Edge Of Hell

Dean walked toward the body, Goh on her heels. She knelt before the dead woman. The body had been disturbed, half pushed onto its side, probably by fighters bumping into her. The grime on the floor of the alley was scuffed with boot marks where big, heavy men had battled.

“Are we done taking pictures of the body?”

Goh nodded toward the crime-scene photographers. “They’ll be taking her to forensics in a few minutes.”

Dean sighed. “I’ll look around here and try to get a feel for the crime scene.”

Goh tilted his head. “You seem to have a feeling already, Melissa.”

Dean swept the alley, drifting off for a moment, looking at the pockmarks from weapons, smelling the stink of urban warfare and serial murder all sewn up into a tiny corridor of stone and garbage. It was a claustrophobic place where men had tried to kill each other, and one presumably innocent woman lost her life.

The vibes given by the scene were strange.

If enigmas had a scent, Melissa Dean now knew how to recognize it.

Sometimes, if you’ve been to enough murder scenes, you developed a taste for what it was all about. Some were madness. Some were fury. Fueled by jealousy, betrayal, loneliness—she’d had felt them all.

This was different. There was no emotion in this.

The body was too perfectly filleted, too neatly placed. Just how the other Ripper kills were set up.

But the addition of Westerbridge’s killer…that was a new twist.

How could it not be? The kind of firepower used doesn’t show up more than once a year in London’s back streets, she thought. Now twice in one night?

There’s no such thing as coincidence.

Dean shook her head. “Where are you heading now?”

“Back to the station. Need a lift?” Goh offered.

“I have my own wheels,” Dean replied. “But I’ll meet you there.”

The mental images of two horrors, one a century and a half old, and one thoroughly modern formed an amorphous blob of murder and mayhem in the middle of the city she was sworn to protect. The burden hung on her, troubling her on the drive back.

4

Try as he might to put aside his theories and memories about the previous night’s murder, Mack Bolan couldn’t shake them. But he wasn’t completely left cold.

As he showed up at the offices of London’s Metropolitan Police Homicide East unit, the Executioner felt the usual tingle he felt whenever he entered a police station while on a mission. Hal Brognola had arranged credentials that were so far above reproach they could bounce a small nuclear warhead. But none of that gave Bolan the impression that he was truly safe. The gulf that stood between the lone soldier and the forces of law enforcement was one that was hard to cross without the sense that he was walking a tightrope.

There were just too many variables for him to truly feel comfortable working inside a system—the possibility of dealing with corruption, of losing brave allies, of being too constrained by the rules and allowing his enemy to slip away to cost more lives…

Bolan took a deep breath. He had no patience for those who got away, literally, with murder. And so, he spoke to those killers in their own bloody language—regardless of laws.

He reached the watch commander, a sturdily built, square-shouldered, full-faced woman with long, once black hair shot through with streaks of silver. She was in her fifties, no longer the fresh-faced youthful beauty she had once been, but something shined through the crow’s-feet and smile lines. She had a sharp eye as keen and hardened as any beat cop. She looked down on him with a matronly glower.

“Can I help you, sir?” she asked.

“I’m here to see Detectives Dean and Goh, Homicide East.”

She pursed her full lips, studying him for a moment, disapproval crossing her face. She cleared her throat. “Their desks are on the second floor, in the Homicide East squad room. They’re expecting you, Detective Cooper.”

“Thank you,” Bolan replied.

He followed the desk sergeant’s directions and was soon at the desk of an unlikely couple of lawmen sitting at face-to-face desks, paperwork and foam cups littering them, computer screens displaying crime scene reports.

Goh looked up at Bolan, dark eyes taking him in with a single glance as his raven hair fell in sheets off his collar.

Dean had short blond hair that stopped at her collar and piercing, pale blue eyes that almost mirrored his own. She studied him as well, her gaze penetrating, trying to cut through the layers of pretense he was hiding behind. While Goh was offering his hand in greeting, she was holding back, tense and withdrawn, in observer mode.

Bolan took Goh’s hand.

“Matt Cooper,” Bolan offered.

“Kevin Goh.” The detective’s flawless East End accent indicated he was London born and raised, or at least raised. His grip was strong and firm. “This is Melissa Dean.”

“Pleasure,” she said, but making no effort to act like it was.

“Likewise,” he answered. He was sincere about it, but wondered how far behind he was on his rapport with these two.

“So you’re interested in the latest run of Ripper killings?” Goh asked.

“Yeah. I was interested in the case. Meredith Jones-Jakes, about five months ago, was the last one I’d heard about,” Bolan explained. “Then this morning, there was supposedly another one?”

“You seem to have learned about it pretty quickly,” Dean spoke up in a stinging broadside. “Coincidence?”

He met her gaze unflinchingly. “There’s no such thing as coincidence.”

“So what are you doing so far from the colonies?” Dean pressed.

“You have the paperwork sitting on your desk.”

Dean pushed it aside. “Administrative leave from the Boston Police Department. That’s the reason. What’s the story?”

“I’m set to testify in three months,” Bolan told her. “And I’m under a gag order about anything else.”

Dean’s eyes narrowed. “A mobster?”

“Make of it what you will.”

“That’s why you’re traipsing through a Met station packing a hand cannon under your jacket? The Mafia doesn’t have roving hit squads around the world, Detective.”

Bolan was tempted, for half a heartbeat, to tell her that she was wrong. Early on in his career, he’d run into more than enough heavily armed gangsters in Soho, giving him his first experiences with the awesome Weatherby Mark V and the efficient Uzi 9 mm submachine gun. And only a few hours previously, he could have shocked her with the level of hardware at Sonny Westerbridge’s Rotherhithe warehouse.

Instead, Bolan remained diplomatic. “It’s not a cannon. And it’s cleared.”

Dean’s jaw set firmly. “I just don’t want to see it unless we come under fire from the entire Peruvian Third Naval Commando unit, all right?”