Clues and Crimes

By Jessi Hammond

Megan Dennis needs to clear her friend of a murder charge... A Deadly Game

Cara's workplace is plagued by a Christmas thief... Casting for Clues

Corbin is trying to find his missing friend... Hidden

Arrow stumbles onto a robbery in a snowstorm.... Snowed Under

David Longley is a retired New York cop working cold cases in Australia... Moving Target

Five stories of clues and crimes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Jun 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201529666

Book preview

Introduction

Mysteries and crimes.

The world is full of mysteries and crimes, from missing persons to murders to robberies to hit and runs.

Fortunately, most of us don’t come into contact with the more violent side of life, but a lot of us seem to like reading about it. Including me.

I tend to veer away from the more stark and gritty crime stories. Why? Because parts of my early life were a little violent (my middle brother was a covert bully) and also, I am a sook. I like my crime more adventurous and puzzling than violent. More The Three Investigators and Ken Holt Mysteries than John Grisham or Jeffrey Deaver.

And that’s what you’ll find here.

In A Deadly Game, Megan Dennis is trying to help her friend Kylie, who is a suspect in the murder of the man who bullied her all through high school. Megan knows Kylie is innocent… but does the murderer have more than one victim in mind?

Carren has a different mystery to solve in Casting for Clues. It’s the week before Christmas and someone is exercising their inner Grinch by stealing merchandise from the store Carren works in. Carren thinks she knows who it is, but will anyone believe her?

Flick and Arrow are also dealing with a robbery in Snowed Under. They don’t know each other, but together their computer and parkour skills are formidable.

In Hidden, Corbin is trying to find his friend, Millie, who went missing without a trace months ago. But his efforts drag them into a plot bigger than he could imagine – and closer than he thinks.

Moving Target is a little different. Retired New York detective David Longley came to Australia to solve his brother’s murder, and never left. Now he helps investigate cold cases in Queensland. His first case involves a fifty-year-old murder and a theft and a witness who was only three years old at the time.

Five different ways of searching for the truth.

Five stories I hope you enjoy.

Jessi Hammond

A Deadly Game

Megan Dennis Mysteries 1

When her friend Kylie is accused of murdering the man who bullied her all through high school, Megan Dennis jumps at the chance to clear her name.

Kylie had motive and opportunity, but things don’t add up. Why would Terry Markham taunt Kylie in the hours before his disappearance? And what is Amber, his pregnant fiancée, doing in the middle of the night?

Megan needs to put the clues together before the murderer strikes again…

One

Every afternoon Megan Dennis walked to the park on Mermaid Point, which was a street away from her home.

J K Forrester Park was an oasis of native trees and scrubland nestled between the beach and the streets of Neptune Bay. The Council kept the area around the paths and the kids’ playground equipment neatly mowed, with green grass thick enough for feet to sink into, even in summer. But it let the trees and scrub run a little wild, which Megan appreciated. Most of the trees were old-growth, either left to grow here on Mermaid Point when Neptune Bay was first settled, or planted when the park was opened fifty years ago.

Megan reached her bench and sank onto its scarred wooden surface, unable to suppress a sigh of relief as she stretched out her right leg. Putting weight on it still hurt, even six months after the accident. She dropped the hated forearm crutches out of the way (and partially out of sight) beneath the bench and leaned back, half-closing her eyes against the sun filtering through the leaves of the huge Morton Bay fig tree which shaded the bench.

The park was her destination-of-choice, but the walk itself wasn’t. The walk was part of the daily therapy set out by her doctor and her physiotherapist to strengthen her leg. Her new watch was equipped with a pedometer function, and each day it had to register at least one hundred more steps than the day before, until it reached five thousand.

Megan hated it with a passion.

Before the accident, before the long, painful weeks in the hospital and the longer, more painful months of regular outpatient physiotherapy sessions, she’d been a hiker. A camper. A trainee park ranger with the Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service.

That was gone now, thanks to that mongrel in his fancy four-wheel-drive.

He’d done more than leave her on the side of the road with life-threatening injuries.

He’d taken her dream job away from her.

A ranger had to be physically fit and active, and she would never walk properly again.

The QPWS had offered her a desk job or a payout when it was clear Megan wouldn’t be able to finish her traineeship. Stupidly, angrily, bitterly, she’d chosen the payout – if she couldn’t be a proper ranger, she didn’t want to be a desk jockey. She’d regretted it after, alone in hospital and unable to sleep, but it was done, the money in her savings account dwindling a little each week that she wasn’t able to work.

It was her best friend, Kylie Bennett, who had suggested Megan do the TAFE courses in horticulture and animal care while she had time to burn.

‘You’ll probably know a lot of the stuff already, but at least you’ll have a certificate that says you do,’ Kylie had said in her quiet voice. ‘There are other jobs with animals and plants. And you need something to do besides grouch about physio and what you’ll do to that mongrel who hit you.’

