Page 112 of First Blood
Stacey expected the line to die again in her hand, but instead she heard the dialling of another phone. She also heard a generic voicemail kick in.
A pause before the woman did it again and got the same result.
‘Strange,’ she admitted. ‘We’re getting no response from the patient’s phone either.’
‘Because they’re not a patient,’ Stacey explained. ‘The call was made by someone with a grudge against Doctor Lambert, who has lured him out to a—’
‘Number 24 Cedar Close, in Belle Vale. That’s where he was called to.’
Stacey thanked her and ended the call.
‘So you got an address?’ Dawson asked, with a glint in his eye.
She reached for the phone. ‘Yeah, I’m just gonna call…’
‘Right, the boss is on her way to a potential crime scene in action and right now we don’t know for sure if Doc Lambert is even involved. You have the address that the call-out service sent him to, and if you want to speak to them again and ask them to make contact, be my guest but I don’t think the boss will welcome a progress report right this minute. You want to rethink?’
Stacey’s patience was wearing thin after the phone conversations and she was in no mood for long speeches or cryptic questions.
‘What the hell do you suggest I do, Einstein?’ she snapped.
For the first time all week she saw a genuine smile.
‘You wanna come with me for a ride?’
Chapter One Hundred Four
Kim was counting down both the miles and minutes as Bryant drove. The satnav on her phone had told her they’d been eleven minutes and 4.6 miles away from Quinton, and each passing minute was torture.
For just one second she’d considered telling Dawson and Stacey to head towards the site in Quinton. They were one mile closer, but her dynamic risk assessment of the situation had persuaded her otherwise. She didn’t know either of them well enough to be sure of how they’d react to a potentially dangerous situation, but what she did know was that Dawson was unruly and impetuous and Stacey was inexperienced and at her most comfortable behind a desk.
Neither of those things were deal breakers for her as team members, but for first response to a serious crime in action those qualities could get either or both of them killed. Not something that would go down well on her first week assessment.
She had briefly considered calling Woody and asking for backup. She played the request in her head;
Sir, I think I need assistance at a site where I think torture and murder might be about to take place to a doctor I’ve never met by a handyman of whom I have not one shred of physical evidence but the nursery rhymes say so.
He would politely refuse the reallocation of resources and issue her with a direct instruction to return. Which she couldn’t do if she was hoping to save a life and catch the person responsible for six other deaths. No, any further assistance at this point was not an option.
If Carl Wickes had persuaded his brother to impersonate him during questioning then this murder was going to happen tonight. It had to happen tonight, but she didn’t have the time to try and explain her certainty of this to anyone. She only knew that he had guessed they were on to him and he was still desperate to add another victim to his tally.
It was just her and a man she had known for four days against a killer whose thirst for blood was increasing by the hour.
She glanced sideways at her colleague as she took out her phone and typed in a search of The Willows. She couldn’t read his expression in the darkness of the car. She realised that she barely knew the man beside her any better than she knew the other two.
But right now, he was all she had.
Chapter One Hundred Five
‘Jeez, slow down, Dawson,’ Stacey said, hanging on to both the door handle and the underside of the passenger seat. As someone who had been terrified her whole life of taking driving lessons this experience was not instilling her with confidence.
‘Come on, you can’t tell me you’re not getting a buzz out of what’s going on right now. And if you’re not then you’re in the wrong job,’ he said, taking a bend at what felt like sixty miles per hour.
‘Have you forgotten that there’s a man’s life in danger here?’ she asked.
‘And we’re involved in trying to save it,’ he said, taking another corner at speed.
Why the hell had she agreed to come with him in the first place when she could be watching or co-ordinating events from the safety of the office? It was almost 11p.m. and she could no longer remember what had happened today and what had happened yesterday. In fact, the whole week was rolling into one long shift.
