Cold Blood: A gripping serial killer thriller that will take your breath away (Detective Erika Foster Book 5)

by Robert Bryndza

  The Range Rover stopped a few feet behind her, its engine idling. Then the headlights went out, plunging her into darkness.

  ‘Shit, shit,’ she whispered, trying to move quickly, gritting her teeth against the pain. The loading bay was surrounded by warehouses, blocking out much of the surrounding artificial light. She felt in the passenger footwell and her hand closed around the radio, but when she tried to call in for backup, there was no signal. ‘What?’ she said, pressing frantically at the buttons. She tried again, switching between signals but there was nothing but dead air. She turned her head and winced. The Range Rover’s headlights were off and she couldn’t see any movement inside. She pulled at the door handle, but the front wing had been pushed back over the driver’s door, preventing her from getting out. Erika tried the radio again, and felt around for the leather belt with the taser and baton.

  ‘Control, are you reading me?’ she hissed. She saw the button just under the steering wheel and pressed it, activating the blue lights and high-pitched sirens of her unmarked police car. The Range Rover was still and dark. Erika clambered over to the passenger side, her long legs and long dark coat becoming briefly entangled with the gearstick, and she tried the passenger door, but this too was jammed. She shouldered the door, feeling pain shoot through her body, but it still wouldn’t budge. She was about to squeeze through to the back seats, but remembered the doors and windows were disabled for carrying suspects. She reached through, wincing at the pain and tried both doors, but she was right.

  Erika was now panicking, and sweating under her thick coat. She leaned forward and tried to open the electric windows in the front, but they weren’t working; the door frames were bent inwards. She looked to the back window and it was now steaming up. Her mind was working fast. Did they know she was due to drop the evidence bag? The lab’s location wasn’t known to the public. Why else would someone force her off the road?

  Through the steamed-up back window, Erika saw the doors on the Range Rover open; two tall figures in black slowly got out. They approached the car carrying crowbars, and both wore full-face balaclavas. Erika looked around and saw the buckle of the leather belt containing the taser and the long baton poking out from under the passenger seat. The car rocked as one of the black-clad figures tried to lever the boot open with the crowbar. Erika reached under the passenger seat as the driver’s window burst inwards with a shower of glass. The cold air and the sound of the blaring siren rushed in. She turned to the figure at the window. His eyes glowed beadily through the holes of the balaclava.

  ‘Show me your hands,’ he said, pointing a gun at her.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  October 2016

  The events on the holiday in Dartmoor changed Nina. Max had helped her back to the hotel that night, confiscated her phone, and given her tablets which made her sleep. When she woke late the next day, she still wanted to go to the police.

  ‘I was defending you,’ said Max incredulously. ‘Nina, he could have killed you. And in return you’d have me put away?’

  ‘They wouldn’t put you away if we told the truth!’ she’d argued.

  ‘And what is the truth, Nina? It’s something that we know, me and you, but what about the police who’ll look at my record? The DNA evidence left on him. The fact I dumped his body, and we walked away. Would a judge and jury believe the truth, or would they look at me and just see a murderer?’

  ‘But… That’s how things work…’ she replied weakly. ‘You tell the truth, and it will all be okay. My mum always says that if you speak the truth then things will all work out.’

  Max shook his head and took her in his arms.

  ‘You need to open your eyes to how the world works, Nina. It’s not just my DNA is on him, yours is too. Do you think the police will believe you, any more than they believe me?’

  ‘He tried to rape me.’

  ‘You had sex with me as he watched. And you were draping yourself all over him the night before in the pub. They’ll hear you were acting like a slut. And a judge and jury would think the same…’ She buried her head in his chest and began to sob. ‘Do you know what prison is like for young pretty girls like you?’ he said, rocking her like a baby. ‘He’s lying at the bottom of a deep, deep well. They’ll never find him. He was a loner, a drug dealer, and a rapist. You remember his hands around your neck, don’t you, Nina?’ She’d pulled back and looked up at him and nodded, her face red with tears. ‘He could have killed you.’

