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If Kristin had been given a choice, she probably wouldn't have picked the old cement works up on Murphy's Rise as the ideal place in Brokenwood to spend a cold, dreary August morning. Apparently this wasn't a universal opinion, however, or else they wouldn't have been called out there this early to look at a body.
"Group of kids found him," Chalmers said, detaching himself from the small cluster of uniformed officers as she and Mike arrived to join him at the scene. "They claim to have been doing a spot of urbex."
"Urbex?" Mike said blankly.
"Urban exploration. Climbing around old abandoned buildings to take photographs."
"Yeah, there's... not really a lot of urban in Brokenwood to explore," Kristin said, looking around. Even the industrial eyesore of the old cement works was surrounded by open fields on three sides. On the fourth it backed up against a tangle of wild vegetation, vividly green after yesterday's on-and-off rain. From up here, the rise and fall of the land hid the houses of the town, creating the illusion that there was nothing but farm fields and trees between them and the distant sea.
Chalmers smiled wryly. "Yeah, well, I'm pretty sure if you shook these three down a lot of cans of spray paint would fall out."
She turned to look at the huddled trio of teenagers, the picture of gormless youth with their oversize hoodies and track pants and ever-present phones. Out for a bit of antisocial behaviour and illicit underage everything? Yeah, she wouldn't be surprised. Murder? Nothing was impossible, but it wouldn't have been her first assumption.
Especially given the victim wasn't one of their teenage peers, but a doughy middle-aged man in a business suit. He'd been found inside one of the buildings, where a number of raised metal catwalks, rusted pieces of machinery, and even a few holes in the corrugated iron roof offered all kinds of options for high places to take a fall from. Everything said accidental, except for the inherent fishiness of his being here in the first place.
"I don't know, this guy strikes me as a little bit old for a tagger," Kristin said, looking around at the unimpressive scrawls decorating the machinery. None of them looked fresh enough to suggest the teens who'd called it in had been at work before they'd stumbled over the body.
"Well, that's just ageist," Chalmers said.
"Do we have a name?" Mike asked.
Chalmers checked his notebook. "Derek Healey, fifty-nine. Unmarried, no children. Used to run Healey's Insurance until he sold up to a firm from the city that closed the Brokenwood branch about a year ago."
Insurance. Not the first profession that sprang to mind as a hotbed of backstabbing and crimes of passion, though Brokenwood had surprised her before.
Mike crouched next to the body. "Well, Derek, you picked a strange place for a risk assessment," he said. "What were you doing here?"
If he got any answers from the late Mr Healey, he didn't share them with the rest of the class. Of course, that was about the time that Gina arrived on the scene, suited up ready to get to work.
"Mike. I am here for your body," she said.
"We'll leave you two alone," Kristin said, and she and Chalmers smiled their way out as Mike gave them a reproving look.
Outside, she was hailed by Aitkin from the uniform branch. "Sims!"
It turned out they'd stopped a young couple from approaching the scene. According to what they'd told the officer who'd detained them, they'd been looking for some private alone time.
"Romantic," Chalmers said.
"It's no Ngakinowai Falls, huh?" she said to him.
"I said I knew of its reputation," he said. "I didn't say that I used to go there myself."
"Too uncool?" Kristin said in sympathetic tones.
At least she could live safe in the assurance that her own high school makeout spots were far away from Brokenwood, as was anyone who would be able to repeat embarrassing stories from her youth. Well, unless her siblings visited.
The couple that they'd picked up weren't exactly high schoolers, but they weren't that much older, either. She judged them both to be in their early twenties. He was Kyle Warren, a skinny, fidgety type with bleached blond hair that didn't quite suit him; she was Gabrielle Sutcliffe, a sturdy redhead in denim with a thing for pāua shell jewellery. They both seemed pretty nervous to be interviewed, but Kristin was willing to concede that this was potentially a reasonable reaction to turning up to find your preferred spot for sneaking a little private one-on-one time had been cordoned off as a crime scene.
Still... "The cement plant?" she had to ask.
