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

but ended up in the same dungeon, tied to a bed with a chain around their necks, to be tortured and abused. Luckily for the two girls, an eyewitness to the second abduction was able to pass on details of the van’s licence plate to the police, who swooped on a ramshackle, white-washed farmhouse on the outskirts of the town of Sars-la-Buissiere and arrested the home-owner, a thirty-nine year-old known sex criminal named Marc Dutroux. Initially, Dutroux refused to talk, but after several days of questioning he showed Belgium police the secret entrance to his dungeon of torture, and the pair of girls were rescued and reunited with their families.

As if this were not bad enough it soon became clear that Dutroux was also responsible for the abductions and murders the previous year, 1985, of four more girls and young women aged between eight and nineteen, as well as the death of an accomplice and local drug addict, Bernard Weinstein.

The saddest part of the whole tragedy was that police had missed an opportunity to rescue the first pair of missing girls, both just eight years old when they were taken. Having captured and locked them away in his farmhouse, Dutroux subjected them to the most terrible of ordeals for week after week. But then, a month or so later, Dutroux was arrested for an unconnected crime – he was caught stealing a car – and was sent to prison for three months. While locked away the psycho kept the whereabouts of the two young girls a secret, and imprisoned as they were back at his house, they slowly died of thirst and starvation. Even Dutroux’s wife, who knew about her husband’s sordid secret, did nothing to help them.

The case shocked not just the nation of Belgium but the whole world.

Now, going back over the events of the past few days and wondering if there were any clues that he and his colleagues may have missed, Pieter found himself struck with the terrifying possibility that history was about to repeat itself.

They had to find Nina Bakker as soon as they could before this case took on an even more frightful turn.

There was nothing to be gained by sitting here, he told himself.

Kaatje would be in the operating theatre for at least two or three hours. In the meantime, while he was at the hospital, there was something he wanted to check up on.

Pieter headed for the morgue, which was across the car park in a separate building but also connected by an underground passageway to allow the deceased to be moved there from the main wing without upsetting other patients and visitors. He went looking for Prisha Kapoor the Chief Pathologist, and he found her in her office at the end of the corridor, on the phone to her partner, Rowan.

They were in the middle of moving home, having finally had enough of Amsterdam and its noise and congestion and general madness. The horror of the Werewolf case in the spring had been the final straw for Prisha. The personal toll it had extracted had almost sent her spiralling over the edge, and so at Rowan’s suggestion, she had decided to throw in the towel and take up the offer of a post as a lecturer at the University of Humanistic Studies in the city of Utrecht.

She was due to quit her current job in about a month to start her new career in the New Year. Pieter would miss working with her, for the wealth of knowledge and experience she had amassed in the time she’d held the position of the Amsterdam Police Chief Pathologist was second to none. Therefore, Prisha had told him that he was welcome to phone her at any time should he need advice or help with his caseload going forward.

At times like this, he envied her, wondering whether he should try and get out of the rat race himself. But he knew that was just a pipedream. Being a cop was all he understood, and the city – nasty and cruel as it was, a place that sucked the life from people like a leach draining someone’s blood – well, Amsterdam, its streets and its people, defined who he was. There was a phrase for it that only Amsterdammers used: City Junkie. That’s what he was. Hooked on the drug of this place.

He lingered outside the door to Prisha’s office, hearing her soft voice.

“Probably another four or five should do, the ones with the blue plastic lids. We can take them down during the week,” she was saying to Rowan. “Oh, and don’t forget to pick up the spare set of keys. Yes, I’ll try, we still have time on our lease. Bye-bye.” She finished the call and noticed Pieter lingering outside in the passage. She waved him in.

The office was a mess, with files and papers covering every square inch of her desk as well as both chairs and the small camp bed that she kept in the corner for when she worked late – yet another reason for getting out, Pieter surmised. She wanted her life back.

“This looks a bit crazy. You busy destroying documents before your successor takes over?”

“Would be easier if I were. These are all old cases and reports, going back over the last twelve years. I’m trying to scan as many as possible and save them on my flash drive. Can you imagine, a whole career stored onto this?” She held up the tiny memory stick.

“Is there a metaphor there?”

“It’s the story of the last few months for me.” Prisha shook her head, looking at the mess around her. She reached for a pile of papers on the edge of the desk and dumped them onto the windowsill. “You can sit there,” she told him, pointing to the tiny space she had cleared. “But don’t touch anything on pain of death, OK?”

Pieter perched himself down, keeping his hands in his pockets.

“So how’s your, erm, your colleague? Officer Groot?”