Last Kiss (4 page)

The pendulum swung the other way on the night I killed him. I was fully conscious of the knife in my bag. Part of me wondered why no one else knew it was there. The recollections come in waves – watching him open the door to that tart, imagining what was going to happen next, the pendulum in my head swinging back and forth, knowing that calmness would come in time.

After the whore had left the hotel room, I turned the key in the door. At first he seemed surprised, then pleased, thinking I had come back for second helpings, his ego getting in the way again. He knew nothing about me, not really, so when I produced the Special K, he thought he would experience a high, swallowing his drink down fast. I like to think he knew what was happening in the end – lessons are for learning.

I waited: everything would happen in good time. Once his body weakened, I would have my best chance. I let him see the blade before I used it. Perhaps he thought I was playing another game, but I soon got his attention.

Slash, the first cut across his throat – blood gulping from his neck.

Slash, the second cut deeper than the first, his back arching in spasms, spurting more blood. I kept counting while he clenched his throat, stabbing him hard. His body folded, recoiled. The final blows of the knife took the last of my anger.

The bed, even in the dark, was red with blood. I felt the rush, even though the blood was not my own, and waited like a common thief. I stole his last breath in my kiss. In retrospect, it was all inevitable, but I felt weary when it was done.

The aftermath was far more fun – tying him up like a piece of
meat, his eyes beautifully hellish, staring out onto the lights of the car park, the same way I had looked out on the light of the party shining on the drive, calling for a dance.

The Hangman card could have gone either way. I know that now. It is the interpretation of the card that is the key. I will spin the wheel of fortune for my
new
lover. I will rein him in. There will be no mistakes this time, not now that I am so close. His need is evolving, and he is on the brink of wondering why he sees his boring wife as his partner, not me. He hasn’t said as much, but I can sense these things. It’s determining my next move, which I assure you will be interesting.

Men can be fickle but are deliciously capable of being manipulated. They each have a notion of the perfect woman, which is often difficult for them to articulate, but it is there. Of late, he has become closer to my way of thinking. I can see it in the way he talks about her, almost as if she is slipping from his consciousness. It might be tricky, although he recognises his need to turn his back on the banal, boring life she shares with him. Part of the beauty is that she is unaware of the magnitude involved. She has her suspicions, but they are not important. If anything, they lean in my favour. Ultimately she will retreat, crawling back under the safe, mediocre stone where she belongs. I will put her there. Nothing surer – just watch me.

KATE WATCHED IAN Morrison as he carried out his final examination on Rick Shevlin’s body before its removal from the hotel room. Bit by bit the rest of the evidence would follow, the scene consigned to memory, and whatever crime-scene evidence, photographic or otherwise, the police had managed to collect. She had taken her own images, which she would examine later, but right then, the issue of the dead man having been immobilised or substantially weakened was playing on her mind. It tied in with another theory, one she wasn’t yet willing to share.

A hotel room offered secrecy, she thought, a place to meet someone you might not want others to know about. If the
victim had been rendered considerably less hostile, the killer would have been in charge from that point onwards, if not before.

Kate flinched when Mark Lynch patted her arm, his hand lingering longer than necessary.

‘Is everything okay?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I’m fine.’ She hadn’t expected his touch. Maybe she had forgotten what it was like to be touched by a man. She and Declan were barely on speaking terms, she procrastinating about their official separation for weeks.
Bury your head in the sand, Kate, like you always do
. Damn him, she thought. Concentrate. She stepped forward and away from Lynch. Thankfully, he took the hint.

Staring at the corpse, she thought again about the positioning and application of the ropes – those at the victim’s ankle and the ties behind his back. If Morrison was correct, and the ropes were applied after death, there was some kind of payback in the ritual for the killer. Was it dominance, a fetish or a means of re-enactment? Whatever the reason, it reinforced something. The man’s nakedness and the whip marks implied a level of sexual activity, but there was more to this, she was sure.

‘Mark,’ she called.

If he was irritated by her summons, he didn’t show it. This investigation, she thought, was putting the detective on a positive high.

