Last Run

by Hilary Norman

  Hilary Norman and The Murder Room

  ››› This title is part of The Murder Room, our series dedicated to making available out-of-print or hard-to-find titles by classic crime writers.

  Crime fiction has always held up a mirror to society. The Victorians were fascinated by sensational murder and the emerging science of detection; now we are obsessed with the forensic detail of violent death. And no other genre has so captivated and enthralled readers.

  Vast troves of classic crime writing have for a long time been unavailable to all but the most dedicated frequenters of second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing means that we are now able to bring you the backlists of a huge range of titles by classic and contemporary crime writers, some of which have been out of print for decades.

  From the genteel amateur private eyes of the Golden Age and the femmes fatales of pulp fiction, to the morally ambiguous hard-boiled detectives of mid twentieth-century America and their descendants who walk our twenty-first century streets, The Murder Room has it all. ›››

  The Murder Room

  Where Criminal Minds Meet

  themurderroom.com

  Last Run

  Hilary Norman

  Contents

  Cover

  The Murder Room Introduction

  Title page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Outro

  By Hilary Norman

  About the author

  Copyright page

  Prologue

  August 10

  The beach at night’s a cool place for killing.

  Biggest bath in the world for washing away blood. Sand ruffling with every breath of breeze, shifting with each passing footfall, sweeping away prints, eradicating evidence.

  A crime-scene technician’s nightmare.

  And a detective’s.

  One minute the guy was running; nice, easy, loping strides, warm air sucking in, and blowing out of his well-trained lungs, free as a bird and loving it, the way he always felt this time of night, the tedium of his day blown away, his body and mind in peaceful tandem, getting ready for rest, for sleep.

  No sense of danger.

  Not till it was on him. Something swinging at his face.

  Last things he heard were the sounds of his own bones smashing.

  And the screaming.

  Last things he felt were the terror and the agony.

  Nothing after that.

  Chapter One

  At least six people heard it (every one of them failing to report it at the time) just over four hours before the body was found – at five a.m. on Wednesday – not far from a jet-ski rental booth on the beach close to North Shore Open Space Park, just south of Surfside.

  The crime had been brutal and ugly; the sound, they said, a kind of screaming. ‘But not the kind a victim would make,’ one person volunteered. Which made it either the scream of a witness or, some were speculating, the sound the killer had made.

  ‘Sounded like an animal to me,’ said a middle-aged man, who’d heard it through the open bedroom window of his fifth-story, ocean-facing apartment.

  ‘Crazy was what it sounded,’ said his less fanciful wife.

  Sam had come in to the handsome white building that was 1100 Washington Avenue, and which housed the Miami Beach Police Department before six a.m., planning to dig in for a day at the office, when Lieutenant Kovac had appointed him lead investigator for the North Shore homicide, and agreed to free Martinez from the aggravated assault case he’d been working on, so they could work on the new case together.

  Not because Kovac liked either of them any better than he ever had, but that was the way it went; the detectives in the Violent Crimes Section worked a kind of rotation, each man and woman having their turn to take responsibility for fresh cases. Besides which, even Kovac had been forced to admit over the years that Sam Becket and Al Martinez, while not officially a partnership, worked better together than apart.

  So, for both detectives, a day at the office had turned into a day at the beach.

  No picnic, though.

  Especially for the late Rudolph Muller.

  No problems with unconfirmed identification (no official ID possible yet with the dead man’s face pounded beyond recognition) since Muller had worn a runner’s belt, complete with water bottle and a pouch for his keys and wallet. Rudolph F. Muller, a janitor at Trent University in North Miami, living on Abbott Avenue, just a handful of blocks from where he had died.

  Had been murdered.

  The twenty-dollar bill and three quarters in the wallet, the small size of the wallet itself, and the presence of the man’s keys, appeared, at least at first glance, to rule out the likelihood of robbery or a drug deal gone bad.

  There were two stages to the assault, according to Elliot Sanders, the medical examiner. The first stage had been a vicious blow to the face – possibly with a baseball bat or some other blunt, club-like object – which had almost certainly rendered Muller unconscious, after which his throat had been cut.

  ‘Straight across,’ Sanders told Sam, just after six thirty, moments after he’d made his preliminary on-scene examination. ‘Nice and clean, probably because the victim was out cold.’

  ‘Surgical?’ Sam forced his eyes back down to scan again the horrors that were, to his enduring regret, an integral part of his working life.

  ‘I’d say not.’ Sanders stooped again for another look. ‘Kitchen knife, maybe. We’ll know more later.’ He surveyed the facial destruction again, and raised a brow. ‘Anaesthesia technique could use some work.’

  ‘Anything else, doc?’ Sam was six-three, a rangy African-American, tough-looking, but still grateful he’d missed breakfast that morning.

  ‘Later.’ The overweight ME hauled himself back upright, took out his handkerchief to mop his brow, already glistening this humid August morning, and began to move away from the body.

