Mp, p.4
MatchUp, page 4
The stocky man chuckled.
They moved deliberately across the clearing toward the walls of the lodge. Condensation puffed from their mouths with every breath. They kept low as they neared the log walls.
When they were leaning against it, the stocky one whispered, “One, two, three.”
And they both sprang up and looked over the wall, their rifles sweeping the dirt floor.
After a beat, the stocky man said, “Where the hell did they go?”
“Right behind you,” Coburn said, raising the .45 with his left hand.
Joe didn’t even have the stock of the shotgun up to his cheek before there were two loud booms and orange fireballs erupted from the muzzle of Coburn’s weapon. Both the rednecks were thrown into the wall by the bullets’ impact. The skinny man fell like a puppet with his strings clipped. The stocky one regained his balance, turned, and raised his rifle. Coburn shot him again and the man dropped to the ground.
Pickett’s ears rang.
He barely heard Coburn say, “I think I forgot to say freeze.”
COBURN EYED PICKETT IN THE amber light from the campfire. The game warden had finally stopped talking and had settled in to shoveling spoonful after spoonful of canned stew into his mouth.
“I can’t believe I’m so hungry,” Pickett said. “Usually when I see a dead person, I get sick.”
“Then drink,” Coburn said, extending a bottle of bourbon they’d found in the One Nation cache.
Pickett grabbed the bottle, sucked a long swig, then grimaced.
“Good, huh?” Coburn said, taking it back.
The liquor dulled the pain from his shoulder but not as much as he would like.
“How did you know they wouldn’t see us leave that shelter to hide in the trees?”
“The darkest time of the night is that ten-minute window after the sun goes down, and just before the moon comes out. It takes a few minutes for your eyes to adjust. You learn that by chasing poachers around. That’s why we left when we did.”
He nodded.
Smart thinking.
Something emerged from the trees.
Like a ghost, twenty feet from the fire, startling them both.
“My steed,” Pickett said, definitely pleased. “Rojo.”
The horse snorted.
Pickett stood with a grunt and led the animal closer to the fire, tying him to a tree trunk and fishing a radio out of the saddlebag.
“I’m going to contact the Teton County Sheriff’s Department. When the good guys get here, do you want to go straight to the hospital?”
“Where else?”
“Thought maybe you’d want to roust your tattoo guy first.”
Coburn savored another deep drink of the bourbon.
And grinned.
VAL MCDERMID AND PETER JAMES
VAL MCDERMID TELLS ME THAT the idea for this story came while she was having her feet worked on by a brisk German reflexologist. While lying there she kept thinking about how most people consider feet unattractive, and yet for some they’re a powerful sexual fetish.
A thought occurred.
What would happen if a foot-fetishist reflexologist confronted a pair of feet so perfect he wanted to keep them forever.
And the story was born.
Both Peter and Val are British crime (thriller) writers. But their novels are set at opposite ends of the country. Val’s principal characters are a detective and a psychological profiler. Peter’s is a pure detective. For them both, the whole world of foot fetishists was a relatively unexplored subject. Learning about the weird and wonderful world of feet, as objects of eroticism, seemed a bit mind-boggling for them.
But there was an element of fun to it too.
Peter wrote the skeleton of an outline. Val then fleshed it out and drafted the opening, setting the scene and the tone. Together, they then worked back and forth, each writing segments of about a thousand words. Val counted on Peter for all the police procedural elements, which gave her free rein to have some fun with the characters. And they both had “a bit of a giggle” at each other’s terrible puns about feet.
The result is something quite unique.
Footloose.
FOOTLOOSE
A WATERY RED SUN WAS struggling to defeat skeins of cloud above the moors of either Lancashire or West Yorkshire, depending on personal allegiance. A narrow ribbon of road wound down from the high tops toward the outskirts of Bradfield, its gray sprawl just emerging from the dawn light. Gary Naylor steered a van crammed with bacon, sausages, and black pudding from his organic piggery down the moorside, knowing his bladder wasn’t going to make it to the first delivery.
