The Turin Shroud Secret Read online

  Also by Sam Christer

  The Stonehenge Legacy

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978-0-7481-3001-6

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Sam Christer

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Also by Sam Christer

  Copyright

  Part One

  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

  Part Two

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Part Three

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Part Four

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  Chapter 116

  Chapter 117

  Chapter 118

  Chapter 119

  Chapter 120

  Chapter 121

  Chapter 122

  Chapter 123

  Chapter 124

  Chapter 125

  Chapter 126

  Chapter 127

  Chapter 128

  Chapter 129

  Chapter 130

  Chapter 131

  Chapter 132

  Chapter 133

  Chapter 134

  Chapter 135

  Chapter 136

  Chapter 137

  Chapter 138

  Chapter 139

  Chapter 140

  Chapter 141

  Chapter 142

  Chapter 143

  Chapter 144

  Chapter 145

  Chapter 146

  Chapter 147

  Chapter 148

  Chapter 149

  Chapter 150

  Chapter 151

  Chapter 152

  Chapter 153

  Chapter 154

  Chapter 155

  Chapter 156

  Chapter 157

  Chapter 158

  Chapter 159

  Chapter 160

  Chapter 161

  Chapter 162

  Chapter 163

  Chapter 164

  Chapter 165

  Chapter 166

  Chapter 167

  Chapter 168

  Chapter 169

  Chapter 170

  Chapter 171

  Chapter 172

  Chapter 173

  Chapter 174

  Chapter 175

  Chapter 176

  Chapter 177

  Part Five

  Chapter 178

  Chapter 179

  Chapter 180

  Chapter 181

  Chapter 182

  Chapter 183

  Chapter 184

  Acknowledgements

  Final Word

  To Donna and Bill for your priceless gifts

  of time and understanding

  One by one the devotees remove bricks from the centuries-old sanctuary. They know they are unleashing a force that will kill most horribly, one that will either save everything they hold sacred – or destroy it for ever.

  PART ONE

  And Joseph bought a linen shroud and taking him down, wrapped him in the linen shroud and laid him in a tomb that had been cut out of the rock.

  English Standard Bible

  1

  WEDNESDAY EVENING

  BEVERLY HILLS, LOS ANGELES

  There are many reasons why he kills. Why, right at this moment, he is about to kill again.

  It is a need. A craving. An aching, gnawing compulsion. Like sex. When he’s not doing it, he’s thinking about it. Fantasising. Planning. Rehearsing. Killing to him is as necessary and inevitable as drawing breath. Only more pleasurable. Memorable.

  This one is going to be easy. Perfect. The best yet. The unkilled always are. That’s what he calls them. Not the living. Not the next victim.

  The unkilled.

  A quiet neighbourhood. A woman living alone. One not even aware that while she busied herself in that pretty rear garden he slipped into her life and home.

  He’s been lying in wait for hours, unnoticed like a dog in a favourite hiding place, his ears twitching as he follows her sounds around the darkening house, his furtive mind imagining her every movement.

  There’s a thin clattering noise – she’s tidying up after her dinner for one.

  A soft thump – shutting the dishwasher.

  Tumbling clunks. Ice from the dispenser on the tall fridge by the kitchen door. A
glass of water to take to bed.

  Click, click, click. Turning out the lights. Closing doors.

  Bump, bump. Bump, bump. Footsteps. Coming upstairs. Heavy footed. Desperate to lie down on her big soft bed and sleep.

  A soft click. A bedside lamp warms the big bedroom with a buttercup glow.

  Running water. A shower. Nice and hot. A warm soak to make her clean for bed.

  Fresh for death.

  He waits. Counts off the seconds and minutes. Seven hundred and twenty seconds. Twelve long minutes. Now the whirr of a hairdryer. Best not to go to sleep with wet hair. Most unhealthy. The television mutters. Music. A film. News. She’s zapping. Searching for something to distract her from the rigours of the day. The Tonight Show. Conan. House.

  Click. The crackle of static on the plasma screen.

  Silence.

  A final click. The lamp.

  Darkness.

  He lies there. Beneath the bed. Savouring the floating echo of the last sounds – like a sliver of communion wafer dissolving on the tongue.

