Hunting a Monster: A Logan Thorne DCI Scottish Detective Thriller by Duncan Wallace

Author:Duncan Wallace [Wallace, Duncan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-21T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

The victim was still curled up on the cold, cold ground, with her arm outstretched, and her knees were tucked into her chest. She hadn’t quite suffered the beating that the first two victims had received, and I guessed that was either because she was less of a threat or had even less time to try and defend herself. But the state of her body still caused my throat to catch, and I forced myself to breathe normally as I mentally catalogued her injuries. It was immediately clear to me that we weren’t looking for two separate killers.

“It’s him,” Harding murmured.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “Who else could do that?”

I gestured to the victim’s face, neck, and top of her chest, but Harding didn’t need that pointed out to her. Once again, the throat had been caved in, and I could see why Sykes had felt so uneasy about the circumstances. I felt the same way, and judging by the look on Harding’s face, she did as well.

When a person is killed by manual asphyxiation, we’d normally see rows of deep bruising and burst blood vessels on the face from the amount of time needed to choke someone’s airways. But that wasn’t the case there, and my only immediate explanation was that it must have happened too quickly. But how could that be possible? I didn’t know a single person with that amount of required strength.

“Why is her arm out like that?” Harding asked.

“She’s pointing towards the main road,” I said. “She was reaching out for help.”

“Oh,” the Brit said quietly back.

The victim was older than Anderson and Donoghue, in her mid-thirties I guessed, and from what I could see from the uninjured parts of her face, was that it was a pleasant but unremarkable face, and she had short, dark-blonde hair which needed a trim. She had been bundled up from the cold and had a thick pair of snow boots on despite the lack of snow. In short, she was, on first glance, from a completely different world than the one Anderson and Donoghue lived in.

“Hey, Harry, have you found any ID on the body?” I asked the crime scene manager, who stood at the edge of the scene and kept a watchful, hawk eye on his workers. It was the same guy from the first crime scene, and I’d taken time to learn his name in between. SOCOs could help out your case, or they could hold it up, and I’d do just about anything to stop the latter from happening.

“Not yet,” he replied without a look at me. “There’s no hand bag, either. Or at least, not one we’ve found.”

“Mugging gone wrong again?” I murmured to Harding.

“Gone that wrong?” she shot back. “If it is, it’s massive overkill.”

Then I noticed the slight concaves on the victim’s chest, and I knelt on the ground to get a better look. I frowned. It seemed as though something very heavy had been planted on her chest. And I mean, very heavy, like the weight of three adult men.

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