There was, he knew, a lay-by round the next bend, tucked in against a dry stone wall. He’d stop there for a quick slash. Nobody around to see at this time of the morning. He pulled over and squirmed out, duckwalking over to the wall. He had eyes for nothing but his zip and his hands and then, oh, the relief as he directed his hot stream over the low wall.
That was when he noticed her.
Sprawled on the far side of the gray drystone dike lay a woman.
Blond, beautiful, dressed in a figure-hugging dress, wide-eyed and indisputably dead.
Dead and covered in his steaming piss.
DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR CAROL JORDAN of the Regional Major Incident Team had already been awake when the call came in. She’d been halfway up the hill behind her converted barn home, exercising Flash, her border collie. She walked; the dog quartered the hillside in a manic outpouring of energy that made her feel faintly inadequate. She took the call and turned, whistling the dog to follow. Five yards in and Flash was in front of her, heading like an arrow for home.
She let the dog in and called to the man who shared her home but not her bed.
Dr. Tony Hill emerged from his separate suite at the far end of the barn, hair wet from the shower, tucking his shirt into his jeans.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Body of a woman found up on the moors. A fresh kill, by all accounts.”
“And it’s one for ReMIT?”
“Oh yes. It’s definitely one for us. She’s got no feet.”
Carol Jordan and Tony Hill were a better fit in their professional lives than they’d ever managed personally.
He was a clinical psychologist who specialized in unraveling the motivations of the twisted killers who wanted to express themselves again and again. She was the kind of detective for whom justice matters more than any other consideration. Now she’d been put in charge of ReMIT, he was at the heart of the tight-knit team she’d built to deal with major crimes across six police areas. So when they turned up at the lay-by on the moors, there was a perceptible lowering of the level of tension among the local officers who’d been called to the scene first.
They could relax a bit.
This wasn’t going to be down to them if it all went tits up.
The detective sergeant who’d been on duty when the call came in introduced them to Gary Naylor, sitting hunched in his van with the door open.
“I’m sorry,” Naylor said. “I’m so, so sorry. I never saw her till it was too late.”
For a moment Carol thought she was hearing a confession.
But the DS explained. “Mr. Naylor urinated on the woman’s body. Then when he realized what he’d done, he threw up.” He tried to keep his voice level, but the disgust showed in the line of his mouth.
“That must have been upsetting for you,” Tony said.
“Have we taken a statement from Mr. Naylor?” Carol asked.
“We were waiting for you, ma’am,” the DS said.
“Have someone take a statement from Mr. Naylor, then let the poor man get on with his day.”
An edge to her voice stung the DS into action.
They took the marked path to the wall and looked down at the woman’s body. Even stinking of urine and vomit, it was possible to see that she’d been attractive. Pleasant enough face, though nothing out of the ordinary. Good figure. Shapely legs. Except that where her feet should have been there was a puddle of blood-matted grass and heather.
“What do you make of that?” Carol asked.
Tony shook his head. “I’m not sure what he’s saying to us. Don’t think you can run away from me? You’ll never dance with another guy now? Impossible to know until I know a lot more about the victim.”
She gestured to the forensic technicians working the scene. “Hopefully they’ll have something for us soon.
“How’s it looking, Peter?” she called out to the crime scene manager.
He gave her a thumbs-up. “It’d be easier if the witness hadn’t voided most of his body fluids over her. On the plus side we’ve got a clutch bag with a credit card, a business card, a set of keys, a lipstick, and forty quid in cash. The name on the credit card is Diane Flaherty. The business card is for a model called Dana Dupont. The contact number is an agency in Bradfield. I’ll ping the details to your e-mail account as soon as I can get a strong enough signal. It’s a nightmare up here.”
“What’s the agency called?”
“Out on a Limb.”
