Murder in the First - Day 4

Finding the crime scene wasn't very hard. There are very few alleys in the city that are surrounded by police cars, police tape and people lined up to see what gruesome crime had been committed on their doorsteps - you just have to be willing to drive around long enough to find it. 

Unfortunately I ended up at four different crime scenes before I found the right one, the problems of living in a city with a high crime rate and only two or three competent police men – those being Fred, Harry and a handful of men who still worked in uniform.

So by the time I found the right crime scene, Ellis and Turndune were waiting for me. This wasn’t wholly unexpected after I ended up at the second and third wrong crime scenes, cops talk to each other, and seeing me touring crime scenes when Ryan Barlow was the number 1 suspect in a murder case – doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what I was looking for, or for that matter, what I was doing.

When I stepped out of the car, the first thing that happened was that my door was slammed shut by Turndune and Ellis pushed me up against the car. If it had been anyone else, or almost anyone else; then I would have broken their jaw without a second thought for pushing me up against my car. However with Ellis and Turndune they were both just looking for an excuse to arrest me, and assaulting a police officer was the perfect reason to lock me up so that I was out of the way whilst they steamrolled over Ryan.

So after being threatened, taunted, subjected to Ellis’ terrible halitosis and several references being made about what both of them wanted to do to my deceased mother – they forced me back into my car and had me escorted home by a very loud, and I must say unnecessary, group of police cars.

Of course what neither of them had realised is that the whole time they were taunting me, I wasn’t paying any attention to them, but was instead looking at the crime scene.

What I saw was something that looked remarkably staged and all too familiar, something that jogged some rather unpleasant memories.

In my short number of years on the earth, I have seen some of the worst that humanity has to offer. I won’t say I have seen the worst, as I am pretty sure there is someone out there who is disturbed enough to plunge to new depths of horror without even trying; but never-the-less, there are times when what I have seen before comes back to haunt me in very real ways.

What I began to realise when I actual saw the scene was that firstly Fred and Harry hadn’t seen it and secondly, this crime wasn’t just about Fred and Ryan. It was about me and Harry too. More importantly, it was mostly about Harry.

Harry has always been a ladies’ man, the string of women that he was wined and dined over the years is probably worthy of a Guiness World Record, but not every woman that crossed Harry’s path ended up sleeping with him. Something I am very proud never having stooped to myself.

One of these women that was oblivious to his charms was a girl in her early twenties that had tried to rob Harry’s apartment and had been caught in the act by the owner returning home early as someone may have thrown tomato sauce all over him when he complained about how long it was taking them to make dinner. I still maintain that I slipped.

The girl had been called Amy Barstow and after arresting her, interviewing her and letting her go, Harry had decided to help the unfortunate girl get back on her feet – or to find her feet in the first place. She had run away from home at a tender age and found herself at the mercy of some of the city’s more notorious villains, setting her up for a life of crime that was a vicious circle that would end in incarceration or death.

Having seen this happen many times before, Harry was a man on a mission to save this girl in a way that I have only seen Fred practise before.

Two weeks after Harry had helped her get out of the criminal life she had been found raped and murdered in an alley. The crime scene and positioning of the body had been identical to that of Sonja Lesner. Amy had been murdered as a message to Harry and he hadn’t tried to save anyone else since.

I still couldn’t place where I knew the name Lesner from but I was sure it would come back to me. What was keeping my mind occupied at the moment was who this message was for and how Harry would react when he found out.

I thought it would be best if I told him before Ellis or Turndune brought it up and caused Harry to start a riot in the station. Though it had occurred to me that was exactly what the perp had in mind when he set up the scene. 

Murder in the First - Day 3

If it had been any other time of day when I had walked in Ryan, the sound of him yelling in surprise and fear would have brought all the boys in blue to investigate why people were screaming in Rogers' office when he was elsewhere in the world.

But even at 2am, I wasn't so sure that Ryan screaming wouldn't cause the officers on duty to fly into a panic, find him and arrest him.

So I made sure that my hand was placed firmly over Ryan's mouth when I woke him up.

This seemed like a sensible precaution on the surface, however I had failed to take into account that Ryan had been woken up like this before by men with big guns and malicious intent. So his reaction to a hand over his mouth wasn't exactly normal.

In short, he bit me.

If it had been any other time of day when I had walked in on Ryan, the sound of him yelling in surprise and fear would have brought all the boys in blue to investigate why people were screaming in Rogers' office when he was elsewhere in the world.

