Hunters (Out of the Box Book 15)

by Robert J. Crane

  “DI Clements will see you now,” Maiden Aunt said as she hung up the phone. She hit a buzzer and a door to my right made a not-subtle unlocking noise. “Straight through the door and he’ll meet you just on the other side in a moment.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and went for it, beckoning Rose to follow.

  Maiden Aunt harrumphed, clearly meant to get attention for some reason. “Excuse me.”

  “You’re excused,” I said, not intending to give her any more of my time than she’d already absorbed, like an incubus stealing minutes of my life. I opened the door and held it for Rose.

  Maiden Aunt was on her feet, outrage increasing second by second. “I’m sorry, but your…associate—” and boy did she put some mustard into that word “—will have to wait out here.”

  “Listen, Dame Saggy Smith,” I said, causing Maiden Aunt’s mouth to gape in outrage, “I don’t know what they’ve told you about me, but when I came here, they gave me carte blanche.” I indicated Rose with my palm up. “This is my carte. Now blanche off.” And I tilted my head to suggest Rose get inside, which she did with all due haste, and then I closed the door on Maiden Aunt before she could start in to sputtering.

  “That was a bit harsh, wasn’t it?” Rose asked once we were in the interior hallway.

  “I didn’t say a single swearing potty word,” I said, “and no one lost a soul or their life, so…no, that was mild.”

  Rose snickered, and a second later a harried fellow came around the corner dressed in a well-pressed suit. He was middle-aged but still had his hair, dark and full, above a brow that was just starting to evince signs of his age. He stopped when he saw us barreling down the corridor toward him, and waited as I strutted up.

  “Sarah Nelson,” I said by way of introduction. “This is Rose, my associate.”

  “DI Clements,” he said in precise tones, another Edinburgher who lacked much of a brogue. “What can I do for you, Ms. Nelson?”

  “In our investigation, we turned up a second vic,” I said. “Roommate to Adam Perry, name of Graham Selkirk. Got anything on him?”

  Clements furrowed that brow, the subtle wrinkles of his advancing age turning into deep canyons as he contemplated this. “Aye; came though a couple weeks ago. I actually interviewed his flatmate at the time.”

  I followed him around the corner to the bullpen, which seemed to be a fixture of police stations the world over. I liked the air, the noise, the general feel of being in them, so to me this was a plus. It felt like home. “You interviewed Perry? And you didn’t put two and two together when the news came through that he died this morning?”

  “The Perry case never hit my desk,” Clements said. His expression said that he was probably sincere, in a lazy, didn’t-care-about-anything-but-his-immediate-job kind of way. “And Selkirk got ruled a heart attack by the coroner. It’s out of my hands now.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t want to step on any toes higher up by declaring it a homicide,” I said, both acknowledging the somewhat precarious situation he was in but also kinda calling him a lazy chickenshit for not doing any digging, all at once. But subtly. “When I got this case,” I said as we settled in the area around Clements’s desk, him taking his chair and not offering either of his lady guests one, “I was told that Perry was not the first victim they’d tagged for this perp. Did any of those land on your desk?”

  “Aye, for a time,” Clements said, looking into a pile of paperwork in neat little bins on the corner of his desk. Paperwork, too, seemed to be a universal police burden, which was probably why they needed bullpens—to do the piles of paperwork. He selected a folder and pulled it out. “Bianca Kelly.” He laid it down, then carefully picked out another. “Elizabeth Sutler.” Threw it on the pile. “Petra Evans.” And added it to the other two. “These are just the ones we can confirm, in the last two weeks, which was where I started digging before the people upstairs yanked it out of my hands.” He smiled benignly.

  I stared at Clements and he stared back. He hadn’t totally slacked off. He’d started to work on this thing before it got bumped up to Logan, Wexford, and, eventually, me. I picked up the folders, opening the topmost, the one belonging to Petra Evans. “Anything in particular stick out at you?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t have much chance to dig,” he said blandly. “But no. This connection you’re mentioning between Perry and Selkirk, it’s the first such I’ve noted. Evans lived with her husband up in Dunfermline, across the Firth of Forth—”

  “The what of what?” I asked.

