The End of Summer: Book One in The Detective Bill Ross Crime Series

by Irving Munro

  As Tommy had said in the briefing, if someone had been in the house, these vacuum cleaner marks would have been disturbed and they would have seen the footprints on the carpet. Unless, of course, they also vacuumed after they left. The place was pristine: no water droplets in sinks, no evidence of anyone having been in the house post cleaning. Stan was sure the killer had not come into the house.

  When he was finished with the internal inspection of the McCord home, Stan sat back in his police cruiser and let out a long sigh. “We are nowhere on this! Who was this woman? How did she meet her killer? How did she get in the McCord backyard? Why was she staged?”

  The team had been at it for several days and they had made little progress on any aspect of this killing. They needed a breakthrough and they needed it fast.

  Chapter 8 - Galina Alkaev

  2005 - A Great Adventure

  The sun’s warming rays woke Galina Alkaev as they penetrated through a one-inch crack in the thick red curtains covering her bedroom window. She lay there for a few seconds, allowing her some time to clear the sleep and to focus. Her heart started pounding with excitement. She was going to do it.

  She threw back the covers, jumped out of bed and stepped across the hallway to the bathroom. As she sat on the commode, tears began to slowly roll down her cheeks. She felt sad for her parents, Alexi and Lyudmila, who had already left to handle the breakfast rush at the Alkaev Family Restaurant, a Russian ethnic restaurant they owned on Reisterstown Road. Local workers from the Pikesville Ford engine plant and medical staff from the night shift at Johns Hopkins Hospital in central Baltimore would be streaming in with big appetites. Galina could almost smell the grenki cooking on the grill.

  As she pulled off her nightgown and stepped into the shower, soothing jets of hot water caressed her long golden hair and washed away her tears. She had to do this. Had to get away and make a new life.

  “This is the right thing to do,” she whispered to herself, trying to force the last remnants of doubt from her mind.

  She dried herself and then stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. She had to pull herself together. The face looking back at her had red bloodshot eyes from crying and looked drawn and tired as the past few weeks of sleepless nights had taken their toll.

  “You’re going to do this!” she said as the image in the mirror repeated the words back word for word. She opened the bathroom cabinet and began filling her overnight bag with all of her shampoos and toiletries. She grabbed a set of dry towels from the airing cupboard and stuck them in her bag.

  Before returning to her bedroom to pack her clothes, she walked down the hallway to her parent’s bedroom. She could smell the Novaya Zarya, her mother’s favorite perfume, lingering in the air. She walked into her parents closet and driven by some hidden force, ran her fingers gently over the garments like a maestro pianist at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall in Moscow. She landed on her mother’s favorite dress, grabbed it in both hands, pressed it against her face and slowly inhaled.

  As she turned from the closet to leave, she looked at her mother’s dressing table. Everything was in its normal place. “This room hasn’t changed in twenty years,” she thought to herself.

  Her parents loved each other deeply and they had raised two children who loved and respected them. She felt a twinge of regret that she was now betraying that respect. She and Pavel were eloping and she knew her parents would be devastated. Before leaving her parents’ bedroom, she whispered a prayer of hope asking God to guide them on their journey to find a new life together.

  Galina ran to her bedroom and packed her things. She stood in the center of the room and slowly looked around to say goodbye. She had a good and happy childhood growing up in this house. The bedroom had witnessed her tears of joy after Pavel told her he loved her for the first time. She also remembered the night she cried herself to sleep when she heard her grandmother had died.

  Galina thought of her parents again. The restaurant would be full and food orders would be backing up. They relied on her and she was letting them down. Suddenly, she realized that she had to leave soon. Her mother would be on the phone at any minute demanding that she get to work.

  Galina had worked in the family restaurant in Pikesville, Maryland for as long as she could remember. She had swept floors, washed dishes and peeled potatoes on her way to becoming a combination maître d’ and waitress. She hated it. Galina wanted to go to college, but her parents couldn’t afford to help. They had offered to pay her to work in the restaurant so she could save money before going off to school but Galina knew their hidden agenda. They hoped she would stay permanently. Galina knew that there was no future in this and that when her parents retired, if they ever would, that the restaurant would go to Nickolay. He was their son and that’s how it worked in Eastern European families.

