A Clattering of Jackdaws (The Birdwatcher Series Book 2)

by European P. Douglas

  It was approaching midnight when Sarah turned from the road and started up the access road to Tyler’s house. She could see lights on and was a little disappointed. It would have been nice to rouse him from sleep and ruin that for him for him too!

  She drove fast towards the house, making as much noise as she could and just as she got there she saw him come out of the front door onto the porch. His cool demeanour and amused face annoyed her and at that moment she would have liked to plough this car right into the side of the house, that ought to wipe the smile from his face.

  “Do you think this is all some kind of game?” Sarah said as she pulled herself clumsily from the car, not noticing the engine was still running. Tyler stopped smiling, and she was glad of that, but his face held only confusion now.

  “Did you come all this way to chew me out again?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “And you’re going to hear me out!” Tyler nodded and then turning back to the house said,

  “Kill your engine and I’ll go put on a pot of coffee.” Sarah looked at the car and then sighed; this night wasn’t going well for her at all. She leaned in and turned off the ignition and then walked into the house after Tyler.

  He was standing on the far side of the kitchen island waiting on the coffee pot. He leaned calmly against the kitchen counter, his arms folded and a look of keen attention on his face. To Sarah he bore the look of an insolent teenager who knew the principle couldn't do any lasting damage to him. This was enough to set her anger in motion again

  “What is it you don’t get in all of this?” she shouted at him

  “There’s nothing I don’t get,” he said back, not shouting but his tone firm.

  “That’s not how it seems to me!” she cried back, “People are dead all around us and you still continue to lie and keep secrets!”

  “Not all secrets are bad things, Sarah. What I don’t understand is why you can’t see when someone is trying to protect you!”

  “I don’t need protecting!” she shouted.

  “You do!” Tyler shouted back, “If from nothing else then from yourself,” he finished with a little less force. Sarah was about to snap something back, what she wasn’t sure, but this stopped her. The coffee pot hissed and they both looked at it. “Coffee’s ready,” Tyler said, turning to it and taking down two cups. Sarah watched him as he did this. She turned his words over in her head trying to figure out what exactly he meant. She was touched by the idea he would want to protect her, but she didn’t really understand how he felt he was doing this.

  “Carson is on me, and I have to live with that,” Tyler said, his back still to her. She saw his hands on the counter edges and his shoulders slumped; she could only imagine the look of sadness on his face. “Putting you at risk at the same time would have been too much. I didn’t know what Spalding had planned, or if he was going to be there. I thought he might try to kill me.” Sarah could hear tears in his voice but still he didn’t face her.

  “Then why did you go?” she asked, her anger melting to pity and sorrow faster than ice melting in the hot sun.

  “I had to try to save Carson,” he said and his arms crumpled at the elbows and his head went to the counter as Tyler shuddered with sobs. Sarah rushed round the island to him and put a hand on his back,

  “You didn’t kill him,” she said, “You didn’t know Spalding was out to get him.” Tears were running down Sarah’s cheeks now too and it was for so many different reasons. Tyler turned to face her and when he saw she was crying he took her in his arms and they hugged like that for a long time in the kitchen, each of them thinking of their own failures and regrets but not speaking of them any more. When the embrace broke they locked eyes for a moment and then each leaned in simultaneously for a long lingering kiss, a kiss that continued on up the stairs and into Tyler’s bedroom where they fell into bed together.

  They didn’t talk anymore and they made love and then they slept, each exhausted, in one another’s arms. No, it would be fair to say nothing went as Sarah had planned that evening at all.

  Chapter 45

  IT WAS A HARD THROBBING noise, that was what it was. Sarah woke slowly, unsure of the world around her. Above her was dark and the smells were different. Then she felt someone against her side and realised she was naked. She turned in shock and there was the sleeping form of Tyler Ford. It all came flashing back to her and she sat up, not sure if she was happy or angry about what she had done. She knew it had been good, but did that make it a good thing?

  She planted one foot softly on the wooden floor and then knew what the noise was. It was her phone down on the island counter top where she’d left it last night when she came in. She stumbled around in the dark and gathered up enough of her clothes to be getting on with and then shuffled out the door hoping not to wake Tyler up. She thought she’d succeeded and she dressed in the hallway fast, a sock was missing and her silk vest, but that wasn’t the end of the world.

  Her phone was vibrating again as she rushed down the stairs, creaking noises all about that she just knew was going to wake Tyler. She lifted the phone and saw that it was Malick calling and also that it was now already four in the morning.

  “Malick, are you okay?” Sarah asked, answering lest she miss him again.

  “Why haven’t you been answering?” Malick asked back just as breathlessly, “Never mind,” he went on, “Spalding’s compound has been found!”

  “What?”

  “Some girls, one of them Karl Stanver’s daughter escaped and they came into a police station last night. The local sheriff’s office thought they were full of shit until they finally looked up Stanver and then called in State Police. They are searching the house right now!”

