Logan McRae Crime Series Books 1-3: Cold Granite, Dying Light, Broken Skin (Logan McRae)

by Stuart MacBride

  With an exasperated sigh Isobel started in on the preliminary examination. She narrated her way around the corpse, finding evidence of at least a dozen separate violent incidents. The most recent set of contusions weren’t even old enough to bruise properly. It looked as if someone had held Jamie down so someone else could punch him repeatedly in the stomach. There were even little marks around his mouth, probably caused by a hand being clamped over it to stop him from screaming. No wonder the poor sod had killed himself.

  And then it was time to open him up, but for once Logan got the feeling Isobel was just going through the motions. She sliced through flesh and tissue in a half-hearted, distracted way, as if there was something else on her mind. Probably what she was going to do to Colin Miller when she got her hands on him. The morgue phone rang while Isobel was lifting out the contents of Jamie’s lower abdomen. Brian scampered off and answered it, speaking in hushed tones, telling whoever it was on the other end that the pathologist was in the middle of someone right now, but if they wanted to call back, she’d be done in about an hour. Pause. Then a hand over the mouthpiece as he simpered at Isobel, ‘I’m sorry, Dr MacAlister, but there’s a phone call for you.’

  She stopped, Jamie’s liver in her hands, speaking slowly and carefully through gritted teeth. ‘I’m busy: take a message!’

  Brian’s face contorted itself into an ingratiating smile. ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, but they say it’s urgent.’

  Isobel swore under her breath. ‘What is it?’ Brian hurried over to the cutting table, taking the phone with him, holding it to her ear as she severed the last strip of connective tissue and lifted the liver free. ‘Yes, this is Dr MacAlister. . . What?. . . No, you’ll have to speak up.’ Jamie’s liver was dark, dark purple, hanging like a vast slug between her gloved fingers. ‘He’s what?’ Her eyes went wide above her mask. ‘Oh my God!’ The liver slapped against the tabletop then slithered to the tiled floor at her feet.

  Isobel turned and ran out of the sterile area, past the fridges, discarding blood-soiled latex gloves, mask and apron on the way. Logan ran after her, catching up as she charged up the stairs to the rear podium. ‘Isobel? Isobel!’ She pointed a key fob at her large Mercedes and jumped in behind the wheel, still wearing her blood-smeared green scrubs. Logan grabbed the door handle before she could slam it shut. ‘Isobel, wait! What is it?’

  ‘I HAVE TO GO!’ She grabbed the door and slammed it shut, flooring the accelerator, leaving twin trails of black rubber on the tarmac.

  ‘Fine,’ he muttered to himself as her car raced down the ramp, round the corner and out of sight. ‘Be like that then.’

  33

  Back in the morgue, Doc Fraser was slowly lumbering his way into a set of surgical greens while Brian washed the little bits of grit and fluff off Jamie McKinnon’s liver. ‘Any idea what that was about?’ asked Logan as Brian patted the slab of purple offal dry with green paper towels.

  ‘No idea,’ he said, laying the thing in a kidney dish. ‘It was the hospital and they said it was urgent, but other than that, nothing.’

  ‘OK, ladies,’ said Doc Fraser, snapping on his latex gloves. ‘If you don’t mind we’ll get through this one sharpish. I’ve still got all those bloody expense forms to fill in.’

  The rest of the post mortem went by in a haze, Doc Fraser cutting, hefting, weighing and examining Jamie’s innards, taking tissue samples for Brian to preserve in tiny plastic tubes full of formalin. It wasn’t long before Brian was stuffing Jamie’s organs back where they’d come from, using a well-practised blanket stitch to sew the body back up again.

  ‘Well,’ said Doc Fraser, pinging his gloves into a pedal bin like elastic bands. ‘I’ll have to go through the Ice Maiden’s tape before I can give you the full monty, but it looks like your boy here didn’t actually die of an overdose. OK, the silly wee bastard shot himself so full of shite there was no way he was going to survive, but it was the diced carrots that killed him.’ Logan looked puzzled. ‘I’d guess,’ said Fraser as Jamie was wheeled past on a gurney, heading for cold storage, ‘that he’d been on the wagon for a bit, so the effects of the dose were magnified. Heroin, and lots of it. There’s a whole heap of diamorphine still in his bloodstream; your lad snuffed it before his system could absorb it all. Fell unconscious and choked on his own vomit. Classic rock star death.’

