The Dead Sea Deception

by Adam Blake

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9780748123773

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 Adam Blake

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  To Chris, my father

  And Chris, my brother

  And Chris, my soul-brother

  And Sandra, my sister – but maybe we

  should call her Chris to avoid any ambiguity

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART ONE: ROTGUT

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART TWO: DOVECOTE

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  PART THREE: 124

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  PART FOUR: GINAT’DANIA

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Prologue

  When despatch called to tell Sheriff Webster Gayle about the plane crash, he was at the bowling alley, just about to sink a spoon into an enormous bowl of ice cream. One of the thoughts that went through his mind as he listened, along with the first gripes of pity for the dead and bereaved, and dismay at the shit-storm this would bring him, was that this seven-dollar sundae was now surely going to waste.

  ‘Emergency landing?’ he asked, making sure he understood. He cupped his hand around the phone to shut out the reverberating sounds of pins falling and being reset in the adjacent lane.

  ‘Nope.’ Connie was definitive. ‘No kind of landing at all. That bird just fell out of the sky, hit the ground and blew the hell up. Don’t know how big it was or where it was coming from. I’ve put calls out to ATC at Phoenix and Los Angeles. I’ll let you know when they get back to me.’

  ‘And it’s definitely inside the county limits?’ Gayle asked, clutching at a feeble straw. ‘I thought the flight path was more to the west, out by Arcona.’

  ‘It came down right by the highway, Web. Honest to God, I can see the smoke right out the window here. It’s not just in the limits, it’s so close you could walk to it from the Gateway mall. I already passed the word along to Doc Beattie. Anything else you want me to do?’

  Gayle considered. ‘Yeah,’ he said after a moment. ‘Tell Anstruther to get up there and rope it off, a good ways out. Far enough so we don’t get anyone stopping by to rubberneck or take pictures.’

  ‘What about Moggs?’ Meaning Eileen Moggs, who comprised the entirety of the full-time staff on the Peason Chronicler. Moggs was a journalist of the old school, in that she drove around and talked to people before she filed copy, and even took her own photos with an over-sized digital SLR that made Gayle think of a strap-on dildo he’d seen once in a sex toys catalogue and then tried to forget.

  ‘Moggs can go through,’ Gayle said. ‘I owe her a favour.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’ Connie queried, just blandly enough that Gayle couldn’t be sure there was any innuendo there. He shoved the bowl of ice cream away from him, disconsolate. It was one of those fancy flavours with a long name and an even longer list of ingredients, leaning heavily on chocolate, marshmallow and caramel in various combinations. Gayle was an addict, but had made peace with his weakness a long time ago. It beat booze, by a long way. Probably beat heroin and crack cocaine, too, although he’d never tried either.

  ‘I’m on my way over,’ he said. ‘Tell Anstruther a good quarter of a mile.’

  ‘A good quarter of a mile what, chief?’

  He waved to the waitress to bring him the check. ‘The incident line, Connie. I want it to be at least five minutes’ walk from the wreck. There’ll be people coming in from all over when they get a sniff of this, and the less they see, the sooner they’ll turn around and go home again.’

  ‘Okay. Five minutes’ walk.’ Gayle could hear Connie scribbling it down. She hated numbers, claimed to be blind to them in the way some people are blind to colours. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘That’s it for now. Try the airports again. I’ll give you a call when I get out there.’

  Gayle took his hat from the empty seat beside him and put it on. The waitress, an attractive dark-featured woman whose name tag said MADHUKSARA, brought him the cheque for the ice cream and for a hot dog and fries he’d had earlier. She affected to be scandalised at the fact that he hadn’t touched his dessert. ‘Well, I’d welcome a doggy bag if it was a practical proposition,’ he said, making the best of it. She got the joke, laughed louder and longer than it deserved. He creaked a little as he stood. Getting old, and getting rheumatic, even in this climate. ‘Ma’am.’ He touched the brim of his hat to her and headed out.

  Gayle’s thoughts were on idle as he crossed the baking backlot towards his battered blue Chevrolet Biscayne. He was entitled to a new car on the police budget whenever he wanted one, but the Biscayne was a local landmark. Wherever he parked it, it was like a sign saying, THE DOCTOR IS IN.

  How was Madhuksara pronounced? Where did she come from, and what had brought her to live in Peason, Arizona? This was Gayle’s town, and he was attached to it by strong, subterranean bonds, but he couldn’t imagine anyone coming from a great distance to be here. What would be the draw? The mall? The three-screen movie theatre? The desert?

