The Eulalie Park Mysteries Box Set 1

by Fiona Snyckers

  Donal nodded. “I know it.”

  “So, with you out of the department, you’ve been neutralized. You’re not a threat anymore. Why would someone bother to take a shot at you?”

  “I think they would have left me alone if I had only disappeared when they suspended me, like I was supposed to. But I didn’t. I logged back into the website and went through the account statements again. My sister helped me. We even printed them out. It didn’t occur to me at the time that anyone who was also logged on would have been able to see that I was active on the site. They would have seen exactly which pages I was looking at and printing out.”

  “That’s bad, lad.”

  “It would have been obvious to them that I wasn’t going to go away even though I’d just been sacked. It was while I was stilled logged into the site that I got the email from Sergeant Shortridge telling me to come in to help with the riot squad. The next day, I was in hospital.”

  There was silence in the flat. Constable Burns had stopped his protests and denials. He was sitting with his fingers laced across his chest, staring into the middle distance, and thinking hard.

  “What made you think you could come to me?” he asked.

  Chapter 8

  Eulalie

  She collapsed face-down in the dirt, scraping her cheek painfully.

  “Turn over.” He shoved her onto her back with his foot.

  She looked up, squinting at the bright blue sky. What she saw chilled her to the bone.

  It was his face.

  He had taken off his balaclava. It was at that moment that she knew she was going to die.

  He had been so careful to keep his face hidden, just as he had with the others. He had spoken in a hoarse whisper, meaning that she couldn’t even identify his voice. Now he was showing her his face and speaking in a normal voice.

  “Careless Carrie.” He dropped to his knees next to her and poked a finger into the deep gash on her face, making her wince. “You’ve gone and hurt yourself again. You’re not careful like me. Do you want to see how careful I can be?”

  His other hand came into view. He was holding the knife, its blade catching the sunlight.

  He bent close to her face. She could smell his rancid, early-morning breath. There was a look of deep absorption in his eyes. It was the look of a man who loved his work.

  “Here… and here…” He made little nicks in her neck. Earlier it had been her arms, and then her chest. Now it was her neck.

  She closed her eyes as he cut deeper and more randomly, his breathing harsh and excited. It was almost a relief when the final cut came – a deep slice into her carotid artery that soaked him in blood and made the world fade to grey and then to black.

  Eulalie floated in the darkness. There was no more pain, no more fear. There was no need to do anything, not even breathe. She liked it here in the darkness. It was so peaceful… except for that banging sound.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  It got louder and louder. It refused to go away.

  Now the banging had stopped. Her relief lasted only seconds before something hit her arm.

  Eulalie’s eyes snapped open and she took a long, shuddering breath.

  “Dude. What is wrong with you?” demanded Fleur. “You weren’t breathing. It was like you were dead.”

  Eulalie continued to suck in air as she fought her way out of the disorientation caused by the dream.

  “You’re white as a sheet. Your pupils are so big your eyes look black. Wait a minute.” She pointed a finger at Eulalie. “You took something, didn’t you? Are you on drugs? What did you take?”

  Eulalie shook her head, still breathing hard. “I didn’t take anything. It was just… a bad dream. Thank you for waking me. Seriously.”

  Fleur stared at her, apparently debating whether to turn and flee now before the friendship progressed. She sat back down on Eulalie’s bed. “You are a serious Grade A weirdo, you know that?”

  Eulalie had been called a weirdo more times than she could count. It was the one insult that could always get under her skin. But somehow, when Fleur said it, it didn’t sting. It sounded almost affectionate.

  Eulalie reached for her alarm clock. “What time is it?”

  “It’s ten-forty. I thought we could go to Intro to Psych together. But I don’t know if you’re going to make it.”

  Eulalie leapt out of bed. Her head swam, but she managed to stay on her feet.

  “Give me two minutes to shower. We’ll make it.”

  They got to class with thirty seconds to spare.

  The lecture theatre was huge, dwarfing the high school classrooms of Eulalie’s memory.

  Some students had set up devices to record the lecturer’s voice. Some were videoing the lecture on their phones. Others, like Fleur, were taking notes on a laptop. Eulalie took out a ballpoint pen and a pad of paper. She processed information best with a pen in her hand, even though taking notes by hand was hard work. As much as she loved computers, she knew what worked best for her. She hadn’t yet declared her majors, but she was planning to focus on computer science and psychology.

  While the lecturer introduced herself and outlined what the course would consist of, Eulalie tore a piece of paper off her notepad and wrote on it in big block letters.

  THERE IS A DEAD GIRL CALLED CARRIE BEHIND THE OLD GAS STATION ON THE SOUTH-EAST CORNER OF CAMPUS. HE LOST CONTROL AND CUT HER THROAT. HE IS IN HIS EARLY TWENTIES WITH PALE SKIN AND LIGHT BROWN HAIR. ABOUT SIX-FOOT, SLIM BUILD, AND MUSCULAR. GREY EYES. HE LOOKS A BIT LIKE THIS.

