Page 1 of What Doesn't Kill You…

PROLOGUE

Five years earlier

Glasgow, Scotland

On a cold, dreich night in Glasgow’s West End, Detective Inspector Violet Lee stood over the body of the man she’d been hunting and felt nothing but irritation. When she’d last seen him, he’d been very much alive. Now, he was lying in a pile of garbage while her colleagues gossiped among themselves, and the whisper of her name carried on the chill night air.

“Violet Lee…another suspect dying violently…"

"…third one in as many months…"

"Can’t be a coincidence…”

Violet tuned out the speculation as the crowd worked around her. Pressing her hand against her ribs, where the dead man had gotten in a kick that afternoon, she crouched on the wet, black pavement beside him. Puddles, leftover from heavier rain earlier that evening, reflected the flashing lights of the emergency vehicles, glowing blue and red in the night. The exact same colors that would appear on her skin in the days to come.

Forcing herself to block out the circus happening around them, she focused on the man propped against the old tenement wall. Although it seemed fitting that a brutal murderer should have ended up dumped with the trash, this wasn’t the way Violet had wanted things to end. She’d wanted to see him in a cell, terrified of his fellow inmates and what they’d do to him. She’d wanted him to live out a very long life, suffering the same kind of fear and abuse that he’d inflicted on his victims.

Sadly, you didn’t always get what you wanted.

Instead, his face had been pulverized by fists much stronger than Violet’s own, and his limbs lay at angles impossible to attain without broken bones.

It was an all too familiar sight.

“I see our suspect has been beaten to death.” Chief Inspector Murray McFarlane was a master of stating the obvious. He was also unsurprised. “And your knuckles are raw, DI Lee.”

It was the kind of casual observation he was famous for making. As though commenting on the weather, instead of letting the perpetrator know he was on to them.

Only, she wasn’t a perpetrator.

Slowly, she stood and turned to face her boss who, like everyone else she knew, was at least a head taller than her.

“What are you doing out of the office?” Usually, it took the promise of food or a summons from HQ to get him to leave his desk.

“This is the third one of your suspects to die this year after they've had an altercation with you.” He eyed her solemnly. “There are questions that need answering.”

“Like whether or not I killed him?”

“Violet, you know that’s not what I thi?—“

“We fought earlier,” she interrupted in a toneless voice. Nothing to see here, nothing to hear. “He got away.”

Murray kept his eyes on the body. “We have witnesses to your fight with the dead man. One woman said you were doing your kung fu crap on him. Kicked him on the side of his head.”

“A glancing blow.” She wished it’d been harder.

“Her husband said you seemed more intent on hitting him than arresting him.” Murray slowly turned his attention toward her, and she saw only pity-filled resignation in his eyes. “It’s out of my hands now, Violet. Management have heard the rumors and they’ve started an internal investigation.”

She looked past him, through the crowd, to where her so-called partner was joking around with some other male cops. Aye, she bet she knew exactly who’d ensured those rumors got to management’s ears. Danny Rossi was a lecherous weasel who was more interested in grabbing her backside than doing his job, yet he still believed she got his promotion. She had no regrets over breaking his hand for touching her. After all, he’d been warned. Unfortunately, it seemed like the pervert held a grudge.

“It doesn’t look good,” Murray said, keeping his voice low.

No. It didn’t. Violet ground her teeth together until her jaw began to ache. She would not protest her innocence again. She’d spent hours doing that after the first two bodies had turned up bloody.

She lifted her chin and stared her boss down. “Guess we’re going to have to let The Police Investigation and Review Commission sort this out. I have nothing to hide.”

Murray nodded before crouching to get a closer look at the victim. “Would rather not have turned this over to the PIRCs but we don’t have a choice." He pronounced the internal affairs abbreviation the way all cops did, as pricks instead of pircs. To say they were unwelcome was to put it mildly. "Looks like he was kicked or shoved into the wall. There are fresh stone chips where he hit before he fell.”

Violet crouched beside her boss. The smell of wet, molding garbage made her want to gag far more than the sight of the dead man.