Read Online Deadline by Craig McLay - Free Book Online Page A

for any sign of who might have knocked him in.
    Lying on the deck only a few feet away was one of the large extendable aluminum poles used to fish objects out of the water. That must have been what whomever he had been chasing had used to knock him in. Colin felt the back of his head and could already feel a lump rising at the base of his skull. An inch or two lower and they would have hit vertebrae instead, so he figured he was lucky, in a way.
    The door leading to the outdoor filtration unit was open. The unit had an eight-foot chain fence around it, but that thing wouldn’t be too hard to climb. On the other side of that was about 30 feet of forest and then the access road.
    Colin wiped his face and kicked at the metal pole, sending it clattering into the pool. Whoever had hit him would be long gone by now.
    “Why did you come here, Devane?” he asked no one in particular. “Half the cops in the country are looking for you and you come back here? In the middle of the night? Why?”
    Colin’s gaze drifted back towards the change room. What had Devane been doing in there when Colin interrupted him? What was the source of that weird blue light?
    Colin pulled open the door and walked back past the showers. He didn’t bother to avoid them. It wasn’t like he could get any wetter than he already was. Besides, the water had actually warmed up a bit.
    He entered into the change room and stepped over the massive bulk of the locker that had almost crushed him. Lying on the floor was a small Maglite next to a green garbage bag. The garbage bag appeared to be full of oddly-shaped objects and a pool of blood had formed underneath it.
    Colin had no intention of looking in the bag. Instead, he looked up and saw a familiar symbol painted on the front of one of the lockers: a small cross inside two interlocking strands of what looked like barbed wire.
    Or thorns
, Colin thought.
Although Devane didn’t exactly seem like some sort of religious nut.
    Colin opened the locker and gasped, not so much in horror as in surprise. The face staring back at him was one he had seen before but had never met. The eyes had been removed, but he was easily recognizable from the bisected spider web tattoo on his neck.
    It was Terrence Devane.

-18-
    G iordino yawned and sat down at the interview table. It felt like she had spent most of the day in here and now she was going to spend most of the night as well.
    She had just gotten back from the rec centre, where the crime scene unit officers were still busy pulling body parts out of lockers in the women’s change room. In less than twelve hours, Terrence Devane had gone from prime suspect to victim number two. At the moment, the only connecting thread she had between the two of them was sitting across the table from her and he wasn’t at all happy to be there for the second time in as many days.
    Colin’s clothes were still wet from his drop in the pool. A damp blanket hung across his shoulders. Betts, who was standing near the door, had jokingly suggested that, if he wanted to change, they had an orange jumpsuit that was about his size. Colin was not receptive to the suggestion or the humour. He was damp, tired and bored out of his mind. All they had given him in the last two hours was a can of Coke and the blanket, which smelled like the floor of a drunk tank. He was not at his sunny best.
    “Now Mr. Mitchell,” Giordino said, suppressing a yawn. “I’d like to go over your story one more time…”
    Colin shook his head. “No.”
    Giordino looked up, surprised. “Excuse me?”
    “I’ve been in this room for six hours out of the last 24,” Colin said. “I’ve been over my story, as you call it, eight times with three different people, including Detective Betts over there, who kept recording the details incorrectly in his notebook. Whether that was just incompetence or some sort of cunning attempt to make it look like I was contradicting myself in various versions, I’m not sure.