Fifty Fifty: (Harriet Blue 2) (Detective Harriet Blue Series) Read online

  He shoved the phone at Kash’s face. I took the phone from between them, looked through the pictures.

  ‘She’s eighteen. I like older women, and they like me.’ Zac winked in my direction. ‘And for all you know, those bongs are full of green tea. Try to prove otherwise. I fucking dare you.’

  ‘I bet those joints we pulled out of your pockets aren’t full of green tea.’

  ‘You came all the way to this shithole to charge me with possession of weed?’ Zac sneered. ‘What a bunch of pretenders.’

  ‘The picture that concerns us is this one,’ I said, finding the picture among the collection.

  The photograph was of a cluttered table in the middle of a dark shed. Tools, wires, buckets of screws and nails. In the background, a rusty gas bottle sitting on a shelf.

  ‘That’s my mate’s dad’s shed,’ Zac said lazily. ‘We build shit in there when we’re bored. That lump of metal in the middle of the table is a half-built go-cart.’

  ‘You ever built anything that goes bang?’ I asked.

  Zac didn’t answer, stared at his fingernails.

  ‘There was a spate of low-level mischief involving explosives about two years ago,’ Snale sighed from where she stood in the doorway. ‘A student teacher doing his internship came out to Last Chance Valley in the second school term. He was being supervised by one of our teachers, Greg Harvey, but one morning Greg let the intern take the class by himself. The young teacher thought he’d endear himself to the kids. It was a science class. He taught them about different types of explosives.’

  ‘Oh, great,’ I said. Kash and I looked at each other.

  ‘It was nothing as complex as what we saw up on the hillside,’ Snale said. ‘So it sort of slipped my mind until now. He taught them about gunpowder, basically. How to make their own fire-works. So some of the kids got together and made their own mini-firecrackers.’

  ‘Bungers,’ Zac said. ‘You can make them as small as a cigarette. About two seconds’ fuse. Chuck them at old ladies. Fuckin’ hilarious.’

  ‘Not you, though. You wouldn’t do anything like that.’ I rolled my eyes.

  ‘No, no. Not me.’

  ‘How many kids were in that class?’ I asked. ‘The one about explosives.’

  ‘’Bout five of us.’ Zac smiled, sat giggling to himself, the only sound in the room as Snale, Kash and I quietly despaired about the four other kids we now had to interview. Kash slapped the table soon enough, shutting Zac up instantly.

  ‘This is all very hilarious, I’m sure, but the number one suspect as far as the rest of the town is concerned is you, mate,’ he said. ‘I’ve worked in villages outside Johannesburg where suspicion of a serious crime is all it takes to get you dragged into the bush and hung from a tree.’

  ‘I’ve worked in villages outside Johannesburg …’ Zac waved his hands, his voice a buffoonish imitation. ‘Dude, you’re such a try-hard. You’re not impressing anyone.’

  Kash looked like he wanted to leap across the table and strangle the kid. But he met my eye and I shook my head. I was in charge now. If we were going to do any roughhousing of the suspects, it was my call. And if we spent too much time knocking innocent people around, the people of this town would clam up on us. Small towns were full of secrets, and if we became their enemy, they’d hide the killer in their midst just to spite us.

  Chapter 32

  KASH WALKED OUT of the interview room, veins beginning to creep up from beneath the skin near his sweaty temples. Snale followed. I went to sit in the chair Kash had vacated and put my feet up on the table.

  ‘Is that tosser your partner?’ Zac asked.

  ‘At the moment.’ I took an intake form from beside the recorder and tossed a pen at the kid. ‘Fill in this form.’ I would take the paper and compare Zac’s handwriting against the diarist’s. The kid sighed and began writing.

  ‘So that guy’s your boyfriend, then,’ he said eventually.

  ‘Certainly not.’

  ‘I thought that was the whole deal, though,’ he snorted. ‘When dude and lady cops work together they get into dangerous situations. Have to save each other’s lives. Then they fuck.’

  ‘I’m no lady,’ I told the kid. ‘And you should be less concerned with who’s fucking who and more concerned about the townsfolk lynching you the moment they get a chance.’

