Hell

Recent Titles by Hilary Norman

The Sam Becket Mysteries

MIND GAMES

LAST RUN
*

SHIMMER
*

CAGED
*

HELL
*

BLIND FEAR

CHATEAU ELLA

COMPULSION

DEADLY GAMES

FASCINATION

GUILT

IN LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP

LAURA

NO ESCAPE

THE PACT

RALPH'S CHILDREN
*

SHATTERED STARS

SPELLBOUND

SUSANNA

TOO CLOSE

TWISTED MINDS

IF I SHOULD DIE (written as Alexandra Henry)

*
available from Severn House

First world edition published 2011

in Great Britain and in the USA by

SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.

Copyright © 2011 by Hilary Norman.

All rights reserved.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Norman, Hilary.

Hell. – (Sam Becket mysteries)

1. Becket, Sam (Fictitious character) – Fiction.

2. Police – Florida – Miami – Fiction. 3. Serial murder

Investigation – Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.

I. Title II. Series

823.9′2-dc22

ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-138-5 (ePub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8074-1 (cased)

ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-378-6 (trade paper)

Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

This ebook produced by

Palimpsest Book Production Limited,

Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.

For Poppy, and all the other beautiful family dogs we've been lucky enough to share our lives with. Great characters, every single one.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My thanks to the following:

Howard Barmad; Batya Brykman; Special Agent Paul Marcus and Julie Marcus, to whom I owe so much for putting up with my endless questions yet
again
(and how would I ever manage without the ‘real' Sam and Grace?). Grateful thanks to Amanda Stewart (who I'm going to miss so much); many thanks to James Nightingale; and to Euan Thorneycroft. Thanks, too, to Helmut Pesch, Carolin Besting, Rainer Schumacher and Wolfgang Neuhaus; and, as always, to Sebastian Ritscher. Very special thanks to Helen Rose – always there to answer my questions! Thanks to Jeanne Skipper. And as always, I'm so very grateful to Dr Jonathan Tarlow – and to Sharon Tarlow, who also helped with this one.

And finally, and most especially, as always, to Jonathan.

Sam Becket

‘Hell can wait.'

Jerome Cooper

ONE

April 12

I
f Jason Leonard, Grace Lucca Becket's first patient of the day, had not arrived early, and if she had not been running a little late after getting Joshua, her two-and-a-half-year-old son, to his preschool, then Jason would not have been kept waiting for her out on the deck, and it might have been Grace who'd spotted it first.

It
.

After which she would almost certainly have called Sam – her husband, a detective in the Violent Crimes Unit of the Miami Beach Police Department – who would probably have come straight home. And Sam might have taken a look and then called the bomb squad, who might have decided to detonate a controlled explosion (better safe than sorry), in which case they might not have found out for a while, if ever, what exactly had been inside the package.

As it turned out, however, Jason had been alone when he'd noticed it.

And being fourteen years old, and bored and a little edgy – since, though he found Doc Lucca pretty cool for a shrink, their sessions had been getting tougher of late – and since one of his
things
was that he couldn't look at nice stuff without wanting to touch it, wanting to make it his
own
, that was just what he had done.

Because it looked neat.

And kind of weird too.

Which made it irresistible.

It had been the dinghy he'd noticed first – a mini-dinghy, like a kid's inflatable toy – tied up to a cleat on the dock piling beyond the Doc's deck, bobbing up and down in the water, bright yellow plastic shining in the sunlight.

Something inside it.

A plastic box, like a Tupperware container.

Something else inside that.

Jason had looked around before he'd squatted and reached down into the dinghy, in case someone was watching him, in case this was a trick – someone trying to catch him out, maybe – though no one except his mom and the Doc knew he was here, so it couldn't have anything to do with him.

Which meant, he guessed, that it probably had something to do with the Doc's little kid, though Joshua was only two, so Jason doubted he was allowed near the water . . .

And all he wanted was a closer look at what was inside the box.

Which was, as it turned out,
another
box, one of those fancy gift types – red with a white ribbon fixed to the lid, so you didn't have to untie anything, just ease off the top . . .

A second plastic container.

Something else inside that.

Something weird.

Jason stopped, stayed very still, listening for sounds of Dr Lucca. He already knew that what he ought to do was leave this alone, put the lid back on the gift box, stick that back in the bigger plastic container, put the whole creepy thing back in the little boat.

Because, to tell the truth, it
was
creeping him out now.

