A Clattering of Jackdaws (The Birdwatcher Series Book 2) Read online

  One of his contacts in the police had managed to get a copy of the crime scene photos to him. They were black and white photocopies and everything looked grainy, but it was a leg up on any of the other reporters on the story as far as he knew. Now all he had to do was find something in those photos that everyone else had missed. Though he was tired, Tyler was confident in his abilities and felt he could do it.

  The police felt all of the items on the floor had been brought by the killer to the scene. If this was right then there was no doubting there was a message in there somewhere—unless of course the killer was simply toying with the police, which was always a possibility when it came to psychopathic killers. But Tyler didn’t think this was the case; something was there and he was going to find it.

  The landline on his desk rang and Tyler looked at the little LED screen. No number came up. His heart quickened a beat and he glanced at his watch; it was just after 11pm and that was a good sign. In his business the best news or stories broke mostly at night when everyone else was just settling in for bed. He picked it up,

  “Tyler,” he said. For a moment there was nothing.

  Then the rasp of a disguised voice came over the line.

  “Hello Tyler; it’s been a while,” he said.

  “It has,” Tyler replied, “I was afraid something had happened to you.”

  “Nice of you to be concerned for my welfare,” the man laughed, though Tyler was now thinking of him as Spalding too, “But your fears are misplaced. It is yourself you need to worry about.” It didn’t sound like a threat, but Tyler was unsure what he meant.

  “Why is that?” he asked.

  “Like I told you before; you’re putting your trust in Sarah Brightwater.”

  “She helps my career.”

  “For now,” Spalding said, “But later, when it is her own career on the line, who do you think she will throw to the wolves?”

  “I can look after myself,” Tyler said.

  “You are capable, I’ll give you that,” Spalding said, “But sometimes we don’t see the trouble coming until it’s too late to do anything about it.”

  “Trouble is what my business is all about,” Tyler replied, thinking Sarah’s was too.

  “I guess so,” Spalding said, and that was the end of the conversation as the line went dead. Tyler wondered did Spalding think the line might be traceable and had cut off before the time needed for such a thing, but he doubted it. Spalding had said what he needed to say; which wasn’t much—just enough to let Tyler know the game was still on and he hadn’t been forgotten about. Things were coming back full circle.

  Circle. The word hung there in his mind and there was a spark to it; an intuition he got sometimes that lead to his break in a story. Tyler quickly pulled the crime scene photographs to him and poured over them once more, this time looking at the items laid out, trying to make a circle of them. He could make a crude circle if he tried but it didn’t make the message any clearer than before.

  It was frustrating; he knew he was close to an answer but it was refusing to reveal itself to him. Taking one page in his hand, Tyler rose and began pacing the room holding it close to his face and then moving it away to see it from all different distances. He rotated it in every combination and even turned it backwards and held it up to the light to try and make something out, but it was all to no avail.

  Finally, after about ten minutes of this furious pacing, he threw down the sheet in exasperation and let out a howl of anger. He stood in the middle of the room, breathing hard to shake off the ebbing fury.

  And then he saw it.

  The paper had landed on the floor face up and the image was clearer now than at any other time. It hadn’t been a circle he was looking for, but rather a spiral. Picking up the paper, Tyler went back to his desk and on a blank page started to write out the names of the items in the spiral pattern he’d seen. Then putting the photo away he stared at his own diagram for s time. He wrote the items out in a new list and then looked over the first letters of each hoping that finding the spiral would be the end of the riddle and it would spell out a message. There was no such luck. Tyler’s patience had returned, however, and he knew it was only a matter of time before he saw the message.

  For the next hour he looked over the words and the images—both the photo and the diagram he’d made—making notes and writing down words he felt he was seeing. Pages of large scrawled notes were starting to accumulate when with a sudden moment of clarity he saw it!

  Working from the centre of the spiral to the outer fringes the sequence was as follows: First word- First letter; Second word- Second letter; and so on to make out two new words.

  ‘There will.’

  The rest of the message must have been at the other two murders but annoyingly he hadn’t been able to get access to a copy of those yet. It was proving more difficult to get those and it ate him up that he didn’t have the information to hand to figure out the rest of the message.

  Frantically, he went online again looking through all the articles for anytime someone mentioned the objects, but though there were a couple of references there were no descriptions of what the items were.

  Sarah would know; not only would she know she would have access to the photos.

  Tyler’s mind was racing. Sarah would also be very interested to hear about the phone call from Spalding as well. If these two items were not a clear indication of how they should be working together, then Tyler couldn’t imagine what would be.

  As he sat back in his chair and lifted his cell phone to his ear, he smiled and tried to imagine a scenario where she wouldn’t be willing to work with him in order to get the information he now had.

  The game was back on indeed.

  Chapter 12

  SARAH SAT BY THE WINDOW looking down on the crossroad traffic lights down below her fifth floor apartment. It had been a rough day and she was having a glass of wine—not something she usually did in the evening. Seeing Malick go to pieces the way he had today had jarred her and she couldn’t get the image of him cowering by the car out of her head. It was so unlike him.

