Don Pendleton - Edge Of Hell

Dean started to count them as Goh walked with her, but the number of holes and casings was enormous.

“Sorry to ring you up so early,” Goh said, shrugging against the cold.

“A Ripper-style murder and a gunfight?” Dean asked, looking around.

“Yeah. At the other end of the alley, there’s disintegrating belt links as well as rifle ammunition. NATO caliber.”

“In English for those of us who don’t speak gun,” Dean said.

Goh smirked. “Someone used a full-blown machine gun, as well as at least three other weapons here last night.”

“Three weapons?”

“A pistol. And two different kinds of submachine gun. One was firing 9 mm shorts. One was firing 9 mm Luger rounds. And the pistol was a Magnum autoloader.”

Dean shook her head, running her fingers through her short blond hair. “Magnum.”

“Forty-four to be exact,” Goh told her.

Dean pursed her lips. “Someone with a Dirty Harry complex?”

“Someone took a big bite out of Sonny Westerbridge’s skull last night. And .44 Magnum and 9 mm machine pistol ammunition mixed in with what Sonny’s men had,” Goh replied. He plucked the casing from her fingertips and showed her the blank end stamp. “The Magnums were also unmarked.”

“But Sonny’s usually based out of Rotherhithe,” Dean said.

“Not anymore. He and nearly forty-five of his men are dead. Gunfire, explosions and one knifing.”

Dean shook her head. “I’m sure the knife job wasn’t like this.”

Not if it’s like our usual boy, she added mentally.

Goh looked at her for a moment, and Dean realized that the Asian detective was a recent addition to London’s finest. Homicides West, East and South, as well as the Serious and Organized Crime unit, were familiar with a pattern, over the years, of criminals and terrorists who came to brutal ends.

There were rumors that these were covert SAS operations, or even the work of men from overseas. When the homicide teams tried to come up with a clue, they were usually stonewalled. The stonewalling was frustrating, but since the victims were thugs and murderers themselves, the police reluctantly dropped the cases. One of these common links was the blank ammunition, and the predominant calibers used. Forty-four Magnum and 9 mm Luger.

They never had much more on this mystery force except that it was small, efficient and rarely brought harm to any bystanders. Dean decided to keep quiet about this, but she couldn’t help wonder if the death of Westerbridge and his men were related to this alley fight in any way other than the mystery fighter.

“Two sides shooting at each other and using the same kind of phantom ammo,” Dean said. “Any information on the victim?”

“No bullet holes in her, except for what looked like an old scar on a flap of her stomach,” Goh told her.

Dean walked toward the body, Goh on her heels. She knelt before the dead woman. The body had been disturbed, half pushed onto its side, probably by fighters bumping into her. The grime on the floor of the alley was scuffed with boot marks where big, heavy men had battled.

“Are we done taking pictures of the body?”

Goh nodded toward the crime-scene photographers. “They’ll be taking her to forensics in a few minutes.”

Dean sighed. “I’ll look around here and try to get a feel for the crime scene.”

Goh tilted his head. “You seem to have a feeling already, Melissa.”

Dean swept the alley, drifting off for a moment, looking at the pockmarks from weapons, smelling the stink of urban warfare and serial murder all sewn up into a tiny corridor of stone and garbage. It was a claustrophobic place where men had tried to kill each other, and one presumably innocent woman lost her life.

The vibes given by the scene were strange.

If enigmas had a scent, Melissa Dean now knew how to recognize it.

Sometimes, if you’ve been to enough murder scenes, you developed a taste for what it was all about. Some were madness. Some were fury. Fueled by jealousy, betrayal, loneliness—she’d had felt them all.

This was different. There was no emotion in this.

The body was too perfectly filleted, too neatly placed. Just how the other Ripper kills were set up.

But the addition of Westerbridge’s killer…that was a new twist.

How could it not be? The kind of firepower used doesn’t show up more than once a year in London’s back streets, she thought. Now twice in one night?

There’s no such thing as coincidence.

Dean shook her head. “Where are you heading now?”

“Back to the station. Need a lift?” Goh offered.

“I have my own wheels,” Dean replied. “But I’ll meet you there.”

The mental images of two horrors, one a century and a half old, and one thoroughly modern formed an amorphous blob of murder and mayhem in the middle of the city she was sworn to protect. The burden hung on her, troubling her on the drive back.

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