  “Firth of Forth,” Rose said. “In Fife.”

  I looked from her to Clements. “You’re both just fucking with me now, aren’t you?”

  Rose chuckled. “A firth is an estuary, leads to the sea. Forth is the river. Fife is the county across the river.”

  “Right,” Clements said, “so, Evans lived across the Firth of Forth.”

  “In Fife,” I tacked on, because if they were having a good laugh at my expense, it was coming later. So far they were dead serious.

  “Aye,” Clements said. “Bianca Kelly was a nurse in a private practice here in Edinburgh. And Elizabeth Sutler was a tech worker. No connection between them. Sutler was abducted from outside her workplace. Kelly was taken from a public park. Evans…we’re not sure, but it looks like she might have had her car stolen at the same time, because it turned up behind a Marks & Spencer at Craigleith Retail Park.”

  “Forensics?” I asked. “On the car, I mean. The killer could have used it for a spell and…absorbed her for the joy of it.”

  Rose cocked her head at me. “Is it fun? Absorbing people?” Realizing we had an audience, she added hastily, “D’ye think?”

  “So I’ve heard,” I said, a little clipped.

  If it made it through Clements’s well-practiced aura of giving a damn about nothing, he gave no sign and offered no comment on it, instead sticking to my question. “The car didn’t make it to forensics before…” He gestured at the folders now in my hands.

  “It left your desk, tragically committing suicide, at least in your eyes,” I said. His narrowed at my swipe. “I need forensics on all this stuff, ASAP.”

  He shrugged almost indifferently. “Can’t.”

  I stared at him. “Why, pray tell?” I asked, with so much more patience and forbearance than I really felt he deserved at the moment.

  “It all got shipped, didn’t it?” Clements asked. “These files? They’re my copies.” He nodded at them. “The rest are making their way through the bureaucracy even now.” He kept a really steady, annoyingly so, gaze on me. “Figured you would know that.” It carried a bite of accusation.

  I didn’t let it rattle me, because unlike some amateur poseur, I’d been faking being federal law enforcement for years before I became an actual one—albeit on a different continent. “Bureaucrats,” I muttered under my breath, loud enough he could hear it as I paged through the folder. In practiced English and affecting a little bit of a heavier accent, I added, “They didn’t tell me nuffing.”

  Clements’s smoky eyes were watching me closely for a moment longer, and then he relaxed an inch. “They do that, aye.”

  I looked up. “Didn’t even tell me about Perry until I was almost here. ‘Surprise,’ they said. ‘Head to this crime scene.’” I shook my head. “Anyway, anything else you can tell me, Inspector?”

  Clements chewed his lower lip, clearly mulling over either the case, or whether he should spill the beans on something. I hoped for the latter. “There was one thing.” He seemed somewhat committed at this point, so I waited for him to come out with it. “Evans and Sutler both went missing before they were found—on different sides of the city, I might add.” He took a breath. “In the course of that part of the investigation, I contacted their mobile providers and tried to track their phones. Both went offline shortly before their deaths, but…I got an interesting point of reference from both of them.” He turned to his computer and clicked it off the screen saver, then brought up
Google Maps. “They’d both been recorded with a GPS fix at the same location—the night before each of the respective bodies turned up.”

  He zoomed in on a section of Edinburgh that I could tell from the overhead wasn’t near the castle or the old town. It looked a little grungier from overhead, and Clements clicked the cursor on a building in the center of the screen. “Right here. Both of these women, seemingly unrelated to each other by work, circumstance, acquaintance, yet…” He chewed that lip again for a second. “Less than twenty-four hours before they die, their cell phones turn up in this building, right here.”

  “What is it?” I asked, peering at the screen.

  “High rise up by the Firth,” he said. “Both of those cell phones—it wasn’t a precise fix, but they were up a few floors.”

