Code Runner (Amy Lane Mysteries Book 2) Read online

  When the crates were all in position, Eduardo looked at the case held in the enforcer’s hand. “The payment? In American dollars, as we agreed?”

  “As we agreed.”

  The hard man stepped forward and set the case down on the sand. Eduardo knelt and opened it, rifling through one stack to ensure it went right down to the bottom. The rat had not cheated him, at least.

  “I regret that our business arrangement is at an end.”

  A meaty hand seized his throat, lifting him clear from the sand and choking the life from him. The enforcer.

  “Stay back! Stay the fuck back!” The mad Irish one was shouting now, a pistol in his hand. “Will you get on with it?”

  Eduardo was propelled backwards, knuckles white as he continued to grip at the case handle. He saw bundles of dollars spilling out on the sand, tumbling along the beach, out of his reach.

  The enforcer threw him down and Eduardo’s head struck something hard, metallic fluid filling his mouth as he bit his tongue.

  A cacophony of voices filled his ears, lamentations in Spanish and Latin, before his face was plunged beneath the water.

  Chapter Four: Beachcomber

  It was bloody freezing for May.

  Last night’s storm had given way to blue skies, but there was no buffer against the chill off the Atlantic and Jason huddled down inside his leather jacket. His mam had hold of his arm and they strolled down Tenby’s Castle Beach together, pretending the wind wasn’t getting to her arthritis and his old brawling fractures.

  The cliffs formed a semicircle, cutting off the beach from the sands on either side at high tide. The sun had barely cleared the cliff top and they were the only ones out for an early morning stroll. The soft dawn light played over the waves and it was hard to imagine that a storm had raged last night. The caravan had nearly shaken itself apart and Jason had shivered under the awning for half the night before giving up and crawling back into the caravan at 1:00 a.m.

  Cerys, by virtue of flirting with the park owner’s son, was “helping” him to walk the dog. The huge black shaggy thing would’ve looked more at home in a horror film than on a beach in the early morning, but when he bounded up to them with a stick in his mouth, he looked more gormless than terrifying.

  Jason wrestled the stick out of his mouth and lobbed it along the beach. The wind caught it, and it skittered towards the waterline, landing among a pile of driftwood washed up on the shore.

  The wind whipped Cerys’s laughter along the beach, her flirtations with the dark-eyed boy obviously going well. The dog was forgotten by them, ambling across the beach to find his stick, and no doubt intending to return it to Jason. He could see the appeal of the mutt but his mother didn’t have time for a pet and he imagined hell would freeze over before Amy allowed an animal among her precious tech.

  But the dog didn’t come back. Instead, he looked to the sky and howled, a desperate sound reminiscent of a wolf and the moon. His master went to check on him, Cerys in tow, while Jason checked his phone for messages from his boss. No signal. Oh, Amy was going to be so pissed off that he was out of her reach. There weren’t many CCTV cameras to hack in Tenby.

  Cerys screamed.

  Jason dropped his mother’s arm and ran across the beach, his heavy boots slipping on the wet sand as he sped towards his sister. If that little runt had touched her—

  They were standing a foot from the driftwood, a stunned tableau. The boy had his hand on the dog’s collar, restraining him, as Cerys gripped his arm and trembled. Jason stumbled up to them.

  “What? What is it...?”

  There were broken crates, three or four of them, and beyond that lay a man floating facedown in the water. That bloated, mottled skin, decaying in the water...

  The boy suddenly jerked to life, as if Jason’s arrival had reminded him he also had legs to move him. “We need to help him. Call an ambulance—”

  Jason seized his arm, blocking him with his shoulder. “Don’t touch anything. We have to preserve the evidence.”

  He tore his arm out of Jason’s grasp. “Fuck the evidence! We need to save him!”

  “He’s dead!” The wind dropped and his words carried across the beach, bouncing off the cliffs to echo back at him dead-dead-dead.