‘You said Rick was an art dealer. What else do we know about him?’ she asked, lowering her voice as he got closer. ‘Had he any priors?’

‘His record is clean.’

‘No sexual history on the PULSE database?’

‘Nothing on file, but as I said earlier, he used an escort service – at least the once.’

‘How do you know?’

‘His mobile-phone records – we traced the last few calls. The second last was to an escort company called Connections. I’ve already spoken to the madam.’

‘You’re sure the escort arrived?’

‘Yeah – the guy on Reception spotted her around eleven, shortly after the booking was made, but she left well before midnight. Rick then rang his wife at twelve fifteen. Probably a guilt call.’

‘And the guy on Reception, did he see her go to Rick Shevlin’s room?’

‘No, he didn’t, but the timing fits. I have the escort waiting at Harcourt Street. It’s always good to get the information while it’s fresh.’

‘I’ll join you if that’s okay.’ Whatever plans she’d had for the rest of the day would have to be put on hold.

‘No problem.’

‘Did you find anything else like this on PULSE?’ She took a couple of steps closer to the bed.

‘Nothing with this MO.’

Her mind began working overtime. If Rick Shevlin had engaged an escort, and then phoned his wife, who had been the next visitor to his room? A jealous lover or someone else? She leaned in closer to the victim’s face. ‘What’s that on his lips?’

Morrison took a few moments to consider. ‘It could be lipstick.’

‘A deep purplish shade of red if it is,’ she replied, as if thinking aloud.

‘It could belong to the escort,’ Lynch added.

‘Or the killer,’ she replied. ‘If Rick was drugged before death, and considerably weakened, we can’t discard the possibility …’ she hesitated ‘… that a woman did this. The physical balance of power would have been on the side of the killer, even if they had been physically smaller.’

‘A woman?’ Lynch also leaned in closer. ‘We’ll take a swab and send it to the lab.’

‘What then?’ Kate asked.

‘If we’re lucky, we’ll get enough to produce a good DNA profile. If not, it’ll be a long path ahead.’

‘How so?’

‘For a start, there isn’t a lipstick database. Assuming we can get a full breakdown of the lipstick’s properties, it will mean contacting the manufacturers individually. We can email them the results of the sample, but if we do find a match, there’s no guarantee it’s not a worldwide product.’

‘A wide net?’ She raised her eyebrows.

‘We’ll start with the probability that as the crime happened in Ireland the lipstick was bought here too. Although it’s unlikely it will be matched to a particular batch number, you never know. Either way, if we find the killer, we’ll be looking for a match.’

He directed his next question to Morrison. ‘I assume you’ll be doing the full works?’ He glanced down at the victim’s genitals as the body bag was zipped up.

Morrison frowned, as if the detective’s last remark was the only surprising thing about his morning’s work. ‘You assume
right, Detective, and I’m sure your superiors will be proud of your investigative know-how.’ A broad, sarcastic smile was etched across the pathologist’s face.

Lynch didn’t rise to the bait. ‘We’re all here to catch the bad guys – or girls, for that matter.’

Kate gestured to the en-suite. ‘Have the techies found anything in there?’

‘Find anything, guys?’ Lynch bellowed.

The techie nearest the door turned. ‘It’s looking very clean.’

‘Surprising,’ Kate muttered, but Lynch heard her.

‘What’s surprising about it?’

‘The blood is localised, but there’s too much here for the killer to be able to leave the place completely clean. If they washed up here, they were extremely thorough, or else they could have used another room in the hotel. How many are there?’

‘Thirty in this wing – they start at 100 and go up to 130. They’re all cleared at this point. It will take a while to check them individually.’

‘Start with the rooms closest. I can’t see this killer walking along the landing covered with blood. There is another possibility, though.’

‘Which is?’

‘He or she brought their own equipment for cleaning.’ Kate walked over to the bathroom. ‘Guys, any residue down the plughole?’

Again the techie nearest the door answered: ‘No. It was the first place we checked.’

‘And nothing at all in the sink?’

‘Nothing.’