"It's kind of cool," Gabrielle said with a shrug, twirling her whale tail pendant around her fingers. "All the, like, dials and boilers and stuff."
"She loves big machinery," Kyle said.
His girlfriend nodded emphatically. "It's kind of steampunk. Well, steam, at least."
"Yeah."
Wow. Well, it took all sorts to make a world - and for some godforsaken reason all of them seemed to live in Brokenwood.
"So you come here for privacy?" Chalmers said, taking up the questioning.
"Yeah." Kyle nodded again.
"Despite all the graffiti artists coming and going?"
The two of them exchanged a look. "Well, we usually come here at night," Gabrielle said. "But-"
"But last night there was something going down," Kyle said. "There were people shining torches around, and some guy shouting."
"What was he shouting, Kyle?" Chalmers pressed.
He shook his head and shrugged blankly. "I don't know. Just, like, 'Get out of here,' or something."
"But not at us," his girlfriend put in hastily.
"No, not at us. He didn't know we were there. We weren't there. We left. We thought there might be, like, a gang war going on over territory or something."
Gabrielle gave him an unimpressed look. "No, we didn't, Kyle," she said, in the tones of one who'd repeated her point more than once before. "We thought they might have hired site security," she said to the two of them.
"Could've been a gang war," Kyle insisted, a bit sullenly.
Kristin opted not to engage with that theory. "What time was this?" she asked instead.
The two of them looked at each other. "Eleven?" Gabrielle hazarded.
"Twelve?" Kyle suggested.
"Or... one?"
"Ish," he said.
Fantastic. Interviewing witnesses was always so helpful.
*
"So, we have a possible timeframe." Chalmers drew out a timeline numbered from eleven PM to one AM on the station whiteboard, then added the 'ish' at the end. So far they had photos of the victim and the two lovebirds pulled from their social media, the names of the three teens, and the words 'torches?' and "Get out of here". It wasn't an altogether inspiring collection.
"What did Gina say?" Kristin asked Mike.
"That you can't rush results," he said dryly.
"And then what did she say when you asked her to rush the results?" Chalmers asked.
"As a special favour. To you," Kristin put in.
Mike shot her a look that aimed for reproachful but still landed at faintly amused. "Looks like the injury to the back of the head from the fall is what killed him, but, there was also some bruising to his right temple."
"Could have hit his head on something on his way down," Chalmers said, playing devil's advocate. "Plenty of old machinery around the place."
"Or somebody helped him on his way," Kristin said. She knew which option her money was on.
"Which still doesn't explain why he would have gone out to the old cement works in the first place," he said.
"Or who with." Mike spun his car keys around his finger. "Next of kin is a brother in Riverstone. I'm going to go and see if he can shed any light as to what Derek was up to in the last weeks of his life. Sims - look into Healey Insurance. See if there were any irregularities in his financial dealings."
Company research. Fun. No one had ever warned her that detective work involved so much of this type of thing.
"I'll go back to the scene, see if Specialist Search has turned anything up," Chalmers volunteered, possibly to avoid getting roped in to assist. Not that she was sure doing the grunt work of trying to catalogue such a sprawling mess of a crime scene would be any less of a headache.
Assuming they were not, in fact, looking at an outbreak of gang warfare between the middle-aged insurance brokers of Brokenwood, she had the feeling this was going to be a tedious one.
*
SSG were still diligently combing through the cement works and surrounds for anything that might be evidence when Chalmers arrived back at the scene. So far all they'd turned up were discarded bottles, cigarette butts, and, yes, cans of spray paint that could well have all been there for years.
Yesterday's rain had hurt more than it helped; the cracked concrete and tarseal offered no chance of footprints, and inside the building a trench at the bottom of one of the staircases was filled at least knee-deep with stagnant green water. He gladly left the task of dredging that to the experts, and headed up the stairs instead, clanging out along a high metal catwalk to look down on all the old machinery that had been left to rust in place. Mixers, boilers, long-dead junction boxes... okay, yeah, that was about where his ability to identify what he was looking at ended.
