The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

half the house as an income in the summer? The location would have been perfect for holiday lets. Air B&B’s were all the rage now and many people topped up their income with a few weeks letting out rooms or annexes each year.

King moved on, did not give it anymore thought. The room he wanted was the master bedroom. Not because of what he knew he would find, but because it was the room with the drawn-closed curtains and the partially opened window.

The smell was worse in this room. There were two people in here and the room faced south, gaining more sunlight on the glass for most of the day. It was a few degrees warmer than the rest of the house, captured the heat more. King could see this from the great shaft of sunlight that shone through the gap in the curtains. Dust hung in the light, intensifying its appearance like a search beam. Or a stage light. This particular stage light, however, shone onto the faces of two dead bodies.

The man had put up a fight. He had taken a beating. King eased the curtains back and the room grew brighter. He could see blood and bruising at the edge of the man’s mouth and eyes. The mark across his face was lightly chequered. Something had struck him hard and had left a distinct pattern. King knew what it was instantly. Familiarity through years of exposure to the design, and use in the field. At the extremity of a rifle’s shoulder stock, there is a chequering, either etched in wood or plastic, or a retro-fitted metal butt-plate. It formed a grip on clothing, allowed a shooter to keep the rifle tight to their shoulder and not slip after a shot.

The man had taken a rifle butt in the face, but it wasn’t the cause of death. That had come from the same weapon that had killed the dog downstairs. And the fact that he had been hit with one weapon and shot with another told King there had been two people up here.

He looked at the man’s knuckles. They were soft hands, that of an office worker, a lawyer or a doctor. There was a cut on the right knuckle and King noted to get the young woman leading the forensic investigation to test for DNA. Maybe he got some of the other guy’s saliva or blood on there when he had slugged one of his killers in the face. The left knuckle was bruised. He wasn’t sure how long bruising continued after death, or even if it did. He noted also to speak to the young forensic scientist on that count too. The man wore a pair of tartan slouching pants. The modern take on pyjama bottoms. He was bare chested. Would probably have been asleep when they were disturbed. Judging by the smell and the wet patch on the bed, neither of them had visited the bathroom that morning. The body let go at the time of death, or soon after.

The woman would have been in her mid-thirties. She was attractive and clearly took care of herself. Both of her wrists were bruised, but apart from resisting somebody’s grip, it didn’t look as if she’d put up much more of a fight. Her nightdress was intact, and he could see she wasn’t wearing anything else underneath. He would get forensics to check, but it did not look like anything sexual had happened. It wouldn’t have. These were professionals. The end had come for her with a bullet from the smaller weapon. There was brain and bone splatter on the headboard and a neat little hole in the wood. Otherwise, her head was relatively intact. King guessed a 7.65mm. Larger than a .22 but smaller than a 9mm. Again, forensics would have the last word, but because of British gun laws regarding handguns, the weapon would most likely be illegal, so ballistic matches would be meaningless, unless the weapon had been used in a previous crime. He looked around the floor of the bedroom. There were no spent cases. The weapon could have been a .32 revolver in that case, but King doubted that. They had policed the scene themselves, that was all. They would have had plenty of time to do that.

He walked back across the room to the window. The California house was perfectly framed in the window, at least two-thousand-five-hundred metres away. Five hundred metres further than any .338 Lapua Magnum should reach accurately and with lethal effect. It was a tremendous shot. King had taken a few himself over the years. The rogue Iraqi commander at nine-hundred metres with a Russian-made 7.62mm Dragunov rifle. Several kills at five-hundred metres with an M4 assault rifle, considered on the limit for both barrel length and range for the 5.56mm round. The ISIS sniper at fifteen-hundred metres using a .50 in Syria. He had even scored bulls and vee-bulls on two-thousand metre targets on Salisbury Plain using a .50 Barrett against static paper targets. But this shot was incredible, and well beyond the cusp of the .338. Which meant skill beyond his own, or anybody he had met. And given what King had done for his country for almost twenty-years, and the company he had kept, that was what scared him the most.

8

 

Three weeks earlier

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