Prologue
What made someone the ideal victim? he speculated.
Were they created that way, right from the start? Was it a case of nature or nurture? On the other hand, was it all down to luck, perhaps? Maybe they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. He chuckled. There was no such thing as the wrong time. Everyone had a time, regardless of how it may play out.
He stared down intently at the washed-out family snap as if it was the first time he had seen it. The truth was, he had studied this photo many times before and with equal fascination.
He was alone. There was no noise from the TV or radio, only the sound of his own trancelike, metronomic breathing, eyes refusing to deviate from the photo as he gazed down at Mum, Dad and himself.
To anyone else it would be a classic family photograph: two children, a boy of about six and a girl of about eight, wearing woolly hats and scarves, frolicking in the snow with their parents. For him, though, it was more. It had always meant much more.
Back, then, to the question. He smiled, and closed the two halves of the black faux-leather photo album, carefully placed it into the box and slotted it in the correct position, the right way around, between number 3 and number 5.
He snorted joss stick-scented air through his flared nostrils and cast his mind back. The first was easy – he had been left with little alternative. The second fell somewhere between curiosity and education. And what of the next? He had been counting down her final days since they first met.
She was… ideal, but she was not going to be alone. The one after her, he would leave to fate, and for the sporting hell of it.
STORM LOG-0505 Description:
STORM LOG-0505 is a detective crime thriller with paranormal overtones, set in Bath and on the North Devon coastline.
Detective Andrew Deans is tasked to locate a high-risk missing person. His enquiries take him to North Devon, where he encounters a psychic dimension he could never have imagined existed, in what soon becomes a murder hunt.
Gripped by his own ‘paranormal awakening’, Deans closes in on a sophisticated killer, but all is not as it seems, and Deans’ future is about to change.
