Page 33 of Killing Mind
She lifted the lid on her lunchbox to check that nothing appealing had found its way in. No, it was as she’d left it when she covered it over: two cracker breads covered thinly with a low fat spread, a tomato, an apple and banana. She closed the lid again wishing she liked healthy food more.
Devon told her every night that she didn’t want Stacey to lose weight and Stacey explained every time that she was doing it for herself. And it was easy for Devon to say that with her five foot ten frame that somehow repelled excess fat. The woman’s weight hadn’t budged in the eighteen months they’d been together. Naturally athletic, her body burned calories like a furnace. If Stacey wasn’t so ridiculously, emphatically, deliriously in love with the woman, she’d hate her bloody guts.
The extra stone she carried had been reconciled in her mind by the constant thought of ‘I’ll lose that when…’
She’d never been clear when the ‘when’ was going to be but it had always been for something that mattered. And what could be more important than her wedding day?
It was the photos that stuck in her mind. Those photos would hopefully be shown to children and grandchildren, and she really didn’t want to look at them in years to come hating the way she looked on the most important day of her life.
No, she had to stick with it, she thought, shifting her attention from the reserved chocolate muffin to twenty-year-old Tyler Short.
His social media didn’t show the outgoing personality of Samantha. His friends were not in the triple figures, so he was not a collector: how Stacey viewed people who amassed hundreds of Facebook friends that they’d never met. But what she couldn’t find were any family members: brothers, sisters, cousins.
There were not many photos of him. One when he’d passed his driving test and a few with a small group of friends. She skipped over those and went to his posts. There were a couple of shared photos of cars and funny memes that seemed to beStar Warsrelated, but what really got her attention were the thoughtful posts. Mainly about mothers and posted around Mother’s Day each year. His oldest photo was a selfie taken with his grandmother and a birthday cake. Just the two of them.
Stacey moved away from his social media with a feeling that she’d missed something but she had to focus on his past, his background, which she wasn’t going to get from social media.
Ten minutes later she’d written a half page of notes on Tyler Short and it didn’t make for particularly happy reading.
Born to a troubled mother ridden with bouts of depression, he’d spent much of his childhood with his maternal grandmother. Stacey had found no evidence of a father. His mother had committed suicide when he was twelve years old, at which point he lived with his grandmother full time. From what Stacey could gather he had given her no trouble and had worked hard enough to get himself into college to study to be a mechanic.
The merging of the hard facts and his social media left Stacey with an overwhelming feeling of sadness. The boy had suffered uncertainty in his younger years with little to no stability and had lost his mother before he’d even reached his teens.
She went back to his Facebook page and in particular to that one photo with his nan.
It really had been just the two of them. She had been the only constant throughout his life and when he’d lost her he really had lost everything.
Her gaze moved across to the most recent photo of Tyler amongst a group of friends and realised what it was that she’d missed the first time.
Her eyes rested on the face of someone she already knew.
Twenty-Nine
It was almost four when Bryant drove them through the cordon at the gates to Himley Park. Small groups of employees littered the grass on the side of the road as they approached the car park at the lake.
Inspector Plant was being talked at by a sturdy woman with her arms folded across her chest. Kim looked away before either of them could catch her eye. She couldn’t answer the question that was most probably on the woman’s lips. She didn’t know when the site could be handed back, and the fact she’d been recalled wasn’t good news for anyone.
She looked up as she got out of the car. No drones; the boy had listened.
The tent was still in place, even though the body had been removed. Kim headed straight for it, guessing that was where Mitch would be collecting his samples.
Before she stepped inside she glanced around the lake. In all she was guessing there were fourteen or fifteen white suits around the perimeter. Some were staggered in singles, but there were two clutches of three or four. One clutch about twenty feet west of the tent and the other bunch opposite the tent on the other side of the lake.
‘Hey, Mitch,’ she said, entering the tent.
‘Inspector, sorry for having to call you back, and thank you for being prompt.’
Oh, the forensic tech was a breath of fresh air compared to the pathologist. He had manners. He used nice words like sorry and thank you.
‘What you got?’ she asked, approaching the small pop-up table that was serving as a work space. Clear storage boxes were open beneath it. She guessed they contained samples of soil and vegetation.
He reached for a clear bag from the box on the left. She recognised it as the matching trainer from the body of Tyler Short.
She took the bag and turned it. The shoe was more muddy than wet.
‘Found just along the edge there,’ he said, nodding towards the first group of techs she’d seen.
‘Dislodged during a struggle before he went into the water?’ she asked.