  With her bag in hand, Galina crept past her brothers’ room and gently pushed open his door. She blew a good-bye kiss to the snoring Nikolay and crept downstairs. She placed the letter she had written on the worktop by the cookie jar and looked around her childhood home before creeping out the back door. Galina Alkaev was gone, off on her great adventure, never to return.

  Chapter 9 - Bill Ross

  2014 - The Cold Case Investigation

  The killer lay in wait. There were several viable targets. He just needed to be patient and the right one would show. The killer had chosen the perfect spot, lying in the dense undergrowth just off the main path alongside a chain link fence. It was just after midday and many had flown in to enjoy the sumptuous buffet. He struck! It was over in an instant. It was now all about enjoying the kill and he would do it leisurely over the days ahead. His dark eyes blinked rapidly in anticipation while his tongue flicked back and forth, salivating at the thought.

  William Ross, Bill to most of his friends, had never witnessed a Texas rattlesnake kill in the wild. Many years ago, back in his native Scotland, he had gone on a school trip to the Edinburgh Zoo and had watched the zookeeper feed the snakes in the reptile exhibit, but this was his first experience of seeing it in the wild.

  Bill scanned the greenbelt at the rear of his home in the Balcones neighborhood of northwest Austin with a pair of vintage binoculars. His father-in-law had given them to him, so he guessed they were made before the Second World War. His deck ran the total length of his home and was some fifteen feet above his yard. He could scan the entire greenbelt and could also see the high-rise apartment buildings in the distance in downtown Austin. Every couple of months it seemed that a new one appeared on the horizon. Austin was booming and every part of the city infrastructure was being stretched to maximum capacity.

  The maker of the binoculars was Barr & Stroud, a Scottish engineering company that was initially formed in 1913 and was recognized for its pioneering work in optical engineering. They made rangefinders for the Royal Navy. This morning, Bill was not aboard a naval destroyer and was not about to lob fifty pounders over the sea at the German Navy. Moments before witnessing the rattlesnake strike, he had finished filling the two bird feeders that hung over the greenbelt and the birds were flying around enjoying the feast. The rattlesnake knew to lie directly below the feeders as eventually a bird or a small rodent would walk by looking for the seeds that the birds had shaken loose and discarded from the feeders dangling overhead.

  Bill thought about the rattlesnake lying in wait for new prey and smiled. He remembered reading about their hunting style. Texas rattlesnakes are creatures of habit; they find a good spot and return to it each morning before it gets too hot. Then, in the heat of the day, they go back to their underground nest and return in the evening when the sun goes down. They do this every day.

  Snakes also have incredible patience as they lie in wait for an unsuspecting creature to walk past. When the victim is near, they can sense it through cavities in their head that pick up both scent and vibration. The snake will then shoot forward from it’s hiding place, like a spring being released from its coiled retention and sink it�
�s fangs into the prey, convulsing it’s body to drive the venom into the poor victim, immobilizing it. It can then take its time to devour it whole.

  In this case, it had been a grey mourning dove, about the same size as the common pigeon. It didn’t seem possible that the rattler could devour something that large, but it did. It was able to disconnect the neck bones at the back of its jaws and extend its mouth over the victim and, with a pulsating, hypnotic, rhythmic motion, slowly suck the bird down its throat.

  “Fascinating,” mumbled Bill to himself. “Time for a coffee!”

  ~

  Bill Ross was born in Scotland in 1950 in the town of Kilmarnock, located twenty-one miles south of Glasgow, in the county of Ayrshire. Ayrshire is the heart of Robert Burn’s country, the world famous Scottish poet. The first published works of Burns were printed in Kilmarnock and aptly called “The Kilmarnock Edition”. If you were to find a copy today, it would be priceless.

