Murder in Containment: A Doyle and Acton Mystery Read online

  MURDER IN

  CONTAINMENT

  A Doyle and Acton Mystery

  Anne Cleeland

  Copyright © 2016 Anne Cleeland

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 0692774424

  ISBN 13: 9780692774427

  For Justice Moore, who is truly honorable; and for all others like her.

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  1

  “Stand by.”

  Detective Sergeant Kathleen Doyle listened to Williams’s voice in her earpiece, and held her breath; the suspect was approaching. It was cold, and as she crouched behind the unmarked police vehicle, she crossed her arms and huddled into the side of the car, her ears on the stretch. The nervous anticipation was not helping the uncertain state of her stomach.

  “Stand by. DCI Drake at the ready.”

  Thankfully, there’d been two days in a row without rain, so it wasn’t overly damp. Chief Inspector Acton hadn’t wanted her anywhere near this particular trap and seizure, but she’d pitched a hormonally-induced fit, and he’d finally agreed to put her on the perimeter, as long as she swore on all the holy relics that she’d not stir a step. Over-protective knocker, she thought crossly; there was little that could go wrong with this particular suspect, and she’d certainly earned the right to be present when he was arrested. She watched her breath form a cloud on the vehicle, and then leaned in to press the side of her face against the cold surface, which seemed to relieve her nausea.

  With some regret, she pulled away, because she was worried that the perspiration on her skin would make her stick to the car. Ignominious, is what it would be, to have to ask the arresting officers to peel her off the vehicle. She mouthed the word, “ignominious,” and watched another cloud appear on the cold surface. Doyle was attempting to improve her vocabulary again, and that was a ten-pound word, if she did say so herself.

  “Suspect approaches; stand by.”

  Letting out a careful breath, Doyle gathered her feet beneath her, slowly, so as not to allow her boots to scrape the pavement. With any luck, she wouldn’t get sick alongside the curb and ruin everything. Mind over matter, she assured herself; best not to think about it.

  Straining to listen in the silence, she waited to hear the footsteps that should be approaching on the street. Acton’s team was stationed at their posts, well-hidden so as not to give the suspect any hint that he was enjoying his last few moments of freedom. The area around the park was as deserted as could be anticipated at this time of year, at this time of night, and in this area of London.

  “DCI Drake to go.”

  Acton would be at the operational command post behind an enclosure wall, along with DI Williams, who was relaying his orders, and DCI Drake, who was to be used as the bait for this particular trap. Moving carefully to peer over the hood of her vehicle, Doyle saw Drake step forward and loiter at the edge of the sidewalk. He wore an overcoat that concealed a bullet-proof Kevlar vest, and no one observing him would imagine he was deliberately exposing himself to a killer; his posture was relaxed, his attitude slightly impatient. Drake had courage—you had to give him that; this killer’s m.o. was a single shot to the back of the head, which was impossible to completely protect against. They were counting on the fact that the suspect didn’t know that he’d been twigged, and therefore wouldn’t shoot immediately, but would walk along with Drake, and then attempt to shoot him unawares. Hopefully before he could accomplish this aim, he would be taken down and arrested—easy to imagine the fuss Professional Standards would make, if this operation resulted in Drake’s getting himself murdered.

  “Stand by. On my signal.”

  Her gaze fixed on Drake, Doyle flexed her fingers in her gloves, and took a deep, careful breath. She was pregnant, and the only reason Acton, her husband, allowed her to be present was because she’d solved this thorny case, and therefore deserved to be. He also knew she wanted to speak to the killer because they were friends of sorts; as a compromise, he’d agreed that she could approach, once the cuffs were on.

  The suspect was not your usual villain. Kevin Maguire was a newspaper reporter who was dying of cancer and—faced with his own mortality—had developed a fit of remorse with respect to murderers he’d unwittingly aided, in his career as a reporter. When Doyle realized that a serial killer was serving out vigilante justice, she’d painstakingly solved the case, although there hadn’t been enough evidence to prosecute Maguire—that whole presumption-of-innocence thing was often a sticky wicket.

  Even without evidence, she was certain that he was the killer, and so she’d confronted him to request that he stop killing people. He’d politely declined, explaining that he’d one more murder to do, and despite her best efforts, she could not talk him ʼround. However, she’d left their meeting with the impression that the last victim was someone she knew, and so she’d put together a search criteria, trying to tie people she knew with Maguire’s newspaper articles from the past. Even though it was like trying to find the proverbial needle in the haystack, as a result of her research, she concluded that Chief Inspector Drake might be a target, and so he was duly warned. When Maguire did indeed call to meet with Drake, this trap and seizure was quickly set up.

  There—Doyle could hear approaching footsteps, coming from across the way, and she watched as the suspect came into view. Drake stood calmly by, his hands in his coat pockets. “Maguire?” the DCI asked in a genial tone. “Is that you?”

