Heart of the Demon (D.S.Hunter Kerr) Read online

  The Detective Superintendent looked up from his copies of the documents and leaned forward. “Okay, thanks for that Isobel,” he began. “Next steps.” He raised his eyes to the ceiling for a second and then returned his gaze. “The matter playing on my mind is the time gap between the killings. So whilst we have teams going over the background stuff of the two girls, we now need to concentrate on some of our old cold casework. Are there any other unsolved murders out there, which could be connected to ours? We also need to focus on the killer or killers. What have they been doing or where have they been during the past fourteen years. We need to make enquiries with prisons and the probation service, to see if we can come up with any likely candidates. We have a lot of tasks to be getting on with and with limited resources so Headquarters have approved me taking on more staff to help.”

  Hunter’s ears pricked up and immediately seized on the opportunity. “Can I make a suggestion Boss?”

  The Superintendent nodded.

  “You’re probably aware that Barry Newstead, ex-CID, was instrumental in pointing us in the direction of Carol Siddons, when her body was discovered.”

  Michael Robshaw nodded again.

  “Well what you might not be aware of is that when she was originally reported missing, Barry was the only person who believed what Carol’s mum was saying, and worked against the wishes of the then DI to try and trace her. Knowing Barry like I do I’m sure he will still have all his notes, and seeing as we’re allowed to take on ex-detectives to help us on these enquiries he would be a great asset.”

  The Superintendent pulled a face.

  Hunter spotted the look of angst. “Look I know what you’re thinking. Yes he was a bit of a maverick in his day, but I’ve been using his knowledge to good advantage just lately, and I’ll vouch for him. I’ll supervise his work and if it looks as though he’s going out on a limb I’ll draw him back, or get shut. Is that OK?”

  Before Michael Robshaw had time to respond they were all taken back by the hurried opening of the conference room door, as it swung back and thudded against the flimsy stud wall. A red faced, perspiring DC Mike Sampson, filled the doorframe.

  “Sorry to disturb you gaffer,” he gasped, “but another body’s been found.”

  * * * * *

  On their hands and knees, in their blue boiler suits, the Task Force search team were working shoulder-to-shoulder carrying out fingertip searches around the site where Carol Siddons’ mummified remains had been unearthed two weeks previously.

  Search grids had been taped off on the old colliery site and white suited forensic officers, some with metal detectors were combing the murky topsoil for exhibits. They had also brought in a specially trained sniffer dog.

  Police dog handler Peter Broughton and his Springer spaniel Lady were currently outside the roped off area, scrambling around in scrubland at the edge of the old pit site. Here the undergrowth was thick and dense in places and it was proving difficult for them to keep on a straight course. This was a first for Peter and Lady. Generally they only got called out when there had been a disaster, where the likelihood was that someone had been buried alive. But this is what they had both trained for. Lady had a nose for finding bodies even if they had been dead for some time.

  On a long rope the Springer darted in and out of sparse bushes and amongst clods of long grasses. They had been doing this for just under two hours and were due a break when Lady stopped longer than normal, sniffing and pawing at a mound of overgrown gorse. Peter increased his pace, taking in the slack of the rope until he was beside his dog.

  “What we found here then girl?” he said patting the Spaniel’s back. He pushed Lady to one side and on bended knees delved into the gorse, parting fronds carefully and slowly. Some of the ferns and grasses split easily from the soil; far easier than he had anticipated and he found himself tugging at a huge clump, taking away a good two inches of top soil. He wondered if Lady had found a badger set and for the next couple of minutes he scraped around an area where the clay was softer and strangely discoloured. He had never seen soil stained in this way before. He was considering calling for a member of the forensic team to join him when he exposed a piece of hemp sacking. Scraping more loose soil away he spotted the NCB black lettering stamped across the old decaying sack. The dog handler muttered to himself and tugged at one corner. It resisted more than he had conjectured and he pulled harder. Quite unexpectedly, it freed itself from the earth and sent him rolling backwards. Cursing and disgusted with himself he pushed himself up onto his knees, brushing dust from the backs of his thighs. He looked into the crevice, which the sacking had covered. What faced him rocked him back on his heels for a few seconds. It was then that he knew he definitely should shout for the forensic team.

  * * * * *

  It was with a feeling of déjà vu that Hunter, Grace, Tony Bullars and Mike Sampson pulled up before the cordoned off area on the Manvers site. Whilst travelling there they had learned that the second body was in fact a skeleton and that what appeared to be girl’s school clothing was still clung to the defleshed bones.

  The team could see that Scenes of Crime, working with the forensic team, were already erecting a second white tent around the site of the decomposed body.

  The MIT team viewed the activity before them. The one good thing about this recent discovery was that the majority of the resources they required were already on site.

  Hunter was duly briefed by the uniformed officer at the entrance to the scene that the other experts who were required to scrutinize this discovery of skeletal remains were already on their way. He knew from that information that Professor Lizzie McCormack and the body recovery team would be soon joining them.

