Free The Outcast by Michael Walters

train of thought. “No. Of course not. I don’t carry a gun. Not off duty. Not on duty, if I can help it, these days.” Tunjin had trained as a firearms officer years before. He’d been a decent shot, once upon a time. Now, he wasn’t sure he could keep his hand still long enough to pull the trigger.
    â€œSo where did the gun come from?”
    It was growing dark outside, Tunjin realised. The sun had set, and the shadows were creeping into the pale room. The lights were on in the ward, but now he could barely make out the spider’s web. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s what I’ve been asking. I don’t know. It was there, suddenly. I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t think. I just used it.” He stopped. “I shot him.”
    There was a long silence. “You did the right thing,” Nergui said at last. “You did the only thing you could have done. If you hadn’tdone it—well, you didn’t know what the consequences might have been.”
    There was something in Nergui’s tone. There was, Tunjin reflected, very often something in Nergui’s tone. “But you do,” Tunjin said. “You do know what the consequences would have been.”
    Nergui was staring past Tunjin, his eyes fixed on the blank glass of the window. “I do,” he said. “I do now. I have a luxury you didn’t have.”
    â€œWhich is?”
    Nergui shrugged. “Information.” He hesitated, as if suddenly aware of Tunjin’s emotional state. “He wasn’t a suicide bomber,” he said. “We know that now. He wasn’t real. The bombs were fakes.”
    The call came just as the pathologist arrived. It was typical, Doripalam thought. They’d spent all afternoon here, achieving very little, waiting for something that might shed some light. The scene of crime people had arrived with their usual lack of urgency, strolling in just as he’d begun to assume they’d deferred their contribution to the next day. They were painstaking enough, there was no question of that, but Doripalam wanted to urge them to move faster, cut a few corners, just to start getting some results. At that point, after an afternoon of fruitless interviews, he’d have settled for anything.
    But there was nothing. He hadn’t seriously expected that there would be. After all, this wasn’t, actually the crime scene; it was just a place to which the body had been delivered. And, except for the blood of the victim, even the carpet seemed empty of any potential evidence. It had been removed for more detailed examination but he had little confidence that anything would be found.
    Which left the body itself. The corpse had been removed earlier that afternoon, and the pathologist had been working on it since then, with all his usual mutterings about needing more time. Doripalam had insisted on an update that evening. There was little point in all of them dragging back across to headquarters, so he had asked the pathologist to come back to the museum.
    And then, literally as the pathologist walked through the door, Doripalam’s cell phone rang.
    He gestured for the pathologist to sit down next to Batzorig, and impatiently answered the call. His mind was already distracted, focused on the thickness of the files under the pathologist’s arm, wondering whether the size of the material would correlate to its value, but knowing from experience that the opposite was usually the case.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he said at last. “Can you repeat that?” He had misheard or misunderstood what the caller was saying.
    The caller, one of the control room team at headquarters, patiently repeated what he had said, “We think it may well be a bomb.”
    Doripalam looked up at the two men sitting opposite. Batzorig looked as eager as ever, his enthusiasm undiminished by the hours of fruitless interrogation. The pathologist, a short