Grind Their Bones Read Free Page A

fighting away the details to let the association stew for a while in my mind. I'd solved my very first murder case off the back of a niggling thought that had continued to crop up when I was out running, the drowning murder of an eight-year-old boy called Wayne Brown by his sixteen-year-old brother that had looked like a tragic accident, and it had taught me to listen to my instincts.
    By the time I found him he was lying under the surface with his mouth and eyes open wide like a fish.
    The teenager's words had caused an immediate reaction in me, an inner spark was the best I could do to describe it, as he'd spoken in a monotone that was devoid of emotion. I was experienced enough of policing in general to know that people respond to grief and loss in different ways, so his demeanour in itself wasn't necessarily unusual. It was something else that bothered me, but I couldn't put my finger on exactly what it was. When inspiration struck, it was as I negotiated a muddy footpath while out on a run, weaving from one side of the path to the other, trying to avoid stepping up to my ankles in the worst of the puddles and cursing the sudden unanticipated change from light drizzle to full-on deluge.
    The puddles.
    I'd stopped dead, waiting for the swirl of realisation to become more coherent, oblivious to the rain. Then it had hit me. Benjamin Brown was lying about at least one important aspect of his brother's death. I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of the facts in the case, so I knew that it had rained heavily the night before the little boy had died, and that meant that the rain water would have turned the water in the woodland pond as muddy with run-off and sediment as the puddles that I'd been dodging as I ran. He would not have been able to see Wayne's body under the surface of the water, yet he found it before anybody else knew it was there.
    The realisation had been like lightning striking, and I had abandoned my run and my precious day off to go back in and re-read Ben Brown's witness statement. Sure enough it talked about the search for the missing boy, and how he had spotted his little brother by chance just beneath the surface from up on top of one of the muddy embankments surrounding the secluded hollow. The older boy had quickly started changing his story under closer questioning, with something menacing fighting to surface in his eyes at each additional strand of his made up story that I pulled away, and the rest was now history.
    I snapped back into the present again - past glories weren’t of any use at the moment - and ran back through sections of the Grey Man's letter in my mind.
    It's about possession, the desire to keep them close even though I must leave most of their physical bodies where they lie. When I hold my sacred communion with their flesh and blood we cease to be alone and apart and we become one, our molecules fusing together forever into one glorious whole.
    What molecules do you suppose we share in common, Zara?
    I’d committed the strange note to memory after multiple reads, and the words ran on repeat loop as I continued on my way. Were they a veiled threat or something else entirely?
     
     

Chapter 7
     
    ‘So what do you think about Doctor Hardwick’s analysis, Wade?’
    Detective Supt Fred Russell always looked like he’d trapped his dick in his zipper, even on a good day, although there was an unproven rumour circulating that he’d once almost smiled back in the eighties after solving a long-running and difficult to crack serial rape case.
    Today was not a good day, and there was an even more livid red than usual creeping into his round face; today he was preparing a press release designed to appeal to those who might know our elusive killer, and it was on the doctor’s instructions. Russell looked like he’d been presented with a shit sandwich and then asked to eat it with great relish for public viewing. Looking at his complexion and bulging waistband, I started to fear for his