  Hunter realised that for the next few hours very little evidence would be gathered but things would be frantic. The Recovery team would need to excavate and remove the cadaver to a climate-controlled Pathology lab as soon as possible because he knew that now the body had been exposed there would be further acceleration in its decomposition. At the same time the body recovery team would be ensuring that the chain of evidence remained intact for the remaining forensic team.

  He stood, hands on hips surveying the scene. His instinct was telling him that this was now a serial murder enquiry. He saw that Tony, Grace and Mike had already passed through the ‘Police line do not cross’ tape, and were busy organizing and briefing officers as to their respective roles in this investigation.

  Within twenty minutes Professor McCormack had landed at the site. Hunter spotted her by the open boot of her car, stepping into her forensic suit.

  Within five minutes he saw her heading towards him, bouncing on the balls of her feet, and he was sure that a perverse grin was stretching across her face, as though she took great pleasure in probing around dead bodies.

  “My my, we are busy little bees,” she said in her soft Scottish voice as she drew ever closer.

  Soon she was easing herself down over the disturbed earth around the grisly corpse. It was devoid of any flesh, a perfect set of white teeth grinned back from the dirty brown skull, and hanks of coarse and matted dark brown hair still adhered to it. It was dressed in a white blouse and dark blue skirt, and although the upper parts were exposed most of the legs still remained covered in the surrounding red clay soil.

  The Professor probed around the skeleton with a scalpel, leaning forwards occasionally, raising the flimsy cotton blouse and skirt and examining some of the bones. She tutted and clucked as she moved around the makeshift grave on her knees. Then she looked up at Hunter, eye raised above spectacles.

  “This is a difficult one for me,” she announced. “This body, unlike the other one you found a couple of weeks ago is completely devoid of any tissue whatsoever. This is not my skill area I’m afraid. What I can tell you is that this is the body of a young teenage girl.”

  “How’s that?” Hunter asked.

  The pathologist hovered her scalpel above the pelvic area of the skeleton and began to rotate it. “The
se flared bones on the hips are a dead giveaway. This is called the sciatic notch. It spreads as a young woman. Nature’s way of accommodating a foetus. Also look at the forehead.” Still using the scalpel as a pointer she aimed it towards the skull. “The frontal lobe is flat. In a man’s there is more of a slope.” Lizzie McCormack studied the body a little longer, before giving off a long winded “hmm.”

  She turned to Hunter. “What I can also tell you is that injuries to the bones in her neck suggest she has been strangled again just like the others.” She paused a second, “And I can also tell you that this looks very much like the handiwork of our killer again.” She pointed to a clear plastic bag poking upwards through loosened soil, its transparency masked here and there by clinging detritus. “If I’m not mistaken that’s another one of those playing cards. Looks like the three of hearts to me.”

  She pushed herself up from the ground. “That’s as far as I can take things for you I’m afraid. I’ll put in a call to check how long the forensic anthropologist will be before he can get here. It’s a colleague of mine so I can speed things up for you. He’ll collect and examine the bones and tell you how long the body has been buried here and hopefully help identify her for you.”

  As the Professor edged away from the site, Hunter saw over her shoulder that the forensic recovery team had just arrived and were taking out the Ground Penetrating Radar, which would determine if there were even more bodies buried in the vicinity.

  * * * * *

  Josh: Hi Kirsty.

  Kirsty: Hi Josh, howa yoo?

  Josh: yeah im gud thanx.

  Kirsty: wot u doin?

  Josh: listenin to sum artic monkeys, jus chillin.

  Kirsty: that’s cool.

  He had been trawling the social network sites on the Internet for weeks, tracking the profiles of a number of people, picking up the language and learning how to develop a character from a mixture of the various sites. It had been time consuming but all too easy.

  He’d made copious notes at first in his attempt to create a believable character with substance. To step inside the head of a typical seventeen year old boy he had searched the music sites for hours on end, selecting the most popular bands and solo artists, and then he had followed up with a little research about each one to enable him to convince his audience. He had also done ‘dummy runs’ to ‘test drive’ Josh, developing convincingly his use of the teenage text language on the websites. It had been a worthwhile exercise and he had hooked several unsuspecting teenage girls in the three weeks he had been socialising across the networks. One thirteen year old had even exposed her cute little breasts to him, which he had captured on his web-cam.

  By the time he had ‘hooked up’ on Kirsty’s site he was an accomplished player. She had been wary at first and tested him on several occasions, but his research had stood him in good stead and within a week he knew that she firmly believed she was conversing with seventeen year old ‘Josh’.

  Josh: saw u at skwl the othr day. u lukd sad.

  Kirsty: wot wer u doin nr my skwl.

  Josh: jus passin lukin 4 a pretty face.

  Kirsty: u r makin me blush. No serious wot wer u doin nr my skwl.

  Josh: jus passin. Goin 2 the park for a game of footie. Why wer u sad.

  Kirsty: I wantd 2 stay over at my friends wiv sum mates cos of skool brake up but mum wudnt let me cos of wat append to Rebecca. We ad a row she freakd out.

  Josh: do u want me 2 cheer u up?

  Kirsty: wat do u mean?

  Josh: u r cute u kno. Do u want to meet up.

  Kirsty: r u askin me out?

