Nine Lives by Anita Waller (best english books to read .txt) 📗

hasn’t been around for five years.’ Beth glanced at her watch. ‘Half eight. I’ll ring a locksmith while we’re waiting for breakfast, then that’s ticked off my to-do list.’

It was quiet in the office. Most of the team were at the river, and Erica and Beth had opted for computer work.

Erica angled her screen carefully to cut out the winter sun that was directly on it, and pulled up the file from twenty-fourteen. There had been no physical contact between the girls who had lost their lives to the L-killer, but the link between them, their names, had been obvious. ‘What if that wasn’t the link,’ she mumbled, but with nobody else near her she received no answer except one inside her own head. What if?

Had they, he or she, been influenced by the press jumping on the bandwagon with their L-killer headlines? Could it have been something else? Erica pulled up a second file headed Leanne Fraser.

Leanne had been the first to be discovered, at the end of April in twenty-fourteen. A seven-year-old boy, Finn Draper, had run into the woods on his way to school, and found the posed, naked body. He had been interviewed, swore he hadn’t touched anything because he watched CSI on television. His mother had cried through most of the interview. She had been distraught that her only child had seen such an awful sight, and she had been unable to prevent it. Finn had been quite blasé about the whole situation. However, they had been unable to help with anything other than finding her.

Nobody else had seen anything, the significance of the slash on her right palm wasn’t obvious at that stage, and even though the Propofol was found in her system, they could find nothing to point them to the killer.

Erica read through Leanne’s employment history, her family life, and nothing helped. It was very much a live investigation by the time it reached mid-May, and on the eighteenth a second posed and naked body was found in woods near to where the Pennine Trail passed through Woodhouse, on the outskirts of Sheffield.

Once more the body was placed so that it would be easily found, and still nobody suggested an idea that the two slashes on Lucy Owen’s palm meant anything other than he’d slipped with whatever he had used to cut off the tip of her little finger.

It was obvious it was the same killer, and the newspapers made noises about serial killers. This was squashed by the police. Yes it was two bodies, but two bodies do not a serial killer make, was their take on the matter.

The third body had. Serial killer strikes again was the gist of the headlines and this time nobody denied it. Laurel Price died in July, on the ninth, but wasn’t found until the afternoon of the tenth. Two boys riding bikes through Rolleston Woods found her and freaked. They had heard of the other two murders, and knew they needed help. One boy stayed nearby, too scared to be too close, and the other went to the edge of the woods to meet the police, after calling them on his mobile phone. They too watched CSI and knew they hadn’t to touch anything at the scene.

Erica read through them carefully. She digested every word until these old cases became as clear in her head as the new ones did. Laurel was the oldest of the four victims at twenty-three, was about to marry, and this fact gave her prominence in the newspapers. Her fiancé was distraught, as were her parents, and although the fiancé hadn’t had an alibi, he had for the first two murders.

She made a note of his name, Nicholas Payne, and decided to check if he had alibis for Susie and Clare’s murders. Rule him out once and for all.

Lilith’s murder had been the final one, and the one that had confirmed what the palm marks meant. She was number four, with an inherent promise of there being more. Except no more appeared, not then. Lilith had been found in Ecclesall Woods, in the south of the city, and gave no more clues than any of the others. She had been found on the twenty-seventh of July, a beautiful sunny day; she never saw the sunrise.

Other than the letter L, they had found no link between the girls, but Erica knew there had to be one, she felt it. Somehow the killer had known the girls, had chosen his victims because of their names, but initially he or she had known them. They had to find that connection with the help of the knowledge they were picking up from the new murders. He or she had known them.

Erica’s page was filled with notes, yet nothing of outstanding interest had occurred to her other than Nicholas Payne’s name, and that was a kind of straw-clutching exercise really, and she knew it.

Four girls with families that still hadn’t had full closure, a killer who was seemingly proud of their work, and who was forensically well informed, leaving nothing at the scene to give them any information.

‘I’ll find you this time, though, you bastard,’ Erica whispered, closed down the file and walked across the office to Beth’s desk.

Beth looked up. ‘Okay?’

‘Kind of. I’m heading out to the river, see what’s happening if anything, then I’m going home. If you need me, ring. One thing I have learned is that the kids of twenty-fourteen all seemed to watch CSI, thank God. Maybe we should have that as part of the qualifications you need to have to get into the police.’

11

Beth went home at three and met with the locksmith, who secured everything for her. Although unafraid of Evan, she felt much happier that he could no longer invade her home. After saying goodbye to the elderly man who had given her peace of mind, she spent some time moving furniture around.

No longer would everything be focused on the television, and she cleared a