of Dean Mullins’s death had been placed within the boundary, but there was no reason to suspect that the killer had moved beyond the crime scene further into the woods. But no amount of reassurance would appease the forensic technician.

As they’d left the crime scene, they’d all known there was a possibility they could have had one less victim. And it was that thought that had stayed with her all night.

As she’d retrieved her dog from the foot of the spare bed where Frost had snored lightly, as she’d taken him on a 3 a.m. walk around the park and as she’d dozed lightly on the sofa for a couple of hours, her only thought had been the vision of all of them at the crime scene of Dean Mullins. When only a quarter mile away lay a woman fighting for her life, unable to move, to call out, even to speak but with a heartbeat and a pulse.

She stole a glance at Bryant who had been right there with her.

A muscle in his jawline was doing gymnastics, and he refused to meet her gaze.

‘We gotta get him, guys, before he gets the chance to hurt anyone else.’

It was that conviction that had catapulted her from the sofa and into the shower before 5a.m. And after leaving a note with instructions for Frost about Barney, she had left him sleeping on the sofa and hurried into work.

‘Do we know who she is?’ Stacey asked, still looking at the photo on the board.

Kim shook her head. ‘Fully clothed but no identification.’

‘Any mileage in the fact that the three male victims were stripped naked but the female wasn’t?’ Penn asked, tapping a pen on his lower lip.

‘Not sure; the removal of the clothing thing might be functional,’ she said, thinking of Keith’s burned body and the rat in Dean’s stomach.

‘But the guy on the rack didn’t need to be naked,’ Penn offered.

‘Look into it, but I want you back on tracking that van we saw going into the trading estate, and Stace, I want you to circulate a photo of Jacob Powell to uniforms so—’

‘Can’t do it, boss. Don’t have one,’ Stacey said, opening her hands.