The Ghost Tree by Christina Henry

Author:Christina Henry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2020-09-07T23:00:00+00:00

2

Alex really was not in the mood for the fair. The captain decided that Alex and Miller would rotate shifts with Hendricks and Pantaleo and that there would be at least one pair patrolling at the fair at all times from open to close—which was from eleven to eight every day, and until ten p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. The chief tried to soften the blow with the promise of overtime pay (“already authorized by the mayor, who’s grateful for our presence”), but Alex didn’t care about the money.

He cared about the hours he was going to spend walking in the heat, dealing with out-of-towners who lost their kids in the crowd or got their pockets picked by teenagers. And when he wasn’t dealing with petty theft and children distracted by the sight of balloon vendors, he’d be giving directions.

People, Alex had noticed, had a firm belief that a police officer in uniform was better than a compass any day. It wouldn’t matter that maps were handed out with the tickets at the gate. Why consult a piece of paper when there was a policeman right there?

But all of these irritations were secondary to the knowledge that as long as the fair was in town he wouldn’t be in the station. And if he wasn’t in the station then he couldn’t search the archives for the other girls.

After his lunch with Miller the day before, they’d gotten stuck dealing with a fender bender on the county road. Once blame had been assigned and the drivers taken away with their cars by AAA, Alex and Miller were called to Pete’s Roadhouse, which was about three miles away from the accident on the same county road. A wannabe bike-gang group had gotten embroiled in a fight with a couple of members of a real bike-gang group.

The fight broke up pretty quickly once the uniforms (and more importantly, their sidearms) appeared, but it had still taken Alex and Miller almost two hours to take down all the witness reports and determine just who was going to pay for the bar’s damages.

By the time all this was done their shift was over. It would have appeared deeply suspicious for Alex to go digging around in the basement archives, so he’d headed home, frustrated that there was no time for him to work on his search.

He thought that in a regular town—or even back in Chicago—he would have been praised for using his own time to work on an active case. At the very least there would have been indifference—an it’s your time, do what you want kind of attitude. But he didn’t think that would be the case here.

It wasn’t anything that had been said outright. Alex just sensed that somehow the department was being steered away from any real investigation of these murders.

But who’s doing the steering? The mayor? Or someone else?

He couldn’t admit, even to himself, that there was some kind of supernatural force at play. He couldn’t admit this even though he’d physically struggled just to take notes on everything he knew so far.

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