Hell, p.1
Hell, page 1
part #5 of Sam Becket Series
Recent Titles by Hilary Norman
The Sam Becket Mysteries
MIND GAMES
LAST RUN *
SHIMMER *
CAGED *
HELL *
BLIND FEAR
CHATEAU ELLA
COMPULSION
DEADLY GAMES
FASCINATION
GUILT
IN LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP
LAURA
NO ESCAPE
THE PACT
RALPH’S CHILDREN *
SHATTERED STARS
SPELLBOUND
SUSANNA
TOO CLOSE
TWISTED MINDS
IF I SHOULD DIE (written as Alexandra Henry)
* available from Severn House
HELL
A Sam Becket Thriller
Hilary Norman
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published 2011
in Great Britain and in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
Copyright © 2011 by Hilary Norman.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Norman, Hilary.
Hell. – (Sam Becket mysteries)
1. Becket, Sam (Fictitious character) – Fiction.
2. Police – Florida – Miami – Fiction. 3. Serial murder
Investigation – Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.
I. Title II. Series
823.9′2-dc22
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-138-5 (ePub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8074-1 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-378-6 (trade paper)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
For Poppy, and all the other beautiful family dogs we’ve been lucky enough to share our lives with. Great characters, every single one.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks to the following:
Howard Barmad; Batya Brykman; Special Agent Paul Marcus and Julie Marcus, to whom I owe so much for putting up with my endless questions yet again (and how would I ever manage without the ‘real’ Sam and Grace?). Grateful thanks to Amanda Stewart (who I’m going to miss so much); many thanks to James Nightingale; and to Euan Thorneycroft. Thanks, too, to Helmut Pesch, Carolin Besting, Rainer Schumacher and Wolfgang Neuhaus; and, as always, to Sebastian Ritscher. Very special thanks to Helen Rose – always there to answer my questions! Thanks to Jeanne Skipper. And as always, I’m so very grateful to Dr Jonathan Tarlow – and to Sharon Tarlow, who also helped with this one.
And finally, and most especially, as always, to Jonathan.
‘Hell is watching the woman you love most in all the world falling into the pit of a nightmare – and not being able to do a damned thing to help her.’
Sam Becket
‘Hell can wait.’
Jerome Cooper
ONE
April 12
If Jason Leonard, Grace Lucca Becket’s first patient of the day, had not arrived early, and if she had not been running a little late after getting Joshua, her two-and-a-half-year-old son, to his preschool, then Jason would not have been kept waiting for her out on the deck, and it might have been Grace who’d spotted it first.
It.
After which she would almost certainly have called Sam – her husband, a detective in the Violent Crimes Unit of the Miami Beach Police Department – who would probably have come straight home. And Sam might have taken a look and then called the bomb squad, who might have decided to detonate a controlled explosion (better safe than sorry), in which case they might not have found out for a while, if ever, what exactly had been inside the package.
As it turned out, however, Jason had been alone when he’d noticed it.
And being fourteen years old, and bored and a little edgy – since, though he found Doc Lucca pretty cool for a shrink, their sessions had been getting tougher of late – and since one of his things was that he couldn’t look at nice stuff without wanting to touch it, wanting to make it his own, that was just what he had done.
Because it looked neat.
And kind of weird too.
Which made it irresistible.
It had been the dinghy he’d noticed first – a mini-dinghy, like a kid’s inflatable toy – tied up to a cleat on the dock piling beyond the Doc’s deck, bobbing up and down in the water, bright yellow plastic shining in the sunlight.
Something inside it.
A plastic box, like a Tupperware container.
Something else inside that.
Jason had looked around before he’d squatted and reached down into the dinghy, in case someone was watching him, in case this was a trick – someone trying to catch him out, maybe – though no one except his mom and the Doc knew he was here, so it couldn’t have anything to do with him.
Which meant, he guessed, that it probably had something to do with the Doc’s little kid, though Joshua was only two, so Jason doubted he was allowed near the water . . .
And all he wanted was a closer look at what was inside the box.
Which was, as it turned out, another box, one of those fancy gift types – red with a white ribbon fixed to the lid, so you didn’t have to untie anything, just ease off the top . . .
A second plastic container.
Something else inside that.
Something weird.
Jason stopped, stayed very still, listening for sounds of Dr Lucca. He already knew that what he ought to do was leave this alone, put the lid back on the gift box, stick that back in the bigger plastic container, put the whole creepy thing back in the little boat.
Because, to tell the truth, it was creeping him out now.
