Michael Fowler - Heart of the Demon

* * * * *

It was with a feeling of déjà vu that Hunter, Grace, Tony Bullars and Mike Sampson pulled up before the cordoned off area on the Manvers site. Whilst travelling there they had learned that the second body was in fact a skeleton and that what appeared to be girl’s school clothing was still clung to the defleshed bones.

The team could see that Scenes of Crime, working with the forensic team, were already erecting a second white tent around the site of the decomposed body.

The MIT team viewed the activity before them. The one good thing about this recent discovery was that the majority of the resources they required were already on site.

Hunter was duly briefed by the uniformed officer at the entrance to the scene that the other experts who were required to scrutinize this discovery of skeletal remains were already on their way. He knew from that information that Professor Lizzie McCormack and the body recovery team would be soon joining them.

Hunter realised that for the next few hours very little evidence would be gathered but things would be frantic. The Recovery team would need to excavate and remove the cadaver to a climate-controlled Pathology lab as soon as possible because he knew that now the body had been exposed there would be further acceleration in its decomposition. At the same time the body recovery team would be ensuring that the chain of evidence remained intact for the remaining forensic team.

He stood, hands on hips surveying the scene. His instinct was telling him that this was now a serial murder enquiry. He saw that Tony, Grace and Mike had already passed through the ‘Police line do not cross’ tape, and were busy organizing and briefing officers as to their respective roles in this investigation.

Within twenty minutes Professor McCormack had landed at the site. Hunter spotted her by the open boot of her car, stepping into her forensic suit.

Within five minutes he saw her heading towards him, bouncing on the balls of her feet, and he was sure that a perverse grin was stretching across her face, as though she took great pleasure in probing around dead bodies.

“My my, we are busy little bees,” she said in her soft Scottish voice as she drew ever closer.

Soon she was easing herself down over the disturbed earth around the grisly corpse. It was devoid of any flesh, a perfect set of white teeth grinned back from the dirty brown skull, and hanks of coarse and matted dark brown hair still adhered to it. It was dressed in a white blouse and dark blue skirt, and although the upper parts were exposed most of the legs still remained covered in the surrounding red clay soil.

The Professor probed around the skeleton with a scalpel, leaning forwards occasionally, raising the flimsy cotton blouse and skirt and examining some of the bones. She tutted and clucked as she moved around the makeshift grave on her knees. Then she looked up at Hunter, eye raised above spectacles.

“This is a difficult one for me,” she announced. “This body, unlike the other one you found a couple of weeks ago is completely devoid of any tissue whatsoever. This is not my skill area I’m afraid. What I can tell you is that this is the body of a young teenage girl.”

“How’s that?” Hunter asked.

The pathologist hovered her scalpel above the pelvic area of the skeleton and began to rotate it. “These flared bones on the hips are a dead giveaway. This is called the sciatic notch. It spreads as a young woman. Nature’s way of accommodating a foetus. Also look at the forehead.” Still using the scalpel as a pointer she aimed it towards the skull. “The frontal lobe is flat. In a man’s there is more of a slope.” Lizzie McCormack studied the body a little longer, before giving off a long winded “hmm.”

She turned to Hunter. “What I can also tell you is that injuries to the bones in her neck suggest she has been strangled again just like the others.” She paused a second, “And I can also tell you that this looks very much like the handiwork of our killer again.” She pointed to a clear plastic bag poking upwards through loosened soil, its transparency masked here and there by clinging detritus. “If I’m not mistaken that’s another one of those playing cards. Looks like the three of hearts to me.”

She pushed herself up from the ground. “That’s as far as I can take things for you I’m afraid. I’ll put in a call to check how long the forensic anthropologist will be before he can get here. It’s a colleague of mine so I can speed things up for you. He’ll collect and examine the bones and tell you how long the body has been buried here and hopefully help identify her for you.”

As the Professor edged away from the site, Hunter saw over her shoulder that the forensic recovery team had just arrived and were taking out the Ground Penetrating Radar, which would determine if there were even more bodies buried in the vicinity.

* * * * *

Josh: Hi Kirsty.

Kirsty: Hi Josh, howa yoo?

Josh: yeah im gud thanx.

Kirsty: wot u doin?

Josh: listenin to sum artic monkeys, jus chillin.

Kirsty: that’s cool.

He had been trawling the social network sites on the Internet for weeks, tracking the profiles of a number of people, picking up the language and learning how to develop a character from a mixture of the various sites. It had been time consuming but all too easy.

He’d made copious notes at first in his attempt to create a believable character with substance. To step inside the head of a typical seventeen year old boy he had searched the music sites for hours on end, selecting the most popular bands and solo artists, and then he had followed up with a little research about each one to enable him to convince his audience. He had also done ‘dummy runs’ to ‘test drive’ Josh, developing convincingly his use of the teenage text language on the websites. It had been a worthwhile exercise and he had hooked several unsuspecting teenage girls in the three weeks he had been socialising across the networks. One thirteen year old had even exposed her cute little breasts to him, which he had captured on his web-cam.

By the time he had ‘hooked up’ on Kirsty’s site he was an accomplished player. She had been wary at first and tested him on several occasions, but his research had stood him in good stead and within a week he knew that she firmly believed she was conversing with seventeen year old ‘Josh’.

Josh: saw u at skwl the othr day. u lukd sad.

Kirsty: wot wer u doin nr my skwl.

Josh: jus passin lukin 4 a pretty face.

Kirsty: u r makin me blush. No serious wot wer u doin nr my skwl.

Josh: jus passin. Goin 2 the park for a game of footie. Why wer u sad.

Kirsty: I wantd 2 stay over at my friends wiv sum mates cos of skool brake up but mum wudnt let me cos of wat append to Rebecca. We ad a row she freakd out.

Josh: do u want me 2 cheer u up?

Kirsty: wat do u mean?

Josh: u r cute u kno. Do u want to meet up.

Kirsty: r u askin me out?

Josh: Of cors.

Kirsty: but I hardli kno u.

Josh: u do wev talkd for ages on this chat room. Uv seen my foto. Don’t u like me.

Selecting the right photograph and then altering it in his Adobe Photoshop programme had been another worthwhile project. He was quite proud of how physically good-looking he had made his character.

Kirsty: u luk nice. u sound nice.

Josh: well then lets meet.

Kirsty: ok but I can’t 4 a few days. ive been grounded. in fact im supposed 2 b doin mi bedroom now instead of chattin wiv u. mum wil freak again if she catchs me.

Josh: wen can u get out then?