Page 31 of Sullied Saints

Needler raises an eyebrow. "If your people are going to put me in the same place as them, perhaps you have that coming?" He wanders to the far side of his small room, and then lies back on the bed. "I've told you what I want."

I stiffen, abruptly reminded of what he wanted another time. Watching me from the bed, a tilt to his lips, I can see he knows where my mind has gone too.

"So,Little Shadow,you can deliver, or not."

Chapter five

Intheend,thedecision isn't up to me.

We're standing beyond the line of crime scene tape, and I already know it’s her. Therealher. The day is deceptively still, last week’s snow a memory and the ice melting off the crooked rooves of Crennick with the clear morning.

I glance at Dirk beside me. "Are you ready for this?"

He feels it too. The familiarity. This street is run-down, on the edge of Crennick, the building an old auto warehouse, now used exclusively by squatters. Well, notexclusively, not since sometime last night. Now it’s filled with the usual forensics team and the small squad of detectives now on these cases. Face tilting up towards the blue sky, which even on a cloudless morning like this one, still retains a pallor that washes out most of the blue, Dirk inhales, his breath misting out on the exhale. "I'm ready."

The body is suspended, fully cocooned, resembling an Egyptian mummy as they may have looked before hundreds of years passed. If they’d been wrapped in neat, bleached cloth and pristine plaster.

There's nothing on the ground below, no clumsiness, no smears. Howie and Dean are already here, and I start to wonder if they somehow sleep less than we do. I walk up beside Howie. Forensics are working out the least destructive way to get the body down, and he’s looking grimly on.

“Waiting on a forklift,” he says, not looking away.

Glancing around at the cement floor, cracked in places, dirty with debris and bright points of discarded wrappers and bottles, I ask, “The floor has been checked?”

“Nothing so far.” I wait. He sighs, giving his neck a break and turning away. "Just what we needed.” He knows it’s the real thing this time, too.

"We need to keep this away from the media, at least until next week when we can announce the official arrest of the laundromat man. The public needssomethingto hang onto." Even if it is only threads.

Howie nods and opens his mouth, but a loud clang has us both looking up, to the right where the frosted glass windows high on the side of the warehouse are broken, looking out to that white-blue sky. But it’s not the sky that we all see. It’s a man teetering somehow outside the window, a long-lensed camera pointing directly at the body. Someone shouts, and he turns the camera, takes a quick snap of the forensics and us, then leans, like he’s started climbing down a ladder on the outside.

"Shit, get him!" I shout as the man disappears. Spreading those photos will only lead to one thing—panic. And a bunch of things that come after panic. Conrad has been quiet on the streets lately; we don’t need him rearing up again.

"Fuck me, they're getting creative," Dirk groans, turning to jog back outside. I follow, but as we step out, the rest of the media has already arrived. Turning his face away, Dirk ignores their calls, running around the side of the building. They’re asking about this crime scene, but also about him. They’re desperate now, begging for his story, details, what it was like.

There's an extended wooden ladder propped against the side of the auto warehouse. We stop at its base, being photographed and called out to all the while. But there's no one nearby, no man with a huge camera. The roof of an old complex slopes to about the halfway point of the ladder, an easy jump-off point.

"Shit."

"Set up a perimeter," I order one of the officers who's followed us. But the odds are low of catching him now. He can go to ground in any of the dilapidated buildings in Crennick, then wait until we tire of looking. His pictures will get out, and we'll have to deal with the fallout all the while drowning in killers.

Dirk touches my arm, glancing at the media horde and their forever flashing cameras. “Come on, let’s head back inside.”

"Detective Lancaster!" One of the people in the group of reporters stumbles, pushing through to the front as they block our way back in. The woman doesn’t have a camera or a microphone—that’s the first thing I notice. All she has is a small square of paper, a business card, and she holds it out to Dirk. "He's willing to pay."

Dean comes to our rescue at that moment, with three other officers to make a path back inside.

The doors close, and I take a breath, turning to Dirk as he looks down at the card in his hand. "What is it?" I ask.

He hands it to me, and I let out a laugh as I look down at the name. "Syr Evans? He must really want an interview." Most people pay to be interviewed by Tregam’s favourite investigative news host.

Dirk grins. "What can I say? I'm in high demand." He crumples the card, but with no bin around, drops it into his pocket.

"Well, we've got bigger problems."

Tawill, ahead of a mass of shouts and demands for a statement, walks in. She eyes the body, then comes back to me. She's not happy. "Get ussomething, detective. I don't care what you have to do. We need progress."

Before I can answer her, or God forbid, question her, she storms off, and Dirk is back at my side. “What’s all that about?”

I frown after Tawill. She’s always been hard, results-focussed, but this latest case appears to be pushing her to new levels of impatience. Shaking my head, I say, “She wants results on the Cocooner case. Sooner rather than later.”

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