Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(45)

‘It could be a number of things.’ He licked his sweaty upper lip. ‘We know from the bomb on the hillside that the killer’s new at this. So I’m leaning away from complex chemical-reaction devices. It’s probably a circuit-breaker. Mercury tilt-switch, maybe.’

‘What? What the fuck? How do we disarm it?’

‘ I need to know more about it,’ he said. The big man before me was trembling gently all over, but his face was hard with focus. ‘It might be connected to the seat. It might be connected to the doors.’

‘How much time do we have?’

‘There’s no telling. We need to find out if there’s a timer and what kind.’

‘You figure that out,’ I said. ‘I’m going to do a quick lap around the immediate area. This is a spectacle. There’s no way the killer would miss this.’

I dashed towards the house, wincing as I heard Zac call out after me.

‘Don’t leave me!’ he screamed. ‘I don’t want to die!’





Chapter 65


CAITLYN ROLLED, USING the momentum to push herself up, her shoulder, arm, hand shooting upwards, the metal rod flashing out. There was less resistance than she anticipated. The end of the rod went straight into his eye socket, seemed to shudder as it cleaved through bone and came to rest in his brain.

She got up and staggered back as the man groaned and flopped away from her, limp as a fish. He lay there on his back, the rod sticking grotesquely from his head, bloodless, his mouth agape. Caitlyn shivered, her eyes darting over his ragged clothes and filthy boots, the long thin tendrils of grey and brown hair running from the sides of his otherwise bald scalp.

A homeless man. One of the people who must have come into the hotel and left the trash she’d seen in the hall. She could hear that it was raining hard, now that the door to her prison room was open.

She stumbled, trying not to gag, her stomach rebelling against the sensation now cemented in her memory of the rod going up, the breath coming out of her victim. Fighting her revulsion, there was a white-hot excitement pulsing through her at the sight of the dark gaping doorway. She could feel sobs pushing their way up her throat but couldn’t hear them. Her ears were ringing. It seemed an age before her hand finally reached the doorframe and she looked down the long hall.

He was there.

Eyes fixed on the unlocked door, flicking now to her face.

Caitlyn’s captor marched towards her.





Chapter 66


I DIDN’T WANT to leave Zac. But I knew if I could find the killer, I could force him to tell us how to disarm the bomb. My teeth were gritted as I bolted into the house and grabbed my gun, Snale running after me with the diary from the kitchen table. The rage rippling up through my throat was almost a growl. I was going to find this sick fuck and make him reverse the trap he’d put the child in. If I had to beat him to within an inch of his life to make that happen, I would do it.

I ran across Snale’s porch and through the back door into the yard, keeping low so that my silhouette didn’t appear against the lights of the house. My gun drawn, I did a sweep, squinting in the dark, then hopped over a fence into the next property. I could still hear Zac’s crying from the windswept fields. Around Snale’s property, lights were coming on. As the seconds passed, more lights appeared in the distance as residents called each other, panicked, in the night.

‘Come on, you fuck,’ I seethed. ‘Where are you?’

I rushed across the road and through the property opposite Snale’s, making for the tiny house in the centre of the barren field. As I leapt up onto the porch a woman emerged, a young mother, small children trailing behind her. She screamed at the sight of me.

‘I’m police,’ I said. ‘Are you alright? Have you seen anyone in the area?’

‘No, no.’ The woman tried to usher her kids back through the screen door but they resisted, mouths gaping at my gun. ‘We heard screaming. What’s happening?’

‘Get inside,’ I said. ‘Shut the door.’

‘It’s all gonna come out.’ She shook her head ruefully, trembling before me, her hands gripping the small children by the shoulders of their pyjama shirts like they might run off at any second. ‘It’s all coming to an end.’

‘What?’ I squinted at her. ‘What’s that mean?’

She disappeared inside the house. I kept moving, doing a lap of her house, the next field, sweat sliding down my neck and ribs. When I got back to Snale’s house she was on her knees in the light of the doorway, flipping through the diary as Kash tried to get sense out of Zac.

‘Did you find anyone?’

‘No,’ I knelt beside Snale. ‘What did you find?’

‘I think it’s this.’ She pointed to a messy diagram in blue and red ink. ‘I think it’s connected to the seat. If he gets up, it’ll blow.’

I grabbed the diary and took it to Kash, who was standing on his toes with another torch, trying to see down the back of Zac’s seat.

‘ Oh Jesus.’ Zac panted, his sweat-drenched hands squeaking on the other side of the glass, fingers spread, desperate. ‘Jesus Christ, I think I can hear ticking.’

Kash snatched the diary out of my hands, glanced at the diagram. ‘Thought so. Circuit-breaker. It’s linked to the driver’s seat. We can open the doors.’