Dying Breath: Unputdownable serial killer fiction (Detective Lucy Harwin crime thriller series Book 2)

by Helen Phifer

  ‘What? Bloody hell, two hours ago we thought it was Toby. Only it’s not because we’re here with him. Jesus, not again. You have to find the new boss, get him to authorise a cell site analysis of Lucy’s phone so we have something to go off. Did she say where she was going?’

  ‘No – she left in a bit of a foul mood, though. I saw her come out of the boss’s office, but the DCI was nowhere to be seen.’ Col was out of breath because he’d run straight from his desk to Tom’s office. ‘He’s still not here. I haven’t see him for ages; I don’t know where either of them are.’

  Mattie ran his hand through his hair, his eyes wild. He looked at Browning, who understood what had happened from the gist of the conversation and the panic in Mattie’s voice. ‘We have to go now. I’m sorry about the mix-up, Toby; we’ll get this straightened out later.’

  They began to run towards the front door and he followed. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  Browning turned to look at him. ‘No you’re not, you’re a civilian – you might get hurt.’

  ‘I might be able to help.’

  Mattie shook his head, but let him follow them anyway. Right now he’d take whatever help he could get. Toby clambered into the back of the car.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To check Lucy isn’t at her house.’

  ‘She won’t be there. It sounds like she’s inadvertently stumbled upon whoever it is you’re looking for. So where might she have gone? Did you have any leads whatsoever?’

  Mattie looked at him in the rear-view mirror. ‘You’re the expert. Your guess is as good as mine.’

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  After Lucy had told him about the fibres that morning, it had shaken him and he’d had to come home. He’d had no idea about them. He was furious because he’d been so careful. There were no blue rugs or carpets in the house. He needed to find whatever it was they’d come from and get rid of it. When he’d finished preparing the acid drum, he’d searched the house from top to bottom, scratching his head, and then he’d checked the van and felt a bubble of anger explode inside his chest when he noticed the blue Afghan throw in the back. How could he have been so stupid? He would take care of Lewis, then come back and dispose of it – and him.

  He’d crept up on Lewis, who had fallen asleep, and had been about to wrap the thick rope around his neck and strangle him when he’d heard the crunching footsteps walking up his gravel drive. He turned to peer out of the bedroom window and saw her. Panic had taken over and he’d picked up the heavy brass lamp from the bedside table and whacked him over the head with it instead. Lewis went out without a fight – he let out a small ‘ugh’ and that was it; he was unconscious. It was messy, though – there was so much blood and he hated mess. Especially in his own house: blood left way too much forensic evidence.

  He’d stood and watched the dark red liquid seep from the wound on the side of Lewis’s head, frozen to the spot, until he heard her hammer on his front door. Just like that, as if she had every right to. Lucy Harwin had definitely got far too big for her boots since he’d last worked with her. He looked down at his Lycra top, which had blood spatter on the front of it, and swore. Stripping it off, he rolled it into a ball and left it on the floor next to the bed. He rushed to the bathroom, where he began to scrub at his hands with antibacterial soap to get rid of any germs that might be in the druggie’s blood. Then he padded back to the spare room to slip on a fresh top before descending the stairs to deal with Lucy.

  As he carried her, he couldn’t believe how heavy she was for such a little thing. He took her into the front room, where he laid her on the sofa, then ran back to the garage to get some more rope to tie her up with. He didn’t want to kill her until he’d taken care of Lewis properly, but if she woke up now he’d have no other option: it would be self-preservation. What he did need to know was why she’d come here, pounding on his door. He would ask her when she came to if she’d known she was walking into the spider’s web or whether she was just pissed with him about something else. He wouldn’t be surprised if she’d just come to have a go at him, oblivious to what he really was.

