I nodded and picked up the box as I stood, carrying it under one arm so I could open the door. “It will all be okay,” I promised. I shouldn’t be the one reassuring my Chief Superintendent, but Dunnel looked ragged and at a bit of a loss. He waved a hand in acknowledgement, and I left him alone in his dim office to return to my desk.
Fletcher was slumped over on her own workspace, head in her arms. DI Rosa Reid, who had helped us rescue Finn Wair, snickered as she walked past us, and I winked at her, holding the cardboard box a foot above an empty patch of desk by Fletcher’s head before I let it drop.
The container hit with a soft thump, but it was enough to make Fletcher yelp and clutch at her head as she sat up, hitting me with the most betrayed look I’d ever seen. “I want a new partner,” she moaned, still hiding her eyes behind sunglasses.
“Alas, you’re stuck with me,” I told her. “You should have thought of this before you pulled me from my lone wolf schtick.”
“I’m going to request another transfer,” she grumbled. She prodded the box with a pencil. “What’s this?”
“Townsend’s case files,” I replied as I sat. “Dunnel said to look through it to see if we can find anything that will help us nail him.”
“Goodie. Reading.” Fletcher lifted the lid up and tossed it aside. The box was stuffed with folders labelled with case numbers and dates. “What about the Greene case?”
“I’ve been feeling a little stuck on it,” I admitted. “Maybe taking a break from it will help shake something loose.”
“Alright then.” Fletcher handed me the top folder and took another for herself, and the two of us got to work.
I wasn’t entirely sure what we were looking for. Townsend certainly wouldn’t include anything incriminating in his own reports. He’d fudge things or outright lie. We could speak with all his old witnesses and CIs, see if there were discrepancies, but that would take ages. I was flipping through his list of contacts when one of them caught my eye. Squeezed in at the bottom of the page, he’d written Mark Fisher’s email. I dug through my desk drawers until I found the paper the journalist had written his source’s information on. The email was just a string of letters and numbers, but if it was Townsend’s, and we could figure out the password, nailing him for accepting bribes would certainly help the rest of Fletcher’s case.
“Townsend might have leaked the details of the Greene case to the Courier,” I said.
Fletcher looked up from her stack of files. “You think?”
“Fisher, the journalist, said he had a contact within the station. Townsend has Fisher’s email written in his address book.” I waved the thing in the air. “Fisher said he paid for his tips.”
“Taking bribes is a big no-no,” Fletcher said with a grin. “But we need more. Let’s get this stuff to Martin and see if he can work his computer magic.”
“You find anything else?” I asked as I gathered up the notebook and Fisher’s paper.
Fletcher tapped the file in front of her with her nail. “This vice case from six months ago is a bit weird. I need to dig into it a little bit more closely.”
“Weird how?” I asked. Fletcher closed up the box and put it under her desk, and we made our way towards the lift.
“Something’s not adding up.” Fletcher pressed the button and then crossed her arms. She still hadn’t taken her sunglasses off. “He made a big leap between his early subject and the man he actually arrested. I can’t figure out how he got there. The whole thing smells funny.”
The lift groaned as its doors slid open, and we stepped back to let a couple of constables exit before we went inside. I leaned against the back wall as we descended, the lights flickering slightly overhead. The whole lift was in need of a major update. The thing felt like a death trap every time I got in.
We entered the lab to find Martin and Benson playing the paper football game. Benson held his hands up like a goal post while Martin steadied a paper triangle under one finger and prepared to flick it at the goal, tongue poked out in concentration. He barely missed, the projectile spinning right under Benson’s raised thumbs, and Benson cheered, pumping his fists in the air.
I cleared my throat, and the two of them jumped, faces guilty as Benson tried to hide the paper football behind his back. They relaxed when they realized it was just us and not someone who would bust them for goofing off. “Want to play?” Martin asked. “I’m terrible at it. The intern is winning, and I need someone to kick his arse.”