  Of course, he reminded himself, this was the twenty-first century. Madhuksara didn’t have to be an immigrant at all. She could have been born and raised right here in the south-western corner of the US of A. She certainly hadn’t had any trace of a foreign accent. On the other hand, he hadn’t ever seen her around town before. Gayle wasn’t a racist, which at some points in his career as a policeman had given h
im a certain novelty value. He liked variety, in humankind as much as in ice cream. But his instincts were a cop’s instincts and he tended to file new faces of any colour in a mental pending tray, on the grounds that unknown quantities could always turn out to be trouble.

  Highway 68 was clear all the way to the interstate, but long before he got to the crossroads he could see the coal-black column stretching up into the sky. A pillar of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night, Gayle thought irrelevantly. His mother had belonged to a Baptist church and quoted scripture the way some people talk about the weather. Gayle himself hadn’t opened a bible in thirty years, but some of that stuff had stuck with him.

  He turned off on to the single-file blacktop that bordered Bassett’s Farm and came up through the fields on a nameless dirt track where once, a great many years before, he’d had his first kiss that hadn’t come from an elderly female relative.

  He was surprised and pleased to find the road roped off with an emphatic strip of black-and-yellow incident tape, a hundred yards or so before he was close enough to see the sprawl of twisted metal from which the smoke was rising. The tape had been stretched between two pine fence posts, and Spence, one of his most taciturn and unexcitable deputies, was standing right there to see that drivers didn’t just bypass the roadblock by taking a short detour into the cornfield.

  As Spence untied the tape to let him pass, Gayle wound his window down.

  ‘Where’s Anstruther?’ he asked.

  Spence pointed with a sideways nod. ‘Up there.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Lewscynski. Scuff. And Mizz Moggs.’

  Gayle nodded and drove on.

  Like heroin and cocaine, a major airplane crash was something outside Gayle’s experience. In his imagination, the plane had come down like an arrow and embedded itself in the soil, tail up. The reality was not so neat. He saw a broad ridge of gouged earth about two hundred yards long, maybe five or six feet high at its outer edge. The plane had broken up as it dug that furrow, shedding great curved pieces of its fuselage like giant eggshells along the whole, tortured stretch of ground. What was left of the fuselage was burning up at the far end and – now that Gayle’s window was down, he became aware – filling the air with a terrible stench of combustion. Whether it was flesh or plastic that smelled like that as it burned he could not be sure. He was in no hurry to find out.

  He parked the Biscayne next to Anstruther’s black-and-white and got out. The wreck was a hundred yards away, but the heat from the fire laid itself across Gayle’s body like a bar across a door as he walked over to where a small group of people was standing, on top of the newly ploughed ridge. Anstruther, his senior deputy, was shielding his eyes as he looked out over the remade country. Joel Scuff, a no-account trooper who at age twenty-seven was already more of a disgrace to the force than men twice his age had managed, stood beside him, staring in the same direction. Both looked sombre and nonplussed, like people at a funeral for someone they didn’t know that well, fearful that they might be called on for small talk.

  Sitting at their feet, on the rucked-up earth, was Eileen Moggs. Her phallic camera sat impotently in her lap and her head was bowed. It was hard to be sure from this angle, but her face had the crumpled look of someone who had recently been crying.

  Gayle was about to say something to her, but at that point, as he trudged up the rising gradient of the earthworks, his head crested the ridge and he saw what they were seeing. He stopped dead, involuntarily, his brain too overloaded with that horrible image to maintain any commerce with his legs.

  Bassett’s North 40 was sown with corpses: men and women and children, all strewn across the chewed-up earth, while the clothes disgorged from their burst suitcases arced and twisted above them in the searing thermals, as though their ghosts were dancing in fancy dress to celebrate their new-found freedom.

  Gayle tried to swear, but his mouth was too dry, suddenly, for the sound to make it out. In the terrible heat, his tears evaporated right off his cheeks before anyone could see them.

  PART ONE

  ROTGUT

  1

  The photo showed a dead man sprawled at the foot of a staircase. It was perfectly framed and pin-sharp, and nobody seemed to have noticed the most interesting thing about it, but it still didn’t fill Heather Kennedy with anything that resembled enthusiasm.

  She closed the manila folder again and pushed it back across the desk. There wasn’t much else in there to look at anyway. ‘I don’t want this,’ she said.

  Facing her across the desk, DCI Summerhill shrugged: a shrug that said into each life a little rain must fall. ‘I don’t have anyone else to give it to, Heather,’ he told her, in the tone of a reasonable man doing what needed to be done. ‘Slates are full across the department. You’re the one with the most slack.’ He didn’t add, but could have done, you know why the short straw is your straw, and you know what has to happen before that stops.