  ‘If he had killed me, would you have gone to the police?’

  ‘’Course I’d have fucking gone to the police,’ he snapped, pushing her away. ‘I did this for you,’ he leaned in, whispering. ‘I killed a man with my bare hands for you, and you want to turn me in to the police, and then you ask if I would chuck your body down that well?’

  ‘No, Max I didn’t say tha—’

  ‘You’re so fucking stupid. Here I am, standing before you, a man who loves you. Who would die for you. Who has killed for you…’

  ‘Max, I’m sorry,’ she sobbed, now hysterical, going to him and grabbing at his clothes.

  ‘It’s obvious that’s not enough for you, so then fine, go to the police. Walk away. Good luck out there in the real world. All they’ll see is a slutty little bitch.’

  ‘I won’t go! I promise, please, I can’t cope. I need you; I love you. Let’s just deal with it. I’ll deal with it…’ Nina gave a lurching sob and had to run to the sink in the bathroom so she could be sick. Max followed and held her hair back.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said, soothingly. ‘You just bring it all up. We’ll move on. Stuff like this happens in life and you have to move on. Move forward. We have each other, don’t we?’

  She’d wiped her mouth and looked up at him through bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘It’s just you and me, Nina; you and me against the world. Say it.’

  She nodded. ‘It’s you and me against the world.’

  When Nina arrived home, she just wanted to curl up in her bedroom and shut out the world. However, her mother informed her Paul had moved his stuff in, and he would now be living with them. The house immediately took on a different feel. It had been Nina and her mother for as long as she could remember, but she found Paul creepy, and the way her mother desperately fawned over him was embarrassing. The house felt alien with his belongings everywhere, hearing the low murmur of his voice when she was upstairs in bed, and the smell of his cheap aftershave aggressively filling the house.

  On the first morning, Nina had emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a small towel, almost bumping into Paul who was waiting to go in. He wore just boxer shorts and an old white T-shirt.

  ‘Morning, Neen.’ He smiled, his eyes lingering over her body.

  ‘Morning,’ she’d replied and went to move past him, but he’d blocked her way.

  ‘You don’t mind if I call you Neen, do you?’ he said, his eyes moving down to the curve of her body under the towel.

  ‘I suppose not…’ she’d said, avoiding his gaze and clinging on to the towel, wishing it was longer.

  ‘I won’t ask you to call me daddy,’ he’d laughed.

  Mandy had appeared at the top of the stairs with a stack of fresh towels, and Paul had immediately dropped the sleaziness, stepping back. But Mandy had seen the tableaux, and decided it was Nina who was overstepping the mark.

  ‘Go to your room and put something on!’ she’d snapped. Nina had hurried off, her blushing cheeks not helping her cause.

  That day she’d visited Max’s bedsit for the first time. It was at the top of an old terraced house near King’s Cross, looking out over the train tracks. It was tiny but clean with a kitchenette in one corner and a tiny bathroom in another. His collection of books took up one wall, a mixture of titles about philosophy and history. He had made them egg on toast with hot mugs of tea. They had eaten it on their laps in front of the glow of a three-bar electric fire, listening to the rain hammer down on the roof, and N
ina had felt safe next to Max. She felt as if she’d been spat out into the world. She no longer had the routine of school, she felt like the cuckoo in the nest at home, and all of her close friends had gone away to university. All she had was Max.

  Over the next few weeks, as the weather turned bad and the nights drew in, Nina spent most of her time at Max’s bedsit. Despite what had happened in Dartmoor weighing heavily on her mind, it was a blissful time, and they grew very close. Nina was shocked at his intelligence, and how articulate he could be. She realised that she might have more qualifications, but in comparison she was uneducated and ignorant of the world. Max talked about world governments, and history. He talked about conspiracy theories, and his obsession with the Illuminati.