“Hey, I’m not an intern!” Benson said, grinning. It was an old joke between the two of them.
“Maybe later,” I said.
“We need you to get into this email account,” Fletcher said, motioning for me to hand over the address book. “We think it’s Townsend’s. We want to prove he’s been accepting bribes.”
Martin’s face darkened considerably at the sound of Townsend’s name. He scowled, mumbling an unrepeatable insult under his breath as he stuffed his fists in the pockets of his lab coat. “Sure,” he said once he’d found a smidge of control again. “Let me see what I can do.”
We followed him over to his computer, and I pulled up a couple of cold metal stools as he got things booted up. Martin glanced back at us as Fletcher and I sat, watching him expectantly. “Oh, you’re going to stay?”
“If that’s okay,” I said.
“You don’t have something better to be doing?”
Fletcher and I glanced at each other and shrugged. “Not at this moment,” she said.
“Have you gotten anything off Jacob Greene’s hard drive? Or,” I glanced around to make sure Benson wasn’t listening in, though Martin no doubt already told him everything, “my father’s?”
“Can I finish this request first?” Martin asked. “Unlike some people, I can’t focus on a million things at once.”
“Right. Of course. We’ll talk later.”
Martin plugged the email address into a program that could detect its matching password, and a few minutes later, he was plugging the information into the website. A clearly fake name was attached to the account, and the only email chain was between it and Mark Fisher. There were no names, but there were crime scene photos and case details and names that should have all been classified. There were records of money transfers, too, all through Cash App which only required a username, no personal information.
“This doesn’t prove it was Townsend,” Fletcher said, disappointed.
“I’ll see if I can’t dig deeper into this Cash App account,” Martin suggested. “It’s got to be connected to his bank account. I just have to get past the encryption.”
“I’ll talk to him again. Maybe I can get him to admit he’s been taking bribes. And I want to talk to a few of the witnesses on one of his cases.” Fletcher rubbed at her forehead, grimacing because she no doubt still had an ache there.
“Is Adams still out on that suicide?” I asked Martin, and he nodded as he saved the email account and Cash App information into a new folder, labelling it ‘DICK.’ All his other reports were under similarly incomprehensible names. Dunnel hated it but had never been able to get Martin to stop.
“Yep.” Martin checked his watch. “She should be back in about an hour.”
“You got anything new on the Greene case for me?” I crossed my fingers by my leg, hoping against hope that Martin would have a lead, because I was starting to feel like I was spinning my wheels.
Martin had Jacob’s work hard drive plugged into another computer, and he shook the mouse to wake the monitor up. There was a spinning wheel and progress bar in the middle of the screen as he ran a program to recover the harddrive’s contents. “The kid was good. This is the third program I’ve tried, and it finally seems to be working. Just… slowly.” The progress bar was barely a quarter full. “I’m having better luck with his email. I contacted the company that maintains the server, and they’re compiling the backups for me. I should have all the deleted emails in about an hour.”
“That’s great.”
I could wait an hour for a new lead. That wasn’t very long.
“As for your father’s computer.” Martin pulled Alasdair’s dinosaur laptop out of the bottom drawer and squeezed it onto the cramped desk. “I haven’t been able to recover the old posts on any of those forums. Information that old on a site this shitty, it’s just gone. But,” he lifted a finger as my face began to fall, “people have been responding to that message you posted.”
I looked at Fletcher, and our eyes widened in tandem. “Really?” I asked.
“One second.” Martin logged into the laptop, and we had to wait as everything woke up and shook the dust off. The browser took ages to connect, but Martin clicked the bookmarked page and took us to the forum I’d posted to, pretending to be my father. “Take a look.” Martin rolled his chair out of the way so Fletcher and I could scoot closer.
My message read: “Back in the game. Found something big. Anyone heard from Kraken recently? Could use their help.” Reading it back now, it sounded contrived and more than a little bit obvious, but there were three replies pinned underneath it.
“A_1_investigator--good to hear from you, man! I was worried about you! Found anything new?”