  * * *

  Amy’s plans for the day involved an extended Lord of the Rings marathon (with commentary) and attempting to hack into the Royal Bank of Scotland. However, she wasn’t intending to start either activity before midday.

  So when her phone rang at barely nine o’clock on a Sunday, she was less than impressed. Except there were only three people who had this number. She thrust a hand out from under the covers and dragged the phone into the warmth.

  “Jason. It is early.”

  “I found a body.”

  Amy sat up, the covers sliding to her waist. “In Tenby?”

  “On the beach. The cops are on their way. You want—”

  “Send pictures. Now.”

  Jason’s laughter carried down the line and Amy clutched the phone to her, her chest full of warmth as she shifted out of bed and looked for her dressing gown.

  “Sending. Look, I had to walk up the beach to get signal, but I’m gonna head back and take a few more.”

  “Don’t let them catch you. I think that might be a crime.”

  “Since when has that bothered you?”

  She could hear his smile and her mouth echoed it as she woke up AEON.

  “That’s him—he was taking pictures of it!” The voice in the background sounded like a young man, almost hysterical.

  Jason swore under his breath. “Shit. I’ll call you back.”

  The line went dead. Amy opened up her email and was gratified to see that the pictures had arrived safely before they’d been so rudely interrupted. She flicked through them, her interest increasingly piqued with every shot. Broken crates. White powder. A hundred-dollar bill...

  Jason was a magnet for trouble. If it wasn’t broken bones, it was stumbling across rotting corpses. And his contact with the police should probably be kept to a minimum with his prison record. Also, he wouldn’t be any use to her in a police cell.

  * * *

  Jason decided Cerys’s new boy toy was a pain in the arse, as the barely grown child told the bemused bobby at his side about Jason’s indiscretion with the phone.

  “You were taking pictures, were you?” the police officer asked, in the ponderous drawl of West Wales, a Llanelli man born and bred.

  “Look, mate,” Jason said, trying his best to look nonthreatening, “I work as a consultant with the South Wales Police, yeah?”

  Technically, Amy was the consultant but a little white lie couldn’t hurt. He was her assistant, all contracted in black and white. It lent him an air of legitimacy, but also meant he damned Amy if he fucked up.

  The copper’s brow knitted together. “You’re a bit outside their territory here. It’s Dyfed-Powys force here in Pembrokeshire. And how’d you get over so quick?”

  Jason wanted to shake him and his annoying dirge of a voice. “I was already here. On holiday with my mam and sister.”

  The officer’s smile turned knowing. “So you’re not here in any professional capacity then?”

  He’d shot himself in the foot now and they both knew it. “I work for Amy Lane,” Jason tried. “She is a technology consultant for South Wales Police—”

  “So it’s your boss who’s the consultant, is it? And a body on a beach after a storm—that, I reckon, is about as far away from a technological case as cases get.”

  Jason realised he’d made the fatal error of equating a slow, lumbering accent with a slow, lumbering brain, but this bloke was twisting his words as well as any Cardiff detective or magistrate.

  “Will you just look at the evidence? This isn’t ju
st any body on the beach!”

  “The Marine Unit have it in hand,” the officer said dismissively. “I’m here to secure the evidence—and stop any more leaks.”

  He looked pointedly at Jason’s phone, which he hurriedly tried to cover with his big palm.

  “Mate, come on—”

  “Are you resisting arrest?”

  Oh, fuck, this holiday couldn’t get any worse. “No way are you arresting me for this.”

  The officer’s eyes narrowed. Jason saw any chance of escaping with a slap on the wrist evaporate instantly.

  “Oh, where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

  Chapter Five: Beside the Seaside

  Jason tried in vain to peer through the windscreen of the police car, but his view was obscured by the hundred or so tourists kept behind the police line at the edge of the beach and restricted by the handcuffs securing him to the overhead handle.

  Gwen, Cerys and the dog were hovering beside the car, anxiously waiting to learn his fate, but Jason was more interested in what was happening to the body on the beach. He hoped Amy had the good sense to send the pictures on to Bryn, because it seemed like the local plods couldn’t find their arses with both hands.