She had a point. Kylie was incredibly observant in her own way. She could read people way better than Megan could, but mostly she kept her observations to herself. She was also odd and different and ridiculously smart. They’d been best friends since Year Seven, when Megan had rescued new-kid Kylie from Terry Markham, Neptune Bay State High’s nastiest bully. They lived in the same unit block now, right next door to each other. Kylie worked from home, and in the last few months since Megan had left hospital she’d come over to Megan’s every day with dinner or funny stories about her day or both.

Megan knew she was checking up on her, but Kylie did it in such an unobtrusive way that Megan hadn’t even realised at first what she was doing.

High, excited voices filtered through the rustling of the leaves above her, and she sat up and glanced at her watch. Ten past three. She’d been here longer than she thought, and kids freshly-released from school were on their way to swarm the playground fifty metres away. The playground had changed a little since she herself was a kid – new plastic climbing frames had replaced the wooden and steel ones she remembered – but truth to tell, she would have gone over and had a go on it now, even at nineteen, if it hadn’t been for her stupid leg.

And the group of younger kids racing toward it.

She sighed and reached for the crutches, then hesitated as her phone rang. She fished it out of her pocket.

Kylie.

‘Hey,’ she answered. ‘I know I’m late – ’

‘Meeg?’ Kylie’s voice was strained. ‘It’s not that. I – I need your help.’

‘Anything, Kyles. What – ?’

‘Can you come to the police station right now? Please? They – ’ Her breath hitched in a sob. ‘They think I’ve killed Terry Markham!’

Megan froze, her mouth open. Terry Markham was dead? Her first thought was Good, her second was, They think Kylie did it? Are they serious?

‘I’m on my way,’ she promised. ‘Is Troy working today? Ask him to get you a lawyer.’

‘He rang the duty solicitor for me. Thanks, Meeg.’ Voices got louder in the background, and the call dropped out.

Megan rang a taxi, then snatched her crutches from the ground and shoved her forearms into the padded cuffs, using them to help her stand up. No practicing walking on her own today – she let the crutches take most of her weight as she hurried toward the corner of Seabreeze Drive and Moss Road to wait for her ride.

Two

When the current owner of the Seaview Apartments had renovated them twenty-odd years ago, he’d separated the old bed and breakfast into twelve units with both a ground and upper floor so his tenants could take advantage of the views across the roofs of the houses to J K Forrester Park and the Mermaid Point Lighthouse guarding the bay beyond.

Kylie lived in number eleven, next to Megan in number twelve; both were nestled in the corner furthest from the road. All the units had the same design. The ground floor was open plan, the front door opening into a small lounge/dining room, with the kitchen and space for a washing machine at the back. The back door led into a tiny walled courtyard paved with big concrete tiles. Kylie’s courtyard was full of bright flowers overflowing from concrete and terracotta pots. A home-built PVC-pipe frame covered the courtyard, supporting finely-woven greenhouse-grade mesh.

Kylie didn’t own a lot of furniture. Her small TV sat on a coffee table against the side wall, in the hollow beneath the wooden staircase. A two seater couch with worn green cushions faced it, and a pine two-person table sat between that and the kitchen. A huge cat-tree sat beside the front window, almost a metre tall and a metre wide with boxes and platforms and poles covered in coir rope and grey carpet.

Phoenix, Kylie’s elderly, almost-blind, steel-grey cat, was currently sprawled across one of the lower platforms, asleep.

Upstairs, she used one of the two bedrooms as an office. She’d started her own software company the year before, Snowbird Interactive. She’d already designed more than a dozen websites, maintained five of them for those clients, and had coded a couple of educational and logic-puzzle games that were selling well. She was working on a strategy game based on piloting a lost spaceship home to Earth.

Troy Connell had driven them home from the police station, stopping to get two pizzas at Dominos’ drive-thru even though it was only Thursday – and barely five o’clock in the afternoon. By unspoken consent they’d crowded into Kylie’s unit. Troy had ducked into Megan’s place next door to grab another chair, and now all three sat around the table, pizza boxes open in front of them.

Hard to believe, Megan thought as she balanced a slice in her fingers and took a bite, that it had only been two hours since Kylie’s panicked phone call.

The taxi driver had dropped her off right outside Neptune Bay Police Station. The building was even older than the Seaview. It was right in the middle of town, on Main Street. Parts of it had been built in the early nineteen hundreds, not long after Neptune Bay had been settled, but it had been added to and rebuilt and expanded so much since then that it looked very little like a historical landmark and more like an architect’s nightmare. Red brick out the front warred with beige cladding around the back, while wattles and explosions of colourful flowers and ground covers tried to hide the walls.

Kylie had been in the police station’s small interview room when Megan arrived. Troy had been waiting for her; he’d