But the fact was, Jason was incapable of doing the
right
thing at moments like these. He could never seem to stop himself from looking at things he was not allowed to see, like the filing cabinet beside his dad's desk when he visited him at his office, and the drawer in which his mom stacked her panties and brassieres, but where she also kept the gross pink vibrator that he knew she'd die rather than have him see – and
that
was an image to make him sick to his stomach . . .

Same deal with any of the things he'd stolen.

He couldn't help himself.

Didn't really
want
to help himself, he'd admitted once to the Doc, probably because the stuff he wasn't meant to see or possess was usually way more interesting than the stuff he was allowed access to.

So now he did what he'd known he would all along.

He opened the box.

Grace had just shut Woody, the family's dachshund-miniature schnauzer cross, into the den, because Jason Leonard was not easy around dogs, when she heard the teenager's cry.

Of fear, she thought, instantly, or maybe pain, her own alarm rising as she quickened her pace, hurried through the kitchen out to the deck, and saw the teenager backed up against the wall of the house.

‘Jason, what's wrong?'

He didn't answer, but he was on his feet, did not appear injured.

He was staring at something – a number of things – lying near the guard rail between the deck and the water, and Grace's own gaze flicked over them, took in plastic containers, a scarlet box, white ribbon.

And then she saw that it was none of those things that transfixed him.

It was something else, something a darker, shinier red.

Blood.

Grace looked back at Jason, scanned him from his red hair right down to his scuffed gray Keds. ‘Jason, where are you hurt?'

‘I'm not.' The boy's voice was scared, guilty. ‘I'm sorry, Doc.'

Grace's eyes flicked back to the mess.

Saw that it wasn't
just
blood on the ground.

‘Dear God,' she said, just as the bad smell of it reached her.

Fleeting relief washed over her that Joshua would be safe at preschool until noon. And then that relief was gone, because this was
trouble
again; this was, at the very least, more unpleasantness, right in their own backyard.

‘It was in that box,' Jason said.

Grace looked at the scarlet box, its white-ribboned lid beside it, and at the two empty Tupperware-type containers close by.

‘I knew I shouldn't have looked,' the teenager went on. ‘But that is
way
disgusting, Doc. You know what it is, don't you?'

Jason knew, because he'd seen one just like it in a horror DVD he and Alex Bailey had ripped off a week or two back.

‘I know what it is,' Grace said quietly.

Anatomy 101.

No doubting it.

It was a human heart.

No bomb squad, but a different kind of explosion of activity happening out on the Beckets' deck now.

Detective Sam Becket and his partner, Alejandro Martinez, were on the scene, checking things out for themselves because, though the Becket house was in the official jurisdiction of the Bay Harbor Islands Police Department, and – where violent crime was suspected, in the authority of Miami-Dade – this was
home
for Sam, his wife, Grace, a respected child and adolescent psychologist, and their young son, and no one was raising objections.

Crime Scene had been there a while, but Dr Elliot Sanders, recently appointed Chief Medical Examiner for the county – still overweight, still smoking and drinking more whiskey than was good for him, but also still the best ME Sam or Martinez knew – had dropped everything to come take a look too; his own special courtesy for a detective he'd come to know well and to respect over a number of years. Along with Sanders, there was a small team of technicians from his office, and after everyone had finished photographing
in situ
, making sketches of the scene and gathering what evidence they could, the little yellow dinghy, the quarter-inch polypropylene line that had secured it to the cleat with a rolling hitch knot, and its mysterious, grisly contents would be removed to the Medical Examiner's Office.

And the process would begin to trace the person to whom the heart belonged.

Best-case scenario, it might turn out to be someone already deceased; an organ donor, perhaps – a heinous enough crime, given the heart's lifesaving transplant potential.

Or it could be something else altogether.

A homicide victim, mutilated post-mortem.

‘Or maybe before.' Martinez, a stocky, middle-aged Cuban-American, voiced the thought, his rounded, expressive face and sharp dark eyes conjuring up images that disgusted him.

‘Don't even go there,' Sam told him.

He was looking at Grace, a few feet away in their lanai, seeing the new strain on her lovely face and hoping against hope that the tying up of the miniature dinghy to their property had been a random choice, that this thing might just as easily have happened to any of the island's other residents.

Except Sam did not believe that.

Had good reason not to.

And he could see, from Grace's expression, that neither did she.

TWO

The New Epistle of Cal the Hater