  “Where is it?” Sarah asked as she patted her clothes to make sure her car keys were on her. The briefest of thoughts of whether she was in any state to drive, drifted into her mind and left as quickly, this was way more important than her state of inebriation. Besides, she hadn’t drank in hours and she had slept since; she was fine, surely?

  Malick told her where the house was and Sarah punched in the information on her phone's navigation system as he talked.

  “I’ll meet you there in two hours,” she said as she hung up.

  “I assume Spalding is not there?” Tyler’s voice startled her from the darkness. She spun to face him. He was dressed in only a pair of tight black boxer shorts and she couldn’t help but admire his body as images of their night together came back to her.

  “No, but this is another step closer. I’m thinking he left there in a hurry once he knew the girls had escaped and hope something incriminating will have been overlooked.”

  “Maybe,” Tyler shrugged, his eyes betraying doubt.

  “You don’t think so though?” Sarah asked.

  “I don’t, but that’s not my main concern,” Tyler replied.

  “Then what?”

  “I find it hard to believe anyone escaped from Spalding.”

  “Are you suggesting these two girls might be in cahoots with Spalding?”

  “Maybe, perhaps unwillingly, but yes.” Sarah felt her stomach lurch. What if he was right, what if this was just the next part of Spalding’s game with them? How were they going to know? And there was no legal reason they could hold these girls in custody, not to mention it would be a terrible thing to do to them if they were telling the truth.

  “I gotta get over there,” Sarah said absently, “I have to see the place for myself.” Tyler nodded,

  “I’ll get onto my contacts and find out where it is and get there with the rest of the press,” he said. Sarah smiled at him, glad that he hadn't asked her for the address but also fully sure he was going to follow her car to find out where the house was.

  “See you out there,” she said and set off for her car. She could feel his eyes on her body as she left and she smiled a moment before getting on with the more serious work.

  Malick came out from the Spalding house to meet her when she arrived
. The place was so rural and she doubted anyone else had seen this house save from the air perhaps in many decades. How had Spalding come across it, she wondered.

  “It’s worse than we thought,” Malick said as she got out of the car.

  “How so?”

  “There are bodies down in the cellar, lots of them.”

  “How did they die?”

  “Gassed.”

  “Do we know who they are?”

  “Working on it, but I can guess they will be on the list of missing people the Spalding case is looking into,” he said.

  “Prints?”

  “Surprisingly few in the main house,” Malick said, shaking his head. “Plenty down below but my guess is we’ll match those to the dead people before long.”

  “How many?” she asked.

  “Ten”

  “Jesus,” Sarah said. Ten, just like that, she thought, and then Carson Lemond too. How high Spalding’s actual total must be.

  They walked the house in the forensic suits amidst the working team around them. The house was clean and tidy but it had no sense of having ever been lived in. The area below ground was extensively remodelled and Sarah felt surely someone had helped Spading build it, that was one lead they could look into. It was luxurious as dungeons went but that didn’t change the face of things with all the dead bodies down there.

  “Whatever it was, it was fast acting,” Malick said of the gas through his mask. Sarah looked around and saw the people dead sitting in chairs or sofas, one had even died while taking a shower. “This is where the two girls escaped,” Malick pointed out the hole in the wall they had made and she leaned in and looked up to see daylight up above.

  “Any of them could have escaped if they knew the gas was coming,” Sarah said. How horrible but in a way it was probably a blessing they didn’t think they could escape just before they died.

  “Agent Malick?” a voice said and they both turned to see one of the forensics people.

  “Yeah,” Malick said.

  “Initial reports are back on the fingerprints you wanted from upstairs,” she handed him an envelope. Malick took it and thanked her and then said to Sarah,

  “We better go outside to open this.” He explained to Sarah that he had asked for the first samples to be sent to the lab in Quantico for analysis right away as soon as Malick heard about this place.

  “Well, let’s see what we got,” Sarah said when they were out in the open air once more and had their masks off. Malick pulled the paper from the manila envelope and nodded before handing it to Sarah.

  She poured over it hungrily, looking for the name of Dwight Spalding but instead there was only one name.

  “The only prints in the whole of the upstairs house are Carson Lemond’s!” she said. It felt like another defeat and she tossed the paper on the ground in anger and walked away from Malick. He looked after her a moment before bending to retrieve the sheet and putting it back in the envelope.

  As Sarah had spun around, her phone flipped out of her pocket and onto the ground. She saw it fall but left it there a moment while she seethed a few feet away looking out on the assembled press that was gathering out by the flashing blue lights of the patrol cars and EMT vehicles.

  What she failed to see, however, was that as Malick bent to pick it up for her, he glanced at the screen and a look of shock ran over his face. He looked to Sarah and then back to the phone. He never expected anything like this.

  Chapter 46

  BEFORE SARAH HAD RALLIED up his driveway to tear him a new asshole, Tyler Ford had been at home looking into ‘The Agrarian’ Case. He’d been thinking about Carson a lot and he needed something to take his mind off it.