  Tearing a strip of material off one of the cleaning cloths from the bucket he’d brought in with him, he tied it roughly around her mouth, gagging her. No doubt she would start screaming the moment she woke up, because there was no way she would lie there and be quiet – she was far too feisty for that. Once he’d done that, he tied her arms and feet so she couldn’t run away if she tried. For the moment she was out cold; pressing two fingers against her neck, he could feel her strong pulse. Good, that meant he could finish off what he had to do to Waite in peace. He didn’t feel one ounce of regret about what he’d done to all his other victims – not even Jenny, and he’d liked her; she’d been his first teenage crush. But for some reason he knew that when he killed Lucy she would be the one to end up haunting him for the rest of his life, and he didn’t know if he could cope with that.

  Back at the station, Col had rallied an assortment of officers and spoken to the duty sergeant, who’d shaken his head at the mention of Lucy’s name.

  ‘What if her phone just died? It happens all the time.’

  ‘She said she’d found the killer.’

  ‘Did she sound in distress?’

  ‘No, she was fucking whispering, so I couldn’t really tell. Look, I need her phone pinging now – we need to get a location on her and fast. If I’m wrong and she’s fine then you can send the bill for it to me, Andy. Is that okay?’

  Andy picked up the phone and dialled the control room. ‘I need to speak to the force incident manager. Now, please.’

  There was a short delay as he was put through and relayed everything that Col had just told him.

  ‘Right, I see. No, that’s fine, we’ll go and check that address first. Thanks.’ Andy put the phone down. ‘Apparently about forty minutes ago she asked for the home address of the new DCI and was given it. Maybe you should try there first – you could have misheard her. They had a bit of a thing a few years ago. They could be in the middle of a quickie.’

  Col held his hand up. ‘Enough – don’t talk bollocks. What’s the address? I’ll go and check it myself.’

  Andy passed him the piece of paper. Col looked at it, then shoved it into his pocket. ‘Thanks.’

  He ran out, grabbing a set of van keys from the whiteboard and pulling out his phone to ring Mattie, who answered straight away, putting the phone on loudspeaker.

  ‘Three Oaks, Country Drive. She phoned control to find out Patrick’s address. I think we should check there first, while they faff around taking forever to ping her phone.’

  ‘I don’t even know where that is.’

  Colin shrugged. ‘I’m not sure. I think it’s those posh new detached houses past the old asylum.’

  Mattie felt as if his world had been turned upside down and he was reliving the same day from six months ago.

  ‘Oh, and Mattie? Andy reckons that it’s possible she’s gone round there for…’

  ‘For what?’

  Col paused, embarrassed to be speaking like this about Lucy because it wasn’t her style, but he thought that it was only fair to warn them in case they did rush in to rescue her and she was pinned to the bed underneath Patrick of her own free will. It happened – there had been plenty of officers who’d spent their shift sleeping around when they should have been solving crimes.

  ‘For sex.’

  Mattie wondered if he’d heard Col right. Browning ended the call for him. He glanced in the rear-view mirror at Toby, who looked as if he were going to cry. Then he looked at Mattie and realised that if he thought the kid in the back was upset, Mattie was positively crushed.

  ‘Look – so what if she has? She’s a grown woman. I just don’t think she would, though; Lucy would never be so unprofessional in working time. It’s fine to bear it in mind, but I still think she’d be in touch.’ Just to prove his point, he dialled her number and it went straight to answerphone.


  Chapter Fifty-Five

  A loud thud on the ceiling above her made Lucy open her eyes. She blinked, not recognising the room around her. The rough cotton material that had been tied tightly around her mouth made her gag. Trying to move her arms and legs, she couldn’t, and was wondering what had happened to her until she felt the coarse rope tighten against her skin. She looked around the empty room until her gaze fell on the stack of cardboard packing boxes, and she felt panic flood her chest. It was Patrick: she was at his house and he was the killer.