  “Did you happen to get out there to take a look?” I asked.

  “I appended it to the report,” Clements said with a shrug. “But I didn’t get this back until after—”

  “The files flew from your desk, never to be seen again,” I said, leaning in. “All right. I guess I know where our next stop is.” I looked back at Rose, who nodded. She looked nicely determined. I approved. “Hopefully…” I said, giving voice to what I wanted—well, sort of, “this will put an end to it.”

  26.

  “Stop here,” I told the cabbie about three blocks from the apartment building that we’d gotten from DI Clements. He dutifully pulled over while I took in Rose’s querying look. “If this guy has people watching, I don’t want to give him a heads-up we’re coming. I’d rather come in quietly, through the back alleys, looking for any watchers he’s got set out so we don’t come stumbling into a trap that’s set for us before we get there.”

  “Ah,” Rose said. “That makes sense.”

  “Of course,” I said, handing the cabbie another £10 note and shutting the door so Rose didn’t have to, “given my luck we’ll come walking into one anyway no matter how much of a precaution we take, but still…” I thought about it for a second, the cab pulling away in a low hum of tires against pavement. “Actually, maybe we’d be better off just running it from here.”

  Rose got a pained look. “Uhm, all right.” Good sport that she was, that was the end of her complaint on the matter.

  We jogged along the street toward our destination, a multi-story red brick building that looked like it had seen much better days. There were older buildings along the street, residential, and a couple other towers nearby, lining the avenue with a distinctly old-timey feel, like they’d been built decades ago and let to go mostly to seed.

  “Gahhh,” Rose breathed, clearly laboring under some pain. I hadn’t checked her wound yet, not wanting to tell her to put up her shirt in any of the cabs we’d been in. It would have felt awkward, and also like the opening scene of a really cheesy porno.

  “You gonna be okay?” I asked, trying to set the pace at a run that would make an Army drill sergeant weep with joy if his charges were hitting this pace, but low enough that she wasn’t completely screwed.

  “I don’t do a lot of cardio,” she said. “So it’s not the wound, it’s the laziness, I’m afraid.”

  “Suuuuure it is,” I said. “I saw you pull out the martial arts in the cafe when you saved me. You’re practiced, and that doesn’t exactly take no stamina.”

  She blushed. “I do a little, it’s true. I took my inspiration on that from you.”

  “So it really is the wound,” I said.

  She clenched her jaw shut. “A little,” she finally conceded. “But I’ll be damned if I let you go busting in there all by yourself.”

  And I’d be damned if I left her behind to be picked off by any flunkies of Mr. Incubus, to be used as a hostage against me later. “Kind of you,” I said. “By the way…what were you doing up on the roof when you first saw me?”

  “Oh,” she said, brightening a little. “Well, I wasn’t actually on a roof when I first saw you. I was down at street level, walking to my job.” She blushed a little. “Erhm…which I maybe don’t have now, since I forgot to call and tell them I’d be not showing up today.” She shrugged. “Seems pointless to do so now, given that I’m hours late. Besides,” she said, a little glimmer in her eye, “this is so much more fun.”

  “It has a certain allure,” I conceded, not wanting to cop to the fact that yes, I was an action junkie, addicted to the thrill of the chase. When I wasn’t working, I felt like I was in static motion, trapped in life. But when I had a case? The sun was shining, children were singing—ones with good voices, like a choir, not a bunch of randos with pitch and tone issues. Even pursued by my country and hounded by the law, I didn’t feel alive, truly, unless I was working on something, catching a bad guy.

  “It’s the most thrilling thing I’ve ever done,” she burbled as we crossed the street. The tower was ahead, less than a block now. We weren’t running so fast we didn’t appear to be human, or a blur or anything—though I could have done that if I wanted.

  “Even the yak yak parts?” I asked, drawing a frown from her. “Where we just talk to people and try and get them to spill what they know about people?”