He turned to look around instead. There was a possible route from here to climb out along one of the building's steel support beams. He wouldn't have bothered to try, except that it passed by one of the holes in the building's outer shell where a corrugated panel was missing. Maybe either Healey or his attacker had been watching through there to see if anyone else approached the building.
Chalmers edged his way out along the steel beam. Peering out through the hole in the wall, he found he was able to look down on the thicket of shrubs and low trees behind the building. It was overgrown, but not so thickly so that you wouldn't have been able to see someone waving a torch around out there, even in the dark and rain.
Or, say, spot two people, not in police colours, lurking underneath the trees down there in broad daylight.
"Hey!" he called down to them. There was a flurry of frantic motion as the two of them looked around for the source of the voice, and then took off running through the trees.
On reflection, probably should have expected that.
"Bugger," he said, and turned to hurry back across the beam and down the stairs.
By the time he'd made it out of the building and around the corner, he'd lost sight of them, but he could hear one of them crashing through the underbrush. He gave chase, getting whipped in the face by wet branches for his trouble. "You're not making any friends by running!" he shouted. Definitely not with him. Why did they always have to run? "Stop! Brokenwood CIB!"
Not expecting this command to actually achieve anything, he almost ran straight into the back of the woman he was chasing when she stopped dead in front of him and threw her hands up. As she turned around to face him with a nervous cringe, he saw that he'd just busted a middle-aged woman in a chunky cardigan and big earrings, clutching a small baggie of weed.
Okay, so maybe this didn't look entirely promising as far as leads went.
*
Their suspect, though it felt like a stretch to call her that, was one Cheryl Fenwick of 67 Tyrconnell Place. Back at the station, she sniffed and dabbed at her eyes with a tissue as he and Kristin sat down to question her.
"I'm sorry!" she said, in a tone that threatened a return to her earlier wailing. "I've never been in trouble with the police before."
"Well, maybe you shouldn't be making drug deals in the vicinity of a murder scene," Chalmers said severely. If she didn't want him playing bad cop, she shouldn't have made him run.
"Murder?" she said with a degree of bafflement that broke through her upset. "Ricky said you were there after him."
"Ricky?" Kristin asked. He hadn't really needed her to sit in on this one, all things considered, but he guessed she'd decided it was a better use of her time than chasing down Healey's ex-employees.
"I don't know his last name." Cheryl shook her head. "Really!" she said, when she saw their doubt. "I don't usually do this kind of thing!" Her voice wobbled again.
"So how did you make contact with this Ricky?" Kristin asked.
"Oh. Sheena from book club set it up for me. She said it would be good for my stress levels. I just knew that it would be a big mistake, but Sheena's one of those people who just sort of decides things for everybody else. And she never picks books that anyone else likes, either," she added, in the hushed tones of one imparting furtive gossip. This said, she sat back and regarded them both timidly. "Am I going to go to prison?" she asked.
*
Cheryl might not know her dealer's last name, but she did have a number for him, which Chalmers duly called. It was answered by a boisterous, slightly drunken voice that gave off strong vibes of having sampled the product. "Ricky Bowman's house of delights! How can I bring you joy today?"
Possibly they were not dealing with the most cautious and careful of criminal masterminds here.
"Hi, Ricky," he said, matching the cheerful tone. "This is DC Chalmers of the Brokenwood CIB-"
There was an alarmed hiss of, "Bollocks!" a frantic scuffling noise, and what sounded like the phone being dropped on a table before it was hung up.
Chalmers turned to look at Kristin. "I guess he didn't want to talk."
"Rude," she said.
*
Having furnished themselves with a photo of Ricky and tried his last known address, they made the rounds of the usual places.
"Do you just assume that everyone who's wanted for a crime will be at the Snake and Tiger?" Trudy Neilson said, when Chalmers showed her the picture.
"Only when they sound like they're drunk in the middle of the day," he said.
She narrowed her eyes at him. "There are other pubs in Brokenwood," she said.
"Yeah, and you and Ray own most of them."
