Grace pressed the bell.
They heard a buzz from the interior, but there was no response. After a brief pause, he tried again.
Still no response.
Ken Anakin radioed the officers he’d dispatched to the rear, asking if they could see into the flat. After a minute his radio crackled into life.
The woman PC spoke, “Sir, it’s hard to see in because there are no lights on and it’s dark. But it looks like there’s a man in an armchair. We’ve rapped on the window a couple of times, but he’s not reacted. I think he might be a G5.”
That was the police terminology in Brighton for a sudden death.
Anakin thanked her and relayed the information to Grace and Branson.
“Push the door in,” Grace said.
“I’ve got a bosher in the car,” the man-mountain said.
“May not need it.”
Branson braced himself, then kicked out hard with his size eleven boot, straight below the keyhole. With a splintering crack the door swung open, part of the frame going with it, the bottom of the door sweeping over a pile of mail that lay on the mat.
Grace breathed in a rank smell.
Not the smell of death that he’d been expecting; this was more a laboratory smell.
Preservatives. Formalin?
He entered first, followed by Glenn Branson, Anakin, and the man-mountain. They were in a narrow but smart hallway, with a red carpet, and recently painted cream walls, hung with professionally framed photographs of feet.
Ladies’ feet.
Extremely beautiful feet.
The toes of one were curled around a snake. A lighted cigarette was held between two toes of another. As they walked toward the far end of the hall, the rank smell grew stronger.
Grace walked through an open door at the far end, into a large, elegantly furnished living room, and froze.
Directly in front of him, seated in an armchair with his back to the window, sat a man, staring at him, a hand resting on each arm of the chair.
Motionless.
He was in his early fifties and had the air of a provincial bank manager. Short, neat, graying hair. A gray pin-striped suit, a pale gray shirt, and one of those rather naff matching tie and pocket handkerchiefs, both in purple. All that was missing were his shoes and there was a good reason for that.
His feet were missing too.
His legs ended just below the bottoms of his trousers, in two blackened, cauterized stumps. Darkened bloodstains lay on the carpet beneath them. In the man’s slowly blinking eyes, Grace could see a vision of hell.
He could see something else too, as his eyes became increasingly accustomed to the dimness in here. One entire wall of the room was full of rows of glassed-in shelving, like in a museum. Lined along each row of shelves were perfectly preserved human feet.
“Rodney Tidy?” Grace asked.
“Help . . . me.”
The voice was weak and parched, more a faint croak.
Grace ran forward, and it took him only moments to realize why the man was motionless.
Arms, hands, the back of the head, shoulders, and the entire spine were all bonded to the chair.
With superglue.
LEYTON GRAY, ACCOMPANIED BY HIS solicitor, an intensely serious woman in her early thirties, sat opposite Carol Jordan and another colleague in the small, starkly furnished interview room.
For the benefit of the CCTV recording Jordan announced, “DCI Carol Jordan and DS Paula McIntyre interviewing Leyton Gray under caution in the presence of his solicitor, Susan Ansell. The time is 10:05 a.m., Wednesday, July twelfth.”
Then she leaned forward. “Mr. Gray, can you tell us your relationship with Mr. Rodney Tidy?
“Rivals. We’ve always been rivals.”
Ignoring his solicitor’s signals for him to keep quiet, he went on.
“I had to stop him. I had to, somehow. He always beat me to the best feet. He just always did. He told me once how much he loved to stare at feet. That he loved nothing more than to sit in a room and look at his latest trophies. So I obliged him. I’ve stopped him from ever getting to feet ahead of me again, and he gets his dream, to sit and look at feet. Did you see his own up there? They’re not exactly beautiful, but I thought it would be a nice touch. That is, of course, if he’s smart enough to understand my signal. Rodney, old boy, you’ve been de-feeted.”
KATHY REICHS AND LEE CHILD
I WAS FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1997 when Killing Floor introduced the world to a quiet wanderer named Jack Reacher. Kathy Reichs also came along in 1997 when Déjà Dead brought us forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
Kathy freely admits that both she and Temperance have the same curriculum vitae. Getting the science right is important to Kathy, and she routinely turns to her own real-life experiences as a forensic anthropologist when writing a Temperance Brennan adventure. With Reacher I’m constantly asked if he’s based on me. Truth be told, there’s a lot of me inside him. It’s almost unavoidable that a character created by a writer not be a little autobiographical. Reacher is pretty much a wish fulfillment for both me and the reader. What I (or they) would be, if we could all get away with it. How he acquired his name is simple. Both I and Reacher are tall. So back in the 1990s, while writing Killing Floor and grocery shopping, my wife remarked that “if the writing didn’t work out I could always be a reacher in a supermarket.”
Talk about fortuitous.
In creating our story, Kathy and I both agreed on the rough outline, then we wrote in turns. She likes things all planned out. I prefer to wander. But we found a happy medium in which to work. I must confess to being a little nervous working with her, given her reputation for thoroughness, but we discovered that our actual writing styles are somewhat similar. This sometimes happens with collaborations. It helped that we’ve both written screenplays. Kathy with the television series Bones, which is based on her characters, and myself with my daughter. There’s a process to fashioning a screenplay that’s different from crafting a novel. Much more give-and-take is there between the various contributors, since rarely is a screenplay written by only one person. Luckily, we were both comfortable with that process.
And the result is an intriguing adventure that involves— Faking a Murderer.
FAKING A MURDERER
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 0940 EST
“OVER THE PAST DECADE, THIS academy has taken a good hard look at itself. We have evaluated the theory and methodology underlying each of our disciplines. Formalized statements on ethics. Developed clear and open paths toward board certification.”
The hall was dim, the stage blazing like a Hollywood set. She could see little from the podium. Rows of shadowy heads. Here and there, a triangle of white bisected by a tie. A wink of reflection off a plastic-sheathed badge.