Saturday 6 April 2019

Episode 64 - Analysing Sykes

Sykes looked down at the coffee cup and realized once again he'd let the brew go cold, distracted by other people's problems.
He'd just come from the Captain's office where he had been told that unless he had some solid leads to follow up on both the Jones cases they could go to the bottom of the stack or he could hand them over to one of the junior detectives.
That wasn't going to happen.  Not on his watch.
But ...
In the case of Joseph Jones, the chief suspect, his wife, had an unshakable alibi, being corroborated by not only Brightwater but also several other prominent people.
It could not have been his brother, Al, as he too had an alibi for the time if the murder, and as for Walthenson’s mysterious woman in the red car, that turned out to be Miriam the woman allegedly having an affair with Al, but all of his investigations proved otherwise.
Miriam was adamant she had not known where Al was after she left him the night he allegedly died, because the body was still missing.  Once again he only had Walthenson’s statement that there actually was a body.
And it didn’t escape his attention that Walthenson was involved in this Jones business up to his scrawny neck, which, if it hadn't been so near death Sykes might have wrung it before now.
Also, he was convinced what happened to Walthenson wasn't linked to the Outtel Finance Company in some way, which was the basis of a third case also irking his boss with no results so far in finding out what happened.
Then there was the problem of Brightwater's so-called suicide.  The medical examiner had written it off as suicide because even Sykes had to admit it was impossible to prove it was anything else, but his investigation into the man showed he was anything but the type who would.
It was why he’d ordered a more intensive panel of tests and was still awaiting the results.
So, after careful examination of all the evidence he had accumulated up to that point and considering of all his notes, in Sykes opinion it was pointing towards Brightwater who murdered his two partners the Jones brothers.  He had the means, an unlicensed gun found at his apartment, recently fired, that matched the bullet pulled out of Joseph, and the opportunity.
All he needed was a motive, and the rumors of possible embezzlement were neither corroborated or denied by the current management could have been perpetrated by Brightwater himself, and not either of the Jones’.  That left him with the possibility of a third player, someone higher up the food chain, pulling the invisible strings.

© Charles Heath 2016-2019

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