  ‘We’re all just pawns in a huge game. No one cares about us, Nina. No one cares about you… apart from me. We’re all just maggots writhing around in the shit, and a small group of people, the corporations, the elite, they control us.’

  He went into more details about his childhood, of being abandoned by his mother when he was tiny, and the terrible time he’d had growing up in children’s homes, and how he had been sexually abused by several of the staff when he was nine years old.

  ‘You have to fight for everything in this life,’ he’d said. ‘I fought for you when Dean wanted to rape you, and take your life. So is me killing him wrong or is that right?’

  ‘I suppose, if you look at it like that, it’s right,’ Nina had replied in a small voice.

  ‘’Course it is. Think of all those politicians who start wars. What are wars?’

  ‘It’s when one country does something bad to another.’

  Max had shaken his head and stood, pacing the room, animated. ‘Nina. Wars are about money. About selling weapons and gaining power. Do you know how many politicians own companies which manufacture products for war? I can show you examples in so many books. Those same politicians declare wars for personal interests. They kill thousands if not millions of innocent people, and they are never held to account. We’re all brainwashed to think that war is noble. That soldiers who go up and fight are doing it for their country. Poor bastards. The soldiers are noble, sure, but what they are fighting for isn’t… And I defended you Nina, I took one miserable life to protect you, and I could be locked away for twenty years and left to rot in prison? How many other women might Dean have raped and killed? No, there is one rule for the elite and another for us the fucking maggots. I refuse to be one of the maggots. I refuse to writhe and be subservient!’

  At the end of October, they were fired from their jobs at Santino’s for not showing up on several occasions. Nina had been fed up of working there for some time, but she’d kept the job, partly because her mother insisted on her now paying housekeeping.

  It was another turning point for their relationship. Max invited her to move into the bedsit and they both started to claim the dole. Nina felt free and happy for the first time in months, and she believed that she and Max had a real future, that she had found the one.

  And then they went to Blackpool.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Friday, 6 October 2017

  Erika could see that the gun pointed at her was a Smith & Wesson with a home-made silencer. The sirens on her unmarked car continued to blare, and the small loading bay was lit up by the flashing blue lights.

  ‘Hands in the air!’ he shouted. His full pink lips poked obscenely through the hole in the balaclava.

  Erika raised them slowly from her crouching position in the passenger seat.

  ‘Open the boot,’ shouted the voice. It was male and well spoken. ‘Do it or I shoot you!’

  ‘The button is next to the steering column,’ said Erika, not taking her eyes off him. ‘You want the drugs?’

  ‘Yeah, now open the boot!’ he shouted, his voice shrill.

  They’ve just assumed I put them in the back, she thought. She was crouched in an awkward position on the seat, and the Tesco Bag for Life containing the narcotics was underneath her legs. There was a squeal of metal as the other man used the crowbar on the boot. Who are these two? she thought. This is amateurish stuff, all for thirty grand’s worth of gear. Even if they cut it with baking soda, they could sell it for a few grand more, but they were risking a lot. They were wearing balaclavas, and she couldn’t identify them; this meant there was a chance they would leave her alive.

  ‘Come on, quickly, open it, and shut off the sirens!’ he shouted, twitching the gun to the steering wheel.

  ‘I need to bend down to get to the button underneath the steering column,’ said Erika.

  ‘Fucking do it!’

  The scraping of the crowbar continued at the back, and in the split second that the man in the balaclava glanced back to the other man and let the gun drop a little, Erika lifted the taser she’d concealed behind her and fired it at his neck. The sirens masked the bang and the charge as the wire hooks shot out and caught in his skin. He went rigid and hit the floor. Keeping hold of the taser, Erika moved across to the driver’s seat and climbed through the window. The man lay on the floor, and she removed the magazine from his gun and pocketed it, limping around to the back of the car where the second figure was now in a panic, clawing at the boot with the crowbar.

