Play Dead (D.I. Kim Stone, #4)(76)

She heard the hiss and puff of the drinks machine behind her and Bryant’s laugh as he shared a joke with the woman serving him.

She marvelled at his easy manner and affable nature. He was one of life’s charmers, possessing the ability to relate to most people he met.

She wondered how that quality had actually been inserted into his personality. Had Bryant been the kid everyone had flocked around at school, or was it a quality that he had grown into and perfected over the years?

Whatever it was, she was grateful for the balance he offered to their team despite his ability to annoy the hell out of her.

‘Double shot, latte,’ he said, placing a glass mug on the table. His own beverage was a pot of tea for one.

He sat down as a girl in her late teens entered the café with a double buggy. Only one seat held a child. The other was filled with carrier bags.

Bryant stood back up and held the door while the girl folded herself around the pushchair into the café.

Kim watched as the teenage mum expertly released her son from the buggy. His arms instantly reached out to be plucked from the carriage. It was a ritual understood and executed by both.

‘Storm is coming,’ Bryant observed, stirring the tea bag in the metal pot.

‘Good,’ Kim said. The cloying heat had been building for days.

Bryant shook his head. ‘You prefer rain to sunshine?’

‘Yep,’ she said.

‘I mean, how can anyone hate the summer?’ he asked, pouring the bronze liquid into a plain white teacup.

It was easy if your most traumatic memories were encased in a wall of sticky heat.

A cry sounded from the little boy as his mother placed him into a high chair. Each time she tried to sit him in it, his legs straightened so they wouldn’t slide down.

Kim looked away to hide her smile. Another routine practised and perfected – this time by the child.

‘We could be wrong about Tracy, you know?’ Bryant said. ‘She might just have needed some space to clear her head. Get away from stuff.’

Kim agreed.

A loud wail came from the little boy. He was trapped in the chair but was trying to wriggle his lower limbs free. He bucked his legs back and forth, raising them up and down.

‘I just think we’re making one hell of an assumption…’

‘Shhh…’ Kim said as she continued watching the child’s attempts to escape.

He leaned forwards, trying to climb out of his trap. His stomach smashed against the food tray before him.

‘Guv…?’

Kim ignored Bryant as the child again flailed his legs back and forth in an effort to get them free.

The back of his thighs bumped up and down on the wooden edge of the seat.

‘Yo, guv…?’

‘Bryant, shut up,’ she said, unable to tear her gaze away.

The child used his chubby little fingers to grab the end of the food tray, pulling himself forwards against the edge.

‘Oh, I think that might be our woman now,’ Bryant said, nodding towards the door.

Finally Kim turned to her colleague, dumbfounded yet sure she was right.

‘Bryant, the marks on our victims that we can’t work out…’

She couldn’t believe what she was about to say.

‘The bastard has them chained in a high chair.’





Sixty-Eight





Tracy put every ounce of effort she had into opening her eyes.

She felt like a weightlifter in a clean and jerk final, focussing every ounce of strength to lift two flaps of skin from her eyeballs.

She managed to raise them up, but initially she wasn’t sure she had. A few seconds later, her eyes adjusted to the darkness. In the distance strange shapes were evident in the black.

‘H-hello…’ she whispered to the shadows that danced along the wall. The returning silence was terrifying.

She could feel liquid tracing a line from the corner of her mouth and knew that it was drool travelling along her cheek towards her lower jaw.

She tried to raise her hand, but it wouldn’t move. Her fuddled brain simply caused her eyes to stare down, wondering why. She tried again before realising that her wrist was confined, but she couldn’t see what was holding her.

It took a full minute before she realised that her other hand was not restrained. She shook her head, trying to clear the fog. A dozen spiders had spun webs in her brain.

Her arm lifted as though gravity was fighting it back down. She idly wondered if she was trapped in one of those dreams where your legs just won’t move, however hard you try.

A flash of hope found her in the darkness. Maybe it was all a dream. Perhaps she would wake up back home.

Even while the hope tried to claim her, the logical part of her brain was coming alive too. The pain around her wrist was too raw, too jagged to be in her imagination. It cut right to her nerves. Her own thoughts, although slow, were real.

She knew she wasn’t asleep and silently cursed the ray of hope that had momentarily distracted her.

She tried to scoot down in the chair. Maybe she could topple the seat forwards and somehow free her wrist, but no matter how she stretched her legs, her dangling feet met with nothing but space.

She could feel a bar in the small of her back and some kind of tray in front of her.

Tracy desperately tried to think back to the last thing she remembered.