Liam rifled through the various statements he’d taken at the airport the day before.  Nobody saw nobody doing nothing, he reflected sadly.  At a conservative estimate, culled from Gruber’s statement, at the time of Bill DeCreft’s death there had been at least ten small planes in the act of landing or taking off, one DC-3 freighter offloading a hold full of lumber, a 737 on a short final, and three small craft inbound.  There were fourteen people in the terminal waiting to board the Metroliner Liam had flown in on, another thirty waiting either to pick up the inbound passengers on the Metroliner or to board the 737, and who knew how many mechanics and fuelers and wand wavers and baggage men and support personnel standing around with their fingers up their noses, not to mention whoever ran Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe.

And nobody saw nothing.  He sighed.  ‘Twas ever thus in police work.

He called the hospital.  The doctor he reached there sounded impatient and irritable.  “Cause of death?  For Christ’s sake, officer.  The man walked into the rotating propeller of a small plane.  What do you want, an exact description of what that does to the human head?”

Liam said no, thank you very much all the same, and set the phone down gently in its receiver.  He called the bank, forgetting it was Saturday, and had to track her down at home.  Fortunately the banker was hooked into her data base by computer.  “Gosh,” she said in thrilled accents, “we’ve never had a depositor murdered before!”

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Excerpt from the first Liam Campbell novel, Fire and Ice. The fifth, Spoils of the Dead, publishes on February 6, 2021. Pre-order your signed hardcover here.

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