  ‘Hands in the air!’ she shouted. He looked up, dropped the crowbar and reached for the back of his trousers.

  ‘Hands where I can see them,’ she said, pointing the taser at his chest.

  ‘You fucking bitch!’ he said through the balaclava.

  Erika angled the taser down to his crotch and fired it at his balls. He screamed and went rigid, hitting the ground.

  ‘That’ll teach you to call me a fucking bitch,’ she said, rolling him over onto his front, retrieving the Smith & Wesson handgun tucked under his belt, and pulling out the magazine. She searched his pockets and found a small black key fob. It was a close-range signal jammer used to block radio and mobile phone frequencies. She then moved to the rear passenger door and smashed the window with the butt of the gun. Reaching in, she pulled out two sets of cuffs. She went to the first man, cuffing one of his hands, and dragged him over to a long low metal railing by the loading bay where she cuffed him to the lowest bar. She pulled off his balaclava. He had sandy blond hair and a smooth round face. He stared up at her, dazed. She did the same to the second man, dragging his limp body over to the railing and cuffing him to it. She also yanked off his balaclava. She was surprised to see how young he was; he barely looked out of his teens.

  She then found her radio and called in for backup, moving to the Range Rover to check that it was empty. She pulled the keys out of the ignition. She came back and flashed her warrant card at the two men.

  ‘You are both under arrest. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

  It was only then, when the adrenalin began to leave her body, that she started to feel the extent of her injuries.

  The older man with the sandy hair attempted to spit in her face, but he didn’t have the energy. Erika had to resist the urge to beat him with the baton. She knew if she started she wouldn’t be able to stop.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  March 2017

  Nina had fallen out with her mother, and as a result of this, they no longer had a car. Max heard from a mate of his in Blackpool who had a car going cheap, so they decided to make a holiday of it.

  As Nina suspected, Blackpool in late October was very cold and very windy. The guest house they stayed in was a bit rough, and even with the windows shut the curtains in their dingy room gently billowed in the draft. But it didn’t matter. They were on the Golden Mile, and at night the illuminations shone through the net curtain, playing coloured lights over the ceiling above their bed. Nina loved to be by the sea. They woke early on Saturday and spent the day on the Mile. They played the slot machines, ate hot fish and chips out of the paper, an
d ventured down onto the beach to paddle in the freezing sea.

  They were due to pick up their new car that evening, and before they left, Max paid for them to go all the way up Blackpool Tower and see the glass walkway. It was shortly before closing, and they were the only ones to go up on the last tour. It was quiet at the top, and Max took Nina’s hand when they walked out onto the clear glass walkway. People moved on the promenade far below, and the sea stretched out to the horizon, with the pier reaching out from the prom.

  ‘It’s like we’re floating above it all,’ said Nina, gripping the railing and crouching down to her knees. She lay face down. She could feel the wind buffeting the tower, and far below, the dragging sound as the breaking waves pulled shingle back from the shore. Max knelt down and joined her, and they lay with the tops of their heads touching. Directly below, two women walked with empty pushchairs, and their three small children ran around them like tiny satellites.

  ‘Look at them all down there,’ said Max.

  ‘Like tiny toy people,’ said Nina.

  Max turned his head to her. ‘Writhing like tiny maggots is what I think. Teeming, blindly wriggling, blindly breeding. Just about surviving. Insignificant. They’re all oblivious to how the world really works… Take those two women. If they knew how the world really works, they wouldn’t have given birth. Do you ever wonder if your mother considered aborting you?’

  Nina turned to him.

  ‘No! And I know she wanted me, despite the fact we’re not talking. I know she loves me.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My mother wanted an abortion, I’m sure of it, but she was too far gone when she found out she’d fallen…’

  Nina looked at the top of his head, the weak sunshine catching in his golden hair. She felt so many emotions for him: lust, pity… fear. But her love for him always floated above these, making them seem insignificant, like white noise.