  Logan nodded sadly. That explained why they’d found the body with the syringe still sticking out of it. Normally a heroin overdose would only kick in a couple of hours after the injection. Then Logan remembered the fresh bruises: the hand clamped over Jamie’s mouth, the marks around the wrists where he’d been held down and punched. . . Or maybe just held down, the hand preventing him from screaming for help while someone forced a syringe into his arm, saying, ‘No one rats on Malk the Knife!’ He shuddered. That kind of thing would be right up Chib Sutherland’s alley. ‘Any chance he didn’t do it to himself?’

  The pathologist paused, halfway out of his scrubs. ‘Don’t remember Isobel saying anything about it. . .’ He looked thoughtful for a moment before telling Brian to get Jamie back out of the fridges: they had some more slicing and dicing to do.

  It took Doc Fraser twelve and a half minutes to determine whether or not the overdose was self-inflicted. There was a cluster of old injection points in the crook of Jamie’s arm, the skin rough and pockmarked, and in the middle of them a little black dot ringed with a faint purple halo. Jamie had only been an occasional user, but he would have known better than to ram the needle right through the vein and muscle and into the bone. Doc Fraser dug around with a pair of tweezers, coming out with a sliver of metal that matched the tip of the syringe found with the body. There was only one needle mark, he explained, because the broken needle was only partially withdrawn from the hole, before being pushed into the vein properly. Doc Fraser was embarrassed at having missed it the first time round; he’d thought Isobel had already looked at the injection site, when she’d obviously been saving it for last.

  Logan told him not to worry about it and spent the next hour and a half filling in the usual pile of paperwork and online forms that followed a suspicious death, before printing the whole lot out. He was going to sneak up to DI Steel’s office and dump it in her in-tray while no one was about. Avoid the inevitable confrontation. His conscience got the better of him by the time he’d climbed the stairs: Jamie McKinnon had been murdered and, like it or not, Logan owed it to him to set the wheels in motion properly. With a sigh, he stomped his way up to the inspector’s incident room. It was bedlam: piles of reports; a queue of uniformed officers waiting to present them; mobile whiteboards with maps of various forests stuck to them, clarted in red and blue pen; phones going; people all talking at once. And sitting at the centre of the tornado was DI Steel. Logan took a deep breath and marched up to the front of the queue, sticking his paperwork under the inspector’s nose. She snatched it and skimmed through the first couple of pages, swearing as she read. ‘What the hell do you mean suspected murder? I thought the wee shite was supposed to have killed himself.’

  ‘Looks like he might have had a little help.’

  ‘Fuck, that’s all I bloody need, another sodding murder enquiry.’ She screwed up her face, the wrinkles all aligning into a starburst centred on her nose. ‘And it’s Craiginches! Who the hell’s going to talk to us? Might as well interview the bloody pavement! Waste of bloody time. . .’ Steel chewed thoughtfully on the inside of her cheek for a bit, then shouted across the room. ‘Rennie! Get your arse over here.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am?’

  ‘I have decided to give you a chance to fuck something up all on your ownsome.’ She thrust Logan’s report into the constable’s hands. ‘Read that, then get up to Craiginches and find me whoever killed Jamie McKinnon. I want a written confession and a packet of Embassy Regals on my desk by this time tomorrow.’

  A look of fear crawled over DC Rennie’s face. ‘Ma’am?’

  Steel punched him on the shoulder, h
ard enough to make him wince. ‘I have every faith in you. Now bugger off – I’ve got work to do.’ Rennie did what he was told, shaking his head in bewilderment.

