There was just a matter of another four girls linked with Kendwick, but while he couldn’t provide specific alibis, nor was there any direct evidence to suggest he’d been involved in their disappearances. After a year in limbo, the case against Kendwick was finally dropped on the provision that he wouldn’t bring charges against Fresno Police or Janey Horton. His lawyers advised him to get out of the country pronto, before circumstances could change.
‘That’s why this is short notice, Charlotte.’ Hardin was waving another piece of paper at Savage and Riley. This time Savage could see the initials NCA at the top. The National Crime Agency. The closest thing the UK had to the FBI. ‘We’ve got to make arrangements. We don’t want a media circus and we certainly don’t want a lynch mob. On the other hand, Kendwick needs to know that we’re watching him, that if he puts one foot out of line we’ll have him.’
‘Arrangements?’ Savage didn’t know where this was going. What could Malcolm Kendwick’s affairs have to do with Devon and Cornwall Police?
‘Yes.’ Hardin had begun to gather the papers together again. He slipped them back into the FedEx envelope. ‘The arrangements at Heathrow. Security on the journey back. What to do once the man is here.’
‘I don’t get it, sir.’ Savage turned to Riley but he could only shrug his shoulders again. ‘What do you mean, here?’
‘There’s no mystery, DI Savage. Here means here. Malcolm Kendwick is returning to the county of his birth. The fucker’s coming to Devon.’
‘Devon?’
‘Yes.’ Hardin stuck his tongue out over his bottom lip in consternation. ‘And you, DS Riley and DC Enders are the lucky buggers who have to go and get him.’
As he looked down from the plane, he could see the mountains below. Grey peaks poking above green forest. There were a million acres down there. A million acres of woodland and rock and dirt. Hundreds of streams and rivers, thousands of miles of tracks and trails, untold numbers of gullies and ravines and caves. By any measure, the Sierra National Forest was a true wilderness. A wilderness you could get lost in, a wilderness you could hide things in, a wilderness where searching was pretty much a waste of time. But they didn’t do much of that in the US anyway. Searching. Not in a country with well over ten thousand homicides a year. What was another handful to them? Nothing, that’s what.
Malcolm Kendwick eased himself back in his seat and thought about the horrors which had happened down there. The girls who had been murdered. Their faces had been all over the media. TV, newspapers, websites. Pictures culled from their friends and family or from the internet. Their names and biographies were indelibly fixed in Kendwick’s memories.
All five of them.
One: Stephanie Capillo, a student from Santa Barbara. Blonde hair. Slim, leggy, and with small, pert breasts. She’d been twenty-one. An English major at UCSB. Liked dogs and children. Helped out at an animal refuge. Went to church. Wore a purity ring. A fucking do-gooder by any standards.
Two: Amber Sullivan. A year younger than Stephanie. Long hair. Also blonde. A little chubby. Not quite the perfect all-American girl since she worked in a cheap burger joint and had a citation for smoking grass. Still, her mother’s pride and joy.
Three: Chrissy Morales. About as far removed from Stephanie as you could get. The most used image was one of the girl in leather thigh-highs and a PVC miniskirt. Petite and very cute and, yes, blonde again. Chrissy usually worked the streets near Highway 99 in Bakersfield. A hooker – the fact even acknowledged by her parents – she was inevitably at the bottom of any list of victims the media chose to display.
Four: Jessie Turner. Seventeen. Her pictures showed a fair-haired cheerleader with pom-poms and a lovely smile or else the news outlets played a video where she sang in a school musical. She’d auditioned for America’s Got Talent and, to hear her family talk, she was but one step away from superstardom.
Five: Sara Horton. Nineteen. Footloose. Had spent a year in South America. Just about holding down a job in some fashion outlet. Like all the others, blonde and a real beauty. Everything to live for, according to her mother.
Her mother …
He cast a glance at the window once more. The mountains were falling away now, the green forests gone as the aircraft crossed the state line and entered Nevada airspace. He shook his head. He wouldn’t see the wilderness again except in his memories. His life from now on would be like the land below: dusty, arid and dull. He sighed and then leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and slept.
Malcolm Kendwick was thirty-two years old. He’d lived in the US for ten years, moving from the UK when the internet start-up he’d founded had been bought up by a company in California. That company had itself been subsumed into the workings of one of the software giants and he’d moved on to another tech firm. He’d grown bored of that after several years and, having plenty of money, he’d jacked in the job and pursued other interests. A new start-up, some time spent catching waves on the coast, several months just bumming around. Now though, he was heading back across the Atlantic, and not through choice.
Janey Horton.
Sara’s mother had been blonde but she hadn’t been young. In her late thirties, Kendwick considered Janey Horton flesh gone sour, a world away from the smooth-skinned beauties who’d died down there in the wilderness, five miles below. Horton was one of the ones who did bother to search. But then you would, wouldn’t you? If it was your daughter who’d gone missing.
Sara had vanished from the small town of Morro Bay some one hundred and fifty miles up the coast from LA. Kendwick had been amused to hear she came from a little hamlet called Harmony a few miles along the Cabrillo Highway. Not that there was anything harmonious about her mother.
When her daughter had disappeared, Janey Horton had looked far and wide, but instead of finding Sara, she’d found him. And he hadn’t had any answers for her. Not at first. Later, when she’d begun to torture him, he’d blurted out stuff. About her daughter, about the others. Anything he could think of really.
And once she heard what he’d had to say, she’d decided to kill him.
You fuckin’ piece of crap. I’m goin’ to cut your fuckin’ dick off and feed it to you, understand?
He could well understand. She’d already carved three slices across his chest using a box knife, the thin blade like a razor the way the cuts opened up. Bloodless at first and then a weep of red painting thick lines down to his abdomen. He’d struggled, but try as he might, the ropes she’d secured him to the chair with held him tight. He’d opened up to her then, just like the cuts. Poured out what had happened, made up some story about how he’d been abused as a kid. Begged for his life. She wasn’t interested. She left him while she went to search for her daughter’s body. He’d been in that chair for two days. Crapping, pissing, bleeding. Crying, even.
Kendwick awoke from a fitful sleep. The horrors of the long hours he’d spent in Horton’s basement still haunted his dreams. He shivered and then pressed his face to the plane’s window once more. The aircraft had met the night now and straight out there was nothing but a winking of a light on the wing tip, beyond the light, blackness. The interior illumination made it impossible to see the stars, but peering down beneath the wing, a glow marked a small town. Surrounding villages and hamlets spread out below as if somebody had flicked fluorescent paint across a black canvas.
Or made a cut and watched blood spatter on the concrete floor of a dingy basement.