  “So, this is our voyeur, is it?”

  Jason started, head whipping round to see a man leaning through the opposite door. He reminded him instantly of Bryn, that same middle-aged dress sense with salt-and-pepper hair. His cheeks were ruddy with the wind and probably a bit too much weekend whiskey, his face dominated by a bulbous nose that was as red as Rudolph’s. And everything about him screamed cop.

  “Afternoon, Detective.” Jason shook his wrist so that the handcuff jangled. “I’d shake your hand, but...”

  “Bryn said you were a comedian.” The man tossed Jason a little silver key. “I hear you work with Little Miss Hacker.”

  Jason made quick work of the lock and returned the cuffs and key to the policeman. “I’m her assistant, yeah.”

  “Taking photos of crime scene and disseminating via a cellular network...” The man sucked air through his bottom teeth, making an odd slurping whistle. “Could be prosecuted under the Communications Act, you know.”

  Jason decided to take a chance. “And if I hadn’t done that, you wouldn’t even know this crime scene existed until, what? Tomorrow? Tuesday morning? And by then—”

  “—the local bobbies would’ve destroyed everything worth having.” The man grinned, the laughter lines around his mouth and eyes deepening. “All right, come and take your pictures. But don’t send them anywhere—never know who’s watching.”

  The man moved away and Jason scrambled across the car after him.

  “Camera, Cerys!”

  She hesitated only a moment before taking it out of her pocket and handing it over. “Working weekend, eh?”

  Jason shrugged helplessly, as if to say “what can you do?”, before legging it down the beach after the detective.

  “Did you touch anything before the police turned up?” The detective strode across the sand as if he were gliding and Jason struggled to keep up.

  “Nothing. The dog got to it first, but his pawprints don’t go anywhere near the body.”

  The detective looked at him appraisingly. “Fancy yourself a bit of an amateur sleuth, don’t you?”

  Jason concentrated on looking forward, trying to stop the embarrassed flush breaking onto his cheeks. “Just doing my job.”

  “Now you let me do mine.” He stopped at the hastily erected tent that now covered the crime scene, a double barrier of sandbags holding back the tide. “You know the procedure?”

  “Of course,” Jason said, cockily. He had been dressed as a Ghostbuster before when entering a crime scene, though he didn’t think he’d ever get used to what he saw inside.

  Inside the first flap of the tent stood a stern woman with a clipboard. Jason figured they must come with a crime scene as standard.

  “Detective Inspector Sebastian Rawlings—Welsh Division of the Organised Crime Command at the National Crime Agency. And this is my assistant, Jason Carr.”

  The woman entered their names before handing them their overalls, caps, masks and booties.

  “That’s an impressive title,” Jason said, trying his best not to be too impressed by it. A cop was still a cop, National Crime Agency or no. He’d noticed how Sebastian’s Welsh accent faded as he adopted his official mantle. It left a bad taste in Jason’s mouth, a local boy ashamed of his roots.

  Sebastian grinned. “It’s new. Bit of a mouthful, to tell you the truth. But it puts the fear of God into gang boys.”

  Determined that it wouldn’t put the fear of God into him, Jason kept his mouth shut as they suited up. He kicked the sand off his shoes against the tent pole before hauling the booties over them, earning a disapproving look from the clipboard woman.

  Somehow, Sebastian retained his gravitas even under all that get-up and Jason felt clumsy and awkward beside him. They passed through the second flap, Sebastian leading the way, into the modest ten-foot-square tent.

  The only thing that had been moved was the body, lying face up on a white tarpaulin suspended like a hammock above the sand. A steady stream of seawater was draining from the body, running off the end into a plastic bucket, with two sealed and labelled buckets beside it. The bloated head and hands were surrounded in transparent bags secured with cable ties, still surrounded by seawater like grotesque mutant fish in a bowl. Jason fought to keep his breakfast down.

