A Fall of Woodcocks (The Birdwatcher Series Book 5) Read online

  A Fall of Woodcocks

  The Birdwatcher Series, Volume 5

  European P. Douglas

  Published by European P. Douglas, 2021.

  While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

  A FALL OF WOODCOCKS

  First edition. January 11, 2021.

  Copyright © 2021 European P. Douglas.

  Written by European P. Douglas.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 1

  A rainbow formed in the spray from the waterfall down below. No matter how many times he saw this sight it never ceased to draw him in. The tumult of the white smashing water at the bottom, the thunderous noise all around and then there, as if floating in the middle of all this chaos a colorful beam of light, ignoring the crazy world around it. That was him, he felt.

  That calm centre amid all the chaos was Dwight Spalding.

  For close to thirty years now, he’d been playing games with law enforcement all over the country, with a few trip to Canada thrown into the mix. Never, however had he come across anyone who was able to get in any way close to him before. Not until now. Tyler Ford had done it. Not only had he unearthed Spalding himself in his guise as a mechanic but also the location of some of his safe houses. The worst part of it all was that Spalding had no idea how Tyler had been able to do it. That made all of his houses unsafe now as he didn’t know the extent of Tyler’s knowledge. He could be holding back information from the FBI to use against Spalding later.

  Well, Spalding had evened up the field a little by outing Tyler as ‘The Birdwatcher’ serial killer. A thing so rare very few in the FBI had even heard about it yet. That put Tyler on the run which was a double-edged sword. While fleeing the plie Tyler would be out of his comfort zone and lose all access to his contacts from life before. This was good from Spalding’s point of view, but it also made it so that Tyler might seek revenge and feel that he had nothing left to lose.

  Another perhaps unfortunate effect of this outing, however, was that Sarah Brightwater had taken it very badly. She’d been working side by side with a serial killer who had gained her trust and she never one suspected it. She was on forced leave now from the FBI. But this was due more to her attempted suicide than her lapse in judgment with Tyler.

  Spalding shook his head as he looked out over the river below. The suicide attempt had thrown him. He’d though from the outset that Sarah was much tougher than that. Still, she had pulled through and the very next day proved herself again by saving Ellie from one of his booby-trapped houses. The fact that Ellie had subsequently killed herself and tried to kill Megan Stanver couldn’t be put down to any fault on Sarah’s part.

  No, all in all, Sarah had made him proud. He’d been right to choose her. It was time now to start reeling her in.

  Much of the next seven hours were spent walking in dense forest before Spalding set himself camp for the night. It was always the same when he came up here. This was the one place in the world that he did not want other people to know about. Of course he wasn’t the only person who’d even been up there, but it was a tough trail and only experienced hikers would take on this part of the mountain range. Spalding walked there every time from places much farther away than he needed to in order that no one be ever able to follow a car he was in or guess where he was from finding it.

  He sat in the dark eating stew heated on a tiny camping stove and looked up at the stars in the clear night sky. The rest of the game was not over, and he thought about that too. Though the police and FBI had been able to find some of his safe houses, they hadn’t found them all. And of those they had found, they were all so highly rigged with explosives and poisonous gases that it was very difficult to rescue the people trapped there. He was going to play with that when he got back to his computer set up.

  The most important thing for Spalding now, though, was to try to work out what Tyler would do next. Right now, Spalding had no idea where his fellow serial killer was. He didn’t know how much work Tyler had done in building alternate lives for if he was ever discovered to be a killer. Spalding was sure he would have disguises and aliases with drivers licenses and other ID, but what would he do? Would he come after Spalding for himself, to get his revenge in person? Or would he work behind the shadows, tip off the FBI here and there, try bring Spalding down that way?

  Of the two, Spalding felt the former was the more likely. He certainly knew which he would choose were he to be in Tyler’s shoes. The trouble with Tyler was that there was no one close to him, certainly not close enough to matter. In other cases, Spalding was always able to find a relative or lover to exploit but he couldn’t do this with Tyler. The only person the journalist might even remotely care about was Sarah Brightwater and Spalding couldn’t do anything to her just yet.

  Laying on his back, he looked at the stars so far away. Was Tyler looking up at the sky right now too. Had he gone back to some place in nature they Spalding liked to? All of Tyler’s victims had been buried in beautiful, wooded places so he knew Tyler liked the outdoors at least as much as he did, perhaps more. Yes, to the forests, that it where Tyler would have gone if he was to stay in America.

