The Night Shift (4 page)

Not surprisingly, Collin was extremely disappointed when the summer came to an end and there were no huge leads on the murder. But even when he was back in school, Collin still occasionally stopped by the police station to pay Teneire a visit and to check to see if there were any developments. That process repeated itself for about two and a half more months before the investigation went completely cold. The police immediately stopped working on that case and Collin was extremely disappointed. But he still continued visiting Teneire just to say hello, and Teneire even welcomed it.

"Yeah, pretty much," he bleakly answered.

Teneire sighed. "All right, Collin, not to burst your bubble or anything, but we're the police. All right? We've got guys trained to investigate. Trained to know what questions to ask. And they came up with nothing. Now don't take this the wrong way, but if those guys couldn't find anything, you couldn't."

Collin brushed off the discouraging remark. "How do you know? I'm now working with the guys who potentially did it. Maybe I could trick them into saying something that could give us a hint."

Teneire lightly put his hand out like he was stopping Collin in his tracks. "Don't get too confident, all right, buddy? If you want to work there, great. But I hope you're not expecting to really find something that'll give us a hint."

Collin looked down at the ground a little bit before he said, "Sir, can you please re-open the Arbur Winslow case?"

Teneire smiled a little bit. "You know I can't do that. We don't have any leads, and there are other cases out there we have to work on. I can't just reopen one unsolved case just because a kid who used to spend his summer here wants me to."

"But…please, sir!"

"Not unless you can give me a reason to reopen it, Collin."

The teen looked down at the floor and gritted his teeth a little. "I'll find something that'll get you to reopen it," he said as if he was making a promise to a loved one on their death bed. "And don't forget-I still have
this
!"

Collin reached into his pocket and pulled out
a
bronze police badge that Teneire had given him towards the end of last summer for all his good work.

"Oh, you've still got that?"

"Of course! And remember what you said to me? With this, I can go pretty much anywhere in this station…
including the evidence room!
"

Teneire didn't
look
too concerned about that. "Yeah, but you already know all the stuff that we have in there, and we didn't get much of a lead from any of it."

"But I can still go in there, right?"

"Yes, but…"

"Awesome! Well, I need to go home now. Thanks, Sergeant! Have
a
good day!"

Collin quickly walked out the door, leaving Teneire sitting at his desk staring out. He sighed. "If only half my investigators were that spirited."

After walking out to the parking lot and getting in his car, Collin quickly drove off and went home. He living in a one story house, but it was built fairly solidly and had quite a few luxuries in it that not many other houses in the area had.

As he walked inside, Collin dashed into his room and closed the door behind him. His bedroom was a bit small and was pretty messy. His bed was right in the middle of one of the closest wall, with the door being on the right and his closet being on the left. Right across from the bed was his computer, and in the
corner
to the right of that was his electric guitar.

But in just a few seconds, he picked up the guitar and put it very close to the closet. He went onto the computer and logged onto Arbur Winslow's official website and printed out a large version of the map. He taped the map onto the wall next to the computer, planning to use it to mark up things such as where he thinks key events during the murder happened, where people supposedly were, and other details. He was basically acting like he was a one-man investigation team and he was seriously going to solve the crime just by doing things like this.

Still on the site, he printed out pictures of all the employees who had profiles on the site and had seen earlier that day. He planned on putting their pictures up on the wall left-to-right in order of which one he thought was the most likely to have been the killer, with the one on the left being the
least
suspicious.

"Heh heh heh…watch out, killer! Collin Bansen, ace detective, is on the job!"

He immediately sat on his bed and started pondering several theories in his head about who could've committed the murder and how they did it.

"Hmmm…I'd better start from scratch…"

Collin reached into his computer desk and pulled out an old school notebook. He flipped to some blank pages about halfway through and wrote down everything he knew about the murder that happened thus far.

Here was how it had happened: on July 27 the year before, Scott Halpen, a thirty-three year old state park employee, was found by a hiker on one of the trails at about 7:00 in the morning. The hiker instantly called the police. From there, it was determined that Scott had been killed by a stab wound to the neck with what appeared to be
a
small knife. But the odd thing was that the knife wound seemed to be a bit different than usual; it appeared that Scott wasn't flat-out stabbed in the neck because the wound wasn't anywhere near brutal enough. Authorities had suspected that the knife had instead been thrown into the neck from a distance, but the knife that supposedly did the killing was never found.

That was the basic idea of what had happened. But Collin remembered one more interesting thing that Teneire told him when the case was really starting to open up. Teneire said that, based on the autopsy report, Scott was actually dead several hours before the body was found.

