A Thief in the Night

By R.W. Wallace

What makes a mystery intriguing? Which element makes the investigators' sixth sense rear up and say this crime will stand out in their memories forever?

Dozens of crabs pushing a man to jump from his balcony should do the trick. Or an island's one of two inhabitants eating rat poison with his cereal. How about an octagonarian going after internet trolls? An experienced kayaker surprised by bad weather? Or a jail break creating unimaginable damage with a slight miscalculation.

All of the above are covered in A Thief in the Night. Contains the short stories Critters, Two's Company, Gertrude and the Trojan Horse, Like Mother Like Daughter, and The Red Brick Haze.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Varden Publishing
• Release date: Oct 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9791095707646

R.W. Wallace

R.W. Wallace writes in most genres, though she tends to end up in mystery more often than not. Dead bodies keep popping up all over the place whenever she sits down in front of her keyboard. The stories mostly take place in Norway or France; the country she was born in and the one that has been her home for two decades. Don't ask her why she writes in English - she won't have a sensible answer for you. Her Ghost Detective short story series appears in Pulphouse Magazine, starting in issue #9. You can find all her books, long and short, on rwwallace.com.

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A Thief in the Night

R.W. Wallace

Published by Varden Publishing, 2021.

Contents

Introduction

Critters

Two’s Company

Gertrude and the Trojan Horse

Like Mother Like Daughter

The Red Brick Haze

Author’s Note

Also by R.W. Wallace

About the Author

Copyright

Introduction

When putting together a short story collection, it’s a good idea for the stories to have something in common. A theme, a genre, a sense of humor... Can be anything, really. When I sat down to make collections of my short stories, the first selection was easy. Holidays stories in one group, the ghost stories in a series in another, Young Adult over here...and a total of ten mystery stories.

Great, I thought. That’s done.

Except not so much.

Even within the mystery genre, there are different types of stories. Some lighthearted, some deep and perturbing. And a collection needs a title!

If there’s one thing that makes me find a million things to do at home in order to procrastinate and push off the inevitable, it’s searching for titles for my books. It’s even worse than writing sales copy. Naming a collection of five separate stories does not make things easier, I’m telling you.

So I had to read through the stories, really look at them. My subconscious apparently found putting these five together logical, so there must be a reason, right?

Well, a pattern of sort emerged. A title, A Thief in the Night, felt right. And what do you know, it fits fairly well with all the stories!

So this book holds stories with rather odd bad guys, people doing things in the shadows, and a fair amount of unintended consequences.

Happy reading!

R.W. Wallace

www.rwwallace.com

Critters

One

At times, I’ve found myself…jealous, for lack of a better word…of my American counterparts. Those guys do the craziest crimes, making for the craziest headlines.

Like people stealing alligators from a zoo. Trying to rob a convenience store with a gun cut out of soap. Seriously, those guys manage anything.

Up until today, my oddest job was a drunk calling the police on himself for making too much noise one night.

Right now, I appear to be looking at a guy killed by a crab.

It’s not as grotesque as it sounds—or at least, it’s not grotesque in the way it sounds. The crab didn’t cut his throat or anything.

It cut his toe.

Which, I assume, somehow made the victim fall off his balcony on the third floor and fall to his death on the city’s busiest pedestrian street.

The crab’s claw is still on the guy’s big toe, but the rest of the animal has yet to be found. I’ve ordered one of my officers to look for it because it seems likely the crab was along for the fall but lost its claw on impact.

Yep, I gave that order.

I have seven officers on scene at the moment with more on the way. Nordre gate—meaning North Street in Norwegian—is the pedestrian street of Trondheim. It has shops, coffee shops, ice cream vendors, everything. Needless to say, on a Saturday offering an unusually blue sky on an August morning, it’s crowded as hell, and people tend to be morbidly curious about a dead body. So at the moment, all my manpower is going into securing the scene, and—

No pictures, please! I yell at a blond guy in his twenties who’s aiming for a selfie with the dead guy. I stalk over to push his arm down. Show some respect, I tell him in my sternest voice. "You put that up on Instagram and I will come after you."

I won’t, of course. Don’t have the time for petty stuff like that. But this guy doesn’t know that.

His eyes widen at the sight of my uniform towering above him and he scurries off, holding his phone to his chest with both hands.

Two colleagues manage to find the time to cover up the dead body with a tarp. Though it’s not going to lessen the crowd’s curiosity much, at least I don’t have to worry about pictures of an ongoing investigation on social media.

I scan the crowd for any other over-enthusiastic photographers, but don’t see any. There’s a woman with two kids in tow—both below the age of ten—and I wonder what makes her think this is an appropriate occupation on a Saturday morning. Next to her, a guy is scratching his crotch—like, really scratching, making me wonder if I should take him in for public indecency—while his eyes are fixed on the spot where the dead body is hidden. Three young girls, probably high school age, have their heads together while whispering and pointing at the tarp. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but the giggles must be heard for miles around.

Shaking my head at the oddities of humanity, I walk over to greet the colleagues exiting two newly arrived police cars.