  Soon he hears the whisper of her breathing, faint sighs rising like soft light breaking the dawn sky. Sleep is gently preparing her for God and for him. He rolls out from his shelter. Slow. Graceful. Careful. A deadly animal emerging from cover. Exposed in the wild. Closing on its prey. Tingling with anticipation.

  He puts one hand around her throat and places the other across her mouth. Her eyes flash open with shock. He smiles down at her and whispers, ‘Dominus vobiscum – the Lord be with you.’

  2

  THURSDAY MORNING

  MANHATTAN BEACH, LOS ANGELES

  It’s November but still ninety out on the dunes. California does that sometimes. A golden fall to make up for a poor summer. Thirty-year-old homicide detective Nic Karakandez makes a visor out of his right hand and strains his blue-grey eyes at the sparkling diamond swirl of the Pacific. Dressed in faded blue jeans and a black leather bomber jacket, the big cop stands out on top of the sands.

  He’s staring hard and seeing more than anyone else. Certainly more than the sand-crusted stiff that the ME and CSIs are bent over. Way more than the bobbing heads of swimmers gawping from the waves.

  Nic sees the future.

  A month from now to be precise. His boat heading out to sea, wind billowing in the sails, a reel or two hanging over the back and a time when jobs like this sorry floater are nothing but distant memories.

  ‘Nic! Get your ass down here.’

  There’s only one woman in the world who speaks to him like that. He drops his hand and squints at his colleague and boss, Lieutenant Mitzi Fallon. ‘I’m coming – give me a chance.’

  The thirty-nine-year-old mom of two is twenty yards ahead of him, down a dip in the soft Californian sand. ‘Hey Big Foot – are you the fast-moving murder police I taught you to be or have I got you mixed up with some pale-throated sloth?’

  He can’t help but laugh. ‘I’m the fast-moving murder police, ma’am. What exactly is a sloth?’

  ‘Short-necked, fat-assed mammal. Sixty million years old and spends most of its time sleeping.’

  ‘I wish.’

  Mitzi’s been breaking his balls since his first day in the department more than five years ago. He pads alongside her as they head towards the fluttering tape ten yards from the ocean’s edge. Pretty soon the crime scene will be gone. Washed away by Lady Tide, that ancient accomplice to so many murders.

  They badge the uniforms guarding the area, slip on shoe covers and join the ME, Amy Chang, a second-generation Chinese medic with a brain as big as the state deficit.

  ‘Afternoon, doc,’ breezes Mitzi. ‘Any chance your poor lady there died of natural causes? I gotta be at a soccer game tonight.’

  The pathologist doesn’t look up. She knows them both well. Too well. ‘Not a chance. Not unless it’s considered normal to go swimming fully dressed after you’ve just had two teeth pulled out, an eye removed and your throat slit.’

  ‘Man, that’s some careless dentist.’ Nic leans over the body.

  ‘Obama’s got a lot to answer for,’ adds Mitzi. ‘He never should have messed with the health care.’

  ‘He got Bin Laden, though – that gives him a Get Out of Jail Card as far as I’m concerned.’

  Amy looks up and shakes her head in mock disgust. ‘You two jokers got a single ounce of respect for what’s going on here?’

  Nic catches her eye. There’s a spark between them. Small but it’s there. He blows it out before she can even blink. ‘Tons,’ he says. ‘We just hide it well. Black humour is the only way we know to protect our fragile constitutions.’

  Amy stares him down. ‘Sick minds are more like it.’

  The lieutenant rounds a CSI sifting sand for anything that might have come off the body and got buried or trodden on. She circles the corpse, staring at it from different angles, like it’s a piece of modern art that doesn’t yet make sense. ‘Any ID on her?’

  ‘None,’ says Amy. ‘Surely you knew you weren’t going to get that lucky?’

  ‘Just hoping.’ She circles again. Slower this time, stooping to study the vic’s hands and feet. ‘Any idea how long she’d been in the water?’

  Amy looks up again. ‘C’mon, Mitzi, I need to check body temperature and tides – you’re way too early to get a polite answer.’

  Amy forces a thermometer through the eye socket into the brain. It will give her a window of about three hours on the time of death. She glances up at the pull and push of the waves beside her. Once she’s consulted a tidal expert, she’ll have a good idea of where and when the vic met her end. She notes the body temperature then uses scissors to cut off the fingernails and bags the clippings.