But even at 2am, I wasn't so sure that Ryan screaming wouldn't cause the officers on duty to fly into a panic, find him and arrest him.

So I made sure that my hand was placed firmly over Ryan's mouth when I woke him up.

This seemed like a sensible precaution on the surface, however I had failed to take into account that Ryan had been woken up like this before by men with big guns and malicious intent. So his reaction to a hand over his mouth wasn't exactly normal.

In short - he bit me.

And unlike other people my reaction to this wasn't to grip my hand in pain but something slightly more, well violent.

I punched him in the side of the head.

It didn't take long for it to descend into a bit of a brawl, which given the amount of noise we were making, I'm surprised didn't have men pounding up the stairs to investigate.

As it was, it took all of five minutes for Ryan to wake up properly, realize it was me and not one of the seventy-five different people who currently wanted him dead and stop fighting me.

The argument could always be made that if I hadn't fought back then we wouldn't have been brawling for five minutes as he would have stopped and realized it was me much earlier, but then again I hadn't had the chance to fight anyone in a while and it is such a good workout.

Ryan sat down and I told him what Fred had asked me to do. Ryan laughed - a lot and then told me I should leave it alone.

This wasn't completely unexpected.

Ryan had never wanted to get me too involved with his problems. Yes, he'd go to Fred when it was something he thought his older brother could sweep under the carpet, but big things like this were things that he tried to keep us both at arm’s length over.

It took about an hour of us arguing in hushed voices for him to not agree at all to me investigating the murder and me saying in no uncertain terms that I was going to find out who was responsible for Sonya Lesner's death whether he wanted me to or not.

There is just something about the Barlow men that just make me want to tear my hair out at times. I think it is their stubborn, self-sacrificing attitude, but it could be something else.

However I knew that Ryan was safe, well hidden and that I could access the police records through Rogers' computer without too many issues when the moment came for that. But first I needed to investigate what had been left at the crime scene and who had been in the area. Most of the witness probably wouldn't talk to the police, but with a little persuasion would talk to me.

Murder in the First - Day 2

I had spent the first day of my investigation finding out what Turndune and Ellis knew. It really shouldn't have taken up a whole day when you consider that their combined IQ is about four and that they wouldn't be able to find their way out of a wet paper bag, even with directions. 

However trying to find out what they knew, without them finding out what I was up to, required some degree of finesse. Now ordinarily I despise stealth and sneaking and all that kind of behaviour that you expect from spies and assassins, but if I had any hope of helping out Ryan, I had to adopt some methods that I generally find deplorable.

When it comes to taking on bad guys and enemies, I have always felt it best to kick down the door and go in all guns blazing; let everyone know exactly where they stand in a very blunt and direct manner. Granted this has meant I have a hospital loyalty card, but still I like it and it does seem to get me results and pay as well as hospital visits.

As it turned out there was little to no evidence available that implicated anyone, let alone Ryan. The murder victim was a young woman, not more than twenty-two years old and was well known to the police.

She had been arrested several times for possession, solicitation, assault, burglary and a string of other petty crimes. I say petty crimes because my yard stick for criminal behaviour is Kevin Metis - crime lord, gang boss, murderer, human trafficker, drug smuggler, kidnapper, rapist and a whole lot more. 

The victim's name was Sonya Lesner, it had some vague meaning to me, buried somewhere in my memory that I couldn't quite grasp when I first saw the name, but I had no doubt that I would remember why it was important when I need to, or more likely, just after I needed to.

She had been found beaten in an alley, her clothes torn off and strangled. The bruising on her neck, arms and torso suggested that it was a man, the hand mark too big to belong to a woman. She had engaged in some form of sexual practice earlier in the evening, but it was clear from the medical examination that she hadn't been raped.

The problem was that the evidence collected showed that the sexual practice Sonya had been involved in had been with Ryan. Ordinarily that wouldn't mean that he would be the prime suspect, especially as no evidence had been found to link him to the murder scene. Yes, he would have been brought in to be questioned and asked to prove his whereabouts etc, but the way Turndune and Ellis were talking, it was very clear they were not looking for anyone else, or even considering that it wasn't Ryan.

It's not surprising for corrupt cops to act this way, especially when they both hate the Barlow family with a vengeance. They were going after Ryan to hurt Fred, and damage his reputation in the standings of the police and general community.

Yet another reason that Fred couldn't get involved in investigating.

Having discovered what I could from Tweedledum and Tweedledee, I decided that I should really get on with finding Ryan before the boys on the beat did.

