Free The Death of an Irish Sea Wolf by Bartholomew Gill Page B

the scene of almost every murder, victims seldom being taken completely unawares. The soft clay-and-gravel drive was pocked with footprints, as was the even softer earth of a small cabbage garden that had been planted between the two legs of the switchback drive. Somebody—evidently whoever had been wielding the automatic weapon—had sprinted across the drive near the cubby entrance to the house and then plunged down through the garden, firing all the while.
    “Hard to figure it though—them’s small prints for a man or even a boy. Could it have been a woman?”
    There was no way of knowing, and at the moment McGarr was merely observing, taking in everything he could. But whoever it had been, he or she had not been afraid of the steep slope through the garden and had leapt four or five feet at a bound, firing all the while. The shell cases looked like bright brass seeds that had been strewn over the earth, which was dark from the rain of the night before.
    But there were other prints too, most notably those of a size as large as McGarr had ever seen.
    “Ford himself,” Rice opined, pointing. “There, there, andthere. Huge man. As tall and broad as we’ve got in these parts, and Mayo has some big men.”
    And there carrying something heavy from the house to the car, most of the weight on the heels. The impressions were filled with clayey rainwater the color of milky tea. But they did not lead to where the boot of the car must have been, given the tire tracks, but rather to the backseat that had contained so much blood.
    There were also prints of a smaller man leading to the back door on the passenger side, and the prints of yet another even smaller man to the driver’s door. Two of those had been partially stepped on by Ford, who appeared to have been in a great hurry getting behind the wheel. One of his immense shoes had slid a half yard before digging deep into the drive as he pushed off.
    Stooping, McGarr picked up one of the several, smaller shell casings. Nine mm. Probably fired from the Webley automatic that the car had run over and was partially buried in the drive. It had to be an antique, since to McGarr’s knowledge Webleys of that type had not been produced since the Second World War.
    And what was that on its grip? McGarr stepped closer. It was an anchor that had been cast in intaglio along with the words “PROPERTY OF THE ROYAL NAVY.” Patent and registration numbers were on the barrel.
    “These here are the palm prints I told you about.”
    There were several. It looked like somebody had fallen and scrambled through the wet gravel and clay with one rather small hand fully opened and the other cupped.
    From his jacket McGarr pulled out a box of cigarettes and turned toward the house where, maybe, he could find a windless corner and light up. At his wife’s insistence, he’d been trying to quit now for…oh, ten years off and on. But mainly off. The overconsidered cigarette wasn’t worth smoking, and he decided he liked the guilt.
    He displayed the packet to Rice, who shook his head and tapped the uniform pocket over his heart. While lighting up, McGarr noticed a pair of high-tech binoculars hanging from a peg. Zeiss, which were high-quality and—could they be?—of the night-seeing variety. They were bulky with a largedome between the lenses. He wondered what something like that cost; doubtless a pretty penny. Whatever the raiding party had come for, it had not been for a simple theft. Turning, he stepped into the house.
    Blood. Rice had said there would be blood, and he had not lied. Somebody had died in the narrow hallway, probably O’Grady from the pieces of sandy-colored scalp and whitish gore that McGarr caught sight of. A gush of vital matter covered the array of framed photographs and paintings on the wall; in fact, Ford with his huge footprints had trod through the coagulating blood and then stopped six or so feet from where the corpse had lain. There was an outline of shoulders where the