Dead Memories (D.I. Kim Stone #10)(96)

Her mind was clear, sharp, focussed. But no matter how forcefully she told it to send messages along her nerves, communication had been severed.

She had no clue of the time and her last memory had been early morning.

She remembered getting out of bed, drinking a green tea, heading upstairs and changing into her running gear. It was enough to ease the guilt for her constant grazing habit while desk-bound and her adrenaline had still been high from the night before. She’d needed the exercise to expel it from her system.

She’d left the house just before 7 a.m., turned left to the end of the street, shortcut through the trading estate to the park. Joined other morning joggers, taken a rest at the halfway point close to the bins and then…

Her thoughts came to a standstill. It was what she did every morning, knowing the circuit was approximately two miles. And she could remember it from that morning.

She closed her eyes and thought harder, trying to get past the brick wall of the bin rest.

Leave house

Turn left

Cross Road

Trading Estate

Enter Park

Man with poodle

Joggers

People sitting on benches

Lady on bike

Stop at bins

Bend over, catch breath

Ouch

There it was, the brick wall again but there was something else first. A pinprick, like a sting to her back as she’d bent forward hands on knees, breathing heavily.

And then nothing.

She had no recollection after that.

Had she been assaulted, raped? What the hell was going on?

Knowing she’d been drugged did nothing to calm the fear because now she understood why she couldn’t move and she also understood there wasn’t a thing she could do about it.





One Hundred Twenty-Six





‘Come on, guys, talk to me,’ Bryant urged from the top of the room. ‘What the hell do we think is going on?’

‘The text message must have been from the killer,’ Penn said, more to fill the silence, he thought.

‘But why no contact?’ Bryant asked in frustration.

Stacey put down the phone. ‘Nothing. I reckon the battery is out,’ she said.

Damn, they were trying to track someone who did not want to be found.

‘I’ve got nothing on CCTV,’ Penn offered. ‘It’s a mile to the first camera and three traffic islands in between. She could be anywhere.’

He hadn’t yet informed Woody that the guv was MIA but he had no clue how long he could cover. She was a phone call away from a whole heap of shit which, right now, was the least of his worries, but if they didn’t have some kind of breakthrough soon it was a phone call he was going to have to make.

What was she walking into and against whom?

‘Maybe the killer told her to come alone? That’d explain why she legged it,’ Penn said.

Bryant knew he had a point. If the guv thought she was putting anyone else in danger she would have gone it alone.

‘Should we have listened to Alison?’ Stacey asked, quietly. ‘She urged us to consider other potential suspects but we’ve been stuck on Duggar this whole time. Maybe we should have—’

‘Doesn’t matter, Stace,’ Bryant said, staring at the board. ‘Knowing who it is doesn’t help us at all. Just like earlier, all that matters is following the crumbs, the logic of the killer. It’s the only thing that will tell us where she is.’

All three of them fell silent and stared at the board for a few minutes.

Penn broke the heavy silence. ‘Everything about these incidents is as close as it could possibly be to the actual event. The young kids in the identical flat, just a few floors below. The handcuffs, the radiator, the cracker packet. All accurate.’

‘The middle-aged couple, respectable, likeable, burned alive in front of the place that was important to them all,’ Stacey said.

‘And the assault,’ Bryant added. ‘In the exact same place that the bastard used to take… the girls to abuse them. The five pound note, ripped in her pocket. So, what does that tell us?’ Bryant asked, frowning.

‘That it’s all in the detail,’ Stacey said. ‘Our killer has to remain as close as possible to actual events to cause the maximum amount of pain.’

‘So, Dawson’s death,’ Penn said. ‘He’s using Alison as the work colleague who fell—’

‘So, it has to be somewhere high,’ Stacey finished. ‘Alison has to fall from a great height.’

‘And the place has to mean something to the boss,’ Penn said.

A memory from earlier in the week clicked in to Bryant’s brain. Something the guv had said.

‘Come on guys,’ he said, grabbing his jacket. ‘I think I know where we have to go.’





One Hundred Twenty-Seven





Kim parked the car, looked up to the sky and shuddered. It was a long way to fall. No one would survive.

She tried to push away the night-time eeriness of the place as she began to climb the stairs to the top.

She knew without a doubt that this was where Alison had been taken. It was the only place that made sense.

Every fibre of her being urged her to go faster, to take the stairs two at a time, but she had to pace herself. It was a long climb and despite her beating heart she had to force herself to remember that the floor show would not start without her. The floor show was for her.