"Oh, man, this is awesome!" he said to himself as he stared at the mini-wannabe-station that he had created from his bedroom. He truly thought he was going to solve the crime just because of this, clearly letting his over-excited nature get the best of him.

Despite having the entire groundwork of the case laid out in front of him, Collin still had hardly better of an idea about what happened than he did before. He had a way to get more organized, and he hoped that would be all the help that he would need to finally figure out what had happened.

He couldn't remember a time he felt more anxious about something than when the murder happened while he was working at the police department. Ever since it had happened, he wanted nothing more than to solve it. He was sure Teneire and the rest of the officers felt the same way, and he understood that they couldn't just talk about an older case when there were new ones to solve.

But from Collin's view, if they weren't able to solve the crime, he would do it himself. He wasn't going to rest until everything finally came to the light.

Chapter 3

A Fight and a Knife

"Iiiiiit's show time," Collin muttered to himself as he was arriving at headquarters for his first official day on the job. He walked up the wooden steps confidently and opened the door, stepping inside the only part of the whole forest that really had air conditioning.

Almost like she was waiting there the whole time for him, Lisa got up from the front desk where campers booked themselves in and went over to him. "Hey, Collin. Ready to get some work done?"

"Yup," he replied very easily. He was hoping he could keep his true motive for working there under her radar.

"Good. All right, like I said, you're gonna be doing some maintenance work today. I'm assigning you to work down at the front of the hiking trail with Jess, all right?"

"Sure thing. What do you want me to do?"

"She's busy raking up all the pine needles that fell from the trees. You're gonna help her rake them up."

"Rake up
pine needles
?"

"We want to keep the park clean, don't we? Don't worry about a thing. It's a very easy job and time flies."

Yeah. I'm sure the time just disappears when you rake up needles,
Collin sarcastically thought to himself. "Great. Thanks."

Lisa gave Collin
a
pleasant smile before she turned around and headed back to the front desk. A strange look crossed Collin's face at that moment; it looked like there was something he really wanted to say, but he wasn't finding the words at the moment. And he thought it would easily blow his cover if he asked, so he simply gave Lisa
a
quick nod of the head and walked away.

He headed off to the east of the camping grounds and to the hiking grounds. As promised, Jess was there, raking up dead pine needles.

Gee, THAT looks exciting
. He walked over to Jess and weakly said, "Hey."

Jess looked up and saw Collin heading straight for her. "Hey. What's up?"

"Ha ha. Apparently I'm raking pine needles with you today."

Jess sighed and shook her head. "I'm sorry. I promise you, no other job here is
this
boring."

"Is it really that bad?"

"Coll, you're raking
pine needles for four. Straight. Hours
."

"All right, I'll believe you. Ugh…you got any tips for making time go quicker?"

"Yeah. Don't complain and just stay focused. Hey, since it's gonna be the two of us, we can talk to each other instead of just counting the number of campers in blue shirts who walk by."

Counting campers in blue shirts? Is that what everyone does for fun around here?...

"Hey, it might even help us get to know each other better," Jess said very warmly. "This might not be so bad after all. Hey. There's a rake in the back of that truck."

She pointed to a dark red truck that had lost
a
lot of its shine over the years and had chipping paint all over it. "Grab the rake back there and start raking."

Trying his best not to groan, Collin did as he was told, and soon, they were both raking up the seemingly endless supply of needles. After a couple minutes, Collin managed to completely clear an area that spanned about three feet across, only to look up and see that there was a whole line of pine needles stretching as far as the eye could see that needed to be raked. Realizing this, he let out an automatic groan.

"I know. It's tough, isn't it?" Jess asked.

Collin turned to her and said. "Oh yeah. We have to rake up
all
of these?"

"Yeah. But I don't want to hear any of your complaining, all right? That's gonna make the day longer for both of us."

"Right. Whatever. Sorry."

He just went back to work trying to rake up the pine needles. Jess was, without a doubt, doing a much faster and more efficient job than he was. It seemed like her years of experience taught her some useful tricks to getting the job done efficiently, and Collin was getting tired after only going about it for twenty minutes.

"So…I remember you telling me you like music?" he recalled, simply trying to jolt a conversation.

"Yeah. I
love
it," she answered as she continued raking. "I told you I played in a band, right?"

"Yeah."

"Did I tell you I keep the newspaper clippings from performances?"

"Yup."

"Great! Hey, mind if I show some to you now?"

"Go ahead."

Jess reached into her jeans' pocket and pulled out a clipping that looked fairly recent but was very crumpled. "This is from when we were playing at the Water Hole (a somewhat popular downtown pub) a few weeks ago."