  How was he going to come at Spalding? Wait at the houses that hadn’t been discovered yet? Make contact somehow and try to arrange a meeting? Things were very different now. Before Spalding had direct lines to Tyler though his phones and work email address. Now that Tyler had to jettison all those things it was going to be hard for them to communicate.

  They would find a way though; of that he was very confident.

  Chapter 2

  It was the first time in her life that Sarah Brightwater didn’t know what to do with herself. She sat with a coffee for a long time looking out on the street outside her apartment block. She watched the people rushing to work and school and then after that it was the turn of the shoppers and errand runners out there.

  Getting out on the side-lines was the hardest thing Sarah had ever had to do. She was not accustomed to life without pace and ever shifting objectives. It just wasn’t in her to sit still and do nothing. Bobrick had been the one to tell her she was being put on a leave of absence and it had been one of his last acts as Special Agent in Charge of her unit. Now Daniels was top dog and a woman called Melanie Delacroix was the ASAIC— Sarah hadn’t even had the opportunity to meet this woman before she was sent home. Perhaps they would have gotten along, this woman understanding something of where Sarah was coming from in this till largely male arena.

  Down below, a man in his late fifties walked along the street
and his hat and old suit reminded him of Detective Freeman. It was his report on her attempted suicide that had her off work pending a full psychological review. She should be mad at him, but she wasn’t. He didn’t take the decision lightly, that was clear and in the end he only did it out of concern for Sarah’s wellbeing. That momentary lapse when she found out who Tyler really was had been the worst mistake of her life. Only time would tell what it was going to end up costing her.

  Crossing the room, Sarah opened the closet door and took out her box labelled ‘The Monster’. This was the master file on Spalding she had been working on and growing since her mother was murdered twenty years ago. It had become something of a behemoth in that time and it thudded heavily when she dropped it on the carpeted floor. She looked down and felt the worn sides of the box and thought it was time for a new box. She started taking out the files and putting them on the coffee table. She’d been through this stuff many times before but never had she so much time to do so. There was no reason this box had to go back in the closet any time soon. This was the closest thing she was going to get to work for the immediate future.

  As she leafed through each page trying to look at it as though it were the first time, Sarah found her eyes drift from time to time to the phone. Now that she noticed this she stared at it a moment and then sat back into the folds of the sofa. Who was she expecting to call? Tyler? Spalding? Freeman? She didn’t know, all three maybe. One to gloat, one to mock and one to say sorry? Did she want any of them to call, seeing as how she couldn’t do anything about it if they did only report it to the FBI?

  Spalding, she thought. He is the one who is going to call. She didn’t know when, but she felt sure he would. He would want to hear in her words about learning the truth about the ‘Birdwatcher.’ She shuddered at the thought of how Spalding had first tried to show her who Tyler was. The coordinates the clearing deep in the woods and all those photos of his victims. How gullible she’d been. She was standing there in the middle of nowhere with a serial killer, him knowing who all of those people in the photos were and what had happened to them and she was completely unaware. How could she have been so blind!

  Thinking of Tyler at that time led her to thoughts of the intimacy they’d shared too. Though no romantic relationship had formed, there was a chemistry between them Sarah had never been able to explain away. More than once she had found herself driving the lonely roads to his country home to spend the night, and each time he was waiting and willing. The day after or the day after that, they would go back to their own lives and it was as though nothing had happened. It made it almost like each time was the first time they’d been together. Now those once beautiful images sickened her and there was no stopping the tears that wanted to fall from her eyes.

  She shook her head to clear her mind and took up a piece of paper from the table to scrutinise. She wasn’t going to do herself any good sitting here rehashing the past. It was as she had this thought, however, that another popped into her head. She did need another box after all, it was time to make a file on Tyler too. She had a tonne of information about him that the FBI didn’t have,, stuff that she didn’t think would help in the search for him, but that might enable her to get a better understanding of him. There were countless articles he’d written online and in the public libraries. There must be clues dotted all over the place to what he’d really been up to.

  Sarah stood up. She needed some air and going out to get some new boxes and file holders was just the excuse. Come what may, she thought as she closed up her coat against the chill outside, I’m going to bring both of them in. At that point she couldn’t give a damn about what came out about her, of what either Tyler or Spalding would try to use to keep her quit. She could slip away into a while different life, another place and other profession once those two were arrested. What would it matter to her anymore after that?

  Even as these thoughts, self-satisfying as they were, rushed through her mind, Sarah knew in her heart she would never willingly walk away from the work she did. She was good at it and it was so important to the victims of these people that good people were on the case and trying to catch them.

  It was always going to be job to bring those people down. Always.

