A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two Mark Hobson (romantic novels in english TXT) 📖

knife and he looked at her in confusion, not liking where this was going.

“You must open up the body, slash him from top to bottom. To release his spirit. If not, then he will haunt you for the rest of your life.”

Doing as his sister said, Bart set to work.

PART 2

THE UNSHRIVEN

Chapter 17

Marc Dutroux

The following morning, a Tuesday, Kaatje was taken for her surgery. Pieter was there when they wheeled her into the elevator and down to one of the theatres, and although he knew the prognosis for the outcome of the operation was poor, he nevertheless tried to maintain a positive attitude, for Kaatje’s sake. She smiled back and even cracked a couple of jokes, but there was a tenseness there, a forced joviality.

There were a few comfy seats in the corridor just outside the surgical suite and Pieter chose one next to a coffee machine. It gurgled and rumbled away, and now and then it spat out brown dregs from one of the little spouts.

While he waited for news, he cast his mind back over yesterday’s events, reliving the horrifying moment when their prime suspect, Tobias Vinke, had been shot in the head by a long-range sniper round.

Following the fatal shot, there had been a split-second of silence from the passengers on the ferry as they spun and watched him fall, a small fountain of blood pumping from the large hole at the top of his head. Then, when the realization of what had just happened sank in, there was complete pandemonium, with people screaming and pushing, shouting at each other as they wondered who amongst them had a gun, thinking the killer was on the boat with them.

Pieter had immediately known otherwise. In the build-up to the murder, there had been nothing to indicate what was about to happen, with no sound of the gunshot, telling him instantly that the round had been fired from some distance away. He had called out to those around him, pleading with them to stay calm; he was seriously concerned that the boat might capsize, or that somebody might get crushed or trampled, or even fall overboard, but it was only when he brought out his police warrant card and held it aloft – “I’m a police officer, please do not panic!” – that some kind of order was restored.

Then he had crouched over the recumbent form of Tobias Vinke and searched for signs of life, checking his breathing, his pulse, wondering if it was worth doing CPR or not, but when his eyes had looked more closely at the wound he quickly decided it was pointless. The whole of the top of his head was missing, with pieces of bone and brain splashed across the boat’s wooden deck, and there was a smaller entry wound square in the centre of Vinke’s face, right where the nose was. The bullet had struck him there and then ricocheted upwards, possibly off his jawbone, and out of the top of the cranium. It was an unsurvivable injury.

Standing up, Pieter looked around, his mind already trying to piece together just what had happened.

Where had the shot come from?

Ignoring the contagious fear amongst the passengers, who were now mostly silent with shock apart from one or two people who were crying quietly, he thought back to the exact moment that Vinke was hit.

Pieter had been standing at the rail and trying to blend in, but he clearly remembered sensing Tobias Vinke turn in his direction, as though he’d been rumbled – and then down he had gone.

His posture had been pointing south, towards the riverside. Therefore the round that hit him in the face must have come from that direction.

And if it was from a long-range rifle, then the shooter would need a good vantage point.

Pieter found his eyes going up to the roof of the large rail station.

Raising his walkie-talkie to his mouth, he’d called it in, quickly explaining to the other members of K Team what had happened.

“Check the station. Up on the roof.”

A few moments later and the ferry arrived at the north riverside terminal, and as soon as the ramp lowered the passengers scattered. So much for getting any witness statements, Pieter thought to himself, but he let them go in any case.

Within ten minutes the area was swarming with emergency vehicles and medics, and Pieter had stood to one side on the riverbank to let them do their thing. Word came back that Centraal Station had been placed in lockdown: nobody was allowed in or out. The concourse and platforms, the shops and cafes, and all of the entrances were flooded with police officers, and several teams were sent straight up onto the station roof to look for the sniper.

Pieter waited anxiously, praying for a bit of good luck for once.

Nothing. There was nobody up on the roof, and nothing suspicious was found in the station itself.

Whoever he or she was, the shooter had somehow slipped through the net.

It quickly became clear what the repercussions of the killing of their prime suspect would be.

In one fell swoop, the whole game had changed, for he was sure the shooting of Vinke had been a deliberate act.

From being the search for a missing girl kidnapped and being held captive by some unknown assailant - a man who had brutally murdered her parents and whose sick motives for taking her were unclear - and rescuing her from his vile clutches, it was now a race against time to find wherever she had been locked up in some hidden location, possibly alone and with nobody to hear her cries for help, before she potentially died of starvation or thirst.

Sitting in the hospital waiting area, Pieter was reminded of the notorious child abduction case in Belgium some years ago.

In May and August 1986 two young girls aged twelve and fourteen were grabbed off the street and bundled into the back of a van. They were abducted three months apart