But the fact was, Jason was incapable of doing the right thing at moments like these. He could never seem to stop himself from looking at things he was not allowed to see, like the filing cabinet beside his dad’s desk when he visited him at his office, and the drawer in which his mom stacked her panties and brassieres, but where she also kept the gross pink vibrator that he knew she’d die rather than have him see – and that was an image to make him sick to his stomach . . .
Same deal with any of the things he’d stolen.
He couldn’t help himself.
Didn’t really want to help himself, he’d admitted once to the Doc, probably because the stuff he wasn’t meant to see or possess was usually way more interesting than the stuff he was allowed access to.
So now he did what he’d known he would all along.
He opened the box.
Grace had just shut Woody, the family’s dachshund-miniature schnauzer cross, into the den, because Jason Leonard was not easy around dogs, when she heard the teenager’s cry.
Of fear, she thought, instantly, or maybe pain, her own alarm rising as she quickened her pace, hurried through the kitchen out to the deck, and saw the teenager backed up against the wall of the house.
‘Jason, what’s wrong?’
He didn’t answer, but he was on his feet, did not appear injured.
He was staring at something – a number of things – lying near the guard rail between the deck and the water, and Grace’s own gaze flicked over them, took in plastic containers, a scarlet box, white ribbon.
And then she saw that it was none of those things that transfixed him.
It was something else, something a darker, shinier red.
Blood.
Grace looked back at Jason, scanned him from his red hair right down to his scuffed gray Keds. ‘Jason, where are you hurt?’
‘I’m not.’ The boy’s voice was scared, guilty. ‘I’m sorry, Doc.’
Grace’s eyes flicked back to the mess.
Saw that it wasn’t just blood on the ground.
‘Dear God,’ she said, just as the bad smell of it reached her.
Fleeting relief washed over her that Joshua would be safe at preschool until noon. And then that relief was gone, because this was trouble again; this was, at the very least, more unpleasantness, right in their own backyard.
‘It was in that box,’ Jason said.
Grace looked at the scarlet box, its white-ribboned lid beside it, and at the two empty Tupperware-type containers close by.
‘I knew I shouldn’t have looked,’ the teenager went on. ‘But that is way disgusting, Doc. You know what it is, don’t you?’
Jason knew, because he’d seen one just like it in a horror DVD he and Alex Bailey had ripped off a week or two back.
‘I know what it is,’ Grace said quietly.
Anatomy 101.
No doubting it.
It was a human heart.
No bomb squad, but a different kind of explosion of activity happening out on the Beckets’ deck now.
Detective Sam Becket and his partner, Alejandro Martinez, were on the scene, checking things out for themselves because, though the Becket house was in the official jurisdiction of the Bay Harbor Islands Police Department, and – where violent crime was suspected, in the authority of Miami-Dade – this was home for Sam, his wife, Grace, a respected child and adolescent psychologist, and their young son, and no one was raising objections.
Crime Scene had been there a while, but Dr Elliot Sanders, recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner for the county – still overweight, still smoking and drinking more whiskey than was good for him, but also still the best ME Sam or Martinez knew – had dropped everything to come take a look too; his own special courtesy for a detective he’d come to know well and to respect over a number of years. Along with Sanders, there was a small team of technicians from his office, and after everyone had finished photographing in situ, making sketches of the scene and gathering what evidence they could, the little yellow dinghy, the quarter-inch polypropylene line that had secured it to the cleat with a rolling hitch knot, and its mysterious, grisly contents would be removed to the Medical Examiner’s Office.
And the process would begin to trace the person to whom the heart belonged.
Best-case scenario, it might turn out to be someone already deceased; an organ donor, perhaps – a heinous enough crime, given the heart’s lifesaving transplant potential.
Or it could be something else altogether.
A homicide victim, mutilated post-mortem.
‘Or maybe before.’ Martinez, a stocky, middle-aged Cuban-American, voiced the thought, his rounded, expressive face and sharp dark eyes conjuring up images that disgusted him.
‘Don’t even go there,’ Sam told him.
He was looking at Grace, a few feet away in their lanai, seeing the new strain on her lovely face and hoping against hope that the tying up of the miniature dinghy to their property had been a random choice, that this thing might just as easily have happened to any of the island’s other residents.
Except Sam did not believe that.
Had good reason not to.
And he could see, from Grace’s expression, that neither did she.
TWO
The New Epistle of Cal the Hater
Giving up the killing was the hardest thing I ever did.
Damned hard.
Even for a damned man.
And they don’t come much more damned than me.
The rest wasn’t so bad. When you’ve already lost everything that mattered to you, you get so down on life that you don’t worry about where your next meal is coming from, let alone your next fuck. Don’t really care, sometimes, if you live or die.
Except for the hell and damnation thing.
But I missed the killing worse than anything.