  For most of the year, Ayrshire is bleak; cold and dark as the winter storms blow in from the North Atlantic and pass over the River Clyde estuary bringing with them wind and freezing rain. Ayrshire is one of the main agricultural regions of Scotland. The heavy black soil and rolling hills of grassland form a patchwork quilt of green, home to herds of brown and white Ayrshire dairy cows that produce the finest milk in the world.

  It takes tough, hard working people to work the land. The county town is Ayr and as Burns wrote in his poetry, Ayr is the place for “honest men and bonny lassies!” Where Ayr is the agricultural center of Ayrshire, Kilmarnock in the 1960s was the industrial center of the county. Bill Ross was Kilmarnock to the core. He met and married his first and only love Elaine there and they were blessed with two children, Tommy and Jenny.

  Bill had a long and successful career in law enforcement and was now retired, living in Austin. His son, Tommy, following in his father’s footsteps, was a detective in the Travis County Police Department.

  Bill’s police career started straight out of school. He did his time as a cop on the beat, walking the streets of Kilmarnock. On any given night, the pubs and bars of this industrial town were packed to overflowing. On the weekends, after a long week of working in the heavy engineering works dotted around town, it was like the men had just been let out of jail. They would party like there was no tomorrow. There were bar and streets fights over disagreements about girlfriends or which local football team was best. Bill never started a brawl but he never walked away from one either. He earned a PhD in the “University of Hard Knocks” on the streets of “Auld Killie”.

  After transferring to the Glasgow police force, a promotion to detective quickly followed his officer training at Tulliallan Police College in Fife. He worked major crimes in the west of Scotland for several years before being offered a transfer to the Homicide and Serious Crimes Command of the London Metropolitan Police (the Met).

  In 1990, he left the Met and took a position with a major security firm in the U.S. Bill, Elaine, and the family settled in Thousand Oaks, a city north of Los Angeles where Tommy and Jenny attended Thousand Oaks High School.

  Tommy joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school, did basic training at Camp Pendleton and MCRD in San Diego and then joined the Marine Corps 26th Expeditionary Unit. He did two tours of duty during the Balkan conflict and was part of the peacekeeping force in Kosovo. His sister, Jenny, went into nursing school, married, and settled in Huntington Beach, California. Bill and Elaine missed Jenny and her family and made frequent visits back to California whenever they could.

  After Tommy left the Corps in 2003, he had wanted to pursue a police career and was hired on by the Travis County Police Department. It took Tommy several years to make detective and then, in January of 2013, he was finally promoted to the major crimes unit. His dad could not have been more proud of his son. Not only did he serve his country in the Marine Corps, he was now serving the good people of Travis County in their Police Department.

  ~

  Bill sat in his den relaxing with his coffee after watching the assassination of the dove in his backyard. Elaine came in to use the computer to get the bills paid.

  “Stressful day?” quipped Elaine as she sat down at the computer. From the day they were married, Elaine took care of the family and the family finances, allowing Bill to “do his thing” and find the baddies. She was a feisty five two brunette with a smile that would turn heads whenever she walked into a room.

  “Are Tommy and Claire coming over for BBQ on Sunday?” asked Bill.

  “As far as I know, that is still the plan,” replied Elaine as she got on with the bill paying.

  Tommy was a single parent with a four-year-old daughter, Claire. Tommy met his wife, Jill, at a Round Rock Express baseball game at the Dell Diamond. Round Rock is home to Dell Computer Corporation and the company bought the naming rights to the stadium after the city built the facility in 2000. They married in 2008 and bought a house in the Brushy Creek neighborhood of Cedar Park. They were very much in love and it had always been Tommy’s plan to own his own home, raise a family and live the American dream.

  This dream was shattered when Jill died in a tragic car accident when Claire was only a year old. She had been driving to work one morning in heavy rain after dropping Claire off at daycare and a pickup truck driving in the opposite direction lost control and slammed into her Toyota Camry. She died instantly.