"Well, I'm no narc, but I can tell you he's not one of our regulars," she said. Her gaze slid towards the back of the room. "But he did just show up today with a bag full of money."
Chalmers followed her gaze, which she would doubtless have denied directing to the chubby bearded guy at one of the back tables who was, yes, openly and gleefully counting a stack of banknotes that he'd pulled out from a battered brown satchel.
"And you didn't think that was suspicious at all?" he asked Trudy.
"Isn't that your job?" she said with a careless shrug, and smirked to herself as he moved away.
Chalmers drew his ID and approached the weed dealer. "Ricky Bowman?" He saw the man grip his bag, visibly considering whether to run. "Don't," he said flatly. He'd had enough of that today.
Ricky thought about it for a moment, then gave up and let go of the bag. "Yeah, fair enough, eh?" he said.
*
"Where did you get the money, Ricky?" Kristin asked, as she and Chalmers sat across from him in the interview room. Unlike his nervous first-time buyer, he seemed a lot more relaxed at the prospect of being questioned by the police. Of course, that could be because he was still mildly stoned.
"Found it," he said. "Finders keepers. That's basically an actual law."
"Ricky, we are the actual police," Chalmers said.
"It was hanging in a tree! Nobody owns trees. Guess it was that magic money tree my grandma always said didn't exist." He snickered to himself.
"Actually, some trees do actually belong to people," she said, "but anyway." That was probably not the most important point to follow up on right now. "Derek Healey."
"Never heard of him," Ricky said, with breezy self-assurance.
"This guy." Chalmers slid a picture across the table for him to look at. "You get the money from him?"
"For weed?" he said incredulously. "How much do you think I'm charging? That would have bought, like, a whole truckload of weed." He coughed. "Er, not that I'm supplying weed by the truckload. I am strictly small business. Artisanal. Boutique."
"Uh-huh," Kristin said. "So the fact that a wealthy man turns up dead at the same cement works where you were dealing and you suddenly 'find' a big bag of money is just a coincidence?"
"Well, yeah," he said. Then seemed to belatedly realise what he was being accused of, and raised his hands. "Hey, whoa, whoa, no. I didn't kill anybody. It's just weed, man. What kind of maniac kills people over weed?"
*
"The worst part is, I think I believe him," she said, as the two of them rejoined Mike in front of the whiteboard. If he was lying to cover up a murder, she'd have hoped he would have come up with something a bit better than 'found it in a tree'.
"So where does this leave us?" Mike said as he contemplated the board. They'd added Ricky and Cherie and drawn a few more connections, but none of it quite seemed to add up to murder. "Bank records confirm that Healey withdrew the money. Then he went to meet someone at the old cement works."
"Blackmail?" Chalmers suggested.
"That or he was paying to have someone else assassinated," Kristin said dryly.
"What's the going rate for assassinations these days?" Mike wondered.
Chalmers eyed him sideways. "Anyone in particular in mind?"
Mike smiled and tossed his board pen up to catch. "Sims. What did you get from the insurance people?" he asked.
A headache. "Well, there were rumours of dodgy dealings around the sale of the company," she said. "General sentiment is that he screwed his partners over by getting them to sell their stakes in the business cheap when he knew the buyer had no intention of keeping the Brokenwood branch open. But the only other person who actually knew the full particulars of the deal was his secretary, who has since died - of a long-term illness, no suspicious circumstances. As for the acquiring company, they just keep directing me to their legal department, who do not want to tell me anything that isn't in the press release." And probably couldn't be made to without stronger reasons for fishing.
"What about the other employees of the company?" he asked.
"Mostly had to leave the area in search of other work," she said. "The only one who didn't took early retirement, doesn't seem that broken up about it, and spent our window of interest at a party on a yacht with, among other people, Dennis Buchanan." She hadn't enquired further, having already heard more than she wanted or needed to know about what Dennis got up to on boats.
"Which brings us back to Ricky the artisanal weed dealer," Chalmers said.
Kristin still grimaced and shook her head. "I'm not feeling it." Were they missing a suspect? Just how many people visited the cement works in any given twenty-four hour period?