  “Look,” she said, almost pityingly, “what I do—did—for work is data entry. So yes, talking to people, even lecherous ones like that shopkeeper and the bartender? Much better than my average day of staring at a computer screen and hoping not to make too many errors.” She shuddered. “At least my meta speed keeps me moving fast enough to keep ahead, but I’ll tell ye—sometimes I have nightmares about sitting at the keyboard.”

  “Well, you’ll get nightmares of another kind entirely from this job,” I said. She nodded, signaling that she understood, but really…she didn’t. No one ever did until they saw some of the things we saw in this gig. And trying to warn her about them? Forget it. They had to be experienced.

  The front doors to the apartment building were Plexiglas, I realized as I held one open and let Rose pass through—once I’d made sure the lobby was empty. It wouldn’t have felt right sending her in without gauging threats first, but the elevator lobby for the place was pretty empty, and nice and open too, with a few apartment unit doors leading off it.

  “How the hell are we going to figure out which is the unit in this building that the cell phones for those vics came from?” I asked Rose as we ambled across the lobby.

  She frowned, then seemed to actually give it some thought, speaking out loud. “Are most of your type, uhm…loners?”

  I blinked, giving it some thought of my own. “The ones I’ve met? Yeah. My mom, Aunt Charlie, James Fries, Sovereign…pretty much all of them lived alone or wandered the world alone. I guess my mom was maybe the least anti-social of them, now that I think about it.” Which was kinda hilarious.

  “Then we’d probably be looking for a single-bedroom, right?”

  She had a point. “Makes sense.” I looked around, searching for a sign, an administration office, anything. A couple of hallways extended past the elevator banks toward the back of the building, into gloomy passages where the lights flickered and nothing good probably ever happened. I picked one, the one on the right, and started down it, looking for—”Bingo.”

  “Bingo what?” Rose asked, coming up behind me as I kicked in a door to an administration office. “Oh.”

  It ripped off its hinges and fell in, sending someone behind it sailing to their feet, screaming at a high pitch that reminded me of an opera singer. When I came through into the administration office for the place, I found it wasn’t actually a woman, it was a guy with shoulder-length curly red hair and a beard that was impossibly twisty. He wore jeans and a baggy denim button-up shirt and he threw his hands skyward as I came in. “Take whatever ye want! None of it’s mine—I don’t care if ye take it all; just please don’t hurt me!”

  I exchanged a look with Rose as she entered, clearly darkly amused by his statement. “I didn’t know anyone was in here,” I said, a little chagrined by this development. The office was a lot bigger than what I
had figured on too, doubling as a kind of janitorial space and maintenance and storage area.

  “I can leave,” he said, keeping those hands up and pointing toward the door. “No problem. I’ll make my way right out—”

  “Hold on there, Braveheart,” I said, causing Rose to display a nervous tick just by virtue of me mentioning the movie title. “Since you’re here, I might as well ask you a couple questions.” I flashed the badge, and he relaxed, finally letting his arms slowly drop to his side. “We’re looking into some suspicious activity—”

  “Yeah, that’d be the sixth floor,” he said. Definite, no budge.

  “I haven’t even told you what—”

  “Yeah, it’s the sixth floor. Trust me.”

  Rose had a hard time containing her amusement. “What d’ye see ‘em doing up there on the sixth floor?”

  “Oh, I don’t see anything,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing at all. Nothing I’d be willing to talk about in a courtroom dock, that’s for sure.”

  “Then why should we start with the sixth floor?” I asked, wondering if this was going to go anywhere good. I’d decided he was probably telling the truth; he was just so completely chickenhearted that once he’d dropped the dime, he didn’t want it to blow back on him.

  “Stuff is going on up there,” he said cagily.

  “What kind of stuff?” I asked.

  “Stuff. Probably not good stuff. Noise-complaints-from-other-tenants stuff.” He swallowed visibly. “That kind of stuff.”

  “If you say ‘stuff’ one more time, I’m gonna stuff something up your nose,” I said. He gulped again. “I’m looking for a serious criminal here. Get specific with me or I’m going to become a lot bigger pain in your ass.”