  He recalled looking into who it had been who tipped off the mob about the impending raids on the farmers' lands that it turned out never happened. As usual when it came to the mob there was a lot of closed ranks and fear of being labelled a snitch but Tyler had found out something on an informant called Donny and was now using it against him—this was how these things worked unfortunately.

  Donny didn’t know who the cop was, but it had been Donny he’d warned so he would pass on the message. Tyler’s conversation with Donny was through fractured text messages on a phone Tyler had given Donny sometime back to contact him.

  Donny told him how the gang bosses had been annoyed at him at first when the raids didn’t happen but that they were glad now after all the murders that had taken place. Their cars would have been impounded and found to be stolen if they were still there now.

  Donny’s description of the cop was nondescript; the only thing being that he was a plainclothesman. Tyler thought about this for a time and then an idea came to mind, something he had thought about before but hadn’t put much stock in. He looked up a few sites on his phone and then selected a photograph of a man that matched Donny's description and pressed send with the message.: Is this him?

  Sarah showed up not long after that and things took an unexpected turn and it was many hours later, after Sarah had left his house when Tyler saw that Donny had replied.

  “YES!” the message screeched out.

  Tyler looked out the window to where Sarah had gone; she was long gone now, over ten minutes. He dialled her number but it went to voicemail. This happened over and over as he got dressed and then finally, as he jumped into his car to try to follow her, he sent a text message to her phone.

  He didn’t pick up her trail and assumed she must be driving like a crazy woman to get where she was going. He was regretting now that he hadn’t asked where the house was and he started calling around to his contacts looking for information. It was twenty five minutes before he got the info he needed.

  All the way there he tried calling her and even thought of calling the local cops out by the house to tell them what he knew, but that was for Sarah to decide. He tried her again and again but still only voicemail.

  “Calm yourself,” he said out loud in the car; “You know the crime scene is real, you know there are plenty of people there. She will be fine until you arrive.” he looked at his watch. Only an hour to go.

  As he drove he cursed himself for having these thoughts before and not acting on them or following them. Spalding had played this one very well and even Sarah with her suspicious FBI nose hadn’t got wind of this one.

  It made sense now how Spalding had been able to tap Sarah’s original phone and how he knew of the FBI investigations of him at key moments of the ‘John the Baptist’ case and now ‘The Agrarian' one. The phrase keep your enemies closer came to mind. This was a lapse in Tyler’s judgment that he didn’t like one bit. He should have seen this long before now. But then, to be fair hadn’t he? He’d simply let himself be led away from this idea by what Sarah was telling him.

  The rural farmhouse scene was much busier than Tyler had imagined it would be. It had the feeling of another ‘Agrarian’ scene but he knew this was going to be something completely different. It seemed as though he wasn’t the only reporter who had informants working late into the night. There must have been well over a dozen news vans and cars there. Flashing lights and news camera lights could be seen from miles around. He’d never seen so many people beat him to a middle of the night gig like this, but then, what did it matter, none of them had the real story, like he did. They were all miles and miles behind no matter how much earlier they arrived here.

  Tyler parked as close by as he could and then ran to jostle for a position at the front of the reporting throng. He got there just in time to see two people coming out of the house and taking off what looked like forensic coverings. It took him a moment to realise it was Sarah and Malick and he saw them exchange an envelope which clearly annoyed Sarah. She threw whatever it was on the ground and then stormed away with her back to her partner. Tyler was too far away to hear anything and he wondered what was going on between them right then. He saw Malick bend to retrieve the paper and then he bent again a few seconds later and picked something else up from the ground. What was
it? A light emitted from it and there was something off about the way he looked at the thing that made Tyler feel uneasy. He did something to the item and then handed it to Sarah. It was her phone!

  Malick had seen his message, that was why his face was the way he was when he looked at it. Sarah must not have seen his message yet and now ‘The Agrarian’ knew that fact, as well as the one someone else knew who he was.

  “Sarah!” Tyler shouted, but there was so much noise around that she didn’t come close to hearing him. He tried to break through the cordon but a burly police officer held him back;

  “You have to warn Agent Brightwater, she's in danger!” he said, not wanting the other press to hear what he was saying. The officer looked over to where Sarah was and saw h she was now walking towards her car with her partner in tow.

  “Danger from what?” he asked.

  “Her partner, he’s a killer!”

  “Her partner! Get out of here, jackass,” the cop said and he pushed Tyler away. Tyler flashed with anger but caught himself, he knew causing a scene here was not going to achieve his aim. He looked back to Sarah and saw her getting into her car and Malick getting in on the passenger side. He ran back to his car; if they were leaving he would be able to cut them off and tell Sarah.

  When he got to his car, however, he saw with fury that this wasn't going to be the case. Another press van had turned up after him and had blocked in his car. There was no one in the driver’s seat and Tyler didn’t see them nearby.

  “Shit!” he said, spinning round to see Sarah’s progress. There was another route for police and EMT only and they were getting away that way. There was no way he was going to be able to cover the distance in the time it would take them to leave. He had to try though, there was no other option.