I tried hard. For a long, long time. Punished myself whenever I felt the need sneaking up on me, the way I used to, the way my mother taught me.
Good old, dead old, Jewel.
I thought she’d be my last.
I really meant to stop.
Really.
I guess I’m just weaker than I figured.
THREE
The month had started out so sweetly.
Springtime in Miami.
Lovers everywhere, strolling hand-in-hand, young and old.
Two of them, on the first Sunday afternoon of April, older than most, taking a walk along the beach around 95th Street in Surfside, shoes off, enjoying the feel of the sand, not too far from where they’d just finished lunching with family.
Celebrating.
Because Dr David Becket, aged sixty-five, a recently retired paediatrician, and Miss Mildred Bleeker – whose age was known only to her and, presumably, to her parents and the New York City Department of Records – had become engaged to be married.
The whole gang sitting around a big table outside La Goulue in Bal Harbour. Sam, Grace, Joshua and Cathy – their twenty-three-year-old adopted daughter, so uncannily like Grace with long legs, butter-gold hair and eyes a similar striking blue, that strangers assumed they were biological mother and daughter; Grace’s sister Claudia and her family, recently returned after several years in Seattle; and Saul Becket, Sam’s much younger adoptive brother – only one year between him and Cathy; Sam and Saul a generation apart, but as close and beloved as any brothers could be.
‘Adoption in our blood,’ David liked to say, because he and his late wife, Judy, had started the family tradition one year after he’d first happened upon Sam, aged seven, a shocked, confused African-American boy stranded in an ER following an accident which had killed his parents and sister.
Forty-three years old now, six-three with powerful shoulders, Grace’s cooking his best excuse for not being quite as rangy as he had been, though he still had the same keen-boned face and loose-limbed, well-muscled body; a tough cop when he needed to be, but soft at his core. His father as proud of him now as he had been every day of their life together.
Meeting Grace the best thing that had ever happened to Sam.
Mildred disagreed with that. ‘Second best,’ she had once pointed out to David. ‘Samuel met you first.’
‘OK,’ David had acquiesced to a degree. ‘My son’s a lucky man.’ And then he’d paused. ‘Almost as lucky as me, finding you.’
‘Goes both ways, old man,’ Mildred had said.
Sam knew that his father and Mildred had been slow to declare their feelings because of their concerns for his and Saul’s sensibilities, Judy Becket, their mom, having passed away almost four years ago.
First chance they’d had, they’d reassured David. In the first place, they’d both heard their mom say that she wanted him to find companionship again; and in the second place, both Judy’s sons – and the rest of the family – had grown to love Mildred as much as David had.
Respect had come first for them all. For a woman whose life’s journey had been rougher than any of them could properly imagine. A woman from a conventional family background who had given up so much for the man she loved, and then, having lost him, had turned her back on comfort and convention and chosen life on the streets.
Which was where Sam had first come to know her, shortly before violence, in the shape of a psychotic killer – self-styled Cal the Hater – had robbed her of that life too, but had also, fortuitously, brought her to Sam’s family and into all their lives.
Cal the Hater, presumed dead until last spring, when he’d written to Sam.
Not dead, after all.
Still alive and, thereby, a threat to the whole Becket family.
Because Cal the Hater, a multiple killer, was also Grace’s stepbrother, Jerome Cooper, son of Frank Lucca’s second wife, a young man who had been brought up to hate both Grace and Claudia.
Though the person he had come to hate most profoundly of all was Sam, because Jerome Cooper had also been raised a racist, and Samuel Lincoln Becket was an African-American, adopted, barmitzvahed Jew, and he was married to one of the women Cooper loathed, and he had, as the killer saw it, caused him to lose everything he had held dear.
Cal-Cooper still out there someplace.
But for the time being, at least, there was happiness in the Becket clan through the joining of two more lives.
FOUR
April 13
No hearts or any other vital organs had been reported missing from laboratories or hospitals. No bodies stolen from morgues or funeral homes or hospitals or any place else.
No body had turned up minus a heart.
Yet.
But Sam would have bet all he owned that this was a homicide.
Attempts would be made to match the heart’s DNA to the CODIS database, but until either that brought success, or a mutilated body was found, or a missing persons report elicited a match, there was little to investigate. No prints on the scarlet gift box or ribbon or on the polypropylene line – not as strong as nylon, Martinez had learned, and hard on the hands, but still used by some as inexpensive anchor line.
‘Also used by waterskiers as tow-rope,’ he told Sam in his lightly-accented voice, ‘and by campers, and even for clothesline.’ He shrugged. ‘Common as bugs in the fucking Everglades, in other words.’
‘Almost, I guess,’ Sam said.
