by Lee Hayton
Table of Contents
Title Page
Book
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About the Author - Lee
About the Author - Paul
WereEagles Fear to Tread
Face the Music: Book One
Lee Hayton
Paul C. Middleton
Copyright © 2017 Lee Hayton and Paul C. Middleton
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
Dedication
With eternal thanks to Kat Lind, the SIL Creative team, the Double-Ds, and our fellow boot-campers at Phoenix Prime.
Rise up from the ashes, people.
Phoenix Prime is a Ph.D. level workshop that spans approximately four months. It uses applied industrial psychology to address components of writing, marketing, branding, business, contract issues, and productivity that combine Creative Writing and Business perspectives.
The participants will create a portfolio to showcase their work alongside students in doctoral programs in several major universities. The objective, in addition to expanding the professional growth of all the participants, is to study the impact of the independent author-publisher on the commercial fiction industry.
WereEagles Fear to Tread
When I first walked into Lindsay and Areanna Thea’s house, the stink of failure had already permeated the air. Sometimes you just sense these things, least I do. After all, that’s why they pay me the big bucks. Hell, sometimes if I Air BNB the shit out of the granny flat out back, I can even make the rent.
The Thea’s eighteen-month-old kid was missing, kidnapped right out of the house while they slept. The culprit smashed through the bedroom window like a crashing wave, spraying drops of glass like frosted water from the three-metre-wide street-facing window. Baby on board, presumably he’d exited the same way.
A snatch and grab with a toddler instead of an ATM as the prize.
Lindsay showed me around his son’s room, taking the time to point out the broken glass before I stepped inside. The crime scene techs had already spray painted the glinting shards with their neon orange tagging, but the effort demonstrated to me he was a genuinely good guy. Not the type of scrote that’d sell his own kid to pay off a gambling debt—and before you look at me like that, it’s happened. And not just the once, mind.
My partner Matt elbowed his way in behind us, oblivious shoving his chosen method for entering any crime scene. My sergeant thinks the sun shines out of Matt’s arse, but I’ve yet to find another team member who feels the same. Blunt as a brick and twice as ugly.
And as for me? My name is Lou Lind, and I let the guys on the force believe it’s short for Louise. Wouldn’t have made it through basic training if they knew it stood for Luscious. Damn horny parents shouldn’t oversee stuff as important as their child’s name.
Sharp daggers of glass stuck up behind the painted wooden sill. The techs had smeared their fingerprint dust in a grimy film on every surface. As if the perp would be so dumb he’d clamber over that shark’s teeth of glass without bothering to wear gloves.
Not saying the criminal element in town is bright, mind. But there’d be nothing—it was just that kind of case.
The wind whistled through the open window, singing a tale telling me to give up and go back home. But what the hell, right? I got nowhere better to waste my time.
I felt for the parents, of course. Their tear streaked faces looked at me, stuffed full of longing and hope. At least the family liaison would cop the bulk of their grief—I owned enough sorrow without victims piling theirs on top.
Matt squatted down in front of Areanna, a stance that gave her a straight view at the spread of his crotch. My jaw must have drawn down in a gesture of revulsion because she caught my gaze and crossed her eyes.
The woman had a sense of humour. She’d need it at a time like this.
Matt leant forward, putting his moist hand on Areanna’s knee. From the corner of my eye, I caught Lindsay’s brow whirl into fury.
“I saw a load of feathers in Jason’s bedroom. Did he have a bird as a pet?”
Damn strange question, right off the bat. I hadn’t noticed anything of the sort, myself.
Areanna scrunched into the couch cushions, the farthest she could back away. I jabbed my pen into Matt’s shoulder, and when the dumb fuck didn’t move, I gave him a resentful kick to the heel.
“Stand up,” I said, indifferent to his angered expression.
He lurched to his feet. Areanna shrank even further back in submission as his bulk loomed over her.
“Hey, Matt,” I said, clamping down on my irritation to keep my tone as carefree as I could manage. “Why don’t you grab Mrs Thea a glass of water?”
He shrugged and ambled off, and I bit down on the sarcastic urge to say, “Good boy.”
“Is it okay if I sit?” I asked, nice and polite just like you’re meant to. Lindsay nodded, and I dropped with a sigh of gratitude into the La-Z-Boy chair adjacent to their couch.
“I’ve got a bunch of questions to ask you,” I warned. “And half of them you’ll already have answered. The difference is, I’ll capture everything, so it’s the last time.”
I waved my notebook at them, though the voice recorder humming in my pocket would do the heavy lifting. People grow anxious around machines, though. Manual scribbling, they trust and understand.
Matt returned with a glass of water, drops already slopping down the side. He banged it down on the polished wood table—sans coaster—then wandered off to annoy the forensic techs again.
“When did you hear the break-in?” I asked. A nice one to ease them in. A worried frown, exchanged glances, and I felt the drag of failure pulling me down again.
Before Lindsay shook his head, I already knew which way the wind was blowing. “We didn’t hear anything.”
The stench of failure. Yep. Spreading over the case like a brown stain.
