A Kettle of Hawks (The Birdwatcher Series Book 3) Read online

  To break the monotonous cycle, he decided to look at another open case for a while. Just something different to get him thinking straight again. He went down to one of the computer rooms and started looking at some CCTV footage of a series of armed petrol station robberies that had been committed by the same gang. Someone else had marked where they left off with the tape and Delgado took it up from there. He had the artist's impressions of the gang on the table beside him and he started speeding through the footage, slowing down when someone who might be close to a description came into the field of the camera.

  This was one of the more tedious jobs in law enforcement, but also it was a guaranteed adrenalin hit if you found something on one of the tapes. It didn’t require any thought at all and it gave him a chance to shrug off the murder cases for a time and think of something else. To his surprise, the tape he was watching was dated the same night one of the murders had taken place.

  ‘Must have been a full moon,’ he thought.

  Frame after frame came up and he marked down people who bore some resemblance to the drawings and then he saw a face that he recognised! Delgado sat up straight as his heart began to pound faster. He paused the screen and then scanned the faces on the table before him. A moment of confusion descended when none of them was even close to the man on the screen, but then he looked back to the monitor and Delgado knew what he was seeing and why the face was so familiar.

  It was Steven Haines, one of the murder suspects. Delgado’s eyes shot back to the time stamp in the top corner of the screen. This was the night Haines had been unable to account for himself, the night of the murder he was suspected of. The petrol station was forty miles away and the time said he was there at nine minutes past seven, about forty-five minutes before he’d been seen near the crime scene. It didn’t look like he would have had the time to carry out the murder. This might clear him!

  Delgado gave up going over the tapes and went back to the murder cases. He looked over their alibis again, their movements on the night they were suspected of committing a murder. He called each of them again, not letting Sarah in on this yet in case it turned out to be nothing but another waste of time. Haines told him he forgot he'd been out driving and stopped to get petrol that night and when he spoke to the others, it turned out James Belfoy had a new piece of information too as to his whereabouts on the night of the murder.

  Delgado checked this and sure enough more CCTV showed James Belfoy was also too far away from the crime scene in the time before he was spotted in the vicinity of the murder. Delgado was exhausted but very pleased with himself. He dialled Sarah’s number.

  “Hello?” she answered, her voice eager as always.

  “I got some good news,” Delgado said.

  “What is it?”

  “Don’t get too excited,” he replied, “I didn’t solve the case yet.”

  “Then what?” she was starting to sound impatient and he smiled.

  “I’ve found evidence that takes Steven Haines and James Belfoy out of the picture for murder.”

  “What evidence?”

  “CCTV footage, too far away from the scene for them to have killed those men.”

  “Why didn’t they say anything?” Sarah sounded annoyed at this.

  “They said they felt under so much pressure they didn’t know what they were saying. They’re not used to being under suspicion,” Delgado said.

  “Both of them said that?”

  “Variations of it,” he replied, “You don’t believe it?” She didn’t answer for a moment.

  “Well, I guess most people don’t hold up well under intense questioning like that. It’s possible they were so scared of the possibilities they weren’t able to think straight.”

  “Fear is the detective's best friend,” Delgado laughed.

  “So, now we’re down to four suspects, including the ‘immigrant’,” Sarah said.

  “I’m wondering very hard about his existence,” Delgado said, thinking out loud, “But I can’t see Tusk being the one to set all of this up.”

  “Me neither,” Sarah said, “It would take someone with a lot more guile and nerve than this bunch to pull off something like this.” She was thinking of Spalding again, Delgado was sure of it. He decided to make an offer.

  “Maybe I should go to Bobrick or Daniels and tell them I think Spalding might be involved. I could act like I was doing it without your knowledge?”

  “I don’t think they’d fall for that,” she said.

  “Well, it’s not a trick,” he countered. “This is an ongoing investigation and the case bears some similarities to cases of the recent past. It would be remiss of me not to bring this to their attention.”

  “Oooh, you sounded so serious and professional there,” Sarah replied and he could hear the smile in her voice.

  “I’m going to do it,” Delgado said, “What harm could it do?”

  “More than you know,” Sarah said, a wistful tone to her voice now. He let the line hang dead a moment and then said,

  “Say no and I won’t do it.”

  “Maybe hold off on it for a little longer, until we speak to the three suspects again.”

  “Okay, you got it. I’ll put it on the back burner.”

  They ended the call agreeing they should go out and look at the crime scenes again before talking to the suspects. You never knew what questions or ideas might come to mind when you stood in the place where a crime actually took place.

  After the call, Delgado sat at his desk looking at the CCTV stills. Was it possible the others were going to have turned out to be far away at the time of death too? Or some other strange reason to exclude them from the investigation. He had never worked on a case like this but he had to admit it gave him a thrill. The oddest cases always did. It was for this very reason that he joined the FBI in the first place and why he wanted to get assigned to this unit. All the strangest cases came through here and now here he was sitting right in the middle of it. He relaxed in his chair and smiled at the idea. He closed his eyes and realised how tired he was. Probably best to get home and sleep before he dozed off at his desk.

