Blood Evidence
Page 20
Anthony didn’t press the issue, thankfully. But I knew what Ram was thinking. It’s easy to recognise something in someone else when you share it. We knew what it felt like to feel guilty. We knew what it felt like to have blood on our hands. We’d been there, seen the life flood out of someone’s eyes, their light go dark. You’re different, after seeing that. You can’t not be.
But that’s not the kind of thing you can casually admit to a police officer.
The sun had dropped lower in the sky by the time they arrived. There was only perhaps a half hour of light left, and they were lucky it was a clear September day; any cloud cover, or a month later, and they would be working in darkness.
“Let’s see what you boys have got for us this time,” Fairlight said, standing off to the side with us and rubbing his hands together in front of his considerable belly. He watched, as we did, while his men did all of the manual labour. The mound was too small to bring in a digger – and the terrain too soft, and the entrance to the park too narrow – so they were going at it with spades, carefully removing load after load of fresh earth.
We watched solemnly. There was an air of wariness around, all of them half-hesitant as they dug, wondering if the next piece of dirt moved away would reveal an arm or a foot.
The sun was almost gone when the shout went up. A few feet down, the metal head of a spade had hit something a little more solid. Maybe a tree root. Maybe not.
“Lights,” Fairlight shouted, and some of the team peeled off to run towards the road. They came back bearing floodlights between them, and lengths of cable, and generators.
Before twenty minutes was up, they had the whole area floodlit, and we could see what the spade had struck.
“Do you think it’s him?” Ram breathed.
“I hope so,” I said, as Fairlight’s men moved us back, out of the way of their operation. “If it’s not, we’ll have more questions than we started with.”
Ram grunted and nodded. “Just a shame,” he said. “Our first missing person. I hoped we were going to find him. Alive, I mean.”
“Me, too,” I admitted. “But at least she’ll know.”
We watched in respectful silence as they carefully removed the rest of the dirt from Ray Riley’s body – soon confirmed to be him, at least unofficially, when they uncovered his face. He was wearing the same things he wore in the CCTV footage we had seen. Those may well have been his last moments.
“But why?” I asked. “That’s the part I don’t yet understand. Why was he killed? We haven’t found anything strange in his past, right up until the moment he disappeared.”
“Maybe the police will find out,” Ram shrugged. “Adelaide paid us to find him, and we’ve done that. She might not want us to investigate further.”
“And you’re happy with that ending?” I asked. I couldn’t believe that he could be.
Ram was about to reply when we both heard Fairlight swearing loudly. Most of the team working the site turned to look at him, as he ended a phone call and threw the device furiously down to the floor.
“Chief?” Anthony asked quietly.
Fairlight rubbed his forehead for a moment, hiding his eyes. Then he seemed to pull himself together, and turned to address the group. “That was HQ,” he said. “Jude Hargreaves has just been found dead in his cell. Apparently, some joker didn’t check him carefully enough for contraband. He slashed his wrists with a razor.”
There was a collective groan from all of the assembled men and women. The case they had just spent all that time bringing to a conclusion was not to even reach prosecution.
“We won’t be getting any answers there,” Ram said.
“He won’t be able to reveal the name of his co-conspirator,” I replied. “The person, or persons, who must have killed Ray.”
“At least we have the body to go on now,” Ram said, nodding towards the hole and rubbing a hand over his tired eyes and cheeks. “Maybe it will provide the forensics to get this closed up.”
But even as he said it, we both knew the chances were hardly high.
33 – Ram
The remains of a takeaway pizza, a carton of chow mein and egg fried rice, and emptied pots of sweet and sour sauce or curry litter the table. I’m on my third whiskey, and the world has been put to rights. Just exactly the way I like it.
Telling Adelaide Walters that her fiancé was dead hadn’t been fun. To my surprise, Will had insisted that we be the ones to tell her, along with the official police representative. She was our client, I suppose.
But now the case is all put to rest, and even if we don’t have clear answers about who killed Ray Riley, the police seem happy to pin it all on Jude. Which might just be the best we’re going to get, considering he has taken any secrets he had to the grave. And that is why we’re celebrating a job well done, even if we didn’t quite get all of the loose ends tied up.
“I wonder if he told anyone,” I say idly. “A friend, or a family member. Would make things quite a lot easier if he did.”
“You’re counting on them coming forwards, though. Which might be a lot to expect if he trusted them enough to tell them about a murder plot.”
“I guess so,” I admit. “I’d like to think if you knew my secrets, you wouldn’t spill them the second I died. I mean, I guess you do know some of my secrets already, but you know what I mean.”