She turned back to Lynch. ‘There may be nothing on the PULSE database, but this killer has acted before, done something very similar.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘The scene is too organised and controlled. The killer came prepared. They knew every step they wanted to take and, most likely, everything they did, they did for a very good reason. Nobody reaches this level of violence overnight. If there’s nothing on PULSE, there’ll be something on Europol or Interpol, but you might have to go back a long way.’

‘How long?’

‘Ten years, possibly more. There will be a trail, nothing surer. It’s simply a question of finding it.’

KATE USED HER own car to drive to Harcourt Street police station, keen to have some time alone. It was partly why she liked to go out running whenever she got the chance, getting away from the multitude of voices and opinions. The killer, she thought, carried a large calling card – ropes, a sizeable knife, possibly enough drugs to sedate the victim – and had most probably planned everything about the attack, including the clean-up operation afterwards. When it came to planning a murder, men and women were very similar, but the taking of another person’s life was less likely to be random when it came
to a female killer. A lot would depend on whether Rick Shevlin was sedated or not, and whether the lipstick on the victim’s lips had belonged to the escort.

Pushing through the double doors into the Special Detective Unit, she practically bumped into Lynch. ‘Perfect timing,’ he said. ‘I’m about to chat to the hooker, Annabel Weston.’

‘I meant to ask you, Mark, about the hotel security cameras. You never mentioned them.’

‘Out of order.’

‘What?’

‘I know. The chief super wasn’t impressed either.’

She followed him along the corridor to Interview Room 4C, where a uniformed female officer stood to one side.

‘Shall we?’ he asked.

Kate nodded. ‘Her name is Annabel?’

He paused. ‘I doubt it’s her real name. In that line of business, it’s less about the truth and more about getting laid.’

There was no denying his smarmy inflection. Mark Lynch was letting his rank as SIO, senior investigating officer, go to his head, she thought. ‘Remember you said you’d check her brand of lipstick?’

‘And I will. I’m not a rookie.’

‘I didn’t say you were.’

This interview was going to be interesting. If she had to, she would rein in the detective’s fervour. As if he was reading her mind, he practically bounced into the room. ‘Annabel, good of you to wait for us.’

The escort stood up immediately. Kate could tell she was nervous, but she soon regained her composure. Even though she
was dressed in black leather and knee-high platform boots, like a dominatrix, she didn’t look tacky. As soon as she spoke, Kate noted her upper-class Southside accent. Her clothes were part of her working image, but not necessarily part of her.

‘I didn’t really have a choice,’ she said.

He smiled at her, then said, ‘This is Dr Kate Pearson, Annabel. She’s a psychologist.’

Kate reached out to shake the girl’s hand, noting how young she looked, and how expertly her makeup had been applied. With her raven black hair, she wouldn’t have looked out of place in a fashion magazine, but she wasn’t in the mood for shaking hands: she kept her arms firmly folded in front of her, like a form of protection.

‘I’ve met her kind before,’ she said, looking at Kate. ‘They want to mess with your head.’

‘Very well,’ Lynch replied, unconcerned. ‘Let’s talk about Rick Shevlin, the dead man in Room 122.’

‘He was alive when I left him.’ She practically spat the words. ‘Look, I don’t know anything. I didn’t even know the guy’s name. But now you say it, he did look like a Rick. It rhymes with prick.’

Lynch was standing too close to Annabel for Kate’s liking. It might have been an interview room, but it was as if he wanted to invade her personal space. ‘Let’s all sit down, shall we?’ she ventured.

‘Absolutely.’ Lynch waved Annabel to a seat, then pressed the record button for the interview, and took care of the opening preliminaries: time, date and the names of those present.

‘Let’s start, Annabel, with you arriving at the hotel room. Was there anything different or strange about Rick Shevlin?’

‘No. It was the same as any other job.’

‘Your first thought?’

‘Getting the guy to come off as fast as possible.’

‘Was he obliging?’ Lynch began walking in a circle around her. It seemed to Kate, and probably to Annabel, that he was physically inspecting her. ‘Did he want to do anything kinky?’

‘They usually have a wish list. The pervs pay better.’ She attempted a laugh.