#
Matt was right, there were feathers. Once I caught sight of the first my eyes picked out more of them. They were dotted all over the crime scene. One stuck in a smear of blood on the threatening edge of a glass shard. Another caught on the edge of the abandoned baby’s pillow. While they fluttered in the breeze, I counted a dozen on the floor.
I knelt, and my knees popped, a protest for missing my early session at the gym. The feathers were a hundred glorious hues of colour, all melding together into taupe. Long, too. These weren’t plucked from a goose or inferior cast offs from a house sparrow fight.
Their appearance coincided with the first tentative throbs I knew from experience would soon develop into a pounding headache. The type I usually earned with a long night of hard drinking. The damn things always hurt more without the joy of prior benefit to ease the pain.
Maybe the ache resulted from my clenched teeth as I listened to Matt blunder around the house. Judging from the wide-eyed grimace plastered on the family liaison, I wasn’t the only one bracing with dread anticipation every time he swept by.
I bagged a couple of the feathers, though the scenes of crime officers would already be isolating their species down at the lab. For some reason, their presence in the desolate room snagged like a fishhook in my brain. If I kept them close, I could check on them if the reason for that inquisitive tugging became apparent.
You learn these things as you go along. Intuition isn’t just in your guts, it pops up in every damn cell of your body.
&nbs
p; Matt suddenly appeared in the doorway, sagging his large body against the frame. One indifferent arm raised in the air displayed a sweat stain leaking down from his pit. The fulsome odour made me switch to breathing through my mouth.
“So, what’d you reckon, Lou?” He sniffed and scrunched up his face to ward off a sneeze. The dander from the feathers irritated my nose too.
I shrugged. “Too early to tell yet. Hard to believe the parents slept through this.” I swept my arm out in a circle over the broken glass.
Matt nodded and leant forward, like a boy about to confess a sin. “I have my own ideas.” He tapped his forefinger twice against his nose.
The pounding in my head ratcheted up a notch. My pulse was now a throbbing light, visible in my eyes.
“Well?” I couldn’t be bothered hiding my irritation any longer.
“It’s Big Bird,” he said with a shit-eating grin. “Yellow feathers would be a giveaway, but I reckon he got a dye job, see. All those years of entertaining kids, he got lonely and finally wanted one to call his own.”
I concentrated on the feather in the evidence bag I was holding, while I counted back from ten. When I completed that, I did it again for good measure, then looked Matt in the eye with my blood still boiling. My cheeks were heated into a vibrant crimson flush.
“If I catch you saying anything that stupid in front of the parents, I’ll see you out of a job by nightfall.”
I shouldered him out of the way as I exited, not sticking around to hear whatever dim retort he could manage. The grapevine said the donkey had taken his Sergeant’s exams. If the force promotes him into a superior position to me, I’m out.
My phone chose that moment to ring, the poor bugger calling earned a curt, “What?”
“Lou? It’s Adams from media coordination. Could you pick us up a photo?”
“Aren’t uniform back yet?” I asked, genuinely shocked.
A pause told me they were and Adams dropped his voice down to a sarcastic whisper. “Yeah, they ‘forgot.’ Or, as they put it, they thought the SOC boys would bring in the snapshots.”
I snorted. Like the forensic guys ever dealt with human beings. “I’ll get some to you, okay if I take a photo on my phone.”
“Anything so long as it’s fast. We’ve got the circus starting up in ten minutes.”
The media announcements were always a joy to the crew back at the station.
“Mrs Thea?” I called out, hanging up and heading towards where I’d last seen her. When I turned the corner, I saw her wide eyes and trembling body and stomped down hard on my empathy. This wasn’t the case to get emotionally entangled with. I let her turn to Lindsay for a hug.
“The station is about to do an initial media blitz about Jason. They wondered if you have a recent photograph.”
The question was so innocent, the look of panicked concern between the couple caught me off guard.
“It doesn’t have to be recent?” I ventured after a moment’s silence, broken again when Matt slouched into the room.
“We don’t have many, but I’ll look for something,” Areanna ventured before leaving the kitchen.
“That a cultural thing?” Matt asked Lindsay, and the muscles in my back stiffened against his impending foot-in-mouth.
Areanna was lightly tan, but in the whitewash of Christchurch, that tone immediately placed her in a different ethnic group.
Lindsay stared at Matt, his eyebrows slightly raised, shaking his head in bewilderment.
Matt rolled his hand while parting his donkey lips wide and braying, “Doesn’t her tribe or whatever believe photographs steal your soul?”
Wince is too mild a word for the facial contortions his sentence triggered. I opened my mouth to give the arse an automatic reprimand, then heard the creak of a floorboard behind me.
Areanna stood with a couple of photographs in her hand. Developed, proper old-fashioned pictures.
“Actually, Detective Wilkins, it’s more of a reaction to Instagram,” she said to Matt. I took the photos from her hand and captured their likeness on my smartphone, pressing send.
