Private London - James Patterson [12]
‘Who found her?’ I asked.
The detective grunted in what could have been ironic amusement, could have been something stuck in his throat. ‘Little toerag by the name of Jason Kendrick. Fourteen-year-old one-man sodding crime wave. Raped and stabbed a teenage prostitute just two streets or so across. Scuttled here just like a rat when he heard the blues-and-twos. Then ran back out again as soon as he saw this,’ Harman said, pointing at the mutilated corpse.
‘Can’t say as I blame him,’ I said.
The detective grunted again. ‘He does. He ran straight into a police car.’ Harman smiled grimly.
‘And the girl?’
‘She’ll live. She fell on her own knife as she tried to fight him off but missed all her major organs. She was lucky.’
‘I guess, but that’s the kind of luck I can do without.’
‘I hear you.’
‘And the boy rapist?’
‘Again, he’ll live. Scrapes and bruises. Hit the side of the car and was winded, apparently. Couldn’t breathe and thought he was going to die.’ Harman twisted his mouth into something between a scowl and a smile. ‘Can’t say the world would have been the poorer if he had done.’
I didn’t comment. Seems to me there’s all kinds of bad luck in the world. The kind that gets you working the streets selling your body while you’re still little more than a child. The kind that gets you into trouble with the law when you are five years old and have been taught no different. The kind that gets you running into speeding police cars nine years later after upgrading to the sort of crime that means you’ll live out the rest of your childhood – and then some – in an institutional correction facility.
The kind of luck that gets you laid out on the cold floor of an old workshop. Being the centre of attention in a way that no one would have wished upon themselves in their worst nightmares.
I watched as Adrian put down the video camera, unzipped his case, took out his stills camera, screwed a lens onto its body, and stepped over to begin photographing the corpse.
He was using an MD180 which, according to Jack Morgan, was the best damn camera ever manufactured for the processing of crime scenes. He had insisted that Private London’s forensic unit should use the same and I reckon that Adrian would have kissed him for it. He certainly handled the camera as reverentially as he would a lover.
Wendy Lee stepped under the tape, suited-up but gloveless. I tossed her my car keys.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ I said.
‘Boss.’
I looked down again at the dead body. Like I said, it had been wrapped in heavy plastic. But rats had eaten away the central section, exposing the torso, pelvic area and upper ribcage. Bones protruded and much of the soft inner flesh and organs had been eaten away. There was no pooling of blood around the area.
A uniformed constable suddenly held a hand to his mouth and dashed out of the room.
I followed him out.
Not the start to the weekend that I had planned.
Chapter 16
‘WHO’S BEEN ASSIGNED to processing the body?’ asked Dr Lee.
She was looking at the sallow-faced DI who was pointedly not looking at the horror show that lay at his feet.
Ken Harman gestured as a tall woman entered. Wendy nodded at her pleased. Doctor Harriet ‘Harry’ Walsh had been her assistant at the time she had left the FSS when she’d been seduced by Private. And Wendy had never regretted her change of employer. Sure, she may not actually process the bodies at scenes of crime any more, but that was just data collection, after all. And it wasn’t the collection that was important – it was what you did with it afterwards that mattered. And Wendy Lee could now crank that data faster than the FSS by an order of magnitude.
‘What have you got for me, Ken?’ asked the pathologist as she snapped on the obligatory latex gloves and walked over. She dipped her head forward and tied back a glorious tumble of red-gold curls, causing them to sparkle momentarily in the bright artificial light before hiding them under a protective cap. She stood up again and at five foot eleven in her flat-soled shoes she made Wendy Lee feel dwarfed,