Cut Short: Some Victims Will Show You Their Killers by BD Spargo

Author:BD Spargo [Spargo, BD]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Howfen Press
Published: 2024-05-08T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

The acrid smell in the garage was strong enough to penetrate the paper mask that Doyle wore, alongside the disposable onesie complete with hood, overshoes and gloves. The scene bore no resemblance to the photo of the home gym that adorned the estate agent’s brochure. There were still the metal carcasses of workout benches and some blackened weights, but every bit of fabric had been burned beyond recognition. Doyle wondered if the pile of discoloured sand in one corner had been inside the punchbag in the photo. It wasn’t in the centre of the room, where the hook it had hung on lay on the sodden floor. The timber beam it had been fixed to now presumably formed part of the ashes that had been spread around the room by the fire brigade’s hoses. He made his way to the middle of the room, to the hook.

‘See those cut-outs in the brickwork?’ Knight pointed to each side of the room. ‘They’re what the ceiling beams would have run between. The hook would have been attached to one of them, at that height.’

Doyle noticed that some of the roof beams above had survived. ‘According to the initial forensic report, the fire started here, on the floor. How tall are you?’ he asked Knight.

‘Five foot six.’

‘And Chloe was five foot five. Do me a favour – hold your arms above your head like this.’ Doyle held his own arms above his head, crossed at the wrists, and Knight copied without question. He looked between the brickwork where the beam would have sat and her raised arms. ‘Taking into account that you’re an inch taller and your feet are flat on the floor, it looks to me like this could be where Chloe was strung up, sexually assaulted and killed.’ A shiver ran up Doyle’s spine as the words left his mouth.

‘I think you could be right,’ Knight said.

‘What did they get from the scene?’ Doyle asked. ‘Anything useful?’

‘Not that I could see, from a brief scan of the report before we came up here. But they weren’t looking for anything to link this place to a possible murder scene. The team here were looking at how and where the fire started. Once they established that it was probably arson, they looked for anything that might give them a clue to who did it.’

‘We’re going to need to go over it again, see if we uncover anything else.’

‘We’re pretty stretched at the moment, but I’ll see if we can get more people in. I’ll go through the forensic report again, and the exhibits list, and see if there’s anything there that could be useful.’

Doyle stopped to think. The house was double-fronted, with the garage adjoining the left-hand side. The part of the house next to the garage was pretty badly damaged by the fire, but other than smoke damage, the other side was largely untouched. ‘When the SOCOs were here the other day, would they have fingerprinted the whole house, or just

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