Death in the Black Wood, Oliver Davies [short story to read TXT] 📗

All three of those stills were from the footage my drone had taken while it was sitting on that wheelie bin up in Kinmylies. Out of all of our locations that one had been the best lit. “But he’s the OIOC, it will be his call whether to do that or not.”

“I just hope he weighs up the possible pros and cons first.” Shay didn’t like the idea, that much was clear. I took another bite while I waited for him to spell those out. “Possible gains. We may get enough calls in from sightings earlier last night to give some idea of where he’d been before we spotted him. We may even get a call from someone who’s seen our man wearing some of those clothes before, maybe even a neighbour. None of those items we found were new. They were all quite well worn.”

“And the cons?” I prompted.

“A flood of misinformation from mistaken callers for starters. Chasing all those down could eat up a lot of man hours, as well as confuse things enough to make the whole exercise pointless. More worrying is the thought of how our killer may react if he sees a televised appeal like that. I wouldn’t like to try to predict what he might do, but there is a possibility that it might cause him to lash out against the police. Nobody likes to feel hunted or threatened and we’re not dealing with a mentally stable person here. Myself, I’d prefer to wait until we had all the forensic reports in before doing anything that drastic.”

“By then, people’s memories of last night won’t be as clear, Shay. We could miss out on a tip that would lead us right to him, or close enough to find him.”

“I know. It’s a risk either way.” He drank off the rest of his tea. “Anyway, I’d better get back. I found one connection between the Dawsons and the Millers before your text came in that I want to follow up on. And I want to run those prints through some more databases too.” He wouldn’t want to discuss whatever he’d been snooping into here, where we could be overheard, so I didn’t ask. He’d call me as soon as he had anything solid, if I wasn’t home myself by then. I drank off the coffee that my machine had finished pumping out and we both got up.

My cousin would be operating in top gear for the foreseeable future. I had a suspicion that he felt that he’d failed us, in some way, last night, unlikely as that may seem. Christ! Without Shay we’d have nothing but those partial remains to go on today. Still, I knew the impossible standards he could sometimes set himself, given the right motivation. Chris Arnold hadn’t just left a wife behind, and their youngest boy was only eleven.

By the time I’d followed him out, Shay already had his jacket on and his laptop bag slung over his shoulder.

“See you later then, Cuz. Buzz me if you decide to work late. Otherwise, dinner at eight?”

“Sounds good. See you later, Shay.”

He didn’t bother to say goodbye to my remaining DCs before he left, but he did send a vague wave in their direction. Maybe, in a few months, he might even soften towards them enough to agree to take on another student. Bryce had surprised the hell out of me. That lad had taken to unarmed combat like a duck to water, and he was already far more advanced than the other three.

“Sir?” Collins ventured as I headed back to my office. “I just wanted to apologise for earlier.” I stopped to look down at him.

“Earlier?” I knew damned well what he meant.

“When we were discussing Mr Keane, the possibility of him not being a civilian after all.”

“Oh, that. Listen Mike, what you choose to talk about among yourselves on your own time is none of my business. Still, as you've brought it up, I’d appreciate it if any further gossiping about my family only happened when I wasn’t here, especially if it’s offensive in nature.”

“Of course, Sir,” he said uncertainly, a little puzzled by that last bit. Right, these kids hadn’t had any dealings with the kind of people they’d been talking about. They probably still thought covert agents were really cool, the ‘good guys,’ knights in shining armour.

Well, far be it from me to destroy their illusions.

I went back to my office to print out a few copies of those stills. Had I ever seen our world in such black and white terms? If I had, I must have been too young to remember it now.

Nineteen

James McKinnon decided to go ahead and air that appeal on Wednesday night. One of Shay’s stills, a full body front view of our suspect, was shown on successive newscasts that evening. As my cousin had predicted, the lines were pretty busy as people who thought they’d seen him called in. Positions and estimated times of sightings were duly listed.

Marked up on a map, they appeared to be a jumble of confusing, contradictory nonsense. McKinnon put two of his analysts on the task of trying to discover which chains of sightings were plausible and which were not. If the suspect was at such-and-such a location between five past twelve and quarter past, could he also have been there, or there, or there, at twelve thirty, either on foot or in a car? With over a hundred reported sightings of ‘possible’ matches wandering around on Tuesday night, there were thousands of possible paths taken to calculate.

I sent it all to Shay on Thursday morning. If he decided it was worthwhile, he might even write a little programme to crunch the data for him. He could probably make sense of that mess, if there was any to be found, faster than any of our people could.

The fake Facebook account he’d told me about last night sounded promising, and I knew he was monitoring both that and the