Rules of Honour by Matt Hilton Read Free Book Online

apartment when we’d found the door ajar on our arrival. When we had called out and received no answer from Jed Newmark we’d gone in. The smell had hit us before we reached the living room, and it was no surprise to find the bloating corpse lying in the centre of the room.
    Jed had been shot in the face at point blank range. The bullet had exited and taken with it a considerable chunk of his skull. The blood spatter pattern showed he’d been standing a little to the left inside the entrance to the room. The spent bullet had buried itself in the door jamb. Other bullets were lodged in Jed’s back, fired into him when he was already belly down on the floor and dead. They had been fired in an act of overkill: that or cold anger. To me it meant that the shooter had come here not only to murder Jed, but also to punish him. The similarities with Andrew’s murder didn’t escape either Rink or me, or the detectives who we called in shortly after.
    Tyler and Jones had treated us with suspicion – and rightly so. When we related how we’d come directly from a funeral to check on the deceased’s missing best friend it relaxed them a tad, but not much. It didn’t take much deduction to figure that Jed had died some time the day before, so it didn’t put either of us out of the frame for his murder. For a second or two I thought Rink was going to go nuclear on them, but to my surprise he’d merely grunted and acquiesced to the detectives’ theory. Now he was simply going with the flow, but I knew why. If we started jumping around and shouting the odds, we’d most likely have the cops hounding our tails and no way would we be able to avenge Andrew, and now Jed. It was apparent that the murderer of both men was one and the same, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with Chaney. We had to play our cards close to our chests, otherwise we’d be hobbled by the SFPD and never find the one responsible.
    A CSI tech had dug the bullet out of the jamb to bag it as evidence. He showed it briefly to Tyler.
    ‘Nine mil?’ Tyler asked.
    The tech nodded.
    I was thankful that we’d come directly from the cemetery, and therefore without our sidearms. My SIG was loaded with nine mm Parabellum ammunition and could have caused an awkward moment if the cops chose to search us for a possible murder weapon. Coming in earlier, Tyler and Jones had done a preliminary inspection of the body and they had concluded from the entry holes that the bullets had been nine mm: Tyler looked pleased that they’d guessed correctly. It didn’t mean an awful lot because many guns use the same ammunition, and didn’t help identify a possible suspect without a gun to compare it to.
    The CSI team had concluded their examination and collected all the evidence they were going to. The men from the ME’s office moved in to bag and tag Jed. It was a cold description of their duties, but at the end of the day was what it was. As they went about their business I turned to look at Rink. It must have been hell for him to witness and I knew what must have been going through his mind, his father having died so recently in similar circumstances. I considered asking him to follow me out of the room but Rink wasn’t one to be mollycoddled. In the brief moment my attention was off the proceedings I missed something. When I looked back the two detectives were crouching down over Jed’s corpse, peering at something that had until now gone undetected. I shared a quizzical glance with Rink and we both stepped in for a look at what had caught their attention.
    It was a photograph in a gilt-edged frame.
    Tyler pulled on latex gloves, handed to him by one of the CSI men.
    He teased the photo out from under Jed, and then paused to look at the carpet where it had lain. Because the shots into Jed’s body had been fired post-mortem there was little blood beneath him, but some dots were visible on the carpet underneath where the photo had been found. I don’t consider myself a