  Small wonder he doesn’t recognize him, thought Doyle. Maguire—formerly stout and rumpled in the best reporter tradition—was now positively cadaverous.

  “Chief Inspector,” the suspect replied in a thready voice. “Thank you so much for meeting with me; I hope it is not too inconvenient.”

  They turned to walk away from her, and Doyle could no longer make out the words. She knew the reporter had lured Drake to this deserted place by promising information that had to be delivered away from potential eavesdroppers—just the kind of thing most appealing to a detective, and most likely to get him out late, on a cold night. Any moment now; she held her breath, and waited.

  “Go, go, go,” said the voice in her ear. Drake shouted, and Doyle sprang up like a hound to the horn, unable to control her reaction, and banging her knee in her haste. She watched Dra
ke easily overpower the weakened Maguire, as three other PCs closed in to bring the suspect to the ground.

  “Suspect in custody. Stand down.”

  Since she’d promised Acton she would stay back until Maguire was cuffed, Doyle waited until Williams began reading the caution before approaching the group on the park’s pathway. Acton was giving direction to the PCs and the evidence crew, whilst Drake calmly brushed the leaves off his overcoat, as though baiting a killer was nothing out of the ordinary.

  The suspect also stood rather calmly— considering that his situation was now very bleak indeed—and fixed his hollow gaze on Doyle, as she came forward.

  “Ah,” he said, with a faint smile. “Cherchez la femme.”

  Doyle wasn’t certain was this meant, but soberly assessed him. “I wish you’d put an end to it, my friend. Now you’ll be numberin’ your days in prison, and with your own lurid story in the press.”

  “You warned me,” the man agreed in a mild tone. “I should have listened.”

  This last remark, interestingly enough, was not true. Doyle had a gift for reading people—inherited, perhaps, from some distant Irish ancestor—and she could usually recognize when lies were being told. With a slight frown, she watched as the officers heeded Acton’s signal to escort the suspect to the police vehicle. So—it appeared that Maguire had indeed listened to her, when she’d tried to warn him off, but for some reason he’d gone ahead and tried to murder Drake anyway.

  As the PCs loaded Maguire into the back of the unmarked, Acton approached to pull her coat more firmly around her. “Williams will take him in for booking, so that I may take you home.”

  “I’m not feelin’ so well,” Doyle admitted, wishing she could go back and press her face against the cold car, again.

  “I know.”

  Of course he did. She’d been minding her own business, working homicides with the famed Chief Inspector Acton, when he’d unexpectedly proposed marriage—unexpectedly being a nice way to say that she’d been completely blindsided. She’d known that he was brilliant and reclusive; what she hadn’t known was that he suffered from an obsessive condition that featured her as its object. Because she wasn’t sure how to handle such a situation, she’d decided that the better part of valor was to marry the man, and then work out what to do later. She’d no regrets, despite the occasional crisis—well, more than occasional, truth to tell, but hopefully tapering off. This one, for instance, had ended very satisfactorily, even though there was still a niggling loose end.

  “Well done,” said her husband quietly. “It was a good catch; you probably saved Drake’s life.”

  “A life worth savin’, knock wood.”

  This was the niggling loose end; Maguire’s pattern had been to kill a suspect from an earlier cold case who’d been acquitted, based on Maguire’s sympathetic newspaper coverage—but whom later events had shown was guilty, all along. For each of these victims, there was always a second, more recent murder. Doyle had found an old Maguire article in the archives about Drake, who’d been a Detective Sergeant at the time a civilian had been accidently killed. A pawn broker had reported a burglary, but apparently mistook Drake for the suspect. In the ensuing altercation, Drake had wrestled the man’s weapon away, but in the process had accidentally shot and killed the pawn broker. The security video—grainy analog at the time—did not seem to show any wrongdoing by the detective, only a tragic case of mistaken identity. For once, Maguire’s article had been on the side of the police, so that instead of showcasing the bereft widow, and reminding the public of other instances of police misconduct, he’d argued that an officer shouldn’t be second-guessed, when confronted with such a dangerous situation.

  However, since Maguire had indeed contacted Drake all these years later—and had planned to kill him—it raised an uncomfortable truth; it meant Maguire believed that Drake’s shooting of the pawn broker in the old case was, in fact, intentional. Despite discreet inquiries, Doyle could not discover why this would be; Drake did not have a reputation for being quick to fire, and there’d been no other reports of excessive force in his personnel file. The handsome DCI had a reputation as a ladies’ man, but other than that, he’d been an exemplary detective, with an eye to scaling the CID hierarchy.

  It all made little sense, and Doyle was eager to ask some pointed questions of Maguire, now that the reporter was in custody. Acton seemed disinclined to pursue it—no doubt because Drake was a fellow DCI—but it didn’t fit Maguire’s profile to try to murder someone who was not, in fact, a killer. It would be a bit tricky, because Maguire’s official interrogation would be recorded, but Doyle hoped she could arrange for a private moment to ask him why he thought Drake got away with murder, in that long-ago case.