There are many places for a smart man or a rich man to hide in this city and never be found. There are even more places that a smart or rich man can go and though the police know where they are, they can never be touched.

Fortunately for me, Ryan wasn't a smart man or a rich man. There were a few places that I knew he would avoid, his place, my place, the library, all pubs, clubs and pool halls. It occurred to me that there were two possible places that he could be hiding that Turndune and Ellis would never think of looking for him in - one was the police station, the other was Fred's place.

There seems to be a generally held assumption that there are certain places that are just stupid to hide in and so are never checked. Though Fred's place wasn't a bad call to go and hide in, I had the sneaking suspicion that Ryan was in the police station and not just anywhere in the police station, but in Superintendent Gary Rogers' office.

Rogers was on a three month cruise with the latest bimbo that he seemed to have collected and as a result his office was not in use, not even post was being delivered there. It was at the top of the building and unless you were going to see the Superintendent, there wasn't any reason to go up to that level. The fire escape also connected to his office on the exterior of the building that meant Ryan could come and go as he pleased.

I waited until the change of shift between 2am and 3am and crept up the fire escape to Rogers' office. The door was locked, but it didn't take a moment for me to pick the lock and sure enough, there on the floor of the office, fast asleep, lay Ryan.

Park

All the people, so many people, they all go hand in hand, hand in hand through their parklife. Blur definitely had it right with their analysis of the park.

I used to spend lots of time in the park, especially after Louise and Arthur were murdered. It gave me somewhere quiet to think that was busy and public and I could be lost in a sea of faces without having to interact with anyone. It also made it harder for Fred to find me.

To begin with he was just another cop to me, another busy body, another person that hadn't done anything to help find out why my mother died and then had stood idly by whilst my sister and father had been taken from me. He seemed to have fixation on trying to save from, well the same fate. He'd already been successful in keeping me alive and sending Kevin Metis to prison, but he just couldn't seem to leave me alone.

I told Harry Lee that Fred was stalking me and Harry told me that if I really thought that then I should go and talk to Ryan, Fred's brother. I asked why and Harry had merely shrugged and said "you'll see". So I went to find Ryan and when I did I understood what Fred was doing. Ryan was younger than me, about ten years old and already falling in with the wrong crowd at school, trying to cope with the death of his parents three years before.

Fred hadn't been able to save his parents, couldn't save his brother from himself and in me he saw someone who could be saved and needed to be protected if he was ever going to believe that life had some good in it. That people could be saved from the bad guys and that justice had some hope of surviving.

It's an odd thing to think now, looking back that Fred was as much in need of our friendship as I was. Of course at no point have I ever admitted to needing Fred - or Harry for that matter. You might think that every friendship would occasionally need such an affirmation for the sake of everyone's sanity; but so far none of us have found that we show each other how much we care by being there. By fighting alongside one another, by always being there to make sure the others don't get kill and rescuing each other when we get kidnapped.

This seems to be verging on being all mushy and close to a chick flick moment...so Fred and Harry are both morons who I'm as likely to shoot as sit down to coffee with.

There I feel much better for that.

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New Year

New Year's Eve always seems to be the most disappointing time of the year. It is always built up by the media and by people to be this fantastic event - so much depending on it, how you spend the evening will be how you spend the rest of the year...

Rubbish!

In fact more than rubbish, completely and unutterably wrong! 

The only time anyone has been more wrong is Fred when he told me I needed to give up drinking and smoking. 

New Year's Eve has never been anything short of a drunken extravaganza designed to make bar and club owners rich and everyone else short of sleep the next day and a lot poorer to boot. 

Every year I hear people in cafes and bars and on the street and even in the off-licence talking about what they are doing for New Year's Eve and who they are doing it with - unsurprisingly some of these conversations involved a level of detail that no self-respecting eavesdropper would be comfortable hearing. Around the millennium it was almost unbearable to hear such hype that turned out to be nothing more than a doubly impressive let down.

In all honesty I try and ignore New Year, New Year's day often brings me a lot of profitable work so on the eve, getting to bed early and stuffing my ears with as much cotton wool as I can find has always been my common practice.

Now this has always proved to be somewhat difficult. There are many factors that always seem to conspire to make me stay up to see the clock change from 11:59 to 12:00 (as though I had never done that before). Most of these come in the form of, yes, you've guessed it - Frederick J. Barlow.