Tony raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”
She nodded. “Let’s get down to the office and see what Stacey can dig out about Diane Flaherty and this agency.”
She tossed Tony a warning look.
“And don’t tell me to put my foot down.”
MOST DAYS SARAH DENNISON RECKONED she had the best job in the world, but today it felt like the worst.
The worst by a million, backbreaking stinky miles.
And it was getting even worse.
This would have been a perfect day for it to have rained and a howling gale to have blown, as it seemed to have done for most of this summer. Instead, under a searing midday sun and beneath a cloudless sky, the air in the West Brighton Domestic Waste Recycling and Landfill Site stood still, rank and fetid. The waste was literally steaming, the methane gas rising from it offering her and her colleagues a headache.
Sarah was a sergeant in Brighton and Hove Police, and part of her speciality training was as a POLSA. Police search advisor. Normally she loved the challenge of searching, particularly fingertip searches at the scene of a major crime, looking for the one incriminating strand of hair or clothing fiber on a carpet, or maybe in a field. It was always looking for needles in haystacks and she was brilliant at spotting them. But today it wasn’t a needle, it was a murder weapon, small fire extinguisher that had come out of a van and been used to strike a man on the head after a row over a girl in a nightclub.
And this was no haystack.
It was twenty acres of rotting bin bags full of soiled nappies, rotting food, dead animals, with aggressive feral rats running amok.
She and her five colleagues lined out to her right and left, steadily working their way through the rubbish, were constantly having to fend off rats with the rakes they were using to tear open and sift through the contents of every single bag. They’d been here since 7 a.m., and her back was aching like hell from the constant raking motions. It was now 2 p.m. and they would keep on going into the evening, for as long as there was light, until they found what they were looking for, or could conclude, for certain, it wasn’t here. She’d not eaten anything since arriving here, nor had any of her colleagues.
None of them had any appetite.
“Skipper,” a voice called out.
She turned to see PC Theakston at the end of the line to her right, dressed as they all were in blue overalls, face masks, gloves and boots, signaling.
“You’d better come and take a look at this.”
His tone was a mixture of excitement and revulsion, in equal parts. Perhaps more revulsion.
And she could see and smell why.
Through a mist of buzzing blowflies a rat was gnawing hungrily at one of two severed human feet, cut off above the anklebones, lying on the ground. The terrible, rancid, cloying smell of dead flesh filled the air all around them, and Sarah yanked a handkerchief from her pocket and jammed it over her nose. The feet were intact, but some of the flesh had turned a mottled green color. Specks of pink varnish dotted some of the nails.
“Where’s the rest of the body?” she said, wondering aloud.
“Done a runner?” the constable said.
NORMALLY, DURING HIS WEEK AS the on-call senior investigating officer, Detective Superintendent Roy Grace, who was a few weeks shy of his forty-second birthday, wanted nothing more than a challenging homicide inquiry—a Gucci job, as he called them—that he could get his teeth into. One that would attract national press, and where he might have a chance to shine to his superiors. Most of the murders in the city of Brighton and Hove in recent months had been anything but. Lowlifes on lowlifes. A street drug dealer knifing another. Then a small-time drug dealer locked in the boot of a car that was then torched. Both of these, like most of that kind, were solved within days. A blindfolded monkey could have solved them in his view.
He knew it was wrong to be hoping for a good murder. But that’s what every homicide detective secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, was after. As he sat at his desk poring over the trial papers of a suspect he had arrested the previous year, a highly evil female killer, whose case was coming up at the Old Bailey next month, his phone rang.
He answered and listened.
Then hung up.
He should wish for things more often.
An hour later, accompanied by his colleague and mate Detective Inspector Glenn Branson—tall, black, and bald as a bowling ball—Grace drove up to the entrance to the West Brighton Recycling and Landfill Site. A marked police car as well as a white CSI van were pulled up beside a Portacabin that housed the site office, and there was a line of blue-and-white police tape across the road, with a uniformed officer standing in front with a clipboard.