  Josh: Of cors.

  Kirsty: but I hardli kno u.

  Josh: u do wev talkd for ages on this chat room. Uv seen my foto. Don’t u like me.

  Selecting the right photograph and then altering it in his Adobe Photoshop programme had been another worthwhile project. He was quite proud of how physically good-looking he had made his character.

  Kirsty: u luk nice. u sound nice.

  Josh: well then lets meet.

  Kirsty: ok but I can’t 4 a few days. ive been grounded. in fact im supposed 2 b doin mi bedroom now instead of chattin wiv u. mum wil freak again if she catchs me.

  Josh: wen can u get out then?

  Kirsty: next satrday evenin. mums out wiv dad wiv frends. Wot about the park?

  Josh: souns gud. c u then pretty face.

  As he exited the chat room site he leaned back on his swivel chair, clasped his hands behind his head and grinned widely.

  Another lamb to the slaughter.

  - ooOoo -

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  DAY TWENTY-FOUR: 30th July.

  The ringing of Grace Marshall’s desk phone disturbed the unusual concentrated silence in the MIT office. She answered it without looking up from her paperwork, clamping the handset between her neck and shoulder. But the nature of the call changed her demeanour. She lifted her eyes as she listened intently to the voice on the other end of the line. Picking up a pen she scribbled notes in her own form of shorthand, only answering occasionally with a one word clipped response. Two minutes later she set down the receiver.

  Solemn faced, her eyes swept across four desks that had been recently fixed together into a square format.

  The two opposite were occupied. Hunter and Barry Newstead were picking through the piles of documents spread across their surfaces.

  “Do you want the good news or the bad news?” she said.

  Hunter looked up from his desk and pushed aside notes he had been making on the recent body find. For the last half hour he had been trying his best to make sense of it all. True he had worked on body count murders before, but it had been where members of the same family had been killed in one single event. He had never worked on multiple victim deaths, which were now being dubbed as the actions of a serial killer. His head felt woolly. A mixture of long hours of intense work, and a lack of sleep, from his lying awake night after night, mulling over the recent events, were taking their toll.

  “Hit me with the good news first,” Hunter responded, placing an already well-chewed pen back into one corner of his mouth.

  Barry Newstead dog-eared the page he had been perusing and peered over his reading spectacles at Grace. It was his first day with the Case Team, joining as a civilian investigator and he had been given the job of sending the profiles of the murdered girls, and the descriptions of how they had met their deaths, to Headquarters Public Protection Unit. In return they had faxed him the backgrounds and histories of the districts most violent and dangerous sex offenders. He had already said to Hunter ‘that he thought nothing could surprise him anymore, that was until he had ploughed through this lot’ and he had confessed ‘he was astonished at just how many paedophiles there were living in his area.’

  “That was the forensics lab,” continued Grace. “They have found some traces on that grey cardigan belonging to Carol Siddons. But the bad news is none of it is human DNA. All they have found are lots of dog hairs, and some black woollen fibres which appear to have come from a duffel coat of some type.”

  “Dog hairs?” interjected Barry. “Carol never had a dog, and neither Susan.”

  “Sure about that Barry?” enquired Hunter, eyebrows raised, teeth clenching harder on the end of his pen.

  “I’m positive. I can give Sue a quick ring, but all the time I was investigating Carol’s disappearance there was never any dog around. And I would have definitely known because I hate the bloody things, I’ve been bitten three times in my career, one of those times by a bloody police dog would you believe.”

  Grace let out a chuckle, then clamped her lips firmly together, when she saw Barry’s not too impressed reaction.

  “And she was living at a children’s home, where pets were not allowed. So more than likely those dog hairs will have come from her killer.” Barry paused, his eyes lighting up. “Just a minute,” he continued, “Steve Paynton used to have a couple of dogs; Staffordshire bull terriers if my memory
serves me right. He used to keep them in the old outhouse at the bottom of his mum and dad’s garden. Rumours were that he trained them for fighting. That was a good few years’ back, they’ll more than likely be dead now. Knowing him though, they’ll probably be buried on his dad’s allotment, or somewhere like that. Can they tell the breed of dog if we find them?”

  “I asked the same question,” returned Grace. “They can. They’ll be able to confirm a match if we find the correct dog. Well done Barry,” Grace continued excitedly. “I’ll feed in to the HOLMES team what forensics have told me, and what you’ve just said and get a search team round to the Paynton’s. They are going to be thoroughly pissed off by the time we’ve finished.”

  “That family’s had it coming for a long time,” added Hunter. “You set that in motion and muster up a search team, we’ve more officers joining us now that we have a serial killer on our hands.”

  As Grace raced out of the room Hunter pulled the pen from his mouth and leaned back in his seat thinking about the sheer volume of ongoing enquiries. They now had three separate crime scenes running, the most recent of which, was a hive of activity. Forensic Anthropologists were picking over every inch of ground, digging in several areas around the scrubland, following the path of the radar. In addition there was Peter Broughton and his dog Lady who had identified further ‘hot spots’ where other human remains might well be. He was just thankful that there hadn’t been anymore body finds.