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  HOUSE OF THE DEAD

  MURDER FORCE BOOK 4

  ADAM J. WRIGHT

  Copyright © 2022 by Adam J. Wright

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  The locations in this book are real. Some details may have been changed for story purposes.

  For my father

  CONTENTS

  The Murder Force Series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  THE MURDER FORCE SERIES

  Eyes of the Wicked

  Silence of the Bones

  Remains of the Night

  House of the Dead

  Echo of the Past

  The Widow Maker

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  The flash drive arrived in a nondescript, brown padded envelope. The name and address were printed on the front in black capital letters.

  Superintendent Gallow

  Murder Force

  York

  There was just enough information for the package to be delivered to the old school building that now served as the Murder Force headquarters.

  There was no return address.

  The desk sergeant on duty the day the package arrived—DS Freeman—eyed the envelope suspiciously and rang up to the third floor, where Gallow’s office was situated. The superintendent was not in the building at the moment, however, and the desk sergeant knew this.

  “Flowers,” a voice on the other end of the line said when Freeman’s call was answered.

  “Matt, it’s Carl on the front desk. I’ve got a package here for the super.”

  “He’s not in today. Just send it up to his office with the rest of the post.”

  “I could do that, yeah, but it’s a bit funny, this one. No return address and barely anything written on the front.

  “Got your spidey sense tingling, has it?” Matt Flowers asked.

  “You could say that, yeah. Do you think someone should have a look at it?”

  Flowers didn’t say anything for a moment, then asked, “Are you really that worried about it, Carl?”

  Freeman looked at the envelope in front of him. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something about it felt…off.

  “I’d like a second opinion. I wouldn’t feel right letting it through.”

  “All right, I’ll be down in a minute.” Flowers hung up.

  Two minutes later, he was pushing through the door into reception. He shot Freeman a quick smile. “Right, what have we got?”

  Freeman placed the brown envelope on the desk between them.

  Flowers frowned at it. “Looks innocent enough. Not much of an address on the front.” He turned it over. “Nothing at all on the back.”

  Squeezing the envelope gingerly, he said, “Something small inside. Hand me that letter opener.”

  “Are you sure?” Carl said. “Making a safety assessment is one thing, but we shouldn’t open the superintendent’s mail. Perhaps we should give him a ring. See if he’s expecting anything.”

  “He’s golfing in Scotland at the moment. Do you want to interrupt his game?”

  “Well, no, I suppose not.”

  “And we can’t just take it up to his office. There could be anything in it.”

  “Like what? It’s too small to be a bomb.”

  “Like a listening device. We discuss high-profile cases up there. What if a reporter sent it to get a scoop on the latest cases? Or find out personal info on our people?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.” He handed Flowers the letter opener.

  “But what if it’s something the super is expecting? He’ll be fuming if he finds out you opened it.”

  “Let me deal with that.” Flowers slid the letter opener’s blade into the envelope and cut a small opening at one end. He held the envelope up and looked inside before sliding the contents into his hand.

  A small, black, plastic flash drive sat in his palm.

  “Is that all?” Freeman asked. “No letter or anything?”

  Flowers checked the envelope. “Nothing. I’m taking this upstairs. Good job, Carl.” He took the flash drive and the envelope to the door.

  “Thanks.” Freeman wasn’t sure why he was being thanked, but he accepted it gracefully.

  Flowers used his access card to re-enter the main part of the building and disappeared up the stairs.

  Matt took the flash drive to the IT department. He walked past the technicians at their desks and went straight to Chris Toombs’ office.

  Toombs was leaning back in his chair, staring at a screen in front of him when Matt walked in. “Hey,” he said. “It’s Matt, right? How can I help you?”

  “This just arrived in the mail.” Matt held out the flash drive. “I think someone should have a look at it.”

  “No problem. We’ll open it on the Brick.”

  “The Brick?”

  “It’s a computer that isn’t connected to any of our networks. It isn’t connected to anything at all. Totally isolated. So, if there’s a virus on this thing, we won’t catch it.”

  He led Matt out of the office and into another room, which seemed to be a storeroom for printer paper and stationery, except for the fact that a small table sat against one wall and a laptop sat on the table.

  The laptop had a black plastic cover on its lid and someone—probably Toombs himself—had painted the word BRICK on it in white paint.