“The Kraken? Cool username. Maybe I’ll steal it.”
“I thought you’d given up on us, A_1_investigator. Been a long time. You never got back to me on that picture I sent you.”
All the usernames had Loch Ness Monster, Nessie, or cryptid worked into them, no mention of a Kraken or other eight-armed sea creature, and I sighed. It was strange to interact with this aspect of my father’s life. He mostly kept his cryptid hunting separate from his family, carving out a few hours each week to dedicate to the hobby, disappearing into the shed while the rest of us amused ourselves in other ways. He’d never tried to indoctrinate Sam or me into his hobby, preferring to keep it for himself. Loch-Ness-Fan333, Cryptid_Joe, and Nessie-Lover-7 knew Alasdair in a way I never had, and I felt oddly jealous of them, even though I knew logically that their interactions had been limited and ultimately meaningless.
“Should we reply?” Fletcher asked.
I shrugged. “Clearly, none of these people know anything. Sorry for wasting your time, Martin.”
“I don’t mind. I’ve been having a blast looking through these forums…” Martin trailed off as he noticed the shutters that had closed over my eyes.
I wanted this done. I no longer cared to dredge up my father’s past and all the reasons he may or may not have left us. None of it would change the fact that he was gone. Let Eleanor or Sam keep digging. I wanted out.
“Forget about it all, yeah?” I said to Martin. He could chuck out that laptop for all I cared.
“Callum?” Fletcher said. She finally pushed her sunglasses up onto her head so she could give me a concerned look.
My phone rang before I had to answer her. I didn’t recognize the number, but I hit answer anyways. Anything to slip away from my current conversation. “MacBain,” I said.
“DI MacBain?” a man’s voice said. “This is Joseph Farin. I work under Adams? She sent me to finish cleaning up the crime scene for the Greene case, and well, there’s someone in the flat.”
“What?” I sat up straighter, my voice louder than intended, and both Fletcher and Martin looked at me, curiosity gleaming in their eyes.
“Yes, sir. I can see a shadow moving behind the cloth we taped over the broken window.”
“Don’t go anywhere,” I ordered as I stood up and motioned sharply for Fletcher to follow me. I walked towards the lift as quickly as my long legs would take me. “I’m on my way. Don’t let the intruder out of your sight.”
“I won’t,” Farin promised, and I hung up on him, dropping the phone into my pocket as I hit the button on the lift.
“What is it?” Fletcher demanded.
“Someone’s in Jacob’s flat.”
Fletcher cracked all of her knuckles. “What are we waiting for then?”
The lift. It dinged open right after she finished speaking, and we jumped inside, repeatedly jabbing at the button for the ground floor as if that would make things move faster. We grabbed our coats and my keys, and I ran for the front doors, forgetting about the crowd of protestors until I stepped outside and their shouts hit me like a bag of bricks over the head. I skidded to a halt, staring at the wall of bodies before me, every pair of furious eyes focused on me. We had yet to give them any updates or promises as to how we were dealing with the situation, and it showed in their suspicious eyes and downturned mouths. There was more graffiti, splattered across the pavement underfoot and the wall of the station, the messy letters like knife strokes across limbs.
Fletcher and I jogged around the edge of the crowd, and the protestors pressed closer to shout at us, the individual words swallowed by the angry din of the ensemble. I forced myself to ignore them and keep moving. Now was not the time to address their grief and fury, as much as they deserved a target on which to vent. For the moment, I had to focus on Jacob’s case.
We made it to my car without incident. I stuck a portable light and siren to the roof, and the light and noise parted the sea of traffic as I pulled out of the car park. The car roared through the gears as I shifted as late as possible to squeeze as much acceleration out of the engine as possible.
I didn’t often get to pull out the siren and really let loose on the speed, so even though the situation was deadly serious and time-sensitive, I couldn’t help but grin as I cranked the wheel and soared through a turn, manoeuvring easily onto the next street. I refused to lose this intruder.
