Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

“But Tip’s mind is on other things. He knows if the body is found in its present condition, he’ll be the number-one suspect.

“Then, an inspiration. Tip’s heard stories, ez oi hev, about men bein’ caught in a trap an’ what they had to do to save themselves. He knows the bear trap’s nearby. So he picks up the bloody leg, and off he goes down the trail. Once in the willow thicket, he jabs around with that grisly member ‘til he hits the pan uv the bear trap under the snow. The jaws crunch together on the leg. Then Tip drops Karl’s sheath knife by the trap to complete his alibi and muckles up the trail between the trap an’ the body so it’ll look like a man’s dragged himself along it. All the footprints are destroyed, or so Tip thinks. But there’s still one uv Karl’s near the body that he overlooked an’ oi found.”

Joshua leaned back in his chair and spread his hands expansively. “An’ that’s the way it wuz, ez they say on the tellyvision. This mornin’ Tip went lookin’ fer someone to be witness to Karl bein’ dead with one leg cut off an’ caught in the trap. He found Mr Kehoe an’ me. If we didn’t immediately assume what Tip wanted us to, oi’m sure he stood ready to point out what he wished us to believe. Ye must, uv course, give Tip credit fer his actin’ ability. He’d uv succeeded, too, if me sharp Injun eyes hadn’t spotted that footprint in the snow by the body.”

“He could beat the rap yet,” Kehoe said. “You’ve got an interesting theory there, Josh, but no real proof.”

“Would the murder weapon do?” Joshua asked. “Oi found an ax out in the shed. Somebody did a hurry-up job uv tryin’ to wipe it clean, but there’s still some reddish stains on the handle an’ blade. Oi dropped it off on the steps on me way in from outside. Could yer police chemists make somethin’ uv them stains, Vern?”

“Yeah.” Lefner got up and peered into the livingroom to check on Tip Spearing. “If the stains are human blood, we’ll have a pretty tight case.”

“Well,” Joshua said, “at least ye’ll hev it easy apprehendin’ yer suspect. Oh my, the hangover he’ll have when he wakes. Oi hope, Vern, that ye won’t be too severe with him.”

“Hell, Josh, he killed a man – his own father.”

“True. But what kind uv a man wuz the father? Seems to me the milk uv human kindness might uv turned to gall in the man’s veins.”

“Look, just because he didn’t give Tip any money-”

“No, oi wuz thinkin’ about how that bear trap wuz placed. It’s winter. No need fer a trap with the bears all hibernatin’. Besides, no bear’s about to hide in a thicket. That’d be the place where the hunters would lurk, waitin’ fer game to pass by on the trail. Like we wuz doin’ this mornin’, Mr Kehoe.”

Kehoe stared wide-eyed at Joshua. “You mean…”

Joshua nodded. “Karl Spearing couldn’t stand to hev people huntin’ his land. He’d do anythin’ to keep ’em away, even shoot at ’em. So I don’t believe he wuz after bear when he set that trap.

“It wuz put there to catch a man.”

Laird Long (b. 1964) is a prolific Canadian writer whose stories have appeared in a wide range of print or on-line magazines, including Blue Murder, Handheldcrime, Futures Mysterious, Hardboiled, and Albedo One. His story “Sioux City Express” from Handheldcrime was included amongst the top 50 mystery stories of 2002 by Otto Penzler in the anthology The Best American Mystery Stories-2003. In this brand new story, he demonstrates how criminals can use the latest technology to commit the perfect crime – if only an impossible crime hadn’t got in the way!

Pinero said, “Marciano or Lewis – who’d you take in that one?” He lowered his Ring Magazine and looked at McGrath, watched the little man down his fourth cup of coffee of the morning, rub his grey face.

McGrath played around some more with his Blackberry, his right eyelid twitching as he stared at the glowing screen. “I told you, I don’t follow boxing. It’s too violent.” Thumbs flying like a twelve-year-old video-gamer chalking up kills on God of War , he added, “You should see all the great features on this thing.”

Pinero raised his magazine again, recrossed his feet on top of his desk. “You’re gonna get radiation poisoning from all those gadgets of yours,” he warned, taking some satisfaction in his partner’s stricken expression.

Pinero was young, liked to wear his clothes flashy, gel his jet-black hair into a subtle Mohawk. But despite all that, he considered himself old-school, less concerned with the geeky forensic fantasies of criminal investigation, than the pavement-pounding, door-dusting street solving of it. And he was good at it, like his father had taught him.

“Pretty soon we’ll be able to break cases without ever even leaving the office,” McGrath stated. “Like fighting a war by remote control.” He tilted his empty mug against his lips, almost choked on the plastic stir straw.

McGrath was well past the age when most cops were puttering around their Victoria condos, bald as a bagel and just as rubbery. But he’d carved out a niche for himself in the Department by becoming a tech-savvy guru, an indispensable computerized tool in the 21st-century assault on crime.

The men’s mutual loathing went back to the first day they’d been paired together in Homicide. Pinero despised McGrath’s foul coffee breath and chronic health whining, his holier-than-Intel attitude. While McGrath didn’t envy Pinero his smooth good looks and muscular physique; he detested him for them, in fact. And the young detective’s apparent indifference to all things chip-driven earned him a special place of contempt in McGrath’s ebook.

Pinero was two weeks away from transfer-bait for trolling John’s with the Vice Unit – and both men were counting the days, one on his Dukes of Hazzard wall calendar, the other on his Outlook software.

Sergeant Bugler walked into the Squad Room, barked, “McGrath, Pinero!” They looked up. “Got a job for you two.” They waited. “Lenny ‘The Rat’ Laymon’s been found dead.”

It was a skid row bungalow bordered by a boozecan on one side and a crack house on the other; smack-dab in the middle of the sour armpit of Vancouver – the downtown eastside. Inside: the nude body of Lenny Laymon, curled up in a fetal ball on the bottom of his bathtub, like a rat in its hole.

Pinero stared at the hunk of limburger on the toilet lid, gestured. “That a joke?”

McGrath slurped java out of a paper cup. “Air freshener, more likely.”

Constable Mullings laughed. “The Rat did like his cheese.”

The two detectives and the uniformed cop looked down at Lenny’s sunken body. The water had still been running from the showerhead when the girl had discovered him, both he and the water ice-cold by then. Even with the long soak, Lenny still looked dirty, the yellow skin on his hairless body going blue, backbone spined like a Stegosaurus. His eyes and mouth were wide-open, back of his blonde-fringed head a bloody mess.

“When’d the girl find him?” Pinero asked Mullings.

“’Bout an hour ago,” the Constable replied, wiping a big, red nose with a big, red hand. “She couldn’t reach him on the phone all of yesterday, so she decided to pay him a visit this morning.”

“How old is she, anyway?”

“Fourteen.”

“How’d she get in?”

“Had her own key.”

Pinero mauled a hunk of bubblegum. They could hear the girl, Kristal, crying away in the next room, lamenting a life gone down the drain: a con artist, fraud artist, sneak thief, pickpocket and stool pigeon.