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Detective John Ridley leaned over the desk and sighed at the monitor. ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.
‘Positive,’ the other man answered. ‘We’ve been through all the footage, and pieced the events together.’ He clicked the mouse. ‘There’s no doubt.’
Another sigh.
‘What made her do it, do you think?’ More mouse clicking. ‘Look at this, John. This is from earlier in the day, when Marcia Rose fell down the stairs.’ He let the footage run, and leaned back in his chair so the detective could see.
John blinked at it. ‘It’s her again, right? The girl.’
Cutter, the tech expert, shook his head. ‘Nope. Not her this time. No way it could be her. She’s caught on a different camera – more than one – with the same timestamp as this. It’s impossible it could be her.’ He pointed towards the screen. ‘See how indistinct this one is?’
‘What are you saying? This one’s a ghost?’ He blinked at the screen. ‘Impossible.’
‘You don’t believe in ghosts?’
‘Do you?’
Cutter shrugged. ‘I’ve seen some weird stuff, and I gotta say, a lot of the weirdest is on the films from this case. You can say the girl did it – and it pretty much looks like she did...’
‘Pretty much? You said you were positive.’
‘Well, I’m positive it’s her wearing the costume when the young guy – what’s his name? Martin – goes out the window, though I gotta say, she didn’t touch him.’ He straightened in his chair and yawned. ‘I’m also positive it’s her in the bird suit when the camera man chokes on a bunch of feathers.’ He turned and looked at John. ‘But she never touched him. She was perched on the bannister. Fuck knows how, she must have extraordinary balance.’
John ran a hand through his hair and shook his head in disbelief. ‘You said it was definitely her.’
‘It’s definitely her dressed up as this sparrow girl, or whatever.’
‘That’s not what I meant!’
‘We don’t have any footage of her touching anyone.’
‘She’s not the killer?’
‘Well, obviously we don’t have any film of the deaths of the other two. Darryl’s and the other guy’s, the one with the missing eyes.’
‘Who looks a lot like he was pecked to death.’
‘Yeah, but without the bird suit, we can’t know that.’
He was pacing back and forth now, both hands messing up his hair. ‘And we don’t have the bird suit, and we don’t have the other girl.’
‘We have less than that,’ Cutter said. ‘We have a guy who was apparently killed by a whole lot of sparrows.’
‘The one who choked on a lot of feathers.’ This case was looking more and more like a nightmare. At first Ridley had thought he’d have it solved in three seconds flat. Half of it was on bloody film, for Christ’s sakes. But the more they examined the footage, and the bodies, the weirder the whole thing got. And now he didn’t even have a real suspect to pin it all on.
‘We’re not going to be able to make it stick to her?’ he said, talking about the girl Deirdre.
Cutter shrugged. ‘We’ll keep going over the footage,’ he said. ‘But we clearly see two of the deaths on the film, and in both she’s in the frame, but not in the frame, if you get my drift.’
Fuck. He’d hoped for a snappy closure for this one. Bad enough that the victims were members of a ghost hunting group, they were all over the Internet, their ‘experiment’ causing a stir already. He didn’t want to know what sort of public exposure the crime was going to get. It was going to be a clusterfuck of major proportions. And if any of this film was ever leaked...
‘I want this footage locked down,’ he said. ‘Absolutely none of it is to reach the public, you hear?’
Cutter nodded.
‘Good. Now go back through it all again. And I’m going to sit here while you do, and you’re going to show me it all, every last second of it from every bloody one of their cameras.’
‘You’re gonna want popcorn,’ Cutter said. ‘It’s a freaking horror movie.’
‘Great,’ John said. ‘Box office hit, that’s all we need.’