What do you need? Sylvia asks before she’s even out of the car. She’s been on the force for four years already, but her chirpy enthusiasm has yet to wear off. There’d been a bet going when she first started working with us, on when she’d start showing up with the same distrustful and depressive face as the rest of us, but we’d all lost. Nobody had bet on more than two years, and her smile is still in place. Her platinum blonde hair is up in her usual simple ponytail, and her uniform fits a little looser than what most of the women choose. My guess is she’s used to getting attention for her looks and has chosen a uniform hiding some of her forms on purpose.

Thank you for coming, Sylvia, I say as I shake her hand. I point to the tarp. The dead body’s over there, but I’ll ask Askild to take care of that part. From what I understand, our victim fell from the balcony up there. I point to the balcony on the third floor, with a door open and white curtains blowing out. There must be more wind up there than down here.

I’d like for you to take your team and get into the apartment up there. Let me know what you find.

Sylvia gives me a huge smile. Sure thing, boss. Then she waves for her colleagues to follow her before trotting up to the building’s main entrance.

Askild and his team are already working on setting up a tent around the dead body. We don’t always do this, but in an area this crowded, we want to minimize the impact of pictures ending up on the internet, and we want to work in peace.

Henrik, the guy in charge of managing and interrogating the crowd, comes over. He’s a bit on the short side—his unruly dark blond hair only barely reaches past my shoulders—but excellent at this type of work. He has an eye for details and his bullshit meter is usually spot on.

I have at least seven witnesses seeing the body hit the ground, he says. He apparently screamed on his way down—but not before, from what I can gather—so that drew the attention of quite a few people. I also have a girl who claims she saw him going over the railing up there. He nods his head in the direction of a young girl, probably eighteen or so, who’s sitting alone on a bench inside the secured perimeter, a melting ice cream long forgotten next to her.

Henrik flips open his notebook to check something, even though he’s never forgotten a single detail from any crime scene he’s ever worked on. She says he came hopping out the balcony doors on one foot, arms flailing, then hit the rail with his hip, and toppled over.

I glance back up at the balcony. The railing doesn’t appear particularly low. How tall is our victim?

Henrik shrugs. Can’t tell for sure, but I’m guessing close to two meters. That railing won’t even have reached his hips.

I have a moment of compassion for our victim. Added to the discomfort of flying, here’s yet another inconvenience to being tall. Balcony railings might not save you.

She didn’t see anybody else up there? I ask.

No. She did see the crab, though. Helped us find it.

Ah. So we have our perpetrator already?

Henrik cracks a smile. He’s even alive, if you want to interrogate him.

I chuckle and seriously consider doing just that when my radio crackles. Boss, Sylvia says. I think you should come up here.

I grab my radio as I march toward the building. What did you find?

Uh. There’s a moment of static. When one person kills a lot of people, it’s a mass murder. What is it when it’s the other way around?

I’m not following.

We have about fifty potential killers up here.

Two

The apartment is crawling with crabs. Literally. The type that’s supposed to live in the ocean.

They cover the floor of the living room and the bedroom. The bathroom is clear, probably because the crabs prefer wooden floors to tiles. A couple have ventured across the threshold to the balcony and even as I watch, one passes through the railing and plummets down toward the street.

Get that balcony closed, I snap. We can’t have crabs raining down on our colleagues working on the dead body below.

This case keeps getting weirder.

I step onto a chair to make sure I don’t get attacked—those suckers can cut through shoes—and try to make sense of the situation.

Once the officers around me shut up, we’re left listening to a chorus of crabs. You’d think they’re silent creatures, but anyone who’s ever cooked crabs knows better. Their sharp, pointy feet tapping on the container—or in this case floor—are complemented by the clicks of their claws as the creatures try to look menacing. Their little mouths open and close continually, making little bubbles which in turn burst in little pops.

They haven’t been here for long, I say. They’re still running all over the place with plenty of energy. Crabs can survive for quite some time out of water, but not indefinitely. If you buy live crabs, you try not to keep them alive for too long because otherwise it’s just cruel. Too many hours in dry air, and they start gathering in groups, moving less, making less bubbles. This group can’t be more than an hour or two out of the water.

Sylvie, standing on a kitchen chair next to me, meets my gaze. Should we assume our victim wasn’t the one to put them here?

I think that’s a safe assumption. Do we know how they were transported here? Any crates lying around?

Nothing, Sylvie replies. We checked the entire apartment. Seems like there’s a girlfriend, by the way.

I nod. Get someone to find the girlfriend. Have her brought to the police station. Search the area looking for crates. You don’t transport crabs in just anything. Chances are, someone was walking around with at least two crates of live crabs not so long ago. I want witnesses and I want crates.

Sure thing, boss, Sylvie says and jumps down from her chair to follow my orders.

I remain standing on my chair for several moments, looking down on the teeming crabs like a god, wondering if it’s considered tampering with evidence if I bring one home to eat it.



The girlfriend is a little slip of a thing. She barely reaches my chest and I could probably