Dead Memories (D.I. Kim Stone #10)(16)

Keats and Mitch were still in heated debate when a diminutive blonde figure appeared in the doorway.

‘Good afternoon, gentlemen. Doctor A at your service. Now how much have you missed me?’

Kim smiled and stepped forward as she heard the collective groan of three grown men.





Twenty-One





‘Doctor A,’ Kim said, moving towards the woman with her hand outstretched. ‘Thank you for coming. I think we could do with a little help.’

Doctor A returned the handshake warmly while looking around her to the metal cube taking centre stage.

‘I don’t think…’ Mitch said.

‘I’m sure we’ll be…’ Keats said.

‘Shush, men,’ she said, moving towards it.

Keats shot daggers her way, and Kim smiled in return.

Doctor A was a Forensic Anthropologist that Kim had worked with on a number of occasions and trusted implicitly. Hailing from Macedonia, she herself simplified her long and complicated name to Doctor A. Many people were put off by the woman’s direct no-nonsense manner but it only made Kim warm to her more.

It had occurred to her at the scrapyard that they needed someone who was used to searching for clues with speed and accuracy. Someone who understood the need for preserving the evidence while also digging around for it.

‘Is that a hand?’ she asked, taking an elastic band and tying back her long hair.

‘Yes,’ Kim answered.

Doctor A turned on her. ‘You didn’t tell me you had metal Michael here.’

‘Mickey,’ Mitch corrected. ‘Metal Mickey.’

‘Is what I said,’ she snapped, continuing to walk around the cube making no sound on the plastic with her trademark Doctor Marten boots.

‘You think male?’ she asked, turning to Kim.

Kim nodded. ‘The size of the hand,’ she explained.

‘And do you think he is all there?’

Kim shrugged. ‘Not sure but there’s a possibility it’s a vagrant who fancied a comfy sleep in a warm car.’

She continued looking and glanced at Mitch’s saw before giving him a filthy look, and laughed out loud at Keats’s scalpel.

‘It is a good job I am here.’

‘Can you offer some advice on the best way in?’ Kim asked, diplomatically.

Doctor A shook her head. ‘I’m afraid I can not.’

Kim tried to hide her disappointment while three others almost danced with relief.

‘This metal box is no different to the ground. You develop a method and a rhythm as you go. The material begins to open up to you, to guide you, advise you. This is not something I can do from afar. I can not supervise from on top.’

‘Above,’ Kim corrected, quickly.

‘I will stay and work it,’ she said, decisively. ‘I shall bring tools of my own but I will be in charge.’

‘Done,’ Kim said, offering her hand and turning on her heel before Keats or Mitch managed to catch her eye.

For the briefest of seconds when the two men’s antagonism had been deafening she had wondered if she’d made the right call.

But right now, the Macedonian scientist was kneeling on the floor stroking the single hand.

‘Do not worry, my friend, we will have you out of there in a jif, I promise.’

Nope, Kim thought, heading away from the morgue.

She hadn’t made a mistake at all.





Twenty-Two





‘Okay, Stace, what you got?’ Kim asked, sitting on the spare desk.

The evening sun had moved around the building and a breeze was winding its way around the coffee pot and cooling the room.

Content that everything possible was being done with the man in the cube, the priority was the murder of two young people.

‘Mark Johnson was twenty-one years old, born to a prostitute who tried for seven months to keep him and then gave him up. No father registered. Over the years he got harder to handle, meaning he spent the majority of his life at a place called Fairview.’

Kim hid the churning of her stomach in reaction to the mention of the place she’d spent most of her childhood too.

She simply nodded and fair play to Bryant, he didn’t react at all either.

‘Not sure when he first got on to drugs but he completed a thirty-day programme a year ago and didn’t stay clean for very long. I’ve got no registered address for him since then and surprisingly he has no criminal record.’

Kim had a clear picture in her mind now about Mark Johnson. Never been in serious trouble, had tried to get clean. He’d entered the programme but more importantly had stayed in it. That was someone who wanted to change their life.

But he had been thrown back into the world drug free, with no home, probably no friends, no job and no way to make the changes stick. He’d fallen back into the same crowd, same surroundings, same life. His return to drugs had been inevitable.

Kim tried to ignore the pang that shot through her. In many ways, she knew him or at least felt like she did.

‘Amy Wilde was an only child who just turned twenty. Normal kid moved around a fair bit as her dad was military until he was killed by an IED five years ago in Afghanistan. No clue how the two of them met but seem to have been together for a couple of years. Her mum lives on the Lakeside estate in Stourbridge.’