  Chapter 27

  The switch had been turned and the charge was running at full now. Tyler couldn't blame Spalding for this but he did so all the same. Though he hadn’t kept to a lunar cycle or anything like that, Tyler’s murders had been carried out at intervals of between thirteen and sixteen months. He’d felt the need come on many times before, but usually it was a gradual thing that came on over a period of two months. This time however, he’d only been feeling it about two weeks and now it was at fever pitch. He didn’t think he was going to make it to California before the itch was too much not to scratch.

  He felt tired, groggy even, at all times of the day. His writing was off and his enthusiasm for the Baltimore Murders was sagging, much to the annoyance of his editor. Again Tyler fantasized about killing Briggs. He was going to have to get his head back into the game if he was going to do this properly. If it wasn’t perfect there was a chance he would be caught, and that would put an end to everything for good.

  The brief thought of going for a hike in one of the national parks and killing someone he found wandering alone passed through his mind. Though that sounded really easy, it wasn’t something that generally came about and there were no end of things that could go wrong. Things were bound to go wrong.

  Tyler needed a serious distraction, something to take his mind off what he needed to do. Spalding was the cause of the acceleration of his desires just now so he decided to put his energies into the search for him.

  Since the discovery of the house where Megan had been held hostage, there had been an ongoing search of isolated farm houses and abandoned buildings in the States of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and southern Pennsylvania. So far that had turned up nothing. Tyler thought the police, though not great at operations like this, would have found anything that was obvious. Tyler started to look for places within ten hour drives of the centr
e of all the crimes of the ‘John the Baptist’, ‘The Agrarian’, the Megan Stanver case and now the current Baltimore case. He felt within this area he would find something that might lead him to Spalding. Serial killers had some habits, he’d seen that in all of them, and in fact had a little thing himself that he hadn’t been able to cut out though he knew it went against his own best interests.

  He was sure Spalding would have something too. But what? He shoved the idea from his head and drew up a map on his computer. This was what he should be focusing on now. He put the border between Virginia and West Virginia as the centre and looked in at radii of five hundred miles. The area within was huge and stretched all the way into Canada to the north. It opened up a hell of a lot of farmhouses and derelict properties that no FBI or police were looking at.

  Tyler was surprised to find that the site of his own first murder was within the circle, but only just. Had Spalding known about that one he would have been suspicious about it being so close to the edge of the area plotted.

  Did he know about Terrence?

  It didn’t seem possible, but none of it had seemed possible. Spalding had been able to uncover killer after killer in a way the police could never hope to. It was like he had some kind of radar for people like himself, an affinity that was tangible to him alone. How long had he known about Tyler? There was no way of telling.

  He looked back to the map and let his eyes pour over it, taking in city and town names, lakes and forests, mountain ranges. It was such a vast area and narrowing it down seemed like an impossible task and...;

  Something caught Tyler’s eye. A word he recognised but he’d lost it on the map. He scanned again where he’d been looking, feeling it was just out his view each moment. It was the name of a place but it meant something else, a word he’d heard before, not a common word but something with another meaning. Where has it gone? Tyler blinked his eyes as if to clear them, opening them wide to let in all the light they could take and then he saw it again!

  Roanoke.

  There it was in Virginia. This wasn’t the Roanoke he’d thought of when he saw the word. What Roanoke meant to Tyler, as with most people probably was Disappearance. That was a word that was also very strongly connected to Dwight Spalding. Tyler googled Roanoke Disappearance and clicked on the first page that came up. There, in bold letters, was the number of people who had gone missing from the ill-fated colony. Between one hundred and twelve and one hundred and twenty-one people had vanished without trace. How many missing people had been attributed to Spalding in that secret case Sarah couldn’t get access to and which Tyler’s contact had been unaware of? He guessed the number would fall in this same region of around one hundred and eighteen

  This town of Roanoke, however, was not the Roanoke where the settlers had been. Both of these places, named the same, were well within his radius however, and as he looked he saw one more place with the Roanoke name- Roanoke Rapids. These three places could be joined in a straight line on a map that spanned about three hundred and fifty miles.

  Tyler looked at the map for a long time and he felt good. He felt what people in the police force called a hunch. He knew that if he was not right about Spalding being in one of these places, he was going to find something there. Spalding always played and this game was almost like hiding in plain sight. He felt it had Spalding written all over it and now his own search was narrowed down significantly. He was giddy at the thought of getting started, and had it not been so late in the day he would have set off there and then to Roanoke. But it would have to wait until tomorrow.

  It was best to give the idea time to percolate anyway. Tomorrow would be fine.

  The net was closing in on Spalding, he could feel it. How incredible would it be for Dwight Spalding to be Tyler’s next victim?

