The Devil Among Us by Ramsay Sinclair (easy books to read txt) 📗

faltered off, uncertain that the PC was convinced by any of this. Using my boot, I kicked the bag farther below Ryan’s desk to hide any evidence of my presence there.

“Typical Ryan.” The PC rolled his eyes. “He does that a lot. Ran my pen out of ink the last time I gave it away. The moral of the story, don’t give them to him when he asks.” The uniformed PC grinned.

“Duly noted.” I gave a tight-lipped smile in return.

The PC came a bit closer. “Did you find it?”

“Find what?”

“The pen, Sir,” the PC reminded me.

“Oh, that! Yeah.” We descended into an uncomfortable silence. “Well, erm, I’d best head off, there’s plenty of stuff I should be doing. Tell Ryan to come and find me when he’s finished eating.”

Ryan and I needed an urgent chat regarding the typed letters and tape that were currently stuffed inside my pockets.

The CID department was preoccupied with their tasks upon my return, apart from Rebecca, of course. The unfolding chaos barely fazed her. Cillian was throwing a tennis ball at the wall, and our rickety printer beeped boisterously to alert everyone within a mile radius that we had an ongoing paper jam. Holding hordes of files flush to her slim hips, Rebecca chased after me. I wasn’t really in the mood to discuss the files, for the CCTV tape was intriguing me a great deal.

“DI Cooper, something’s come up,” Rebecca informed sternly. The sheer urgency in the small sentence made me stop in my tracks. “I’ve got forensics on the stolen phones. They came in over lunch.”

“That was quick.” I reluctantly stopped to hear her out.

“Yeah. Quick and wrong. There’s got to be some kind of mistake, a mix up with the system,” she seethed and flicked over the reports. Rebecca rarely sounded so… misinformed.

Scowling at the halt to my plans, I patiently waited for the efficient woman to elaborate. Forensics were rarely wrong. It happened, but not too often.

“The prints were found on the screen of just one of the phones,” she elucidated, “which is odd, considering the person who planted them at sarge’s house would’ve had to touch them all.”

Scratching my neck, I shrugged. “They could’ve been wearing gloves but touched the screen after they’d planted them by accident. It happens. They’re criminals, not Oxford students.”

“No, sir.” Rebecca denied the theory. “You don’t understand. We’ve severely underestimated them. These people, I hate to say it. They’re somewhat genius.”

“Okay? So, whose fingerprint was on the tech?” The lack of detail was becoming frustrating. To call these bastards genius was a big stretch. There were plenty of other words I could describe them by.

Rebecca hesitated. “It’s DS McCall’s. It’s sarge’s print they found.”

“That’s impossible,” I scoffed, imagining this was some kind of elaborate wind-up, an office joke of the worst sort. “You’re being serious?”

“Deadly,” Rebbeca stated grimly.

McCall hadn’t seen those phones before in her life, let alone planted them. I trusted her with my life. There’s no chance that McCall was involved with the technology or the robberies. I froze to the spot.

“She didn’t even get a chance to touch the phones, they were all in the evidence bag when we arrived. Tony had the phones.”

“Someone’s planted her fingerprints. That’s the only way this could’ve been done. It wasn’t Sarge behind this, we already know that,” Rebecca said, leaping to McCall’s defence, but that wasn’t what worried me. A subconscious notion hit me square in the chest, rendering me short of breath and unable to breathe with ease.

“They must've taken prints from her house before they even planted the phones,” Rebecca carried on wracking her brains, attempting to figure out where the criminals acquired the prints.

“It’s too risky,” I disagreed. “The prints would’ve been all over the furniture. It’s too hard to get an accurate, clean print that way. Also, there wouldn’t have been enough time.”

Rebecca bit her clean nails, contemplating the scenario as a whole. “Then how do you reckon they got her fingerprint ready in time?”

There was one plausible theory, but it wasn’t one I wanted to believe or even entertain. Staring around our office hub, I saw Tony fiddle with the printer in frustration. A gentle giant. Cillian lost the tennis ball underneath his desk and scrambled to pick it up. The bumbling idiot. DC Taylor sighed at the computer screen, the smartest of them here. Then there was Rebecca. Shrewd, complex. Hard to read at times. The ultimate feminist.

The station was covered in McCall’s prints. We all had the subject knowledge and an idea of how the process worked. Any one of them would have been able to find a clean fingerprint if given the time.

19

For the first time in a while, I was left to my own devices and to an empty office. Even so, it didn’t help the distrustful, intrusive suspicions running through my head. To frame me would be one thing, but to frame a decent, hardworking woman like McCall was a whole new playing field.

I remembered what Michael had told me beneath the underpass. The criminals who set us up had threatened the underground networks and forced frontmen to be involved in their drug transportations. Each of those frontmen was now dead.

But what happened when these slippery criminals could also threaten our own officers to double-cross us?

Ryan’s hidden bag had contained multiple pieces of screwed up paper, and I’d only managed to get a hold of one. But the one currently bundled up in my pocket contained a threat, a threat that ordered PC Ryan Shaw to destroy the CCTV tape which I’d also transferred into my care. Could these same letters have forced Ryan into planting McCall’s print onto the phones?

Speaking of the devil, Ryan Shaw knocked on the door and scared the hell out of me. I’d been otherwise distracted since Rebecca revealed the forensic prints.

“DI Cooper? You asked to see me?” His blonde hair stood out from a mile away, contrasting but also creating a synchronicity with his icy blue eyes. He