  The lecturer was talking about what textbooks they would need for the course, so Eulalie did a quick sketch of the man she had seen in her dream. Drawing had never been her strong point. He looked more like a cartoon character than a human being when she was finished, but it was better than nothing.

  Eulalie did not doubt that what she had experienced had been an empathic vision rather than a dream. It was the most powerful one she had ever experienced. It worried her a little that she had apparently stopped breathing. That was carrying empathy a little too far. But in the friendly light of day it was easy to push that thought aside and not worry about it.

  Harder to push aside was the knowledge that he had escalated to killing. A girl was dead because of him. A girl called Carrie. Her last minutes had been full of fear and despair.

  After the lecture, Eulalie folded up the piece of paper with the description and the sketch, addressed it to campus security, and popped it into one of the internal mailboxes that every department was supplied with. They would receive it within the hour.

  There was no way she could have gone to the campus security office and given that report in person. The questions would have been more than she could handle. She might even have been detained as a suspect. At least now Carrie’s body would be found quickly, and the police would have a usable description of her attacker.

  It was as Eulalie walked back to the dining hall for lunch after a full morning of lectures that the guilt began to hit.

  Why had she been so convinced that she had spotted his pattern, and that he wouldn’t deviate from it? Just because he had attacked the previous three girls while it was still dark didn’t mean a thing. He had snatched Carrie in the daylight, held her overnight, and killed her in the morning.

  Why had she been so convinced that he would continue to target hikers and joggers? Another false assumption on her part. Carrie had been dragged out of her car in broad daylight.

  The whole time Eulalie was keeping watch on what she imagined to be his lair, he had been torturing Carrie behind a gas station within a hundred feet of a main road.

  She had imagined herself to be the great hunter – the patient stalker who never lost her prey. He had fooled her in every possible way. She should have left the whole matter in the hands of the police. She had done nothing but mess up the case from the beginning.

  He had probably spotted her snooping around the slopes of Table Mountain earlier that day. Her presence might have con
vinced him to break his pattern. He had gone hunting during the day instead of at night. Off campus instead of on it. He had seized a motorist rather than a pedestrian. He had approached a woman in a situation where she hadn’t been warned to be careful.

  His brazen daylight snatch of Carrie had been anticipated by no one, least of all Eulalie.

  Almost crippled by the violence of her self-recrimination, Eulalie made her way to the dining hall. She didn’t feel like eating – her stomach was in too much of a knot – but she knew her absence would be remarked on, and besides, she needed the energy after her wasted night on the mountain.

  It was while they were eating their quiche and salad that the first rumors began to trickle into the dining hall.

  “My mom just texted me that there’s been another victim,” said Fleur. “They think it’s the same guy. This time he killed a woman. He slit her throat. Her name was Carina Novak. She was an exchange student from the Czech Republic.” She looked up at the horrified faces around the table. “I can’t believe he’s killing people now. This is going to have a huge impact on enrolment. My mom is already saying that I should come home until this guy is caught. She won’t be the only one.”

  Eulalie could barely bring herself to nod. This was all her fault – all of it.

  After lunch, she ran up to her room and locked the door. With shaking fingers, she pressed her grandmother’s number.

  “Grandmère,” she said, shakily. “I have messed up so badly.”

  Donal

  “I came to you for a couple of reasons,” said Donal. “You were surprised to see me turn up for riot duty, which made me think you weren’t part of the plan to get me there. And, as I said, you were truly shocked when I got shot. It was as though you couldn’t believe that someone had gone to such lengths.”

  “I thought you were bad at reading people,” said Constable Burns.

  “It takes me longer than most. I have to think back over what was said and how it was said, but I usually get there in the end. What can you tell me about the finances at the police station, sir?”

  “I noticed something odd about a year ago,” said Burns. “I was in charge of the Christmas party, so I had access to a budget and to records of the previous Christmas parties. I wanted to use the same vendors for catering, and I noticed that the figures didn’t add up. I mean, the totals added up but when I started going through it item by item I noticed that the money that had actually been paid to the caterer and the amount that was recorded as a line item in the budget didn’t match up. There was about seven-hundred pounds unaccounted for. I took it to Inspector Petrick and he said it must be a mistake because the caterer had definitely been paid the full amount. So then, being the mug that I am, I checked with the caterer. They had invoiced the department for about £800 and had been duly paid. But the balance sheet showed that they had been paid £1 500. So, back I went to Petrick.”

  Burns gave a mirthless laugh. “Thirty years on the job and I was innocent as a newborn lamb. Petrick gave me the same song and dance as he gave you about how an independent auditing firm is verifying the department’s finances and will pick up any irregularities. Then he basically warned me that if I wanted to keep my job and not lose my pension I would stop sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

  Donal knew how serious this threat was. Being a policeman could be a dangerous and demanding job, but the big benefit lay in the pension. It was yours for life, and then it transferred to your spouse or civil partner after your death. That pension was the golden shackle that kept officers tied to the job. Threatening to endanger someone’s pension could have life-ruining consequences.

  “What happened then, sir?”