  The technician opened the laptop and booted it up. He took the flash drive from Matt and inserted it into the machine.

  “There’s just a single text file,” he said. “Weird.”

  “What does it say?”

  Toombs clicked the file. It opened and Matt leaned in closer to get a better look. There was nothing but a string of numbers and letters.

  “It’s a website address,” Toombs said. “Probably a link, but we can’t click on it because we’re on the Brick.” He grabbed a sticky note and a pen from one of the shelves and copied the string of characters and numerals.

  He closed the file and removed the flash drive from the Brick. He gave the drive back to Matt. “We won’t need this anymore. There’s a laptop in my office that’s connected to the Net via a dongle and isn’t connected to our network. We can visit this website safely on that.”

  “A computer for every occasion,” Matt said as they went back to Toombs’ office.

  “Can’t be too careful nowadays,” the technician said. “Who was this drive addressed to?”

  “Gallow.”

  “So, it might be nothing more sinister than his holiday snaps?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “If he spent his summer at a nudist colony, we’ll never
be able to unsee this.”

  Flowers laughed. “I don’t think it’s anything like that.”

  When they got to Toombs’ office, the technician removed a laptop from his desk drawer and turned it on. He sat in his chair and invited Matt to pull up one of the spares that were arranged around a small meeting table by the wall.

  Matt sat in a chair and wheeled himself over to Toombs’ desk.

  “Okay, here we go.” Toombs stuck the note to the top of the screen and opened an Internet browser. He typed in the long string of numbers and letters.

  When he hit the Enter key, the screen went black for a second, and then words began to appear one by one, in a red font that dripped animated blood.

  Will the police save them?

  Matt frowned at the words. “Save who?”

  A white square appeared on the screen, with more words—also in white—underneath it.

  Family Get Together

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Matt said.

  “It’s a clickable link.” Toombs clicked the square and it expanded to fill the screen.

  They were now looking at a black and white video that showed four people sitting at a dining table in a house. The words Live Feed glowed in the top right of the screen.

  The feed itself—if that’s what it was and not a recording—was being filmed from the corner of the family’s dining room.

  The father sat at the head of the table. He was facing away from the camera and had dark hair. The mother was blonde and sat at the opposite end of the table. Her face was a mask of terror.

  The children seated at the table looked to be a blonde-haired girl aged around eight and a dark-haired boy who was facing away from the camera. The girl’s eyes were wide and she looked terror-stricken, like her mother.

  Matt wasn’t sure why until he looked closer. Wires trailed across the floor beneath the family, snaking up to the underside of the table, where some kind of device seemed to have been fixed.

  “That looks like a bomb,” Toombs said.

  Matt gritted his teeth and checked the room for some clue—anything—that would tell him where this was taking place. His eyes followed the dark tangle of wires and he realized they were attached to the house’s front door, which was visible from the dining room through an archway.

  “Is this actually live?” he asked Toombs. “Can you tell?”

  The technician raised his shoulders and hands in a helpless gesture. “I don’t know.”

  Matt pulled his phone from his pocket and rang DI Summers. “We have a problem,” he said as soon as she picked up. “I’m in the IT office and I’m watching a family about to get blown up.”

  Dani simply said, “On my way,” and hung up.

  “There are other people watching this,” Toombs said, pointing at a view counter that had appeared at the bottom right of the screen. As Matt watched, the counter moved from 1,341 to 1,457.

  “We need to know where this is coming from,” Matt said.

  “Already on it.” Toombs was on his desktop computer, typing numbers and code into it.

  A smaller inset window appeared over the video feed. This window showed a street and appeared to be shot from a front door. The words Live Feed showed in the top right of this window as well.

  As Matt watched, police cars pulled up outside the house. Uniformed officers got out and ran up the path to the door, their faces almost looking into the lens as they knocked.

  “Must be a doorbell camera,” Toombs said.

  On the main feed, the family at the table looked towards the door. There was no sound, but it was obvious they could hear the police outside.

  In the small window, an officer was taking the big red key—the metal ram the police used to batter down doors—from the boot of his car.

  “No!” Matt shouted helplessly at the screen. Somewhere, the police were about to make entry into a house and trigger a bomb and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  The big red key was brought to the door and the officer holding it brought it back before swinging it forwards.

  The feed that showed the family went suddenly white and then showed only static. The image from the doorbell camera shook and showed the officers being blown backwards towards the road before it, too, broadcast nothing more than static.

