Steele Time's Up.

She's Breaking the Ice.
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-9808-7676-2
Verlag: Craig Steele.
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, Band 1, 414 Seiten

Reihe: Time's Up.

Detective Matilda White confronts a violent drug cartel who are using addiction, horrific torture and staged executions to take hold of the city. She faces off with her all women team against an armed militia their vile leaders and the hideous creatures used to control with absolute terror.  Meth is just the tip of their bloody Iceberg. What hides beneath is pure evil. This savage battle is like no other.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Steele, Craig

Leseproben

Prologue
Matilda stares at the incident board. Her eyes are sore from the plane’s aggressive air vent. She rubs them with the back of her hand. “Great, now I’m going blind, just perfect,” she whispers. The room is small and brightly lit. Three desks lay out in a neat row facing the board which covers the whole wall. Disciplined. Tidy. Computer screens and pen holders are laid with precision on each one. A moose head stuffed and mounted hangs on the opposite wall. “Just popped in for a quick look did ya?” She salutes the moose with huge antlers, then puts her thumbs to her temples and wiggles both her hands, sticking out her tongue. “Wow! It looks so real,” she whispers, walking over to it. Stroking the moose under its hairy chin, she stares deep into the eyes then giggles to herself and returns to the board. To her work. “Concentrate Matilda, come on. You are a police officer. This place has probably got CCTV everywhere. You are being watched! This is the headquarters. Time to look your best! Oh no paranoia. I knew that sleeping tablet would mess with my head. Well at least the flight was quick. For me anyway, it was a blur.” It’s a long flight from her home country and the air vent just kept on blowing straight onto her face. She wipes under her eyes with her index finger and searches through her khaki jacket pockets. On the board are the scenes of horrific crimes. Details are pinned out with names and photographs of dead people next to them. There are many pictures of buildings and vehicles. Maps of a city and a group of large lakes are displayed, covered with red dot corpse markers. She looks closely at one picture of a twisted body laying face up on the tree edged grassy shoreline of a beautiful lake. A young man’s body. Naked. Her eyes go blurred, she blinks repeatedly trying to focus them both in, on the scene. “Damn it! Where did I put those eye drops?” She goes through her pockets again. Her khaki trousers have many of them down each leg. She pulls hard at the zips, checking inside each one. “What in the hell did I do with that stuff?” She is annoyed by the awkward mechanical openings. The naked man’s skin is covered in tennis ball sized, circular shaped deep abrasive wounds. He is completely deflated. Hollow. Another scene shows a man naked in the back of an old pickup truck, with the same type of injuries. He is flat too. Like a nasty costume. “Why no blood at the scene, killed elsewhere?” she asks, and ties her long blond hair into a knot on top of her head. “Where the hell is my scrunchy?” She goes through her pockets and takes a small clear plastic bottle of eye drops out, tilts back her head and squeezes hard. The little bottle whistles and spits. The soothing fluid floods her eyes and pours down her face. Relief. “Ah bliss, that feels good, my eyes are on fire.” She gasps, puts back the drops and gets a stack of big tissues out. Kitchen roll, super strong, super absorbent. The best essential, first aid kit. Her dad always made sure she had plenty of kitchen roll with her, whenever she went out. “A tip for easy living,” he would say, and was always right. Even at school when she was five he would somehow manage to fold away a whole roll of it, packed into her many pockets and lunch box. It always came in useful. Runny noses, tears, grubby hands, spilling a drink, the unmentionable stinky stuff and much worse. Her hair comes undone falling around her shoulders and over her face. She quickly checks her wild appearance in her smart phone. “Far the freak out, now I look like a zombie, where is my lip salve? My lips are worse than a petrol sniffing frill necked lizard’s!” She chuckles to herself, trying to look at the crime scene pictures. Regaining her focus, she backs away from the board in disgust. “What in the hell. Dear Lord, that looks really bad!” She moves in closer for a more detailed view of the strange injuries, puzzled by the weird images. “What in hell would make that mess? So, is that extreme paint balling? Yep I have heard of that over here. Yep. That’s what happens if you lose the game, death by paintball. These guys play hard and I thought footy was a crazy sport.” She continues to study the images. Moving swiftly and silently across