LITMIR.BIZ

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the death penalty until he’d been let off on a technicality. Several other newspapers naturally took the opposing viewpoint. For them, Kendwick was a serial killer who, with his good looks and charm, was following in the footsteps of Ted Bundy. What’s more, he was going to be deported from the States, which meant he’d be returning to the United Kingdom where he would undoubtedly wreak havoc. No female within fifty miles of wherever he ended up would be safe.

      Hardin snorted. He picked up a sheaf of papers and waved them at Savage.

      ‘Funny, isn’t it, how when one of our own is in a foreign country they’re innocent, and yet when a foreigner commits a crime over here they’re guilty as sin.’

      ‘Sir?’ Savage was keen to get to the bottom of what Hardin was on about, why she and Riley had been called in.

      ‘Well, Charlotte, according to this Kendwick is guilty.’ Hardin waved the papers once more to emphasise his point. ‘It’s a transcript of the confession Kendwick gave to the cop. You’ve read the story, what was her name …?’

      ‘Janey. Janey Horton.’ Savage hadn’t cared much about the Kendwick case, but she had kept up with the news on Officer Horton. ‘Tough cookie. Dedicated.’

      ‘Trust you to know her name,’ Hardin said. ‘Five thousand miles but peas in a pod, hey?’

      Officer Horton had been with the Fresno Police Department in California. Her daughter, Sara, had vanished, and Horton had become convinced that Malcolm Kendwick was responsible. Evidence – hard evidence – had been in short supply, but that hadn’t stopped Horton. She’d kidnapped Kendwick and imprisoned him in the basement of her house. Over a period of several days she’d extracted a confession from him along with the location of her daughter’s body. Leaving Kendwick tied up, she went out into the wilderness of the Sierra National Forest to find her daughter.

      ‘She did what any parent would do, sir.’ As she spoke, Savage was aware of Riley casting a glance in her direction. ‘Horton simply wanted the truth about what happened and justice for the man responsible.’

      ‘Well, she didn’t get it, did she?’

      No, Savage thought, but not for want of trying.

      Horton had spent two days searching, eventually discovering the corpse of a woman a good while dead, but definitely not her daughter. She returned to her house to find Kendwick had escaped. She hurried round to his apartment, but he’d fled from there too. Using contacts in the police department, she traced his credit card to a motel on the outskirts of Sacramento. She drove to the place intending to recapture Kendrick, but the owner of the motel grew suspicious when he saw her dragging Kendwick screaming from his room.

      Local officers, responding to a 911 call from the owner, arrived and Kendwick pleaded innocence, claiming Horton was carrying out a vendetta against him. The officers were all for arresting Horton until she showed them a video on her phone. The video was the confession from Kendwick and once they’d seen it they arrested Kendwick instead. And that should have been that, the whole thing done and dusted. On the video, Kendwick admitted killing Horton’s daughter and several other girls. A forensic team hurried out into the wilderness and quickly located the remains of five women, including those of Sara Horton. All that remained was a lengthy trial and, hopefully, a minimal number of years on death row before Kendwick crapped himself as he was strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection.

      It wasn’t to be.

      The evidence on the phone was inadmissible. No room for doubt. This wasn’t some obscure technicality which Kendwick’s lawyer had come up with. It was obvious. Horton had tortured Kendwick and filmed herself doing so. She’d sliced him with a knife and poured battery acid on his feet. Held a gun to his head and threatened to kill him. Anything Kendwick had said in the video couldn’t be used as evidence, couldn’t even be used as a lead to point to other evidence. Kendwick was untouchable.

      Still, Fresno detectives worked double shifts for no extra pay trying to sift through the material Horton had gathered in her initial search for her daughter. The material which had led her to Kendwick in the first place. The problem was much of the evidence was circumstantial: Kendwick had been spotted at a park where Sara Horton often hung out with friends. He’d been seen jogging past the clothing store where she worked. He had a membership at a gym where she once had a part-time job. None of which was particularly incriminating. It looked at first as if Officer Horton had followed a hunch, used a dollop of female intuition, perhaps consulted the grounds in her morning coffee. Then Horton told her fellow officers about a rucksack she’d found in Kendwick’s car. Inside were handcuffs, a full-face balaclava and a pair of gloves, a roll of gaffer tape, some rope, a hammer and several trash bags. Kendwick claimed the items were nothing special, but Horton told the detectives they comprised a rape kit. It didn’t matter. Horton’s search of the car was ruled illegal and the evidence couldn’t be used.

      All hope of a conviction now rested on a scrunchy discovered in Kendwick’s apartment, a single strand of blonde hair entangled in the shiny red material. A blonde hair which DNA analysis proved belonged to Sara Horton.

      Kendwick was questioned about the scrunchy, but, as advised by his lawyer, said nothing more than he’d picked up the hairband in the park one day. Since Kendwick had long hair himself, which he kept tied back, the explanation was all too believable. Short of water boarding, which several detectives were keen to try, Kendwick was on the home straight. 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

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