Fred has this horrible habit of thinking that I am lonely, that I am need of being kept cheerful on this most irritating of nights. Even worse than that is Harry Lee, yes Harry informs me continually that New Year's Eve is the perfect time to, and I quote "get Fred into bed and then let him down gently in the morning". What I don't understand is why Harry thinks I want to get Fred into bed, let alone let him down gently. I've never done anything gently in my whole life, I'm not about to start on New Year's Day.

That's the other thing that gets me about New Year, this idea that people's will power will somehow be greater at this point in the year than at any other time so they decide to create a resolution to do something... why the significance of the changing of the year? Why not when Spring becomes Summer? Or when Wednesday becomes Thursday (or Monday if you have managed to get yourself hospitalized and lost a few days in an unconscious state).

The only thing that has ever made New Year's Eve remotely fun was the time that Ryan turned up at 11pm telling me he knew where Kevin Metis was and that if I was quick I could shoot him in the knee caps and no one would ever know it was me...ah now that was a fun night - and no one ever did know I shot him in the shin and made him lose a toe the stiletto of the woman he was trying to seduce.

However it is now 10pm and I can hear footsteps on the stairs. It will be Fred coming to tell me that his girlfriend is no longer his and how he needs to drown his sorrows with me. If only I thought ahead every year I could go to somewhere remote and quite, like a monastery and not be disturbed, however I am not sure they would let me bring my guns or whiskey with me, so on balance that probably isn't the best idea.

Christmas

Christmas happens to be one of my most favourite times of year. Not because the run up to Christmas is very busy for me with people wanting people followed to find out where money is being spent and why spouses don't come home after office Christmas parties, but because there is a certain level of peace and harmony that seems to fall over the city.

Yes, homes get broken into on Christmas eve of the richer element and have their presents stolen, there are drunken brawls and drunken drivers galore and A&E is not where I want to step foot given the number of incredible Christmas related injuries that occur, but none of this seems to have any effect on dampening my spirit.

Even Fred and Harry are less annoying at this time of year. We don't fight or scream or have any form of exciting adventures, we sit down to a nice meal together with Ryan and spend two days in peace and harmony

That is until I wake up and find the frozen pipes in my apartment, no food in the fridge, Harry has gone out of town with his latest conquest, Ryan has wound up in prison and Fred... Fred is sat with his girlfriend and her family in one of the large townhouses on the other side of the city having the middle class Christmas he loves so much.

Christmas is my favourite time of year because I get to have the peace and quiet of my place all to my self, the phone doesn't ring, no one bursts in unexpectedly and tries to rescue me for dangers untold and most importantly, no one tries to drink from the bottles I have stored up for the day except for me.

Murder in the First - Day 1

There are few days when I get time to myself, to enjoy life, to drink whiskey, read a good book, listen to good music - all without being disturbed. Today was not one of those days, no matter how much it looked like it would be when I woke up.

I woke up to a very cold and crisp morning, the city was covered in a light frost that sparkled in the early morning sun and made me wish that I had better heating in my apartment. I didn't care how many people were inspired to poetry by the sight - I cared about the fact that I had no running water and was at risk of having my apartment flooded again by burst pipes.

So after making sure there wasn't frost on the inside of my windows, and hitting the boiler a few times to make sure it was working, I was able to get up to find that I didn't have time to get dressed before Laurel and Hardy showed up to ruin my day. When I say showed up, I mean both Fred and Harry were already sat in my office looking at their watches and ignoring the fact that they could see their breath.

Now I am sure there are women out there who would welcome the sight of seeing these two annoyances first thing in the morning, I am however not one of them. As I was still in my night attire, that is more revealing than I would have liked at this point in time, Fred's eyes were firmly fixed on my legs. Harry chose to look out of the window instead. After trading the standard pleasantries such as "Get out", "What the hell are you doing here?" and "Fred, stop staring at my legs." and the threats of violence and arrest for the relevant sides of the arguments, I discovered why I'd been paid a visit by the gruesome twosome so early in the morning. Ryan, Fred's younger brother that wasn't so good at staying on the right side of the law, was in trouble.

I have always liked Ryan, he's a lot of fun and fairly harmless, even if he doesn't have the best judgement when it comes to his life choices - though I am hardly one to talk.

Ryan has always been in some degree of trouble. Normally he would come to me directly for help with death threats, loan sharks or gambling debts, mainly to avoid lectures from Fred, but as it was Fred and Harry paying me a visit and not Ryan getting on the phone, it seemed that it might be something a little more serious than normal.

