Page 21 of First Blood
‘Well, folks don’t wash that way any more, you know. There are easier, quicker, less labour-intensive ways of doing things,’ he said, as his face broke into a smile.
He pushed back his chair. ‘You just sit there and keep hand-washing, Stacey, but I think I’ve got a better idea. See you later.’
Stacey opened her mouth to say something and then changed her mind. She knew it would make no difference to her colleague at all. He wanted a quick, easy fix to finding their killer.
He wanted a fast food solution. He wanted to drive through Maccie’s and come out the other side with a Happy Meal, a McFlurry, the killer’s name and address and current location.
She idly wondered how often that actually happened in CID. In uniform the whole process of policing had been divided into sections with neighbourhood teams, traffic teams, firearm teams. She had attended jobs and then never known the outcome. Jobs were passed on and dealt with by close-knit teams who…
Her thoughts trailed away as the reason for the knot in her stomach made itself known to her. She’d overheard something on her last day at her old station. Only three days earlier. She’d been in the locker room at Wolverhampton station, clearing out her stuff. Two of her colleagues came in to clock off. They hadn’t spoken to her and she hadn’t taken too much notice of them, but she knew they’d attended the discovery of the body of a homeless man in the city centre, and although they’d been whispering she’d heard the words ‘genitals’ mentioned before they’d lowered their voices even more.
She turned to her computer and searched for the news article. She skim read it and then pored over it in detail. The news report offered no identity and had quickly been buried under the news that a foreign diplomat’s daughter had been abducted. The report was brief and mentioned nothing of genital mutilation, but perhaps that was one of the details being withheld by the team running the case. It would explain why her colleagues had been whispering as they would have been briefed at the scene.
She tapped her fingers on the desk. What if this had happened before? What if this wasn’t the killer’s first victim?
She took a deep breath as her email dinged and one of her balls in the air fell into her hand.
She had found Luke Fenton’s last known address, and it was time to call the boss.
Chapter Sixteen
‘Please tell me you have the address, Stacey?’ Kim said, answering the call. She was eager to learn more about their victim. This murder was one of the most personally intense crime scenes she’d ever witnessed and she already felt sure that knowing more about Luke Fenton would lead them to his killer.
‘Gor it, guv,’ Stacey said. ‘And texting it to Bryant right now.’
‘Okay,’ Kim said, hearing a note of trepidation in the young detective’s voice.
If she was texting the address why the need for the phone call?
‘And?’
‘Err… boss… it might be nothing but… err…’
‘Out with it, Stacey,’ she said.
‘Well, the other day, as I was finishing up at Wolverhampton I overheard…’
Kim was about to chivvy her up as Bryant took out his phone to read the text message, but realised that what she was hearing was nervousness. She closed her mouth and let the girl finish.
‘…two officers talking about a crime scene they’d attended in the city centre and…’
‘The homeless guy?’ Kim asked. She’d heard the news report. From the sparseness of the details she’d assumed that the death was a result of a fight over a bottle of beer or some other item. She was sure she’d heard the man had been stabbed.
‘Yeah but they were talking about genitals and I just wondered if there was anything there we should…’
‘You heard them say the word genitals?’ Kim asked, raising an eyebrow in Bryant’s direction.
‘Yeah, I mean, I know it ay…’
‘See what you can find out,’ Kim said, noting that Stacey’s Black Country accent became stronger the faster she spoke. ‘But don’t spend too much time on it,’ she advised. Luke Fenton was their priority, although Stacey’s call had dusted off the memory of something she’d heard and forgotten.
She ended the call and scrolled down her call register.
‘Hey, Keats, got a minute?’ she asked, not really caring if he was free or not.
‘Just about to perform a—’
‘Great,’ she said. Just about to do something was not yet doing it, which in her language meant he had a minute. ‘You said something earlier about our victim’s mutilation not being the worst you’d ever seen. What were you talking about?’