  There was another loud thud, followed by the sound of something heavy being dragged along the floor upstairs. She had to get out of here before he came back down. Twisting her arms and legs to try to loosen the ropes, she did her best not to cry out as they burnt into her flesh. She rolled off the sofa onto the hard oak floor with a thump and felt the bile rise in the back of her throat. She knew she couldn’t be sick with the gag around her mouth; she’d choke to death. She lay still, waiting to see if he would come running back down, but he didn’t – he carried on dragging whatever or whoever it was.

  She looked for a weapon, something she could use to cut the ropes free. In the movies there was always a piece of glass or a knife to hand, but as she frantically searched the room, snapping her head from side to side, she wanted to scream. There wasn’t so much as a speck of dust. This room was nothing but an empty shell. She shuffled over towards the boxes, praying there would be something inside them she could use to free herself.

  Patrick rolled Waite’s body into the bedsheet and was dragging him towards the stairs; there was no way he was carrying him. Considering that he was nothing but skin and bones, he was still bloody heavy. He’d just have to roll him down to the garage. He couldn’t carry out his original plan, which had been to get him into the drum of acid and leave him in the car park of the police station. For one thing, it would have to be in the early hours of the morning when the station was dead, and for another, there was the problem of Lucy. He also hadn’t taken into account the sheer weight of the drum when it was half full of sulphuric acid, along with the mass of a dead body. Christ, the Incredible Hulk would struggle to lift it.

  If she didn’t call in soon, that fool whom she so clearly liked would be out searching for her, along with the rest of the station. He had no idea who she might have told about him, or that she was coming here. What he would have to do is to dump Waite’s body in the acid in the garage and just leave him. He could grab his suitcase and use the van to escape; he supposed that Lucy would be fine if he left her tied up here. He was pretty sure she would use her own devices to get rescued. If not – well, she wouldn’t have died at his hands, would she? It would be a tragic accident. He let go of the sheet and stood up straight, his back clicking. He was getting too old for this; he shouldn’t have left it so late to kill Waite. He could have been long gone and avoided all of this mess.

  Mattie drove as fast as he could in the unmarked Ford Focus with no lights or sirens to clear the traffic for them. He’d never been honked at so much in his life as he’d turned onto the promenade. Browning was busy on the phone and Toby was sitting on the back seat with his eyes wide open, staring in horror as the world passed by in a blur.

  Mattie cleared his throat. ‘What’s the plan of action when we get there – shouldn’t we have armed officers attending?’ He didn’t take his eyes off the road; he waited for Browning to answer his question.

  ‘Yes, they’re on the way. From a job on the M6 north-bound – they’ll be around twenty-five minutes.’

  ‘You’re having me on?’

  ‘We do, however, have a couple of Taser-trained officers making their way over; they might get there before we do, although they don’t really know what’s going on and we don’t want to storm in if we’ve got it wrong. Lucy would never forgive either of us – you know that, don’t you?’

  Mattie nodded. ‘It’s a small price to pay.’

  Toby looked at the two men, a grudging respect for them emerging from the anger that had filled his chest. They didn’t care about their own safety; all they cared about was Lucy’s, which was nice. He had always wondered how it must feel to be part of a team, where none of them would think twice about putting their lives on the line to help a colleague. And now he knew, he was glad to be a part of it.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Lucy reached the stack of boxes and pushed against them with her feet. There was something inside one of them. Pushing it over with her feet she stared at the two pairs of stilettos which fell out. A muddy white pair, with dried blood on them and a shiny, black pair. All her hope and anticipation washed away and for the first time she considered the implications of the situation she was in. Patrick was a serial killer who didn’t like mess or blood very much, yet he was preparing to put her into a drum full of acid. She followed the beam of sunlight that was warming her cold skin and looked towards the huge bay windows. There was plenty of glass; she just needed to figure out how to break it. There was no way she would die here in his house, murdered by him. She’d throw herself out of the window and take her chances with a severed artery before she’d let him touch her. It didn’t matter if she bled to death; it was far better to die trying than to lie here and wait for him to finish her off and dissolve her in a steel drum full of acid.