  ‘Er. . .’ said Logan, knowing this was probably going to get him even further into the inspector’s bad books. ‘Are you sure that’s wise? I mean, he’s only a constable and—’

  ‘And you are only a backstabbing arsehole, but I still let you play cops and robbers, don’t I?’ Logan shut his mouth. Steel hopped off the desk and dug her hands into her pockets, rummaging around until she found a wrinkled packet of fags. ‘What’s the worst he can do? No one’s going to come forward and admit to seeing anything; sure as hell no one’s going to confess. So Rennie gets a bit of experience under his belt. He can’t screw it up any more than it already is. And let’s face it: no one’s going to miss a little bastard like Jamie McKinnon anyway.’ She saw the disgusted expression on Logan’s face and snorted. ‘Oh, don’t look at me like that – he was a shitebag. Remember Rosie Williams? Maybe McKinnon didn’t kill her, but he still beat her up badly enough to make her throw his arse out. And do you really think that was the first time he’d had a few pints and laid into her? Check his record: McKinnon liked to get drunk and beat up women. Bastards like that deserve all they get.’ Her voice was flat and bitter. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, Sergeant, some of us have real police work to do.’

  ‘Backstabbing arsehole. . .’ Logan stomped back down the stairs, muttering all the way. DI Steel seemed to have conveniently forgotten that he was the one who’d spotted the car with the missing prostitute in it. That if it wasn’t for him, DI Steel wouldn’t even have a suspect in custody. . . Wasn’t his fault Insch was on the warpath; if Steel had got her finger out and acted like a proper bloody detective inspector in the first place and actually told Insch they had Chib and his mate in custody, this would never have happened. Bloody DI Steel and her personal crusade to grab any glory going.

  He stared out of the back door, watching the clouds whip across the pale grey sky. Jackie wouldn’t be home until after midnight, so all he had to look forward to tonight was an empty flat, a carry-out and a bottle of wine. Maybe two bottles. It wasn’t as if he’d been sticking to the diet anyway. Could always start again next Monday, when things got a little better. But he’d been saying that for the last three months, and they never did. . . It was time to go home.

  He got as far as the off-licence before his mobile phone started ringing. Oh Christ, now what?

  A depressingly familiar gravelly voice on the other end: ‘Where the hell did you disappear off to?’

  Logan groaned. Bloody DI Bloody Steel. ‘Shift’s over, I’m going home.’

  ‘Don’t be daft: more important things in life than beer and nipples. Search team three’s just called in, they’ve found something.’

  ‘Holly McEwan?’ They’d found the fourth victim’s body.

  ‘No. Suitcase: red, smells like a dead dog in a sauna.’ A pause then some muffled conversation. ‘Get your arse back to the station – we’ve got a dismembered corpse to go play with.’

  34

  Garlogie Woods again. Logan pulled the filthy CID car up onto the grass verge about a hundred yards down from the packed lay-by. Steel had spent the trip out brooding and smoking while Logan drove. DC Rennie, however, had cleared himself a little nest in the piles of chip papers and pizza boxes that cluttered the back of the car – the damn thing was still filthy from Operation Cinderella – and discovered the foot well to be full of painful, eye-watering pornography. Showing remarkable strength of character, Rennie ignored it, sticking to Logan’s report on Jamie McKinnon’s murder instead, desperate to get it finished so he could go and start interviewing up at the prison when they were finished here.

  The inspector clambered out of the car without a word and squelched her way through the rain-soaked undergrowth back to the lay-by, squeezing past the line of cars and vans parked up on the verge. Everyone and their dog were here: a canine unit sitting in the middle of the churned-up mud, flanked by one of the search team minibuses and what looked like Doc Wilson’s car. For once Logan was glad he was working with Steel rather than Insch. Given the inspector’s last encounter with the duty doctor, Logan didn’t want to be around when those two ran into each other again.

  He waited on the grass verge while Rennie rummaged about in the boot, coming out with handfuls of latex gloves and evidence bags which he secreted about his person, making the pockets of his suit bulge. Logan locked the car, before asking Rennie what he was doing out here. ‘Thought Steel wanted you to look into Jamie McKinnon’s death.’

  DC Rennie gave the same nervous smile he’d been wearing back at FHQ. ‘The inspector says I have to learn to multi-task. Says she doesn’t trust many people to do this one, just you and me, sir.’ Logan gave a humourless laugh. ‘Trusting’ wasn’t exactly the word he’d use to describe his relationship with DI Steel right now.

