The Rail Wraith: David Longley Mysteries, #2

By Jessi Hammond

After his brother dies, retired detective David Longley moves from New York to Australia and takes on cold cases for the Queensland Police Force.

 

Twenty-odd years ago, the Rail Wraith killed a woman every year for four years on the first Wednesday in June.

The fifth year, the woman survived.

It's David Longley's job to solve the cold case, find the Wraith and put him away.

To do it, he'll need every skill he learned in thirty years as a New York police detective and private investigator.

And the help of the Wraith's last victim…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Nov 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215774076

Book preview

About this book

After his brother dies, retired detective David Longley moves from New York to Australia and takes on cold cases for the Queensland Police Force.

Twenty-odd years ago, the Rail Wraith killed a woman every year for four years on the first Wednesday in June.

The fifth year, the woman survived.

It’s David Longley’s job to solve the cold case, find the Wraith and put him away.

To do it, he’ll need every skill he learned in thirty years as a New York police detective and private investigator.

And the help of the Wraith’s last victim…

The Rail Wraith

One

Early spring in the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, Australia, was like a summer afternoon in New York State.

True, the winds were a little fresh, but the sun was warm, even in my apartment sixteen floors up and two streets from the ocean. I’d found an upmarket plastic outdoor setting, white table and two white chairs fitted with blue weatherproof cushions, and I’d been taking my morning cup of coffee and cinnamon doughnut (New York cop cliché, yes, but old habits are good habits) out on my balcony every morning, just sitting and watching the sun rise over the ocean through the clear panes of my balcony railing. And, like every other first-world person on the planet, my phone was an extension of my hand, so it too was getting its daily dose of vitamin D on the table.

Unlike most other people on the planet though, my phone rang that morning with information on a series of cold case murders.

Two

A friend of mine had suggested I take up my old career of private detective here in Australia, and since I was already bored with retirement, I applied for my licence and set up shop. He also suggested my name to the Queensland Police’s cold case division which, after its obligatory checks turned up the fact that I had been both a New York City cop and a private detective, and that I had no outstanding warrants, arrests or convictions, had employed me several times over the last few months.

Nola Whittaker ran the cold case division’s archive section. Her domain was a rabbit-warren of shelves that stretched beneath a building in Brisbane’s CBD, a domain that she knew like the back of her hand. Those shelves were full of cardboard and plastic boxes, files, bags and all sorts of containers filled with evidence and paperwork from thousands of cold cases.

The unit had its own detectives who worked to solve those decades-old cases (Nola had said they even had a few going back to the 1890s), but they hired me on a case-by-case basis to, as Nola put it ‘cast a fresh, non-Aussie pair of eyes over things’. I’d worked on a few and solved one over the last few months, as well as dealing with cases from the general public. Mostly surveillance there, cheating spouses, an insurance claim (woman was faking a back injury, who knew), and reuniting three siblings who’d lost touch when they were