  Sebastian’s first target was the dead man and the investigator standing over him. “What felled him?”

  The man turned around—and instantly fixed on Jason. “Oh, what are you doing here? Are you following me now, hmm?”

  “Nice to see you too, Rob.”

  Rob Pritchard, forensic examiner and Amy’s unofficial arch nemesis, looked like Jason’s appearance had just turned his Sunday from bad to total nightmare. His greying hair was flecked with salt spray and the bags under his eyes gave the impression that he’d been snatched from a much-needed lie-in. “Are you taking pictures for that woman? I thought I would be safe from you sixty miles along the coast, but obviously not.” He turned his ire on Sebastian. “I thought better of you, Rawlings.”

  “You’re a long way from home, Pritchard,” Sebastian said, ignoring the barb. “Drew the short straw?”

  “I hate water,” Rob said vehemently. “Seven homicides in the last six months and this is the third waterlogged body I’ve copped. At least this one is fresh.”

  “What can you tell us?” Sebastian, at least, was keen to get on with this.

  Pritchard regarded the body and clasped his hands in front of him like a pastor giving a eulogy. “White male, appears Mediterranean in origin. I’d place him at mid-thirties, but if the state of his teeth is anything to go by, he hasn’t had access to good health care. Dressed as you find him.”

  Jason took in the plastic trousers and hooded jacket, wool visible beneath the collar. “Fisherman?”

  “Probably came off a boat, yes. Though what anyone was doing out on a boat last night, I couldn’t possibly say.”

  “I think I could.” A woman’s voice carried across the tent and another white-clad figure made her way over to them. The only visible part of her was her startling brown eyes, outlined in black with eyelashes that went on forever.

  “Rawlings, this is Indira Bharani—my protégée.” Rob spoke with true pride and, if they hadn’t been garbed for work, he would probably have patted her on the back.

  Indira acknowledged his introduction with a nod. “The crates test positive for cocaine. I think this was a drop-off gone wrong.”

  “It went right for someone,” Jason muttered. When everyone turned to look at him, he gestured to the crates, the body. “The coke’s gone, the money’s gone—somebody did p
retty well out of it.”

  Sebastian looked at him with a little too much scrutiny. “You’re well-informed for an assistant.”

  Jason tried to act casual. “I watch a lot of movies.”

  “Not quite all the money.” Indira held up a couple of one-hundred-dollar bills in separate evidence bags. “They were stuck on the broken crates. We’ve got a couple of uniforms combing the beach looking for others—the wind was getting up to forty knots last night. We were looking at a Beaufort force 8, so it’s amazing the body stayed so close to shore.”

  “Do you sail, Miss Bharani?” Sebastian looked amused at the idea.

  Indira arched an eyebrow. “My brother and I sail a cat. He moved her inland on Friday night, but today is set fair.”

  It was difficult to tell with his naturally red cheeks, but Jason was sure Sebastian was embarrassed. “Can we estimate a time of death?” he said gruffly. “Call the Coastguard, set a window for their logs?”

  Rob grimaced. “Couldn’t say. Body temp is useless, and the cold water likely forced the body into early rigor.”

  “Are we even certain he’s related to these boxes?” Sebastian asked.

  “I’d say I’m ninety per cent positive.” Rob gestured at the victim’s shoes, which were caked in heavy sand. “His head may have been in the water, but his shoes remained on the beach. He didn’t wash in from the ocean. Also, COD was definitely asphyxia—petechiae confirm that—but I’ll need to get him back to the mortuary to confirm he drowned.”

  Sebastian looked at him incredulously. “Pritchard, the man was found facedown in the water and suffocated. What more do you want?”

  Rob held up a triumphant finger. “An explanation for these bruises, perhaps?”

  He carefully smoothed out the edge of the water-filled bag to reveal prominent bruising across the man’s neck, a single smear on the right side and dense block on the right. Rob positioned his right hand over the markings, which nearly covered them exactly.