Grace was pleased to see that the site was already secured. But the site manager, a burly harassed-looking woman in a yellow uniform, with the name Tracey Finden on her lapel badge, clearly was not. She strode over before they were even out of the car. As Grace rolled down the window, introduced himself, and showed her his warrant card, she replied, “You can’t do this, sir. We’ve got lorries and the general public coming and going all day. This is going to cause chaos.”
“I do understand that and we’ll be as quick as we can.”
“I thought your officers were looking for a bloody fire extinguisher.”
“They were—and still are. But now you have to understand this is a potential murder inquiry, and I’m treating this place as a crime scene.”
“For how long?”
“At this moment, I cannot tell you. It could be several days.”
“Several days? You’re joking?”
“I don’t think a dead human being is something to joke about.”
“It’s a pair of feet, right? That’s all.”
“That’s all?” Grace replied.
“They could have come from anywhere. You don’t seriously think whoever they belong to is wandering around the site looking for them, do you?”
“I don’t think anything at this stage,” he replied calmly. “Until I have more information. But I am going to need your help, Tracey. Is there CCTV here?”
“Yes, six cameras.”
“How long do you keep the recordings?”
“Two weeks before they’re automatically recorded over.”
“I’m going to need the memory cards. Also the details of all lorries that you’ve logged in the past month and any information you can give about them and their drivers.”
The two detectives climbed out of their car, wormed their way into their protective onesies, followed by overshoes, gloves, and face masks, then they signed the scene log and ducked under the tape.
“Yugggggh,” Branson said, wrinkling his nose at the stench.
Grace too had to swallow to stop himself from gagging.
Then they followed the long length of police tape that had been laid on the ground, guiding them in a straight line through the garbage toward a small knot of people in uniform, standing amid a cloud of buzzing flies.
Unsurprisingly, the home office pathologist, pedantic Groucho Marx look-alike Dr. Frazer Theobald, declined the opportunity to view the feet in situ at the waste site, requesting them to be recovered and taken to the mortuary. Sarah Dennison and her colleagues had completed their search by late afternoon and no other body parts had been found. This, both Grace and the pathologist agreed, indicated the place was more likely to be a deposition site than the crime scene itself.
Assuming it was a crime scene—and Grace was always wary of assumptions. Ass–u–me makes an ass out of u and me was something he frequently liked to remind people of. The feet could have come from a hospital mortuary, taken in a sick prank by medical students. Things like that had happened before. Or some sicko might have stolen them from an undertaker. A funeral director would be loath and probably too embarrassed to report such a theft.
He stood with DI Branson, gowned up in green protective clothing and white clogs in the Brighton and Hove City Mortuary, along with his wife, Cleo, the chief mortician. Or senior anatomical pathology technician as the role was now known. Darren Bourne, Cleo’s assistant, a coroner’s officer, a crime scene photographer, and the crime scene manager.
So far Dr. Frazer Theobald had established the feet were female, size seven, and at some time recently, presumably prior to being severed, had been pedicured. He wasn’t able to date how long they had been severed precisely, and his best estimate from the deterioration of the flesh, and the generation of blowfly larvae, was somewhere between three to five weeks. Tissue had been sent to the DNA lab with an urgent request. But it would be a couple of days before they would know if the owner of the feet was on the national database. The absolute priority for both detectives was to identify that person.
One thing the pathologist pointed out to Grace and Branson, with the aid of a microscope, was the surgical precision with which the leg bones had been sawed through. There were tiny, matching serrations on both feet. What that indicated to him was that the feet had not been hacked off in anger, or as some form of torture or revenge. They’d been removed by someone with medical skills, or possibly with butcher training. But beyond that the pathologist could offer no further suggestion at this stage. Nothing that would help answer the one burning question Roy Grace had right now.