They needed something to stimulate their thinking. She turned towards the kitchenette. "Coffee?"
"Er, actually I... was just going to head over to Frodo's," Mike said. "See if the walk helps me think of anything."
He headed for the door with what seemed like undue haste. She wondered if he was off on one of his inscrutable Mike hunches again.
Oh, well. More for her and Chalmers, then.
*
"One Shepherd Special, coming up," Frodo said as he made Mike's long black behind the counter of the coffee cart. "Oh, hey. Real shame about Mr Healey getting killed like that, huh?"
Mike had long since accepted the impossibility of keeping gossip from going around a small town, and instead decided to embrace it as another information source. "You knew him?" he asked.
"Yeah, nah." Frodo shook his head. "Oh, but I knew his secretary, and I guess he was a pretty nice guy, because she said he paid for her big holiday in Fiji that she took the year before she died."
"Hm," Mike said, cocking his head. A generous retirement package for the terminally ill secretary who'd been the only one to know the truth about Healey's business dealings. Interesting.
"Yeah, I was real sad when she got sick," Frodo said as he handed Mike's coffee out to him through the hatch. "Mrs Sutcliffe was nice as."
Mike paused as that name rang a bell. "Sutcliffe. As in Gabrielle Sutcliffe?" he said.
"Nah, her name was Jenny," he said. Then seemed to remember something. "Oh, but I think she had a niece named Gabi, actually."
"Thanks, Frodo," he said, turning to hurry back to the station. "You've been very helpful."
"I'll add that coffee to your IOU!" Frodo leaned out of the cart to call after him.
*
They put Gabrielle in the interview room and let her sweat a bit while Kristin checked in with Chalmers over the phone. "Any sign of Kyle?" she asked.
"He's not at his place," he said. "Where, by the way, he appears to live by himself."
"So much for needing privacy," she said.
"Well, Gabrielle does, after all, like big machinery," he said in his driest tones.
Somehow Kristin doubted that was the real reason they'd been at the cement works that morning. "They were looking for the money," she concluded. How and why it had been left behind at the scene in the first place was a detail they could iron out later.
"Specialist Search are just about done going over the building," Chalmers said. "What are the odds that when he sees the police are gone he'll come back and try again?"
He couldn't know that Ricky the artisanal weed dealer had found the money, but any blackmailer with half a brain should realise that the police search might have turned it up, and either cut their losses or at least hold off for longer before trying to go back. Kristin contemplated how much common sense and good judgement their suspects had shown so far. "No bet," she said.
"I'll head back to the scene, see if Kyle turns up," he said. "Let me know if you get anything out of Gabrielle."
*
Gabrielle, it turned out, was not just ready to talk, but seemingly under the impression that if she only explained, they would soon realise that everything had been reasonable and justified.
"Look, my aunt told me he made a fortune out of selling that business," she said. "He screwed everyone else in the company over, and he did all kinds of other dodgy stuff. She kept her mouth shut about everything for him, and all she got out of it was a lousy package holiday to Fiji."
"Kept her mouth shut... aside from telling you everything," Kristin said.
"Yeah, well, but I'm family," she said. "She didn't tell anyone else. Apart from my dad, and my brother. And Uncle Jim."
"And you told Kyle," Mike said.
"Well, after Auntie Jen died. I just thought it was so unfair! It was Kyle's idea to do the blackmail," she was quick to clarify. "Except, well, his actual idea was really stupid, so I had to take over the planning. He is such an egg." She shook her head ruefully.
"And whose idea was it to kill Derek Healey, Gabrielle?" Kristin said, holding her gaze.
"Nobody's!" she said, waving her hands urgently. "The plan was supposed to be that we were just going to hide and wait to make sure he left the money, but Kyle thought we should try and scare him a bit, so he went out there and threatened him. He had a mask on, but Mr Healey recognised his voice because he met both of us at my aunt's funeral. Then he was, like, 'I'm not being blackmailed by some dropkick teenager,' even though Kyle's, you know, twenty-two, and they started fighting over the money. Mr Healey ended up throwing the bag out of a window - well, it was more this big hole in the wall, really - just so Kyle couldn't get it."