“You don’t have to keep any secrets from me,” Will says. He knows what I mean. “I wouldn’t tell anyone about San Francisco. You know it makes me look just as bad as you. If not worse.”
“Worse?” I repeat. “No way. That was all my fault.”
“Let’s not argue about this now,” Will sighed. “In fact, let’s not talk about it at all. My point is, you can tell me anything you need to.”
“Alright, B.J. Wong,” I say.
“How did you figure that out, anyway?” Will asks, after rolling his eyes at my obvious point. “And don’t give me any of that ‘I have my ways’ nonsense. Something must have tipped you off.”
I give him a sheepish look. Probably time to confess all. “I saw an email from your publisher pop up on your phone. All it gave me was the name. And then you were always trying to close your laptop when I came in the room. I ended up searching the name, finding the books, and putting two and two together. That was after I spent a whole afternoon trying to guess your laptop password.”
“I’m not an idiot,” Will says. “I use a random number and letter string password. I memorised it via mnemonic, but it means nothing.”
“Well, then. At least only one of us is an idiot,” I shrug.
“You’re not an idiot either,” Will says, lips curving into a smile. “We just solved a murder investigation and a missing persons case. Ahead of the police. At the same time.”
“Here’s to us,” I say, raising my glass.
Will laughs, and touches his against mine with a ringing chime. “To us.”
We each sip our drinks, and then put them back on the table, laughing quietly.
“I don’t know how you always see the things that I can’t,” I say, leaning my head against the sofa cushions and looking at him.
“You always see the things that I can’t,” Will says, copying me. It’s like looking into a mirror, but the reflection is of course not my own.
“I guess that’s why we work so well,” I say. I take in Will’s face, closer to mine than I can ever really remember it being. He has the kind of bone structure that just draws your eyes. Those cheekbones, leading down to the fine angles of his chin, the full lips.
“We’re like two halves of a whole,” Will agrees. How have I never noticed how full his lips are before? They’re the kind of lips that are just begging to be touched.
“Yin and yang,” I say, quietly. Something has changed. There’s some kind of charge in the air, something peculiar that I don’t fully recognise. Or I do, but I don’t know what’s happening, because I never thought I would recognise it with Will.
“That
’s Chinese,” Will says, in that funny way he has of making out like I don’t know the difference between his Korean heritage and other Asian cultures. Usually it makes me roll my eyes or fake-punch him in the arm.
But tonight it goes straight down my throat and hits me in the chest, and tells me this is why you love him.
Because I do love him. He’s my best friend. How could I not?
I feel like we must have moved closer together. Did we move closer together? I can’t take my eyes off his mouth. That soft, plump-lipped, slightly parted mouth, open as if to accept me.
I don’t know if I moved my head or if he did. I don’t know what happened because it all happened so fast, but we are kissing and his lips feel and taste just as good as I imagined they would. They are so soft that I just want to feel them all over me, and I put my hand up into the hair at the back of his head to deepen it and bring him closer –
He pulls away, and I drop my hand like I burned it.
We stare at each other for a moment, out of breath and panting, and Will’s face is turning into a mask of horror right in front of my eyes.
Shit. What did we just do?
Will scrambles to his feet, pushing away from me, and almost trips over the coffee table in his haste to get out of my vicinity.
“Will,” I say, weakly, surprised to find my voice crackling and rough.
I turn to follow him, but the door to his room slams shut and I hear the click of the lock.
Oh, shit. What was that? Was that me, pushing him into something he didn’t want? Or did he move towards me?
Was that me, or him?
And if it was him, why did he just run away without a word like he was scared of me?
What did we just do?
Coda
He sits at his computer again, smiling.
How fun these little private detectives are turning out to be! Getting onto the right track all by themselves, just like that. He left the breadcrumbs for them to follow, and they ate them all up. Intuition isn’t something you can teach, even if you can read all of the clues.
He flips open the file and looks down again at the grainy, old image of the man from San Francisco. The one they killed. Either Julius, or Will, or both of them; with no witnesses, it’s hard to say.
They probably think they’ve got away with it, running away like that and starting over. But they aren’t out of the woods yet.
One more test for them, and he will know if they are worthy of his attention. No one has ever progressed this far, and he can’t help but be excited. But he mustn’t get carried away, not yet. They haven’t got to the bottom of things.
They haven’t figured out that he exists, or who he is.
But they did solve the trap he set for them, and that’s promising.
Everything is in place for the next test, and he is looking forward to it immensely. If they solve this one, he will be very impressed indeed.
If they solve this one, then he will start to play the real game. And they, unsuspecting pawns, will dance his dance – whether they like it or not.
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