  Mitzi is still hanging over her and she feels obliged to give the cop something. ‘We’re talking hours in the water, less than a day. That’s all you’re getting for the moment.’ She straightens up, brushes off sand and beckons two orderlies who’ve been waiting with a marine body bag, the type that lets water out but keeps any evidence in. ‘Okay, parcel her up.’

  ‘What kinda freak could have done this?’ Nic’s eyes are scanning the raw, mutilated flesh.

  ‘No mystery there.’ Amy pulls off purple rubber gloves and snaps her metal case shut. ‘Some bad son-of-a-bitch kind of freak – you know, the type that’s done it before and will soon be doing it all over again.’

  3

  MIDDAY

  DOWNTOWN, LOS ANGELES

  The food corner in the mall is a free-for-all. Shoppers and office workers jostle like cattle at feeding troughs. Stressed-out servers bark orders in the soupy air and pound labelled till keys.

  An olive-skinned young man in his mid-twenties with dark hair and even darker eyes waits patiently in the thick of it all. An island of calm caught in a raging river of inhuman rudeness. Indifferently, he waits his turn, then pays for miso soup, a box of sushi and black coffee. It’s a diet that renders him more slim than muscular – lean, if you want to be kind in your description – too small and skinny for women who like big broad-shouldered guys to hang on to. It’s also landed him with the nickname ‘Fish Face’ at the factory where he works.

  ‘Let me help you.’ He moves quickly to clear chairs and tables so an old man can push his wife’s wheelchair through the dining jungle and lay their food tray at a free table.

  ‘Very kind of you.’ The senior nods a thank you as they settle.

  ‘No problem, you’re welcome.’ He takes his lunch to a table a few yards away. He smiles at the couple as he mixes fiery wasabi paste with soy sauce, stirs it with chopsticks and dips a tuna roll, then turns his attention to the tide of people flowing past. They fascinate him. All of them. No exceptions.

  A teacher leads a crocodile of foreign schoolchildren, Chinese he thinks, in a two-by-two line, little cherubs all holding each other’s hands. All wearing the same orange tops and caps and looking like dolls fresh off a production line. He remembers seeing a poster somewhere proclaiming that there are five times as many
people in China learning to speak English as there are people in England. The world is changing. So is he. He can feel it. Sense it.

  His eyes swing to a mature blonde in a business suit scrambling for a ringing cell phone in her small black leather bag. A cougar past her prime. Smart clothes and a good diet can’t hide what age and the Californian weather do to your hair and skin. She finds the iPhone in the nick of time but doesn’t look pleased. Not a call from her husband or lover, he guesses. More likely a wail of despair from a colleague – a cry for help from the workplace she’s just left behind.

  The young man smiles as she passes him. There’s something familiar in her eyes. He snaps his fingers as he realises what it is. She reminds him of the woman he was with last night.

  The one he murdered.

  4

  MANHATTAN BEACH, LOS ANGELES

  The ME’s heavy morgue wagon, a white Dodge van with shaded windows, ploughs ruts in the litter-free sand as it disappears with its sad cargo. Crowds of rubbernecking bathers return zombie-like to towels and loungers as though nothing had happened. Life goes on – even after death.

  Nic Karakandez steps out of the taped-off crime scene and walks the amphibious tightrope between sand and sea, the line where the dark water washes onto the white sand then mysteriously vaporises in a fizz of outgoing wave. A north-easterly wind is kicking up as he looks to the glittering horizon.

  He’s done with being a murder police.

  Done with being any kind of police for that matter. His notice is in. The well-muscled six-footer made the decision years back, following an incident he doesn’t talk about – the kind that would make most good cops quit. Since then he’s been treading water, going through the motions, marking time until he got enough money together, nailed down his skipper’s licence and finished the repairs on his little sloop. Thirty days from now he’ll be sailing into the sunset to start a whole new life.

  Mitzi looks back towards the disappearing tape and the uniforms she’s just briefed to start canvassing the gawping zombies. ‘How d’you think Mr Freak dumped her? I mean, I didn’t see any tyre marks back there and the sand’s as soft as my gut.’

  Nic points east to a band of black running from the coast road across the beach and out to a squat building some way off in the sea. ‘Over there’s the Roundhouse. I guess he drove down the pier as far as he could then popped his trunk and simply slid her body over the side.’