‘It’s called a hunch and I’ve learned to listen to them over the years.’
‘She’s your new Chuck Cunningham.’ Vanessa laughed and lightly punched Darnell in the arm but he remained silent with a look of frustration spread across his face. ‘Anyway she’s also referenced his influence on Barrack Obama so it can’t be all negative, can it?’
They flicked through the rest of the papers. They found two more which sparked some interest. The first was from a student called Lae Chang. They had seen Lae earlier in the lecture debating Lincoln’s political differences with his wife regarding her ownership of slaves in her formative years. Her subject of choice for her dissertation was ‘Lincoln’s Post-War Colonial Plans for the African Slaves’, who would be considered free people once the Union had won the war. She proposed that Lincoln wanted to deport African people back out of America once they were freed, rather than providing them citizenship in a place many had called home for the previous years.
The final dissertation was from a Kyle Krasinksi, who claimed he was going to expose Abraham Lincoln as anti-Semitic but there was little content to show where he was going to get evidence for such a claim.
‘Professor King?’ Darnell called out of the door towards Barry, who was chatting with another lecturer. He turned around and approached his office door. ‘Can we take these?’
‘Absolutely, they’re just my printouts. They provided electric copies too which I still have in my inbox. I’m old school, I still like paper. Anything there you can have. Just don’t tell my students.’
‘Thank you, professor, you’ve been most helpful.
*
Back at the station they met with their focus group. While it had only been forty-eight hours since they last met, the detectives had been on such a long and tiresome journey that it felt like weeks since they first got together, although they didn’t sense they were much closer to finding their suspect.
Commander Hill began the discussion. ‘So let me get this straight. So far we have two security guards who were either sick or asleep on the night in question, a stolen student card and a bunch of essays from a local university. And now our culprit appears to be taunting us with these letters to the sites you’ve visited. It isn’t looking very good at the moment, guys. What exactly have you two achieved on this mission?’
The detectives looked to each other before bowing their heads in shame. Despite working hard they’d found little of substance. To any outsider, they’d simply had a lovely couple of days out visiting some of the country’s national parks. ‘Have you found anything at all?’
‘Well we suspect that we now have the message they’re trying to send us. It’s regarding this complex theory that they want to change the narrative of the history we were taught in school regarding Abraham Lincoln. We’ve learned that Lincoln’s wife was a slave owner, his uncle detested people of colour and his father married into a rich family who were descendants of slave patrollers; it was a far cry from the rags to riches story we’ve all be sold. We’ve got a couple of students we’d like to follow up on, particularly this Poppy Shipman who seems to have some vendetta against Lincoln. We’ve got a list of colleagues from all the different sites now which we’re going to review too to see if there are any trends.’
‘Lawson.’ Commander Hill turned to their web analyst. ‘Did we establish who sent the email to Detective Jackson?’
‘No, it was as we thought. It’s been sent from a Tor and we can’t establish the sender unfortunately.’
‘And what about the dig itself? Any thoughts?’ He turned towards Harold Manning, a construction engineer who’d been drafted in to inspect the grave to determine what tools the culprit had used to dig up the former president. While the security guards had been found to be otherwise engaged, either sick or sleeping, the police force wanted to understand how they had managed to break into the concrete tomb without causing a disturbance with the local neighbourhood. To date nobody had reported a disturbance on the night in question.
Harold was the only person at the table without a suit. He wore jeans, a t-shirt and a bright yellow high visibility jacket. His white helmet was placed in front of him. He had ginger hair around the sides but it receded on his scalp and he had a matching furry beard. He had been drafted in from Chicago where he’d been leading a build on the construction of a new skyscraper which was due to rival the Willis Tower. He’d been in construction since the age of eighteen working for his uncle. Ten years later, the owner retired and Harold took ownership of the family construction business, which had gone on to be one of the most successful companies in its field in the Midwest.
‘The individual, or individuals, involved in this dig used an expansive cracking agent. My guess would be Bristar or Dexpan, but you’d need chemical tests to check that out. The person who dug through this concrete would have entered the site twenty-four hours before to mix the cracking agent with water and inserted it into holes in the concrete. That is the only actual drilling which would’ve taken place but you only need half an inch so it would have made little noise to cause that.
‘Over the following twenty-four hours,’ Harold continued, ‘the agent expands and then it’s easy to break through quietly, safely and most importantly, controllably.’
Commander Hill took notes but had one last question for the engineer.
‘Thank you, Harold. These seem like fairly simple instructions, would it be possible that any chemist or amateur who had maybe read these notes up on the internet could do the job?’
‘From my inspection this morning,’ Manning