  The gate to the dirt track leading into the forest had been jemmied open, a pair of fresh tyre tracks gouged into the dirt leading off up the hill. A uniformed constable examined their warrant cards and waved them through. The track was pitted and slithery with mud; heather bushes grew on either side, their little purple and white spears waving in the breeze as Logan and Rennie picked their way along the verge. Broom grew in dark green profusion to their right, the brown, brittle seed casings rattling in the breeze like a nest of venomous snakes. And on the other side, tall pine trees, the forest floor beneath them carpeted with fallen needles, soaked almost black with the rain, studded with red mushrooms and luminous green ferns. ‘You going to this thing tomorrow then?’ asked Rennie, as they waded through the wet grass.

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  ‘The funeral? You know, Trevor Maitland?’

  Oh shit. Logan winced; he’d forgotten all about it. How the hell was he supposed to stand there and look Maitland’s widow in the eye? What was he supposed to say – I’m sorry I screwed up and got your husband killed? Great bloody comfort that would be. ‘What happened with that search on the Pirie woman?’ he asked, changing the subject.

  ‘Eh? Oh, right. . .’ Rennie shook his head. ‘Jesus, what a munt she was! The Cruickshanks have filed about twenty complaints against her since Christmas: drunken, abusive behaviour mostly. Even tried for an antisocial behaviour order, but no luck so far. Banned for drink driving about three months ago – Mr Cruickshank tipped the local station off – done for assault last year, two counts of possession, but she got off with a warning. Rumours she was involved in some sort of kiddie porn ring, all anonymous complaints, but the Westhill station recognized the voice—’

  ‘Gavin Cruickshank again?’

  ‘Bingo.’ They reached the top of the hill and started down the other side, still following the rutted tracks in the mud. ‘There’s piles more, but basically she’s a dirty scumbag and Mr Cruickshank’s had it in for her ever since she moved in. Last complaint was made on the Tuesday night when she thumped him one.’

  Logan grunted. No wonder Ailsa thought the woman had something to do with her disappearing husband. She certainly would’ve had a motive. That’s if Gavin wasn’t screwing a pole-dancer on a foreign beach somewhere, while his poor wife fretted and worried.

  ‘What about Ritchie, the Shore Lane Stalker?’

  Rennie shrugged. ‘Have to ask the inspector about that. Playing it close to her chest.’

  That figured. She wouldn’t want to share even the slightest hint of glory. . .

  The forest suddenly opened up into a large, waterlogged dip. This was as far as the Identification Bureau van had got. It was abandoned halfway down the track, its rear wheels partially submerged in watery brown slime, the sides covered with fresh sprays of mud. There was a line of blue and white POLICE tape leading off into the trees just up ahead, and Logan and Rennie followed it. Two hundred yards in and they came across the cordon marking the outermost edge of the crime scene. A bored-looking WPC with a clipboard made them cha
nge into SOC boiler suits and overshoes before signing them in. The IB had put up a makeshift canopy of blue plastic, stringing it up between the trees on the periphery of the clearing. Smack bang in the middle of this impromptu marquee was a red fabric suitcase, identical to the last one, wedged under the bole of a fallen tree, partially covered by a layer of pine needles and soil, with fern fronds piled on top as camouflage. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Logan, watching as one of the IB team squatted down in front of the case and started delicately clearing off the greenery, needles and dirt into a large evidence pouch. ‘Why buy a bright-red suitcase if you’re going to hide the damn thing in a forest? I mean, it’s always going to stick out like a sore thumb, isn’t it? Why not buy a green one, or black? Why red?’

  Rennie shrugged. ‘Wanted it to be found?’

  ‘Then why take it out into the middle of the bloody woods and hide it under a fallen tree? Why bury it under leaves and stuff?’

  A thoughtful pause and then: ‘Maybe to make it easy to find, but look like it’s hard to find, so you’d find it but think it wasn’t meant to be found, even though you only really found it because someone wanted it to be found?’

  Logan looked at him. ‘Did that make sense when it was inside your head? ’Cos it lost something in translation.’

  Doc Fraser was already there, his medical bag sitting next to him on a roll of plastic sheeting while he leant against a tree and read the paper, waiting for the IB to finish taking samples, photographs, video, dusting for prints. . . He looked up from the P&J’s farming section and smiled. ‘What-ho, chaps,’ he said in a mock English accent, ‘smashing evening for a spot of the old dismembered-corpse routine, don’t ya think?’