  ‘All right,’ Kennedy said. ‘I’m slack. So put me on runaround for Ratner or Denning. Don’t give me a dead-ball misallocation that’s going to sit open on my docket until five miles south of judgement day.’

  Summerhill didn’t even make the effort of looking sympathetic. ‘If it’s not murder,’ he said, ‘close it. Sign off on it. I’ll back your call, so long as you can make it stick.’

  ‘How am I meant do that when the evidence is three weeks old?’ Kennedy shot back, acidly. She was going to lose this. Summerhill had already made up his mind. But she wasn’t going to make it easy for the old bastard. ‘Nobody worked the crime scene. Nobody did anything with the body in situ. All I’ve got to go on are a few photos taken by a bluebell from the local cop-shop.’

  ‘Well, that and the autopsy report,’ Summerhill said. ‘The north London lab came back with enough open questions to bring the case back to life – and possibly to give you a few starting points.’ He pushed the file firmly and irrevocably back to her.

  ‘Why was there an autopsy if nobody thought the death was suspicious?’ Kennedy asked, genuinely puzzled. How did this even get to be our problem?

  Summerhill closed his eyes, massaged them with finger and thumb. He grimaced wearily. Clearly he just wanted her to take the file and get the hell out of his morning. ‘The dead man had a sister, and the sister pushed. Now she’s got what she wanted – an open verdict, implying a world of exciting possibilities. To be blunt, we don’t really have any alternative right now. We look bad because we signed off on accidental death so quickly and we look bad because we stonewalled on the autopsy on the first request. So we’ve got to reopen the case and we’ve got to go through the motions until one of two things happens: we find an actual explanation for this guy’s death or else we hit a wall and we can reasonably say we tried.’

  ‘Which could take for ever,’ Kennedy pointed out. It was a classic black hole. A case that had had no real spadework done at the front end meant you had to run yourself ragged for everything thereafter, from forensics to witness statements.

  ‘Yes. Easily. But look on the bright side, Heather. You’ll also be breaking in a new partner, a willing young DC who’s only just joined the division and doesn’t know a thing about you. Chris Harper. Straight transfer from St John’s Wood via the academy. Treat him gently, won’t you. They’re used to more civilised ways over at Newcourt Street.’

  Kennedy opened her mouth to speak, closed it again. There was no point. In fact, on one level you had to admire the neatness and economy of the stitch-up. Someone had screwed up heroically – signed off way too fast and then got bitten on the arse by the evidence – so now the whole mess was being handed off to the most expendable detective in the division and a poor piece of cannon fodder drafted in for the occasion from one of the boroughs. No harm, no foul. Or if it turned out there was, nobody who mattered was going to be booked for it.

  With a muttered oath, she headed for the door. Leaning back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, Summerhill stared at her retreating back.
‘Bring them back alive, Heather,’ he exhorted her, languidly.

  When she got back to her desk, Kennedy found the latest gift from the get-her-out-by-Friday brigade. It was a dead rat in a stainless steel break-back trap, lying across the papers on her desk. Seven or eight detectives were in the bear pit, sitting around in elaborately casual groupings, and they were all watching her covertly, eager to see how she’d react. There might even be money riding on the outcome, judging from the mood of suppressed excitement in the room.

  Kennedy had been putting up quietly with lesser provocations, but as she stared down at the limp little corpse, a ruff of blood crusted at its throat where it had fallen on the trap’s baited spike, she acknowledged instantly what she ninety-per-cent already knew – that she wasn’t going to make this stop by uncomplainingly carrying her own cross.

  So what were the options? She ran through a few until she found one that at least had the advantage of being immediate. She picked the trap up and pulled it open, with some difficulty because the spring was stiff. The rat fell on to her desk with an audible thud. Then she tossed the trap aside, hearing it clatter behind her, and picked up the body, not gingerly by the tail but firmly in her fist. It was cold: a lot colder than ambient. Someone had been keeping it in his fridge, looking forward to this moment. Kennedy glanced around the room.

  Josh Combes. It wasn’t that he was the ringleader – the campaign wasn’t as consciously orchestrated as that. But among the officers who felt a need to make Kennedy’s life uncomfortable, Combes had the loudest mouth and was senior in terms of years served. So Combes would do as well as anyone, and better than most. Kennedy crossed to his desk and threw the dead rat into his crotch. Combes started violently, making his chair roll back on its castors. The rat fell to the floor.

  ‘Jesus!’ he bellowed.

  ‘You know,’ Kennedy said, into the mildly scandalised silence, ‘big boys don’t ask their mummies to do this stuff for them, Josh. You should have stayed in uniform until your cods dropped. Harper, you’re with me.’