A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two, Mark Hobson [notion reading list txt] 📗

over to the processor – lots of nourishment here, he thought in a rare moment of light-relief, as he dropped it into the chute.

Back at the chopping block, he applied the same knife to slice through Visser’s chest. Using an electric sternal saw to cut through the sternum, and a pair of long-handled bone shears to cut through the ribs, he worked diligently until the torso was fully opened up, which allowed him access to the internal organs. These he removed one by one, applying his basic anatomical knowledge gained through practice. These too went into the meat processor.

Going back to the corpse, which now had a fully-scooped out cavity in the torso, he methodically commenced to cut away the bones, snapping through the ribs and vertebrae with the shears, and moving on to the legs and arms and doing likewise, carefully dissecting the skeleton one piece at a time. The bones went into the second machine, the bone grinder, to be powdered up and turned into fertilizer for people’s gardens and allotments. The skull went in last.

When he was done Mr Trinh switched on the machines. There was a loud hum, followed by the ratcheting sound of gears cutting and crunching through the meat and bones, the stainless-steel machinery shaking and grinding as they worked away, to reduce the butchered remains into tiny pieces of processed meat and ground-up bone meal.

At the base of each machine a narrow rubber funnel fed the contents into a pair of steel tubs, and Mr Trinh watched them steadily fill to the brim. The machines kicked off automatically, and two lids were stamped and sealed into place over the tubs, and labels glued on the top with the barcodes marking the contents. One was labelled garden fertilizer, the other as pet food.

Lifting them one at a time, he carried them over to the walk-in refrigerator, pushed them to the back amidst identical stacks of tubs, and shut the heavy door. They would eventually be repackaged and distributed throughout the city to end up on store shelves.

All there was left to do was to steam clean the bench and floor and tools, wash down the apron and rubber gloves and boots, clean the visor with cleaning spray, and rinse out the machinery with water and filtered industrial-strength detergent.

On his way out he gathered up the neatly folded clothes.

Once laundered they would be as good as new. He would add them to his growing collection.

Mr Trinh locked up and laughed gently to himself.

“Hehehehehe.”

◆◆◆

It was late evening by the time Pieter reached the hospital. He asked to be directed to where Officer Groot was being kept, and was told she was on the second floor on the assessment ward and under observation, but the male admitting clerk pointed out in strong terms that visiting was not permitted this late. Pieter ignored him, and headed for the bank of elevators.

Kaatje was in her own private room with a police guard outside. She lay in the bed, her eyes heavily bandaged, but still awake. She turned her head as he pushed through the door, and he saw her flinch and tense.

“It’s me,” he whispered gently, and she relaxed back into her pillow.

After his hair-raising escape from the clinic, he had immediately called in some back-up, and within minutes a police ERT team had arrived on the scene, sealing off the car park and throwing up roadblocks to divert traffic away from the area. Shortly after, a well-armed assault squad had made a forced entry into the building. Led by the reassuring figure of squad leader Dyatlov – who had worked with Pieter on the Werewolf case back in the spring – they searched the place room-by-room and corridor-by-corridor, scouring every inch of the clinic for any sign of the patients or staff. But apart from the bodies of those that Pieter had shot during his escape, there had been no sign of anyone. They had all melted away into the night, either into the streets or across the frozen pond towards the nature park. It was a bitterly cold night, with temperatures set to plummet well below freezing, and everybody mostly agreed that they would not last long, dressed as they were in flimsy pyjamas.

Pieter wasn’t convinced. With Lotte involved, he knew this would not be a normal investigation. There would be aspects of this case that many of his colleagues would find so unusual, so out of their comfort zone, that many would dismiss as ridiculous, maybe the ramblings of a fraught and stressed out cop fresh back from mandatory sick leave, someone who was still so badly affected and traumatized that he probably should never have been allowed back at all. That’s what they would say, and Pieter could hardly blame them.

Yet equally he sensed a realization from them, during the few moments he had spoken to them and explained the situation, that they had been presented with an opportunity to get Charlotte Janssen once and for all, to settle scores after the nightmare that had gripped Amsterdam during the spring. They were determined that this time she would not get away.

Yet they must not forget about Nina Bakker, Pieter told himself.

They could not afford to be distracted and focused only on finding Lotte, not when there was a frightened twelve year old girl still being held captive somewhere.

Putting these concerns to one side for the moment Pieter turned his attention to Kaatje.

Her face was turned towards him still. She was on very strong pain relief, and an operation was planned to see if anything could be done to save her eyesight, but he knew the prognosis was poor. He’d seen for himself the damage done to her eyes, and the shock and distress and worry must be eating away at her, and so he reached out and took her hand in his, giving her fingers a reassuring squeeze.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, her chin trembling with barely-controlled emotion.

“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hung you