  The Police Department would be expecting a report from her and no doubt Daniels and Bobrick at the Academy were going to want to know what happened too. If she included what actually happened with Malick that could finish his career, but if she didn’t, was that doing him any favours really? In another situation today, they both could have been killed because of his breakdown. It seemed obvious that she should tell the truth, but Malick had been her friend and partner for a long time and Sarah knew there was no way he could take it other than a betrayal. If their roles had been reversed, she certainly would. This was an added mess Sarah could seriously do without.

  Her cell phone started to ring and her first instinct was that it was Malick. It was a surprise when looking at the screen she saw it was Tyler Ford. She hesitated, her hand hovering over the phone. How she wanted to answer and yet how scared she was of what he might say. Danger lurked in every communication with him but so too, she was coming to learn, did progress on her cases.

  “Hello,” she answered.

  “The ‘Agrarian’ is leaving a message,” Tyler said. Sarah’s eyes shot open wide as she leaned forward on the seat. It had been the right decision to answer!

  “What?” she asked, making no attempt to disguise how desperate she was to know.

  “It’s spread over all the crime scenes, but I only have photos from the first one. Do you have the others at hand?” Sarah was already walking to the sleeping laptop on the table.

  “Hang on a sec,” she said as she swiped the cursor pad to bring the machine back to glowing life. She logged in quickly and went for the files for the case. “Okay, I’m in,” she said.

  “The items the killer brought, that’s what you need to be looking for,” Tyler said. Sarah clicked to those images from the other cases.

  “Right, what am I looking for?”

  “Like I said, I haven’t seen those ones, but i
s it possible to make a loose spiral shape from the items locations?” Sarah looked and for a moment her eyes refused to see it, but just as she was about to shake her head in exasperation and tell Tyler she couldn't see it, the pattern jumped out at her.

  “Yes!” she said, “I see it, it’s messy but it’s there!”

  “Write down all the names of the item on a sheet, do it for both and then call me back at this number.”

  “Alright, I’ll call you in a few minutes,” she said and hung up.

  Scrawling down the names of the items, Sarah hoped she was going to see the message without having to go back to Tyler, but by the time she had it all written down, it made no more sense to her than it had when she was on the scene of the crime.

  When Tyler was back on the line, he talked her through his system for reading the message. Sarah wrote it down as they went but the end result was not as clear as she would have liked.

  “This doesn’t make sense at all,” she said, almost shouting down the phone as though it were Tyler’s fault.

  “Are you sure you followed the example exactly?” he asked, his voice calm and irritating on the line.

  “Yes!” she snapped back, looking back over what she’d done to be sure. “Yes,” she said again.

  “Maybe it’s backwards this time,” Tyler said, “Do the same thing with the items in the opposite direction and see what that gives you?”

  “Okay,” she said wearily,

  “I’ll stay on the line this time,” he added quickly before she could tell him she’d call him back. At least he was as eager as she was for the answer, she thought.

  Sarah didn’t answer before laying the phone on the table and starting to work again on the puzzle before her. The pressure of the open phone line made it feel like she was taking part in some super important timed exam and it was grating on her nerves. Though she was making progress and words were certainly forming this time, she kept glancing at the phone like it was her enemy and hating it more and more.

  “I got it!” she said lifting both the sheet of paper and the phone up at the same time.

  “What does it say?” he asked.

  “What does yours say first?” she countered. There was a moment of silence and then he answered,

  “There will.”

  “Mine says, ‘be another’,” Sarah told him.

  “Another what?” Tyler asked softly though it wasn’t really directed at Sarah, “We need to read the end of the message at the most recent murder scene. Have you got those photos too?”

  “Got them right here,” Sarah said. “I’ll call you with the results in a few minutes,” she added and then hung up before he could reply.

  It was with a growling level of frustration that Sarah saw neither previous ways were working this time; there were no words coming back from her efforts. The phone was sitting there like a brick around her neck as she waded through the words and photographs and the pressure was back and her head throbbed with it. Nothing she was trying was coming up trumps and she was running out of ideas.

  Twenty minutes passed before Sarah picked up the phone again.

  “Well?” Tyler’s expectant voice answered.

  “Where are you now?” Sarah asked him.

  “I’m at home.”

  “I’ll be there within the hour,” she said.

  “It’s in a different code again, isn’t it?”

  “Yep, and nothing I’ve been able to figure out on my own.” Though he head was telling her she was handing over some kind of victory to Tyler in this, her heart didn’t feel it. Sarah felt like they were an old team reforming and how easy it would be to slip back into the old pattern.

  What didn’t go away, however, was the idea of how dangerous this could be to her career.

  Chapter 13

  TYLER LOOKED AROUND the room when Sarah hung up. It was tidy, as ever, apart from his desk which was covered in his writings and drawings from breaking the cipher. Now that he had done so, it didn’t seem like it had been much of a task in the end. If he were to come up with a secret message, it would be much more complicated than the ones in the first two photos. Perhaps this last one would be the saving grace and would be harder to crack.