"Where it ended up in a tree." Apparently Ricky the artisanal weed dealer was at least honest, if somewhat confused on the finer points of the law. The rest of the story, Kristin suspected, was all too sadly predictable from here.
"What happened, Gabrielle?" Mike asked patiently.
"Kyle got pissed off and threw a punch at the old guy. I yelled at him to watch out, but I guess Mr Healey was already off-balance from throwing the bag, and he just... fell." She twisted her necklace, looking truly worried for the first time. "That counts in my defence, right? That I told Kyle to watch out."
"You might want to reconsider whether you want that lawyer now," was all Mike said. He motioned for Kristin to stand up with him so they could confer outside.
"And I made him leave his gun behind this morning as well!" Gabrielle added rather desperately.
That gave them both pause. "His gun?" Kristin said.
"Yeah. We had to wait till daylight to look for the money, and he was saying all this stuff about scaring off scavengers in case anyone else had found it." She rolled her eyes. Only a moment later did it seem to occur to her that this detail might actually make things worse, not better. "We didn't know the police would be there," she said hastily.
And Kyle didn't know that Chalmers would be at the cement works now... but he might well be on his way back there in hopes he could still reclaim the money.
*
"Should we call in Armed Offenders?" Kristin said as they headed out to Mike's car.
"Let's just see what we're dealing with first," he said. Coming from a man who had repeatedly walked into hostage situations and armed standoffs without stopping to put a vest on first, that wasn't entirely reassuring. If pressed, he'd probably say something about not escalating the situation further - or, more realistically, say something characteristically enigmatic and leave her to make her own assumptions - but from what they'd learned about Kyle Warren so far, he seemed pretty eager to provide his own escalation.
She put in a call to Chalmers while they drove, which also had the added bonus of meaning Mike couldn't play his country cassettes at her.
"Chalmers. Any sign of Kyle Warren at the cement works?" she asked.
"None yet. Specialist Search have pulled back. I've been scouting around to try and find Ricky's magic money tree, but 'majestic, like a wise old man of the forest' is not the most helpful description to go on."
"We're on our way to join you," she said. "Gabrielle confirmed the two of them were behind the blackmail attempt. She claims Kyle was the one who knocked Healey off the edge, after he refused to play ball and threw the money out of the building through a hole in the wall. Hence their coming back to look for it in daylight." Personally, if she'd been a would-be blackmailer returning to search the scene where she'd left the victim dead, she might have at least made the effort to get up at dawn, but these two hadn't struck her as the greatest of planners.
Which didn't meant they weren't still dangerous.
"I think I know the place where he'd have thrown it out from," Chalmers said. "I'll go back and take a look." There was a rustle of vegetation as he headed towards the building.
"Kyle may be armed if he comes back to the scene," Kristin warned him. "According to Gabrielle he wanted to bring his rifle to scare off anyone who might have found the money."
"Hopefully he'll have the sense not to try it now he knows there might be police around," Mike put in from where he was listening in as he drove.
Unfortunately, she wasn't sure that Kyle had demonstrated sense to be one of his greatest qualities.
"Copy that," Chalmers said. "I'm going to climb back up and have a look, see if I can see..." He trailed off.
"Chalmers?" Mike asked after a moment.
"I think someone's here," he said, low and slightly muffled, as if he might be shielding the phone to cover the light of the screen.
Kristin exchanged a look with Mike. "How far are we away from Murphy's Rise?" she asked.
He took his eyes off the road for a moment to glance in her direction. "Two minutes?" he said.
She had to screw her face up sceptically at that. "Really, Mike? In the Kingswood?"
He looked slightly hurt. "Three minutes," he conceded.
"We're on our way," she told Chalmers. There was no bag of money left for Kyle to retrieve, so if Chalmers could just hold off on engaging him until they were there to back him up...
Or not.
"Hey!" The phone picked up a distant shout on Chalmers' end. "Who's down there?"