  The door opened and DI Summers entered, her face concerned. “Matt, what’s happening?”

  “It’s too late,” Matt said grimly. “They’re all dead.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  “Tell me again about the flash drive and how it got here,” Dani said to Matt. They were sitting in one of the meeting rooms, beneath a fluorescent ceiling light that Dani found too bright.

  The envelope and the flash drive had been sent to the lab for testing.

  “There’s nothing much to tell, Guv,” Matt said. “DS Freeman received the package at the front desk and was suspicious of it, so I opened it and took the drive to Toombs. That’s how we found the website and the feed. If that’s what it was.”

  “We’re checking,” she said. The question that kept running through her mind was why. Why would someone send them the video?”

  Her phone buzzed on the table. She picked it up. “Summers.”

  “Hi, this is Cathy from the admin team. I’ve been looking into the request you put in earlier regarding searching for reports of an explosion today.”

  “Yes,” Dani said. She wanted the girl to get to the point.

  “There was an explosion earlier today at a house in York. It’s all over the news. They’re sifting through the rubble now.”

  “How many people were hurt?” Dani gripped the phone tightly. She already knew she wasn’t going to like the answer.

  “Early reports indicate four people inside the house and three police officers were found dead at the scene. Two officers were rushed to hospital and another three suffered minor injuries.”

  Seven people dead. “Is there anything else? Has anyone claimed responsibility? Is it a terrorist attack?”

  “That’s all we know at the moment, I’m afraid. It’s still early days. It’s only just happened.”

  She wanted to shout, Yes, I know it just happened. Two people in my team had to watch it happen, but instead, she said, “Right. Thank you, Cathy,” and hung up.

  “Everything all right, Guv?” Matt asked, detecting the frustration in her voice. They’d worked together for a long time and could read each other easily.

  “Seven people dead at the scene, Matt, and two more taken to hospital.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I don’t understand the live feed. Why send it to us?”

  “Well, technically, it was sent to Superintendent Gallow.”

  “But he is us. He’s the face of Murder Force that everyone sees on TV.”

  “Maybe the Doc can figure out why someone sent it to us.”

  “Tony’s still on leave.” The forensic psychologist had taken a couple of days off because his girlfriend was visiting him from an archaeological dig in Sussex.

  Dani’s phone buzzed again. The screen said, Battle.

  “Sir,” she said as she answered.

  “Have you heard what’s happened?”

  She could hear traffic in the background. It sounded like the DCI was driving.

  “If you mean the explosion—“

  “Of course I mean the explosion. It’s all over the bloody news. I’m on my way there now. I want you to get over here as well. 34 Winsall Road. The media are crawling all over this. That makes it a high-profile case, so now it’s been dropped into our laps. I don’t think Counter-Terrorism is too happy about that, but it is what it is.”

  “There’s more to it as well,” she said. “The explosion was broadcast live on the Net. Someone sent us a link.”

  “What? Right, tell me the details when you get here.” He ended the call.

  “I’m going down there,” Dani told Matt. “Battle is already on his way. Check in with Toombs. See if he’s
worked out where that site is being broadcast from.”

  He nodded. “All right, guv.”

  She left the meeting room and collected her coat and bag before going downstairs. She approached Carl Freeman on the front desk. “I’m going to need a full report about that package that arrived earlier,” she told him.

  Freeman—who obviously didn’t know what had been on the flash drive—nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Dani went outside, crossed the car park to her Land Rover and got in behind the wheel. The weight of frustration sat on her shoulders, and it wasn’t only because her team had been targeted by whatever sicko had carried out this crime.

  She knew that this was just the beginning. Setting up a website, posting a flash drive, and broadcasting the crime over the Net didn’t feel like a one-time thing. Whoever was behind this had planned it out meticulously and got the result they wanted. There was no doubt in her mind that they would do it again, and more lives would be lost.

  She tried to put that out of her mind as she drove out of the car park and through the industrial estate on the road that led to town. She could only focus on what was in front of her, not on what was going to happen in an unknown future.

  That thought didn’t make her feel any better. They would be scrambling in the dark trying to solve this while the killer would know exactly what was going to happen next, where he would strike from the darkness.

  She used the hands-free to call Matt. Maybe he had some good news. Toombs was an expert in all things digital, so perhaps he’d uncovered something.