  A forensic photographer with the Scene of Crime Officers was asked to take photographs of Maguire’s weapon as it was tagged-and-bagged, and Doyle noted that the photographer wasn’t the blonde woman who usually worked on Acton’s cases. Teasing, she asked him, “Where’s your SOCO, Michael? Have you thrown her over, poor thing?” Acton was handsome and titled, which meant he had many admirers—not that he paid any attention. One of these was the female photographer who was only too happy to serve on any case under his supervision.

  He didn’t deem the question worthy of a reply, and instead took her elbow. “Let’s take you home.”

  Doyle teetered on the edge of asking if she could ride in the unmarked police vehicle with Maguire, but decided she’d best not press her luck with Acton, and besides, she didn’t want to be sick in front of everyone, and the odds were beginning to favor such a humiliating occurrence. Tomorrow she’d find an opportunity to meet with the suspect, once he’d had a few hours to stare at the bleak cell walls, contemplating his fate.

  Their footsteps echoing in the now-quiet night, Doyle accompanied Acton over to the Range Rover. “Will you take the interrogation?” The Maguire case was a delicate situation, and Acton was usually called upon when the Met was probing into matters delicate. Scotland Yard would not be covered in glory by the revelation that murderers from prior cases had been allowed to go free, and even though it had been largely the press’s fault, the press was unlikely to publicize this unhappy fact.

  Acton was a favorite with the public, who considered him above reproach, in part because he held a title. For reasons that were unclear, the public loved its aristocracy. The illustrious chief inspector was often enlisted to handle any public relations problems that cropped up—indeed, he was already hip-deep in some mysterious case involving the Home Office, that was being kept very quiet. There was the Wexton Prison corruption case, too—quite the plateful, and the last needful thing was for the public to read about yet another situation where the justice system did not seem to be so very just, after all.

  “We may need to call in someone from another jurisdiction.”

  Doyle nodded. Since the crime involved one of their own, it was probably more appropriate that the matter be handed over to someone not on staff at the Met, so as to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Unfortunately, this case had all the makings of a public relations nightmare: a serial killer, past murderers let go, and a cloud of suspicion hanging over a DCI. The case against Maguire was straightforward, of course—save for the niggling question about his motive for Drake’s murder. Perhaps Maguire would agree to negotiate a plea, so that the CID could keep the more lurid details under wraps, and away from the papers.

  After seeing her settled in the car, Acton pulled out into the street, adjusting the heater as he drove. “Are you hungry? Should we pick up a fruit pie, on the way?”

  “No,” Doyle replied shortly, as she didn’t even want to think about eating. “And can you turn off the heat? I’ll be needin’ some cold air on my face, or I won’t be answerable for the consequences.”

  He glanced over at her, worried. “Shall I roll the windows down?”

  “Faith, I don’t know, Michael.” She immediately regretted her tone, and sighed in apology, as she leaned h
er head back on the leather headrest. “I’m sorry. I’m that sick of bein’ sick.”

  “Hang on; we’ll be home in short order.”

  Thankfully, the streets were quiet, and there wasn’t much traffic, as he navigated his way toward their flat in Kensington. His mobile pinged, and after noting the caller’s ID, he took the call. “Acton.” He listened, then made an impatient sound. “Send him to the morgue, then. I’ll need a full report.”

  After ringing off, he announced quietly, “Maguire’s dead. Williams said he died in the car on the way to booking—some sort of seizure.”

  “Mother a’ mercy.” Doyle stared at him for a moment. “Have them check his hands and fingers for trace—he wasn’t wearin’ gloves, and he may have taken somethin’.”

  “Right,” nodded Acton, as he rang the call-back to Williams.

  Doyle rolled down her window, and took some deep breaths, trying to steady her stomach. Maguire hadn’t much longer to live, and may have had something on hand, just in case suicide seemed the best option. She knew exactly how he felt, as she reached for one of the plastic bags she kept in the dashboard compartment for just this sort of occasion, and retched miserably into it—she couldn’t even do a decent job of retching, being as she hadn’t eaten much this day.

  Her husband stroked her back in sympathy. “Not much more of this, I think; the nausea should be tapering off, soon.” Acton had bought a medical treatise about pregnancy, and regularly studied its contents, comparing her progress.

  “There’ll be nothin’ left of me soon.”

  “On the contrary; I would say there’s definitely more of you, lately.”

  “Not the nicest thing to say, Michael.” She was cross and tired.

  “Nonsense. You are utterly beautiful.”

  With a mighty effort, she mustered up a smile, and leaned back to close her eyes. “I’m sorry I’m such a crackin’ trial.”

  Her husband reached over and gently placed his palm on the slight bump of her abdomen. “Mary, you must stop plaguing your poor mother.” Acton had decided the baby was a girl, and he’d further decided to name her after Doyle’s late mother.