  Chapter 28

  Crime scenes after all the forensics and police had left are dull vapid spaces. They emanate a sorry sadness and sense of emptiness for a long time after the fact, especially sites of murder. This drab apartment where a man called George Kiplam had been murdered was no different, though Sarah got the sense this might have been a sad pace before the man was killed.

  Agent Delgado and she walked around the room, looking at it from different angles, seeing the view from the windows again, checking out the bathroom where the killing had taken place. Forensics hadn’t found anything of use at any of the crime scenes. There were no fingerprints other than the victims in each place, no physical evidence of someone forcing their way into the apartment and no sign of a struggle in any of the rooms. None of the neighbors had heard anything either. It was like nothing had happened but yet there was a dead body at the end of all of the scenes.

  “It still looks to me like each victim let their killer in willingly,” Delgado said shaking his head. “That would indicate someone they knew at least a little, but none of the victims knew each other or had anything in common.” Sarah knew he was thinking out loud, had noticed it was part of his process and she didn’t answer him as he spoke but kept on looking around herself. She also had a process and it was generally keep on looking until something came to her. And it usually did.

  “Say it was someone who knew each of the victims, at least in some limited way,” Sarah said after a time. Delgado looked over to her. “It could be a casual acquaintance, like a delivery person, or...;”

  “Drug dealer?” Delgado suggested with a smile. Sarah nodded, this wasn’t out of the realism of possibility. Some weed had been found at three of the apartments.

  “Maybe,” she smiled back, “So if it was someone like that, it would explain why none of the victims knew one another but did know their killer.”

  “A lot of illegals do takeout delivery driving, paid in cash, tips in cash,” Delgado commented.

  “Which ties in with Tusk’s story, to a slim degree,” Sarah said.

  “It’s about all that does,” Delgado scoffed. It was true, Tusk’s story sounded so full of shit but though he'd been scared he hadn’t deviated from it. The only thing he seemed worried about was that they might think he was a scumbag. Sarah looked and saw Delgado was writing something in his notebook.

  “What are you writing down?” she asked.

  “Making a note for someone to check local take out joints for delivery people who have bailed from work in the last few days or who have been acting oddly.”

  “You may as well write down the drug dealer’s angle too,” she said. It would be harder to get info on those though due to the nature of their work. Perhaps she could ask Tyler to look into that aspect for her? She had no doubt his reach into the underworld of Baltimore was farther than her own.

  This idea made her think of Carson Lemond, the wannabe gangster and how Spalding had taken him from Tyler’s home and killed him, looking like he was trying to set Tyler up at the same time. What a mess that had been.

  “You okay?” Delgado asked, breaking her thought flow. She looked at him with raised eyebrows, “You look like you got sad there all of a sudden?” he went on. Sarah shook her head,

  “It’s just this case, it’s a mess and all these people dying needlessly so someone can try and show off how clever they are.”

  “He won’t be impressing anyone when he’s locked up in a cell in a max security prison,” Delgado said. He sounded sure of himself and Sarah liked that. It reminded her of herself not all that long ago. Before Dwight Spalding came back into her life.

  “Door to door canvassing has turned up nothing new?” she asked, getting back to the case at hand.

  “Nothing, I don’t know what’s going on with the people around these buildings, they don’t seem as nosey as the general population.” Delgado was smiling but she wasn't sure he was joking too much.

  Over the next few hours they visited each of the murder scenes and Sarah was frustrated at the end that not one good idea had come to her the whole day.

  They were back in the car now on the way back to the FBI Academy.

  “What are we missing?
” Sarah said angrily, “It’s something obvious and stupid and we are looking right past it!” Delgado glanced her way and then back to the file in his lap without saying anything. “Something links them all, suspects and victims and we are just too dumb to see it!” Out of the corner of her eye she saw Delgado nodded like a husband reading the paper and nodding at his wife’s comments on something one of the neighbors had done to their yard.

  “Are you even listening to me?” she asked, looking at him for a second before concentrating on the road again.

  “I am listening, were you expecting me to answer you?” he replied. She supposed she hadn’t been expecting an answer really, she didn’t know what she’d expected but it wasn’t silence.

  “I don’t know, I’m tired and this case is pissing me off,” she said wearily.

  “It’s grating,” he agreed, “But I have a feeling we’re going to do it. Something is close, do you not feel it?” he asked her. Sarah looked at him and saw the earnestness in his eyes. It frightened her for a moment as she wondered once more if Delgado was somehow involved with Spalding. How did he know something was coming?

  “I don’t feel it,” she said trying to dismiss her fears, “Not this time.”

  “Well, I can feel it strong enough for both of us,” he said.

  Sarah’s phone began to vibrate then and she looked to the screen. It was the Academy.

  “Agent Brightwater,” she answered.

  “There’s been another murder in Baltimore,” ASAC Daniels’s terse voice informed her. “Get over to Farley Tusk’s place right away. He’s dead.”

  “We’re on our way,” Sarah said but Daniels had already hung up. She looked to Delgado, “I guess you were right.”