  Both men stepped cautiously, the measure ingrained, though they and Al Martinez – currently in conversation with a crime-scene technician over on the sandy path that led to 88th Street and Collins – had all realized on arrival that the crime scene had already been contaminated by an unknown number of passers-by. Certainly by the two joggers whose misfortune it had been to find the body; then, just as inevitably in the circumstances, by the fire and rescue team who’d pronounced the victim dead. By which time, the Miami Beach police officers securing the crime scene had to have known t
hat despite their best efforts all kinds of evidence, most notably any foot impressions that the killer might have left (doubtful, in any case, since the instant a foot lifted up on the beach, the soft sand was already shifting) were lost for ever.

  Reaching the path outside the taped-off area, Sanders lit a cigarette and grinned, without malice, at Becket’s still discernible discomfort.

  ‘Get any paler, Sam, they’ll be calling you Jackson.’

  ‘Get any fatter, doc – ’ Martinez, slightly built with a rounded face, sharp dark eyes and a lightly accented voice, joined them – ‘we can rent you out for shade.’

  ‘Never heard that one before, Al,’ the ME said, wryly.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ Martinez asked Sam as they pulled up outside the ochre-and-cream two-storey apartment building on Abbott Avenue that had checked out as Rudolph Muller’s home.

  They were friends as well as colleagues, had worked side by side for years with liking and mutual respect. Both of them good, solid, occasionally outstanding detectives, yet neither having won the promotions they might have anticipated in that length of service; Alejandro Martinez, even-tempered till seriously roused, a courteous man with a strong streak of street fighter, never really seeking advancement because, as a bachelor – albeit with an eye for pretty women – he felt responsibility to no one other than himself; Samuel Becket because he had developed a tendency – disapproved of by his superiors – of sailing dangerously close to the wind if department regulations came up against his own strong personal instincts.

  ‘Muller worked at Trent,’ Sam replied to his colleague’s question.

  ‘Cathy.’ Martinez knew that Sam’s adopted daughter was studying for a bachelor’s degree at Trent’s School of Social Work, and was equally aware of how his partner felt when any semblance of danger impinged on her life. ‘The guy was a janitor, man. Cathy probably never even saw him, let alone met him.’

  ‘I know,’ Sam said.

  ‘And he was killed on home turf, not at Trent.’

  ‘I know,’ Sam said again.

  Martinez glanced at him. ‘She doin’ OK?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Sam said, which was thankfully, so far as he could tell, true.

  ‘Grace?’

  Sam smiled. ‘Grace is doing wonderfully, thank God, and Saul and my dad, too.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Martinez. ‘All one of me.’

  Sam opened his door. ‘Two lucky bastards.’ He looked up at Muller’s building. ‘And now we get to wreck someone else’s life.’

  ‘Real lucky,’ Martinez said.

  Six years had passed since a grisly serial homicide case in the Miami Beach and surrounding areas had finally been laid to rest, bringing to an end a long and hideous nightmare that had personally affected both Sam Becket and Dr Grace Lucca, and had all but destroyed the life of their daughter-to-be Cathy Robbins.

  Sam and Grace – a child and adolescent psychologist – had been married for four of those years, living with Cathy in the Bay Harbor Island house that had first been Grace’s: a small white stone house with a red-tiled roof, arched windows, a pair of palm trees and a bottlebrush tree at the front, and a deck at the back – Grace’s favourite spot – overlooking Biscayne Bay.

  It might have felt crowded to her sometimes, this space that had previously been hers alone, but it never had. It just felt right. Marriage – first for her, second for Sam – and their parental guardianship of Cathy had seemed to flow naturally and, for the most part, contentedly; the only real sorrow in their relationship their seeming inability to bring a new baby into the world.

  After two soul-wrenching miscarriages, however, Grace’s latest pregnancy had made it through to six months, and for both of them joy just didn’t begin to describe it. Sam had hit forty a while back, and Grace, at thirty-seven, was being termed a geriatric in medical jargon. Still, Barbara Walden, her obstetrician, seemed quietly confident they were past Grace’s primary danger zone. And if Sam had thought he could get away with wrapping his wife up at home for the duration, he might have tried, but he knew better. Anyone who’d spent much time with Grace knew better than that.

  Happy family.

  Not so happy as they might have been, because they had lost Judy Becket – Sam and Saul’s greatly loved chicken-soup-and-steel mom – to bone cancer last year, and so Judy had never known that Grace was pregnant again, had come to fear that Sam (who had, almost fifteen years ago, endured the agony of losing his baby son) would never be blessed with another child.

  ‘I was trying – ’ Saul, Sam’s nineteen-year-old brother, had said at one of their family dinners a month or so back – ‘to work out the many parts of my nephew-to-be.’

  ‘Racially, you mean?’ David Becket, their paediatrician father – Sam’s by adoption – had raised a grey eyebrow. ‘Too magnificent a mix to waste on calculation.’