And when I say a little more serious than normal - it was a lot more serious and when I say it was a lot more serious, it's just about as serious as a situation could get.

There had been a murder committed overnight and it turned out that Ryan was the prime suspect. Fred and Harry were not investigating what happened, that honour belonged to Richard Ellis and Ross Turndune. However Fred couldn't believe that his brother was responsible, so as he couldn't interfere professionally he had come to me to help.

Ryan wasn't in custody yet, in fact no one knew where he was, he hadn't been since the murder had taken place and the victim hadn't even been identified yet either. There seemed to be an awful lot of work to do and not much that Fred and Harry could do to help without winding up being arrested.

I spent an hour listening to Fred protesting Ryan's innocence and Harry telling Fred I needed to go get dressed, before Harry managed to steer Fred out of my office and let me sit down and think about what I needed to do.

I needed to work out where Ryan was, work out who had been murdered, why they had been murdered, who had murdered them and if Ryan was really innocent - it wasn't a very long list of things to do really...but before I could do any of it, I really did need to get dressed.

Looking for the perfect Christmas present for Raven Siren fans? Look no further!  The Nicolette Mace books are now available in digital and paperback from Barnes and Noble.

Fred

So it has been a number of years since Fred first saved my life and yes, I still won't admit to his face that he did indeed save my life, but that is beside the point. I realized that I know very little about Fred's early life except for the little family anecdotes that Ryan, his younger brother, has told me.

Though these precious tales of misspent youth are entertaining (one does involve Fred being chased up a tree by two Chihuahuas, which is a particular favourite) they don't really tell me anything about the man he is.

Yes, he is annoying, more annoying than any other individual on the planet. And yes, he does seem to have a habit of turning up just in the nick of time to save me from horrible villains. And yes, he is incredibly kind and generous and all of these things that make men ideal, but that isn't really knowing him - it's knowing what he's letting me know about him.

So in an effort to learn more about Fred I decided that it was about time to break into his apartment and look through his belongings to see what I could find out. Okay, most people would think that just going out for coffee with him would be a much easier way of finding out what I wanted to know - but then I would have to sit opposite that smug face of his and listen to the glee in his voice about me spending time with him.

Clearly my only option was to break into his house.

And when I say break in, it's hardly breaking in when I have a spare key. And when I say have a spare key, I know where Fred keeps it (on top of the door frame is not really the most secure place to leave a key). So I was merely trespassing when it comes down to grounds for prosecution.

Trying to find out information that helps you get to know people better is surprisingly difficult. Fred doesn't have a whole lot of pictures of family decorating his place. There are lots of pictures of me, Harry and Ryan alongside Fred but none of his parents or wider family.

I'd heard rumours that he'd been married or close to being married, but I'd never seen Fred with any woman and he never spoke about them in front of me. I once asked Ryan about it and then Harry but both of them said the same thing "he's in love with you, why would he be married to anyone else?"

That was something I didn't really appreciate.

After an hour of snooping around his apartment I found a shoebox in the bottom of his wardrobe that didn't have any of his handcrafted Italian footwear in. It was crammed full of letters and pictures of Fred with different women in cuddly poses. The letters were written by him and to him and also were incredibly sweet and cute and all the words that most women would associate with their dream man...

I spent what seemed like five minutes, but was more like three hours, reading through all the letters and notes and discovering an awful lot I didn't know about Fred, including the fact that he was engaged to a girl called Jessica Beach about three years ago. The ring was even in the box complete with engraving but there wasn't any information as to why they weren't married.

It was just after I discovered this that Fred may have come home and found me sat on the floor of his bedroom, surrounded by ALL his love letters and looking at the ring...it wasn't the best situation to be honest.

It took about forty minutes for him to stop yelling at me, to snatch the ring out of my hands, stuff the letters back into the shoebox and throw it back in the wardrobe. When he'd done all that he did spend a further fifteen minutes ranting "how dare I invade his privacy" and telling me to "get out of his house and never come back" - it's amazing how bent out of shape he was over it all. I never thought he'd be so upset, if I had then I would have just emptied the shoebox and read it all back at my place and snuck all the papers back later.

Still, after all the shouting and ranting was done and I may have apologized, he didn't seem too mad about it, but it is hard to tell if people are angry with you when they are kissing you.

Author Note: If you enjoy the blog entries of Nicolette Mace: The Raven Siren then check out the new Siren Wiki, the kickstarter project. Books of the adventures of Siren are available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, iBooks, Sony, Kobo, Diesel and many more.