the room behind her are two people in civilian clothes. Both are wearing police ID lanyards around their necks. Rich perfumes fill the air. They stop and stare. The young woman and middle-aged man watch. The man wears a dark blue suite, ironed up the legs and arms to a sharp knife edge. His hair is pure white, combed back and immaculate. He is tall and well built, obviously no stranger to the gym. The perfect male, it seems. The woman is tall, slim, dressed in a dark blue trouser suite. Her light brown hair is styled in a neat cut bob which frames a toned face and immaculate eyebrows. Both look tanned and healthy. The woman speaks, her voice is quiet and slow. A pleasant tone. “Hi Matilda. What in hell, indeed. We have never seen wounds like that either. Now paintballing, that’s something we have certainly not considered. I think we should.” She giggles and smiles at the man. Matilda turns, startled by the voice. Long snot strings swing from her nose, her cheeks are soaking from the eye drops and mascara. Her hair is hanging wildly across her strangely, zebra patterned face. “Fantastic! You caught me at my very best!” The young woman holds out her manicured hand towards Matilda. “Detective Jacqueline Saint. This is my boss, Detective Leon Lewis. He’s in charge of this case. I spoke with you on the phone.” “Hi Jacqueline. Sorry about the bad language there. Nice to meet you Leon. Great place you have here.” Matilda frowns at the board. “I hope those pictures up there have not upset you Matilda,” Jacqueline asks in a caring tone. She outstretches her hand further towards Matilda, as does Leon. They both look down confused as Matilda offers her hand out to shake, stuffed full of kitchen roll. “Crikey! What a great first impression! I look like I need a straight jacket don’t I? Far out, am I doing well, or what? You must think all people from my country are crazy cave dwellers, looking at the state of me. Well let me explain just a bit here. No the pictures are not too upsetting. Shocking, yes. Confusing, yes. I am, however, kind of falling to bits at this very moment, because of the flaming air con in the plane. Add to that jet lag and the sleeping tablet I took and, bingo!” Matilda takes a bow. All three of them smile. Matilda folds the kitchen roll and stuffs it into one of her many pockets. She spins her hair confidently into a bunch and pulls a scrunchy off her wrist, then captures the bun with it. “Found ya! Cool. Now I’m cooking with gas!” “Not to worry Matilda. You will have plenty of time to settle in. Leon, Detective Matilda White is from the Federal police Down Under, their Drugs Division.” They shake hands. “Matilda is here to hopefully help us out. She has had to travel a very long way.” Matilda gets to her feet. She takes a deep breath and seems to settle down. “Ice or Meth production here has dramatically increased,” she said, “so if I can help you, then we may be able to also stop it from getting into our country — hopefully. That is the idea, and not a bad one.” Detective Lewis passes Matilda a photograph of a closeup shot of the unusual wounds. She looks at the print, frowns and shakes her head. He explains the photos: “They have triangles of broken skin running into the middle, where there is usually a deep hole entering through the fat layers, rupturing all the blood vessels and going right down into the bone. The skin all around them is always raw, but with no bruising.” Matilda looks at another photograph of a man who has the same wounds on his face, but again, no sign of blood or bruising. Around both of the eyes are large round rings. The man has his eyelids held open wide by forensic tape. Both of his eyes are missing. In the middle of each empty socket is a deep hole revealing his white skull. Matilda stares in disbelief for a moment, then says, “What kind of sicko would pluck out the eyes?” Detective Saint points to the color map on the board of a massive lake system, and a large city. “We have four dead, found here,” she said, tapping the red dot locations around the lake and in the city. “Three are intact, one is in pieces. Some of the parts are still missing. All have the same injuries. All have ice in their bodies. We have no ID on any of them except the man from your home city, which is where your information kicks in.” Matilda opens her pocket book and flicks through the pages. “This guy is identified as Simon Crane, from Sydney Street in the city docks area. He was twenty-eight, born here in this country. He has a criminal record for possession of a small amount of ice in our country. That’s all pretty boring stuff! But he worked for a shipping merchant out of the city, so we think that’s the connection, and that’s how the ice is getting into our country so quietly. Hence, that’s why I’m here.” Jacqueline taps her red painted finger nail on the board and speaks. “So to sum up, we have no hard evidence or ID on the four. Killed...