  This led Tyler to think of the killer and his mind-set. Had he made this code easier so that those following him would be able to understand it? Did that mark him out as intelligent or was this the best he could do? Tyler thought it more likely the man was smart. The ‘Agrarian’ certainly believed he was, or else he would never have left a message in the first place.

  There will be another- That was the message so far. Tyler sincerely hoped the end was not simply going to be a number. The idea crossed his mind that perhaps the number of objects at the last scene was what they were looking for to complete the sentence. It was possible.

  While he waited, he looked over the other photos of the first murder scene. Gruesome stuff indeed and Tyler couldn’t help but wonder was there a message in there as well. Why else go to so much trouble? It would take a long time to cut a body and splay the skin like this—and that was even if you were rushing. It was clear though that the killer in this first case at least had taken his time, made sure he did the job right. Did he have an image of it in his head that he was trying to recreate? What did it mean to the killer, or for that matter to the victim? Tyler’s own feeling was that the ‘Agrarian’ was trying to show the ‘real’ person he killed, show what they were like on the inside. Was he exposing them? If so, exposing what? Perhaps he would ask Sarah what she thought when she arrived.

  This made him look at his watch; she should be here any minute. Tyler got up and put on a pot of coffee. He had a feeling this was going to be a long night. As if on cue, the sound of an engine being worked hard rose in the quiet rural night. He walked to the door and stepped out onto the porch as Sarah’s car dropped gears and turned into his long driveway. He wondered for a moment if it was possible his own countryside residence made him a possible target for the ‘Agrarian’. It seemed he could have no thought this evening that didn’t lead back to the killer.

  Sarah’s car jerked to a halt and the lights and engine died instantly. The door swung open and she was out on her feet like this was an FBI raid.

  “Hey,” he waved and she smiled and said hi back. Tyler was shocked by what he thought was a look of lust in her eyes. It was fleeting and the smiling reply took it away; but he felt there was no mistaking it. Was what why she was here? Tyler was attracted to Sarah physically- after all who wouldn't be, she was a knockout brunette, but if she had her eyes set on anything other than sex, she was barking up the wrong tree. Sarah breezed past him as he held the door open and her perfume wafted under his nose. The desire to take her followed but he stayed himself. It would be up to her to make the first move; he wasn’t willing to give up his power that easily.

  Any notions of sex, however, were quickly crushed as he closed the door and she dropped down a file on his kitchen island and said,

  “No copies, and they come back with me tonight.” Sarah was all business once again- so much so Tyler began to doubt he’d seen what he thought he had. No, his inner voice assured him. You saw it and it was real.

  “Anything you say boss,” he said straightening up and saluting her comically.

  “Do I smell coffee?” she said smiling.

  While Tyler poured the two cups, Sarah sat on his sofa and spread the photographs of the third scene on the low coffee table. He looked down over her shoulder as he rounded the end of the sofa and handed her a cup.

  “No let-up in the amount of work he went to on the body,” he remarked.

  “All three exactly alike, must have taken hours each time,” Sarah said, shuddering noticeably. Tyler leaned forward and moved the photos a little to make the one of the objects centre of the table for both to see better.

  “So this is our final riddle,” he said. “Did you think of anything on your way over here?” he asked.

  “No,” Sarah said shaking he
r head, “Other than the possibility the number of objects is the clue and he’s saying he’s going to kill six more men before he’s done.” Tyler was amused they had both had the same idea; was it possible they’d been having it at the same time too?

  “I was thinking that too,” he said.

  “You dismiss it?” she asked.

  “I think so, but I’ve no real reason to, save giving the killer a little credit.”

  “Me too. I think he’s smarter than that.” Tyler didn’t point out that this meant the killer felt the same way about the police or the FBI.

  For the next forty minutes they ran through alternate names for the items and tried the letter combinations from before in the same way and with the same negative result. They agreed to start working on different variations of letters from each word—taking into account the alternate names—and see what that yielded. Tyler seemed to make the word ‘The’ and Sarah ‘Of’ but everything else was gibberish.

  “I’m going to come at this from a different angle,” Tyler said then getting up. Sarah watched as he poured two glasses of Jameson Redbreast Whiskey over a single cube of ice in each. He put hers down saying, “Only if you want it, but I’m having one.” He drank. Sarah looked at the glass a moment and then took it up and sipped it.

  Another hour (and another drink) passed and still they were coming up blank. Tyler was beginning to think they had been right in the first place with the numbers being the answer.

  At last Sarah flopped back on the sofa with an exhalation of exasperation, throwing her neck over the backrest and rubbing her eyes.

  “I can't look at this shit anymore tonight,” she said. “It’s driving me nuts.” Tyler sat back too nodding.

  “It’s annoying alright,” he said, though his patience was nowhere near exhausted yet. He glanced at the clock and saw it was almost three in the morning. Was she going to stay? Sarah yawned but still lay with her head back facing the ceiling.