“When everyone has a thousand pictures of meals they’ve eaten on their smartphones, it cheapens the intimate value of looking back. We,” she nodded to Lindsay, “made an agreement to only take photos of Jason when it was warranted.”
The hipster appeal of her explanation floated by while I listened more intently to the sweet subtlety of her body language. The faint grimace, the locked stare, the jerk of her head tilting from one side to another.
For whatever reason, Areanna was lying.
#
A clash of cymbals vibrated inside my head as Matt opened his mouth again. I held up my hand in an attempt to get him to shut his stupid gob, but it was no use. The man understood self-preservation as well as he understood subtlety.
“Ma'am, if you don't tell us the truth about everything, we can't help you. We may as well walk away right now!”
What I wanted to do at that moment was to curse him with every foul word I'd ever heard my father say, and my father had been a cavalry trooper in the army. I heard him say a fair few.
Instead, I turned on my heel and gestured Matt outside. I waited until we were both on the path out of sight of the door, then twisted his arm up behind his back, and crushed his face into the rough brick wall.
He squealed and wriggled, but I don’t go to the gym for an hour most mornings to look pretty.
“Since you’re incapable of being an asset to this investigation you can go back to the station house and start filling out the paperwork.”
When he opened his mouth to object, I twisted his arm higher. “You can also tell the Sergeant about what you’ve said in the last few minutes to Mrs Thea.”
I stepped back, releasing him to cautious freedom. As he turned to leave, I held up a finger. “I’ll be submitting my own report later,” I tapped my pocket, “complete with recorded evidence. I suggest you don’t let that be the first time the Detective Sergeant hears about it, and those reports better match.”
At that point, he paled. He gave nodded generically and quickly left the house. I heard his car start, and the tires squealed as he drove off. He was obviously pissed at someone. Because he was such a stupid, arrogant fool, I suspected he was pissed at me, more than himself.
It looked like his Sergeant's badge was some time away now. As I headed back inside, a trilling Piccolo accompaniment formed the background of that thought.
Areanna had moved inside her missing son’s bedroom, and as I watched for a moment, her shoulders slumped in resignation.
Walking in, I cleared my throat. “I apologise for my colleague’s behaviour, Mrs Thea. He seems to have forgotten his training.”
I smiled and touched a hand gently to the back of her hand, leaning closer. “While I can't remove DC Wilkins from the investigation completely, I can make sure he’s supporting from behind the scenes, rather than contaminating the investigation.”
Gratitude flashed over her face. Then tears rolled down it as she grasped the coverlet from her son's bed. I was about to ask whether there was anything else she could tell me, push her a little, when I saw Lindsay in the hallway.
Ariana tightened as she heard a creaking floorboard behind her. The look she gave me was one of pure supplication. I sighed internally, and said with a perfectly calm expression, “Perhaps you'll find it easier to talk through these potentials suspects outside the house, Mrs Thea?”
She nodded gratefully, and I turned to look at her husband. “Sometimes it's just too overwhelming to do it so close to the scene of a kidnapping, Lindsay. We shouldn't be long, and I'll send one of the uniforms in to explain to you how to deal with the situation if you receive a ransom call asking for her while we are gone. It's best we do this as early as possible in an investigation for several reasons.”
He only grunted. It was obvious there was something going on between him and his wife that I was not privy to yet. That was a big roadblock in the inves
tigation. Hopefully, this tactic would overcome it.
I walked over to the officer at the front door. “Officer... Richmond?”
“Yes, DC Lind?”
“Call me Lou,” I said, the phrase automatic. “Have you done the basic kidnapping and ransom training?”
“Yes… Lou. It's one of the reasons I was assigned to the scene.”
“Being in the house is upsetting Mrs Thea too much for me to get a clear interview. We're just going to go down the street to grab a coffee and a chat.” I looked over my shoulder before lowering my voice. “You know what to do if a ransom caller specifically asks for her?”
“Yes,” she nodded vigorously. “Tell them she’s too sedated at present to converse. That she had to be sedated for her own safety.”
“Good,” I gave her a firm nod and a smile. “We don’t expect it given there’s been no warning against contacting police, but if anything happens the Sergeant’s on alert at the station. I'll just chat with the scenes of crime officers, then we'll go.”
I turned and faced the blockage to my investigation. Everything Matt had said was right, it was just how he said it. His first two comments had been completely out of line. The final one had just been a little off.
However, it had also painted me into a corner which annoyed me no end. I heard an oboe playing in the background, somehow. A mournful kind of tune. I shook myself. I had to focus get on with this.
I walked over to the SOC techs. “Did you get the phone tap sorted?”
A man looked up from checking evidence tags, and I recognised Burton from a training course we’d once done together.
“Set up on the home line, and the mobile providers are recording both cell phone numbers until we tell them differently.” His calm efficiency was like a string quartet to my ears. “Do you think…?”
I shook my head, not that I was an expert on ransoms. But for the most part, they went, step one—don’t contact the police.
Either a note had gone astray, or there was a different motive.
“The government will back us if we need urgent funds, but at this stage…” I shrugged my shoulders.