"Kyle, this is DC Chalmers from Brokenwood CIB!" he called in response. "You want to come down from there?"
No response from Kyle that she could hear, but a faint metallic clink that suggested Chalmers had taken another step on the stairs. Backing down to avoid agitating Kyle, or following instinct and moving towards him? She wished she had eyes on the scene to get a read on the body language, or at least see if Kyle was armed.
Could Chalmers see if Kyle was armed? There was no way to check in with him now without risk of being an ill-timed distraction or drawing Kyle's attention to the fact that they were on the line. All they could do was listen, and wait for Chalmers to give them some kind of signal.
Mike's shoulders were looking distinctly tense as he drove. She spared a moment to be glad of Brokenwood's lack of traffic, and then another to hope she hadn't just cursed them to getting stuck behind some slow-moving piece of agricultural machinery.
"There's no point, Kyle!" she heard Chalmers say. "We already spoke to Gabrielle. The money's gone."
"Whatever she told you, she's lying!" he said.
"Okay! Well, you want to come down and we can talk about that?"
"Don't come any closer!" Kyle yelled wildly, and Kristin winced. They were still minutes away, and it didn't sound like this was de-escalating.
"I'm not coming any closer, Kyle," Chalmers said. Calm. Controlled. Doing things by the book.
Then there was the crack of a gunshot, and the line went dead.
"Chalmers?" Mike said, raising his voice frantically.
"It cut out," Kristin said, looking at him a little wide-eyed. "He... probably dropped his phone."
"Right," Mike said, matching her expression. Neither of them mentioned the most likely reason that he might have dropped the phone.
She redialled, going straight through to voicemail, as Mike called it in over the radio. "Comms from BDC1. 10-10. Repeat, 10-10. Do you copy?"
"Comms receiving. Go ahead, BDC1." The voice of Comms was cool and collected as ever, which failed to make her feel any better.
"Shots fired at the old cement works on Murphy's Rise. Police officer on the scene, current status unknown."
"Roger that, BDC1."
Backup was on its way... but no one who could get there any faster than they would. Mike had his foot down, and it probably wasn't fair to blame the Holden Kingswood when right now any amount of acceleration would still have felt too slow.
They screeched to a halt on the concrete outside the cement works a long ninety seconds later. Everything was quiet as they got out of the car, which could be either good or bad. Kristin exchanged wary looks with Mike as she adjusted her vest. He wasn't wearing one and he wasn't armed either, but he still took the lead as they approached the building. No point suggesting or requesting they wait for backup. Neither of them would be prepared to do it.
Evening was drawing near, and out here away from the lights of the town, the old industrial site was thick with shadows. She eyed her surroundings watchfully, every vast pipe and high chimney a potential hiding spot for a sniper to lie in wait.
Nothing moved. Was Kyle even still here? And if he wasn't, what did that mean for Chalmers?
The door to the main building stood open, as it had for long years since bored kids or the elements had busted it that way. A low heap of debris had accumulated in the entrance. As Mike eased his way past it, his boot knocked a pebble that skidded off across the wet concrete.
"Who's there?" Kyle's voice called hoarsely from somewhere up above. "Come out, or I blow this guy's brains out!"
Well, that was both reassuring, and... not.
The two of them raised their hands and stepped out into the building, taking no chances. Kyle was up on one of the high catwalks, aiming a hunting rifle down at Chalmers where he was huddled at the dog-leg corner of the metal staircase that led up to it. Hurt, or just ordered by Kyle to get down on the floor? She couldn't tell, and didn't dare risk calling out to him in case it set Kyle's hair trigger off.
"Hi, Kyle. Mike Shepherd here," Mike said. She was reminded, inanely, of the way he introduced himself to murder victims; always earnestly conversational, no matter how off-kilter the situation. "See, we're coming out. No tricks."
To be honest, criminals tended to overestimate how many tricks they actually had in their arsenal. Confrontations with armed suspects didn't come up often enough that they had an actual playbook for ways to handle them, though she was starting to think they should put one together. What was in the water in this town, seriously?