  She began the job of shuffling towards the windows. She heard the noise of something being rolled down the stairs and wondered what it was – Patrick had clearly been busy when she’d interrupted him. He was going to be really pissed off with her for disturbing him. Then she remembered her phone and almost screeched with delight. Instead she choked on the material fastened around her mouth. But she didn’t care; she remembered that she’d been mid-conversation with Col. When Patrick had cut her off, surely Col would have sent the team out looking for her. If she sat tight they might come and find her before she had to jump. Poor Mattie would be furious with her for going off on her own. She’d been the one worrying about them and it had been her who had walked straight into the thick of it. She hoped they hadn’t given Toby too much of a hard time; they’d been wrong about him and he had potential. He’d make a great detective, even if he was a little odd. That she could cope with – murderous intent she couldn’t.

  It suddenly struck her that she’d never even tried to open the door; Patrick might not have locked it. She could be shuffling her way out of here right this minute. She began the painstaking series of small movements that would take her back towards the door and her possible freedom.

  Mattie turned into the quiet street and felt his heart drop to see Lucy’s car parked further along. He wanted her to be safe. He also didn’t want to rush in there and find her in a compromising situation with Patrick, because he didn’t love her like Mattie did. They heard the sound of approaching sirens and Mattie picked up his radio. ‘Whoever that is, turn the bloody sirens off: silent approach.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ a voice answered. ‘Sorry.’

  Mattie looked at Browning. ‘Should we just go in first?’

  He nodded. ‘Come on, let’s not be wasting time.’

  They got out of the car and Toby tried to open his door, but the child locks were on. Mattie stuck his head in. ‘Sorry, this is as far as you go. I’m not being held responsible if you get hurt.’

  Browning smiled at Mattie. ‘Nice one.’

  They ran towards the gate and onto the path, careful not to step onto the gravel as it would make too much noise. At the moment the only thing they had going for them was the element of surprise – and a can of CS spray. There was some loud banging coming from the side of the house, so they headed in that direction. From inside the dark garage they could make out the shadowy figure of Patrick. He was dragging what looked like a body wrapped up in a sheet.

  Mattie felt a crushing wave of grief fill his chest. Oh my God. Lucy! We’re too late. All caution thrown to the wind, he began to sprint towards the man, ready to kill him with his bare hands. In the final seconds before Mattie reached the g
arage, Patrick sensed someone moving towards him and he dropped the body. He turned and ran back through the doorway into the kitchen and locked it. Mattie was pounding on the metal fire door in rage.

  Browning ran in after him and dropped to the floor beside the bloodstained sheet with the body inside. Ripping it open, he stared at the battered face of Lewis Waite and shouted, ‘It’s not her!’

  Mattie who had been afraid to look, turned around and stared in horror. ‘Thank God. Where is she, then?’

  A loud noise as the garage door began to close jolted them from their trance. They ran towards it but it shut before either of them could escape through the gap. They began to hammer on the door as Mattie pulled out his radio and yelled into it: ‘Urgent assistance required, immediate response.’

  Toby, whose admiration of the two officers had turned to indignation that they didn’t think he could be of any help, began to try to pull off the metal grille separating the back seat from the front. He took his frustration out on it, and before long he’d kicked it enough times that it had bent in the middle and come loose from its fixtures. Ripping at it with both hands, he managed to tear it off altogether, then clambered through into the front seat and opened the driver’s door. He heard the racket coming from the garage and realised that Mattie and Browning were locked in there, so he ran towards the metal door and tried his best to lift it up. It didn’t budge.

  ‘I think it’s remote controlled. I’ll try and get into the house and let you out.’

  Mattie hissed back, ‘You need to hurry, mate – he’s gone inside and Lucy’s in there.’

  Toby ran around to the front of the house and squinted through the bay windows. It took a couple of seconds for his eyes to adjust and then he gasped to see Lucy, whose hands, feet and mouth were gagged and tied.