  Chapter 3

  Before anyone knew Tyler’s dark secrets, he had followed his various online fan clubs. Some had been around a long time and others had come and gone over this period. He often joined the websites masquerading as another teenage girl with a crush on Tyler Ford. His reasons for this had nothing to do with personal vanity or trying to groom young girls for sex. No, Tyler had a far more sinister motive for keeping an eye on his adoring hormonal fan club. Someday, he knew they were going to come in useful to him. That time had now come.

  In the end it hadn’t been hard to single out his most ardent supported from the dozens of girls spread over the sites. One website in particular, a blog, was so well maintained and kept up to date, it even had links to every news article he’d written which showed a level of interest far and above his physical attractions. This girl cared about his writing as well as his looks. She believed in him.

  The girl who ran the website was Anna Saskin. Though her social media channels Tyler had been able to learn a lot about her life, her interest’s, and her passion for his work. Her blog was called ‘Tyler Ripped’ and there was a header bar with a picture of him topless with flexing abs and chest muscles on a beach from about five years ago. It was a ruse, though. There were picture dotted throughout the blog, but Tyler felt they were there to keep other girls attentive while they inadvertently read about ow much Anna admired Tyler’s journalism. He had a feeling Anna was a very clever girl—for a teenager. But if there is one flaw that all teenage girls (and boys) have in common it is their hormones and their uncontrollable ability to be swayed by love. Or what they thought was love at that tender age.

  Anna wanted to save the earth and she had done some passionate writing on the subject on her blog. It was good writing and Tyler felt sure she could be a journalist in the future if she put her mind to it. Though true, this was the kind of flattery that most likely to work with a girl like Anna. She was attractive too, but Tyler didn’t think that was so important to her. He could be wrong, but that was the feeling he got.

  Tyler had thought long and hard in his motel room on the outskirts of Tacoma, Washington, about the best way to contact Anna. His name was all over the news now and there could be no doubt that any website associated with him was going to come under heavy police scrutiny. That made the chat sections of the blogs and websites a no-go area for him, at least until he and Anna had worked out some kind of code. But that was getting ahead of himself.

  He scrolled though Anna’s Facebook profile, saw all the same things he’d already seen, and the thought send her a message through the messenger service there might be a good way to get to her. On the flip side of that, Tyler also knew that girls and women these days got so many unwanted lurid photo’s sent to them in this way it was possible his message would go unnoticed languishing in her outbox with all of that other stuff. He paused a moment and then decided to try it.

  Time to make her believe in him again.

  Anna, this is Tyler Ford. I know what is in the media about me right now, but I want to let you know it is all a lie. I have information on the administration of the FBI and links with CIA groups that they don’t want made public. That’s why I had to run. I know you follow my writing and I need someone to trust. Could that be you?

  The message was short on detail but high on what she would most likely want to hear. Can you save the man you idolize?

  Contacting her in this way had another bonus Tyler had thought about. Judging from her online activity over multiple social media accounts, Tyler could see that Anna was one of those people who was almost always online. This would mean that he would know it a matter of minutes if she actually saw his message.

  It lit up as read and instantly those scrolling dots along the bottom told him
she was typing a reply. Then it stopped and for a long minute nothing happened. Tyler waited. It was unlikely she would believe it was him right away. She was probably thinking of some comeback to test him. Either that or she had started to reply and then thought better of it and decided to ignore him. He waited some more.

  Then those dots started moving again.

  What was the name of the first article you published?

  It took him a moment to remember but then he typed back,

  Unspoiled Waters. University Student Newspaper, Jan 27th 2004. He surprised himself with the recall of the date.

  You know your Tyler Ford facts, but I won’t believe it’s you without at least a photograph to prove it.

  Tyler looked to the room around him, saw the dim bulb of the bedside lamp and the garish old wallpaper, both things that if caught in the background of a photograph could give his location away to the FBI. He got up from the bed and pulled the white sheet from it before hanging loosely over the back of the bathroom door. He stood before this, checked his reflection in the camera view and saw there was nothing but him and the white background and then snapped the image. He sent it to her without any text. Her reply was not long in coming.

  I haven’t seen that picture before, but how do I know it was just taken now?

  “Jesus,” Tyler said, and he looked around. He pulled the sheet to the far side of the bathroom door and stood before the narrow mirror. This time he held the phone out so that she would be able to see their current conversation on one half of the screen while he took a photo with the other half. He looked over the photo carefully before sending it on. There was nothing incriminating in it. The dots once more, and then stopped. And then again. And then stopped. She was excited and didn’t quite know what to say back. She wanted to word it well without coming off like a child, he thought. This was looking good.