  “I was a good boy and did as I was told. I figured it was only a couple of hundred pounds here or there and it wasn’t worth losing my career over.”

  “And how do you feel now?”

  “Look around you, son.” Burns gestured to the tiny apartment. “Does this look like a life worth fighting for? Everything I was afraid of happened anyway. I lost my wife, my kids, and my home. I don’t have much left to lose. And anybody who sets up a wet-behind-the-ears rookie like yourself for a kill shot deserves to be taken down. No offense, lad.”

  “None taken, sir. Now, what are we going to do about it?”

  Donal’s gunshot wound throbbed like a drum by the time he got home. Apparently, fighting your way across town on public transport did not constitute taking it easy.

  He made himself a ham and cheese sandwich, followed by an antibiotic and a couple of painkillers. Then he just sat and waited to feel better. An hour later, he jerked awake in his armchair. Falling asleep during the day was something he never did. He was clearly more affected by the anesthetic than he’d realized.

  The pain in his shoulder had subsided to a faraway ache, and his head was clearer. The road in front of him still seemed dark and confusing, but he knew what the next step should be.

  He picked up his cellphone and called his sister.

  “Donal?” She sounded worried. “Is everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “How is your wound looking? It hasn’t started bleeding again, has it? Are you still taking it easy?”

  “It was sore earlier, but I took pills and now it’s okay. How are you? How has your first day of maternity leave been?”

  “I’m bored to tears. Everything is ready for the baby. We’ve washed all his clothes. It’s like the stage is set and we’re waiting for the star performer to arrive. But no one knows when that’s going to be. He could even be late. If he’s late, I think I’ll go out of my mind.”

  Donal had no comment to make on the likelihood of his nephew being late.

  “I need to ask you something.”

  “Go ahead. Anything to take my mind off the waiting.”

  “If you were in charge of a local division police department and you were looking for new ways to skim money out of the budget, what monthly expense would be most attractive for you to try to fiddle?”

  “That depends what you mean by attractive. There are some monthly expenses that would be superficially tempting because they are large items, but they would be very difficult to manipulate successfully, and you would be stupid to try. Then there are other items that are easy to skim, but the amounts involved are chicken feed. I need a better idea of what you have in mind.”

  “If I were to come to you – as a service provider, say – and offer you a way to fiddle one of your monthly expenses on a regular basis, which would be attractive enough to make you bite?”

  Catriona didn’t sound bored anymore. “Does this local division pay rent for its premises or does it own the land the station stands on?”

  Donal thought for a moment. “I think it has some kind of ninety-nine-year lease. I don’t think they pay a monthly rental for the premises.”

  “What about other rentals? Cars? Equipment? Anything like that?”

  “They own all their vehicles but are paying some of them off to the bank.”

  “Okay, we’ll put a pin in that. That has potential. What about a monthly cleaning service?”

  “There are two cleaners on the regular payroll. They aren’t outsourced.”

  “That brings us to the biggest and most delicious prize of them all. It also happens to be the most difficult to fiddle. I’m talking about salaries. For most organizations, their monthly salaries bill is the biggest line item in the budget. But because this is real money being paid to real people, it isn’t easy to fiddle.”

  “A lot of companies use payroll software to pay their salaries these days, don’t they?”

  “Yes. More old-fashioned institutions still do it manually, but many have moved over to using software.”

  “Imagine that you were the inspector of a local division looking for new ways to boost your sideline in creative accounting, and someone came to you offering you a software package for salaries that would let you do just that, would you be interested?”


  “You’re thinking of setting up a sting operation?” She sounded worried again. “Donnie, I don’t think that would work. Anything that came from you would be viewed with instant suspicion. They know you’ve been sniffing around their financial statements. That’s what got you fired. I think you should leave this alone. It’s not your business anymore.”

  “What if it didn’t come from me? What if it came from a veteran in the department with thirty years’ experience, who has known about the skimming for a year but has been keeping quiet about it?”

  “There would be nothing to connect it to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’d need someone to pose as the software salesman. Your veteran couldn’t pretend that he has suddenly designed his own software package.”

  “It would have to be an experienced salesman,” said Donal. “Some smooth-talking operator who could sell ice to Eskimos. Someone we could trust implicitly.”

  Catriona laughed. “Now you’re talking about Remus.”

  “Would he do it, do you think?”

  Catriona thought of her husband and his fun-loving, risk-taking nature.

  “He’d do it like a shot.”

  Chapter 9

  Eulalie

  “Chérie, ma petite, mon ange.” Angel de la Cour murmured French endearments to her granddaughter. “What is wrong? What has happened? Tell Grandmère.”

  “A girl is dead, and it is all because of me.” Eulalie began to sob.

  Angel overflowed with love for her granddaughter, but her practical side asserted itself. She made her voice firmer.

  “Tell me exactly what has happened, ma fille.”

  So, Eulalie did. She told her everything, from the attack on herself and Fleur, to her conversation with Whitney, to her discovery of what she believed to be the predator’s lair. She described the night she had spent keeping watch on the mountain, and the dream she had had that morning.