  Tommy was a fantastic father but could not have done it without the support of Elaine and Bill. Being a single parent was already incredibly hard. Having a very stressful job with long hours made it even tougher. Tommy dropped Claire off at daycare every morning but Elaine picked her up most evenings and made sure that she was bathed and fed. Her daddy would then pick her up after he finished work and tuck her in to her own bed each night. This ritual was repeated each weekday morning starting at 6:30. The weekends were the best of times when father and daughter could hang out together and enjoy life in Austin.

  Bill stared blankly out of the window of his den, took a sip of coffee and said, “I want to talk to Tommy about something, so I just wanted to make sure that the plan was still the same.”

  ~

  When Sunday rolled around, Bill and Elaine played golf with their friends in the morning, and then when they got home, Bill made sure that the Green Egg (the greatest BBQ ever invented in Bill’s opinion) was cleaned out and ready for the Sunday night ritual of steak, chicken, and burgers. He loaded the oak charcoal into the Green Egg about five o’clock and fired it up. The coals took about an hour to be perfect for grilling.

  As the aroma of the sizzling meats on the BBQ wafted across the backyard, Bill sat on his deck, cold beer in hand and thought about the discussion he planned to have with Tommy later in the day. He needed to be a bit tactful and not just dump it on him without any context. He needed his son’s help and Bill was not accustomed to asking for it.

  “Hi Dad, hi Mom!” called Tommy as he opened the front door. Claire ran ahead of him with her mass of long golden hair blowing in the wind yelling, “Mimi, Papa, where are you?”

  When Elaine came out of the kitchen, Claire almost bowled her over.

  Two long hours of meat, beer and conversation followed. When the BBQ was over, Mimi and Claire watched an episode of “Peppa Pig” (Claire’s favorite) in the family room. Tommy and Bill sat on the back deck overlooking the greenbelt. Bill poured a glass of Glen Morangie single malt for himself, popped a bottle of Corona for Tommy and launched into the subject he wanted to talk about.

  “I always dreamed about retirement, but it’s not what I imagined, Tommy. Is there any way that I might get involved and help out at the Travis County Police Department?” asked Bill.

  “What? Do you want to be like a Wal-Mart greeter? Welcome to the Travis County Police Department and have a nice day,” laughed Tommy.

  “That’s not quite what I meant,” said Bill, taking another mouthful of the single malt. “Is there a cold case team where I could help out looking over old fi
les and stuff?”

  “Look, Dad, I just made it to major crimes and I don’t want to be seen as trying to create a job for you. Detective Sargent Jack Johnson heads up the cold case unit. Let me ask him on the quiet and see what he says,” said Tommy.

  “Great, that’s all I ask, son. I am bored out of my skull. God Almighty, I sat watching a rattler in the greenbelt today for two hours. How lame is that?”

  “You know the way things are done today in the US and in the Travis County Police Department might be totally different from what you did in the Met dad,” said Tommy with a hint of concern in his voice.

  “Police work is police work the world over, Tommy. There is certainly more technology available today than back in my day, but the process of finding the baddy is basically the same. It’s hard work. I’m sure that your detective Johnson would agree.”

  Tommy’s face held concern as he said, “You’re also going to have to be careful with the British Police thing, dad. Most people know about the London Met and we don’t need anyone thinking that a big city detective has come to teach Texas rednecks how to do their job.”

  “You need to give me a little more credit than that Tommy. I understand. If you would prefer that I didn’t stick my nose in, then let’s just forget about it,” said Bill now more than a little pissed off with his son’s reaction.

  “Sorry dad. I didn’t mean it that way. It just came out bad. I’ll talk with Jack Johnson in the morning. I need to get Claire home and get her clothes ready for day care tomorrow.”

  Tommy and Claire left and Bill sat on the deck looking at the lights of Austin in the distance. “That didn’t go too badly,” he thought.

  “Hmm, soon be dark,” mulled Bill as he poured himself another two fingers of the nectar of the gods.

  Chapter 10- The Scottish cavalry