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Cara nods a goodbye toward Ross, and they walk back down the track. Deakin holds the tape as Cara ducks under it. They pull off their suits, and she bleeps the car open. They climb inside, relieved to get some respite from the freezing cold.
Deakin lights a cigarette almost immediately and takes a long drag. He opens a window and blows smoke out into the cold air. She presses her fingers against her mouth, thinking, watching the SOCOs move around the scene.
Two women dead—no more than girls. She remembers their clothes: glittery tops, tights, and short skirts.
“On a night out?” she says.
“On a Monday?” He takes another drag, and she looks at him. Noah Deakin is the sort of person that smokes as if he’s been doing so since birth. And it fits with his overall look. Today he’s wearing a slim-fitting shirt, tie loosely done up, dark jeans. On anyone else it would look scruffy; on Deakin it’s effortlessly cool.
“Students?” Cara suggests.
“But what are they doing out here?”
They’re in the middle of nowhere, more than ten miles from the closest town.
“They’re walking home, he picks them up, abducts them?” she replies.
She eyes his cigarette enviously. She’s seen dead bodies before, sure, but nothing like this. What must have been going through their minds as he drove them here? As he handcuffed them? They must have been terrified.
Cara’s phone rings, interrupting her chain of thought. She puts it on speaker.
“Boss? Are you at the scene?” The voice of their DC—a diligent, quiet guy by the name of Toby Shenton—fills the car.
“We’re here. Anything back on the plates?” Cara asks him.
“Reported stolen last night,” he says, and Cara sighs. “They’re bringing the owner in for questioning.”
“Good. Noah’s sending you the names of the victims now. I want to know everything about them by the time we get to the station.”
“You don’t want me to—” he stutters, and Cara interrupts him.
“No, don’t worry, Toby. I don’t want you to notify the families. Leave that to us.” Next to her Noah is rolling his eyes. She smiles indulgently. “Just do the background.”
“Boss …” Shenton hesitates again. “Is it true, what they’re saying?”
Cara frowns. It was bound to get out. Details about a double murder like this, so unique, so graphic, would find their way around the Major Crimes team in minutes, as much as they might try to suppress it.
“Yes, it’s true.”
“That the victims were …”
Cara glances to Noah. He takes another drag of his cigarette, staring out the window.
She remembers the inside of the car. Two bodies, crumpled, broken. Two bloody necks: white bone, flesh, tendons visible. And two heads lying alongside. Casually discarded, wet hair trailing in blood, glassy eyes wide open.
“Yes,” she says. “Decapitated.”
CHAPTER
4
TIME PASSES IN a blur. Jess remembers the ambulance, asking about Alice, about Patrick, being wheeled into the hospital, bright lights overhead. She remembers the doctors, different faces in her line of sight.
When she wakes, she instantly knows where she is. She recognizes the noises: the beeping, the chattering in corridors, the squeak of comfortable shoes on a linoleum floor. She recognizes the feel of rough sheets against her skin.
She’s in a hospital ward; the blue curtain has been pulled around, isolating her from the rest of the patients.
She hears a creak of someone shifting in the chair next to her, and she turns. There’s a man there, a big guy, wearing a black jacket and scuffed jeans, with large heavy boots.
