Free Logan McRae Series Bundle (1,2,3,) by Stuart MacBride

anything more till I get the body back to the morgue.’ Hopping on one foot, she pulled off a Wellington and dropped it into a plastic-lined box, replacing it with a suede boot.
    ‘What was that all about?’
    ‘All what about?’ She went to work on the other Wellington, trying not to get too much garbage on her nice new shoes.
    ‘Look we’re going to have to work together, OK?’
    ‘I am well aware of that,’ she said, tearing off the boiler suit, flinging it in with the wellies, and slamming the boot shut. ‘I’m not the one with the problem!’
    ‘Isobel—’
    Her voice dropped twenty degrees. ‘Were you purposely trying to humiliate me back there? How dare you question my professionalism!’ She wrenched open the car door and climbed in, slamming it in his face.
    ‘Isobel—’
    The window slid down and she looked up at him, standing in the pouring rain. ‘What?’
    But Logan couldn’t think of anything to say.
    She glowered at him and started the car, doing a three-point turn on the slippery road, before roaring off into the darkness.
    Logan watched the car’s tail-lights disappear, cursed under his breath, and trudged back into the tent.
    The little girl was lying where Isobel had left her, the IB team too busy bitching about the pathologist’s departure to carry out her orders. Logan sighed and hunched down in front of the pathetic, taped-up bundle.
    The child’s face was almost completely hidden: the packing tape wrapped tightly around her head. The hands were taped together against her chest, and so were the knees. But it looked as if her killer had run out of tape before they could get the legs secured. That was why the left one had been poking out of the bag for a lucky seagull to nibble on.
    He pulled out his phone and called in, asking if they’d had any reports of a missing girl, about three or four years old. They hadn’t.
    Swearing softly, he punched DI Insch’s number in to give him the bad news. ‘Hello, sir? Yeah, it’s DS McRae. . . No, sir.’ He took a deep breath. ‘It’s not Richard Erskine.’
    There was a stunned silence at the other end of the line, and then,
‘You sure?’
    Logan nodded, even though Insch couldn’t see him. ‘Definitely. Victim’s a little girl, three, maybe four, years old, but she’s not been reported missing.’
    Foul language erupted from the earpiece.
    ‘That’s what I said, sir.’
    The Identification Bureau team mimed picking up the body and buggering off to the morgue with it. Logan nodded. The one who’d called Isobel a frigid bitch took out a mobile and called for the duty undertakers. It wouldn’t do to cart a dead child about in the back of a grubby van.
    ‘You think the deaths are connected?’
There was a hopeful edge to DI Insch’s voice.
    ‘Doubtful.’ Logan watched as the tiny corpse was gently rolled into a body-bag far too big for it. ‘Victim’s female, not male. Disposal’s different: the kid’s been wrapped up in a mile and a half of packing tape. No sign of strangulation. She might have been abused, but we won’t know until the post mortem.’
    Insch swore again.
‘You tell them I want that kid done today, OK? I don’t want to spend the night twiddling my thumbs while the media make up horror stories! Today!’
    Logan winced, not looking forward to breaking the news to Isobel. In her current mood she was more likely to do a post mortem on him. ‘Yes, sir.’
    ‘Get her cleaned up and photographed. I want posters run off: have you seen this girl?’
    ‘Yes, sir.’
    The blue body-bag was picked up by two of the IB team, and carefully placed in the corner of the tent, out of the way. Then they started collecting the rubbish from the bag she’d been dumped in, making sure it was all properly bagged and labelled. Banana skins, empty bottles of wine, broken eggshells. . . The poor little kid hadn’t even been worth the effort of a shallow grave. She’d been thrown out with the garbage.
    Logan was promising to call