"Nobody wants any trouble here, Kyle," Mike said. "Just tell us what you want."
"I want my money," he said sullenly, before veering up into a more threatening shout. "Get me my money!"
"Okay," he said placatingly. "If you let Detective Sims contact-"
"No! No games!" he said.
"Come on, Kyle," Chalmers said from his position at the corner of the stairs. "How do you see this ending if you're not willing to negotiate?"
On the one hand, good to hear he was still in a condition to talk. On the other hand, shut up, Chalmers.
"Get up!" Kyle barked at him, gesturing wildly with the rifle. With Armed Offenders on the scene it might have given them a window to risk taking the shot, but as it was, it was just dangerous.
"Let's everyone just stay calm here, all right?" Mike cautioned as Chalmers got stiffly to his feet, gripping the stair rail for support.
Unfortunately, Kyle was in no mood to be calmed. "You're not taking me seriously!" he said. "Do I have to shoot somebody for you to take me seriously?"
"We're taking you very seriously, Kyle," Kristin said, a little frantically. There was no way she or Mike could rush him from this far away. She could see Chalmers sizing him up, clearly thinking his odds would be better going for a surprise tackle than trusting Kyle's temper to hold.
Either Kyle saw it too, or he was too wound up for it to much matter what they did. "Stay back!" he yelled, jabbing the rifle towards Chalmers again.
Before there was even time to see if Chalmers obeyed instructions, he pulled the trigger.
"No!" Mike yelled. The two of them launched forward uselessly as-
The rifle clicked empty. Kyle looked baffled and tried again. Then it seemed to sink in that he was out of bullets.
"Oh, bugger," he said.
Before he had time to think of using his gun as a club, Chalmers threw himself at him and knocked him backwards. Kristin wasn't far behind, overtaking Mike to race up the staircase and leap into the fray.
The scuffle that followed was brief, awkward, and mostly successful, aside from her whacking her knee pretty hard on the metal grating and her hand on a railing, and Chalmers getting both a rifle butt to the gut and an elbow in the side. The latter might have been hers. Oops.
"You okay?" she asked him, once backup had arrived to take Kyle off their hands and she could collapse on her back on the catwalk to recover her breath. Which she would probably regret, given the general level of grime in here, but that was a problem for future Kristin and her dry cleaner to figure out.
He nodded, rendered slightly less convincing by the way he was slumped beside her, equally winded. "Just got a little banged up taking evasive action when he shot at me earlier."
"So, you... fell down the stairs," she deduced.
"Evasively," he said.
She nodded sagely.
"My phone went in there." He pointed off the edge of the catwalk. She leaned sideways and peered down to see a trench filled with scummy green water.
"Ooh. Yikes. Good luck with that." Still, if a phone was their most significant casualty of the evening, they were doing well.
Mike came over to join them once he'd finished directing the evidence-handling. "I'll give you two a ride back," he said, jangling his car keys.
Kristin offered a hand up to Chalmers, who looked like he was debating embracing the horizontal lifestyle on a more permanent basis. "Come on. You've got the joys of 1970s suspension to bounce you safely home." She was pretty sure his heartfelt groan wasn't just from the effort of sitting up.
"Hey." Mike looked vaguely wounded. "She got us here when we needed to be."
"Eh, I had it all under control," Chalmers said, as he made his way down the staircase with arthritic slowness.
"Oh. In that case, would you like to maybe... jog home?" Kristin suggested.
"Nah. Wouldn't want to put you two to shame," he said.
"I am not actually ashamed of not jogging," Mike said.
"Me neither." And while they were on the topic of healthy lifestyle choices, she could murder a pizza. "Hey, what do you say we stop by the Porky Pigeon on the way back?"
Chalmers cocked his head. "I could eat," he agreed.
Mike just smiled as he unlocked the Kingswood.
Kristin recognised what that mood meant, since it was, after all, what most of Mike's moods meant. "He's going to play country music at us the whole way, isn't he?" she said.
Chalmers just nodded resignedly.
They still got into the car with him anyway.