  They had tried it though, wading through their respective inheritances; Cathy attempting the math and failing. Hardly surprising, they all discussed, laughing, with Sam, an African – Bahamian-Episcopalian barmitzvahed Jew, descendant of a runaway slave, married to Grace, daughter of a third generation Swedish-American-Protestant mother and a second-generation Italian-American-Catholic. Both David and his late wife, Judy, were children of Jewish refugees from Nazism, David’s roots in Russia, Judy’s in Poland, and Cathy had Scottish and French blood back along her own family line.

  ‘Though that doesn’t count for the baby.’ She smiled. ‘Just as well.’

  ‘More important ingredients than genes – ’ Grace’s hand lay over her swollen abdomen – ‘are going into this particular pot.’

  ‘Whole lot of love,’ Sam said, covering her hand with his own.

  Mocha on cream.

  Happy family.

  Chapter Two

  August 11

  By Thursday morning, most of the summer students on Trent’s small but lovely, sun-baked campus near Elaine Gordon Park in North Miami were talking about the murder; the majority, so far as Cathy could tell, with more than a degree of morbid curiosity.

  None, Cathy could almost guarantee, had a clue what they were talking about. The true horror, the ugly brutality of violent killing. She knew. So much that she sometimes felt as if her mind had become infused with the blood and agony of her memories, as if they had become a part of her.

  Grace – back when she had not been her adopted mom; when she had still, to Cathy, been Dr Grace Lucca, kiddie shrink – had tried to help Cathy believe that though the memories were irrevocably hers she would, in time, be able to move forward; be able to push the ugliness farther away and draw strength from her own survival.

  Nothing had come easily, for all their kindness and patience. Cathy had found a real sense of belonging with Grace and Sam, had long ago ceased feeling the need to unload daily secrets into the computer journal she’d confided in during the bad times. Yet she still harboured private fears that loss might strike again, and her ongoing insecurities had made it an uphill battle to achieve adequate grades to get accepted at Trent. She had managed it though, and she was now hoping to put her own experiences to good use in social work.

  Running still did it for Cathy – better than drink or dope or Tony Roma’s baby back ribs, better even than dancing to Born to be Wild, better than sex – not that sex had ever come close to Steppenwolf. Running had always been Cathy’s greatest release, the loss of it during her time in prison had been her greatest deprivation, and any time things got her down or terrified her, she put on her Pumas and got flying.

  The news of the Trent janitor’s murder had not exactly freaked her out since she’d never met the poor guy. But the fact remained that a man had been slain, a human being with family and friends whose worlds were presumably now being ripped apart. Which was something else Cathy knew too much about; and the last thing she wanted to do was think about it. So this morning she’d driven into school, parked her Mazda (Grace’s car until Sam had bought his wife a new Toyota), struggled through an hour’s
study in the library, and then got out on the track.

  She was unaware until she had finished running, had done her cool-down stretching exercises and was stepping into her track-suit pants, that she was being watched.

  Photographed.

  The glint of the lens was what alerted Cathy. And then the camera was lowered, and she saw who had been taking her picture. Kez Flanagan, of all people. If Cathy had a heroine at Trent, it was Kerry – Kez – Flanagan, the twenty-one-year-old powerhouse of the Tornadoes.

  Flanagan was standing under a jacaranda tree.

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hi,’ Cathy said back, pulling on her jacket despite the heat.

  ‘Hope you don’t mind?’ Kez Flanagan indicated the camera strung around her neck – the kind Cathy thought of as ‘real’, not one of the dinky digital numbers the whole world carried around these days. ‘I was finishing a roll, and—’

  ‘And I got in the way,’ Cathy said quickly, embarrassed.

  ‘I like your style.’ Flanagan’s voice was husky and a little brusque.

  ‘Really?’ Cathy heard the surprise in her own voice, and felt even more flustered.

  ‘Nice smooth action,’ Flanagan said.

  ‘Thank you.’ Thankful, too, that exercise had already flushed her cheeks.

  ‘I’m Kez Flanagan.’ The woman held out her hand.

  ‘I know.’ Cathy felt the powerful squeeze of the tanned hand, glanced down as it withdrew from hers, noticing its long fingers and intricately painted nails – almost like the late great Flo-Jo’s, but very short, the way guitarists cut their nails. ‘I’m Cathy Becket.’

  Close up, Flanagan’s short, semi-spiky hair was almost the colour of the fiery bottlebrush tree in their yard at home on the island, her eyes green-flecked hazel, her chin pointed, mouth straight and even, her nose small but aggressive, like an arrow-head.

  ‘I know,’ Kez Flanagan said. ‘I’ve seen you run a few times.’

  ‘You have?’ Cathy was finding it hard not to stare at her.

  A pair of runners rounding the bend to their right raised their right hands in a salute to Flanagan, who waved back, watched them for a moment or two, then turned back to Cathy.