He nodded.
Smart thinking.
Something emerged from the trees.
Like a ghost, twenty feet from the fire, startling them both.
“My steed,” Pickett said, definitely pleased. “Rojo.”
The horse snorted.
Pickett stood with a grunt and led the animal closer to the fire, tying him to a tree trunk and fishing a radio out of the saddlebag.
“I’m going to contact the Teton County Sheriff’s Department. When the good guys get here, do you want to go straight to the hospital?”
“Where else?”
“Thought maybe you’d want to roust your tattoo guy first.”
Coburn savored another deep drink of the bourbon.
And grinned.
VAL MCDERMID AND PETER JAMES
VAL MCDERMID TELLS ME THAT the idea for this story came while she was having her feet worked on by a brisk German reflexologist. While lying there she kept thinking about how most people consider feet unattractive, and yet for some they’re a powerful sexual fetish.
A thought occurred.
What would happen if a foot-fetishist reflexologist confronted a pair of feet so perfect he wanted to keep them forever.
And the story was born.
Both Peter and Val are British crime (thriller) writers. But their novels are set at opposite ends of the country. Val’s principal characters are a detective and a psychological profiler. Peter’s is a pure detective. For them both, the whole world of foot fetishists was a relatively unexplored subject. Learning about the weird and wonderful world of feet, as objects of eroticism, seemed a bit mind-boggling for them.
But there was an element of fun to it too.
Peter wrote the skeleton of an outline. Val then fleshed it out and drafted the opening, setting the scene and the tone. Together, they then worked back and forth, each writing segments of about a thousand words. Val counted on Peter for all the police procedural elements, which gave her free rein to have some fun with the characters. And they both had “a bit of a giggle” at each other’s terrible puns about feet.
The result is something quite unique.
Footloose.
FOOTLOOSE
A WATERY RED SUN WAS struggling to defeat skeins of cloud above the moors of either Lancashire or West Yorkshire, depending on personal allegiance. A narrow ribbon of road wound down from the high tops toward the outskirts of Bradfield, its gray sprawl just emerging from the dawn light. Gary Naylor steered a van crammed with bacon, sausages, and black pudding from his organic piggery down the moorside, knowing his bladder wasn’t going to make it to the first delivery.
There was, he knew, a lay-by round the next bend, tucked in against a dry stone wall. He’d stop there for a quick slash. Nobody around to see at this time of the morning. He pulled over and squirmed out, duckwalking over to the wall. He had eyes for nothing but his zip and his hands and then, oh, the relief as he directed his hot stream over the low wall.
That was when he noticed her.
Sprawled on the far side of the gray drystone dike lay a woman.
Blond, beautiful, dressed in a figure-hugging dress, wide-eyed and indisputably dead.
Dead and covered in his steaming piss.
DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR CAROL JORDAN of the Regional Major Incident Team had already been awake when the call came in. She’d been halfway up the hill behind her converted barn home, exercising Flash, her border collie. She walked; the dog quartered the hillside in a manic outpouring of energy that made her feel faintly inadequate. She took the call and turned, whistling the dog to follow. Five yards in and Flash was in front of her, heading like an arrow for home.
She let the dog in and called to the man who shared her home but not her bed.
Dr. Tony Hill emerged from his separate suite at the far end of the barn, hair wet from the shower, tucking his shirt into his jeans.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Body of a woman found up on the moors. A fresh kill, by all accounts.”
“And it’s one for ReMIT?”
“Oh yes. It’s definitely one for us. She’s got no feet.”
Carol Jordan and Tony Hill were a better fit in their professional lives than they’d ever managed personally.
He was a clinical psychologist who specialized in unraveling the motivations of the twisted killers who wanted to express themselves again and again. She was the kind of detective for whom justice matters more than any other consideration. Now she’d been put in charge of ReMIT, he was at the heart of the tight-knit team she’d built to deal with major crimes across six police areas. So when they turned up at the lay-by on the moors, there was a perceptible lowering of the level of tension among the local officers who’d been called to the scene first.
They could relax a bit.
This wasn’t going to be down to them if it all went tits up.
The detective sergeant who’d been on duty when the call came in introduced them to Gary Naylor, sitting hunched in his van with the door open.
“I’m sorry,” Naylor said. “I’m so, so sorry. I never saw her till it was too late.”
For a moment Carol thought she was hearing a confession.
But the DS explained. “Mr. Naylor urinated on the woman’s body. Then when he realized what he’d done, he threw up.” He tried to keep his voice level, but the disgust showed in the line of his mouth.
“That must have been upsetting for you,” Tony said.
“Have we taken a statement from Mr. Naylor?” Carol asked.
“We were waiting for you, ma’am,” the DS said.
“Have someone take a statement from Mr. Naylor, then let the poor man get on with his day.”
An edge to her voice stung the DS into action.
They took the marked path to the wall and looked down at the woman’s body. Even stinking of urine and vomit, it was possible to see that she’d been attractive. Pleasant enough face, though nothing out of the ordinary. Good figure. Shapely legs. Except that where her feet should have been there was a puddle of blood-matted grass and heather.
“What do you make of that?” Carol asked.
Tony shook his head. “I’m not sure what he’s saying to us. Don’t think you can run away from me? You’ll never dance with another guy now? Impossible to know until I know a lot more about the victim.”
She gestured to the forensic technicians working the scene. “Hopefully they’ll have something for us soon.
“How’s it looking, Peter?” she called out to the crime scene manager.
He gave her a thumbs-up. “It’d be easier if the witness hadn’t voided most of his body fluids over her. On the plus side we’ve got a clutch bag with a credit card, a business card, a set of keys, a lipstick, and forty quid in cash. The name on the credit card is Diane Flaherty. The business card is for a model called Dana Dupont. The contact number is an agency in Bradfield. I’ll ping the details to your e-mail account as soon as I can get a strong enough signal. It’s a nightmare up here.”
“What’s the agency called?”
“Out on a Limb.”
Tony raised an eyebrow. “Interesting.”
She nodded. “Let’s get down to the office and see what Stacey can dig out about Diane Flaherty and this agency.”
She tossed Tony a warning look.
“And don’t tell me to put my foot down.”
MOST DAYS SARAH DENNISON RECKONED she had the best job in the world, but today it felt like the worst.