SIXTEEN
The helicopter shuddered violently as it was buffeted by the oncoming storm they were heading right into. “Jesus!” Kate Bell snapped as she nearly dropped her iPad. She was flicking through the pictures of the victim again, one in particular had caught her eye before, at the time she didn’t know why it felt significant but it had been gnawing at the back of her mind ever since. She scrolled from one gory image to the next in a desperate attempt to find the picture again, she cursed herself for not keeping the image separate, but she had to admit she couldn’t put her finger on what it was that could be so important.
The co-pilot stuck his head around the back of his seat, his face white as a sheet which didn’t fill Bell with much confidence. “Thirty minutes, if we don’t fucking crash first!” He called through.
“Good man,” Pearce said. He hardly seemed to notice the co-pilot’s panicked demeanor or the fact the helicopter felt like it might shake apart at any moment. Bell knew this was because he only had eyes on their eventual destination and hopefully a date with a so far elusive killer.
Finally she came across the photo, it was a shot of the victim’s face, half obscured, battered and bruised out of shape and blurry as hell. But still there was something about it. She messed with the re-sizing tool but this just pixilated the image. “Bollocks,” she reduced it back down and then a flash of recognition hit her hard. “Christ!” She had heard the expression of someone saying their blood turned to ice water when hit with shock, now she knew exactly how it felt.
She turned to Pearce who was staring straight ahead, his brow knitted in concentration no doubt his thoughts focus on the potential confrontation to come.
“Boss?” Bell said but the word came out in little more than a choked whisper. She cleared her throat and spoke again much clearer this time. “Boss!”
He turned to her with a look of mild amusement on his face seeing her expression. “You alright, Kate?
“Boss, now you’re gonna think I’ve lost it...”
“Too late for that Bell, but go on.” He joked.
She gestured to the iPad. “I’ve been looking at the pictures of the victim, well one in particular,” she hesitated, suddenly afraid she was going to look like a complete idiot. But one glance back down at the photo dispelled the feeling instantly. No she was right.
“Go on,” Pearce told her patiently.
She handed him her iPad. “Sir, take a look at this one. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think that’s Harrold Carrick.” Pearce frowned and squinted at the photo. Bell told herself over and over she wasn’t mistaken, but still her heart missed a beat when Pearce didn’t react to the picture.
“Harrold Carrick,” she blurted out. “We brought him in twice for questioning last year in connection with the killings.”
“I know who Harrold Carrick is detective. And I seem to remember we couldn’t prove a thing.”
“Sir, please,” she was almost pleading with him now. “Let me pull up his mug shot so we can compare the two.”
Pearce held up his hand to silence her as he looked at the photo. After what seemed like a full five minutes to Bell he let out a long slow breath. “Jesus wept, it could be.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Bell said as tension gave way to a wave of relief.
Bell took back the iPad and began searching through her files, she typed in Carrick’s name and was rewarded not only with his mug shot, which confirmed it was him, but also his personal details. “Carrick lives in Grimsby, that’s on the same coast, seventy miles away. You could drive it in an hour and a half tops.”
Pearce nodded ever so slightly. Bell could see the gears turning in his brain at what this could mean. If this was Carrick, a suspect in the killer’s case. How did he himself become the latest victim? Her already aching head began to swirl with possibilities. Revenge? Could someone close to one of the victims have sort Carrick out? If so how did they know he was a suspect? Moreover, the exact details of the scarring on the victims backs had been kept under wraps to weed out any of the inevitable false confessors that always came out of the wood work in these types of cases. Yet this latest victim, Carrick or not exhibited the exact same wounds.
Then an even scarier scenario hit her. What if it was one of their own team? They had all the facts and she knew as much as any of them how frustrating their lack of real evidence against any of the very short list of suspects was. No! She almost said it out loud and actually wished she was mistaken about this being Carrick, after all it was a crap picture.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Pearce said snapping her out of her daze. Then he turned to Bell. “I need to be sure, get back onto the island, get Williams to take a clear picture of the victim’s face.”
She smiled to herself. He always could read her mind.