I cut the lights and siren just as I turned onto Jacob’s street, leaning heavily on the brakes so the car screeched to a normal speed. We rolled to a stop a few buildings down from Jacob’s so we could approach on foot and hopefully avoid detection for as long as possible. I called Farin back as I climbed out of the driver’s seat, and he picked up after two rings.
“Is the intruder still there?” I asked.
“I’ve been watching the front door, and no one’s come out. I doubt they could climb out the window, so probably,” Farin answered. I spotted him seated at the bus stop, pretending to read a book as he watched the building. Someone had climbed up to the window the night Jacob was killed, so it was possible someone could get out that way as well, but watching the front door was the smarter choice.
“We’ll take it from here. Thanks for the tip.”
Farin nodded but didn’t move or even fold up his newspaper, maintaining his ruse just in case the intruder was watching out the window.
I glanced at Fletcher, and she nodded that she was ready without my having to ask. I unclipped the buckle that held my PAVA spray secure in its holster, but I didn’t draw the canister yet. No need to jump the gun, so to speak. We had Jacob’s keys, so I was able to let us in through the main entrance, and I led the way up the stairs towards the door at the very top, moving as quietly as I could so the steps didn’t creak and betray us.
We paused on the landing, and I pressed my ear against the wood, trying to listen. I thought I could hear footsteps inside, but I couldn’t quite tell if it was a projection of what I thought I should hear or the real thing. I gripped the doorknob and looked at Fletcher one last time. She had a determined look in her eyes.
I twisted the knob and yanked the door open, and Fletcher rushed inside. “Police!” she yelled.
Something fell and shattered within the flat.
“Go,” I said, and the two of us ran for the living room.
We arrived just in time to catch a man in a hoodie trying to climb out the broken window only to discover there was nowhere for him to go. He’d knocked a vase to the ground, and it had broken, hence the crash we’d heard. I darted forward, grabbing his hood and yanked him back into the room. He stumbled back and Fletcher and I blocked his exits.
He backed away from us with his hands raised and slowly turned around. Blonde hair flopped out of his black hood, and his dark eyes darted back and forth around the room, searching
for a way out.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” I demanded. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes rimmed red.
His foot snapped out and caught something on the ground, hidden behind the table, and his kick sent a red ball spinning towards us. Fletcher was just ahead of me, and it hit her on the arm, shattering and spraying glass everywhere. She yelped and staggered back, and the man spun around her, hoping to bowl right over me and out the door. His gait was odd, his right leg hitching with each stride.
I braced myself, but instead of colliding with me, the man dodged past me, and I didn’t shift my weight quite quick enough to catch him. I lashed out and hit him in the side, spinning him off balance and giving me enough time to twist and snap my leg out, foot hooked around his right leg, sending him crashing to the ground.
He cried out as his chin bounced off the wood floor, losing all his forward momentum. “Enough!” I yelled. I grabbed the back of his jumper, hauling him upright and dumping him onto one of the chairs around the small dining table. His eyes cut towards the door again, but Fletcher and I boxed him in, blocking his view of the opening. Fletcher held her left hand tightly, a bit of blood seeping out from between her fingers.
“Are you okay?” I asked. I glanced at her for just a second, not wanting to take my eyes off the man in the chair for long.
“Just a cut. It’s fine,” she said.
I turned my full attention back to our captive. “Now, I’m only going to ask one more time. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”
The man pushed his hair from his eyes with a trembling hand. “This isn’t what it looks like.”
“So you didn’t break into a murder victim’s flat just days after he was killed?” I said, raising an eyebrow.
The man blanched, face going yellow and pale. “Okay, yes, this is what it looks like. But it’s not for the reason you think.”
“You still haven’t answered my first question,” I reminded him, folding my arms across my chest. I would never admit this to Fletcher or anyone else, but in the early days of my career, I had practised several intimidating stances and expressions in the mirror to make sure I got them right.
The Hidden Eye Page 12