  ‘The townspeople can blow me.’ He sat back in his chair. This kid had a real fascination with fellatio. ‘You ask me, it’s the Old Man you lot should be looking at.’

  ‘Who’s the old man?’

  ‘The dude,’ he waved vaguely behind him, in a westerly direction, ‘I don’t know his name. Us kids just call him the Old Man. He lives out there in the never-never. His people and Dez’s people had some drama back in the day, when Last Chance was first settled. He won’t be friendly, join the town. But won’t fuck off, either. You’ll know him when you see him. He’s scary and old.’

  ‘Scary and old,’ I said. ‘Right. I’ll make a note of it. Until then you’re going to have to stay low. People around here want your blood.’

  ‘What else is new? Everything around here falls on me. You get used to it. I’m too big for this joint. They won’t know who to pin shit on when I bust outta here.’

  ‘You’ve got plans to leave?’

  ‘End of the term, I can legally leave school,’ he said. ‘I’m getting out of here and I’m never coming back. I don’t care if I have to work at a McDonald’s and sleep under a bridge. You’ve gotta start somewhere, man.’

  ‘Is that what people do?’ I asked. ‘Take off as soon as they get the chance?’

  ‘No way.’ He put his arms behind his head. ‘Around here you take over your family farms or you go work for the mines and send your money back here. That’s the only reason people have kids in this town – because if they don’t, their farms will close down. If everybody leaves, the whole town closes down, so anyone who makes plans to go hasta keep it secret or people will start calling you a traitor, talking about how you’re abandoning the place. It’s supposed to be one for all, all for one. So people keep having kids, and their kids take over the farms, and then they have kids. It’s an endless, meaningless cycle of bullshit.’

  ‘So what happens if you’re a kid around here and you don’t want to be a farmer?’

  He made a gun with his fingers, put it to his head. ‘Bang!’ ‘Don’t they try going into the cities?’

  ‘How are you gonna leave and start again in the big city when you grew up your whole life in a hole in the Earth? You got no money. No friends. No family backing you. No work experience. You don’t know the city ways. You try to climb out, it just sucks you back in.’

  ‘But you’re not going to get sucked back in.’

  ‘No way.’ He stretched, reached for the ceiling. ‘I’ve got a plan.’

  ‘Oh yeah? What’s that?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  He settled back in his chair and knitted his fingers over his skinny chest like he was planning on going to sleep. I knew that kind of calm. The emotionless resolve that comes with knowing you’ve reached rock bottom, that there’s no more trouble that you can get into. No expectations. Maximum ostracism. I’d been that kind of teenager. Wandering around the city at night on my own, spray-painting trains, breaking windows, lighting rubbish bins on fire.

  It was actually while I was sitting in a holding cell at Maroubra Police Station, listening to the goings-on in the office, that I’d found my calling. An old lady had wandered in bleeding after being knocked down only a couple of blocks away, her handbag stolen. I’d watched through the bars as two female officers brought her to a chair by one of the desks, tended to her, soothed her, made her a cup of tea. They were like two daughters caring for their frightened, befuddled mother. And the old lady’s eyes wandered over their immaculate blue uniforms, their faces, with awe and joy. I’d imagined someone looking at me like that one day. Like I was their hero.

  Zac Taby needed to decide how he
wanted to be looked at. Right now it was only me looking at him, seeing myself. But I knew what he was in the eyes of the people here. Their runt. The enemy in their midst.

  ‘You’re going to go home and stay there,’ I said. I shoved the kid’s phone back towards him. ‘Play Xbox or something until this whole thing blows over. If I hear or see you around town before I leave, I’ll kick your arse.’

  The kid took his phone and gave a dismissive laugh. He didn’t know how serious I was.

  Chapter 33

  THERE WAS A slender, beautiful Pakistani woman standing in the police station’s main room with Snale and Kash when I emerged, shutting Zac in the interview room to cool his heels. Zac’s mother. Kash still had his interrogation stance on, arms folded and head bowed, eyes narrowed as he took in her face, her figure, as though he could see cruel intentions written on her very countenance. I didn’t see anything but a worried, tired woman fed up with her son’s antics.

  ‘Is he in there?’ She pointed towards the door as I closed it. ‘I am going to absolutely nail that kid.’

  I laughed. Her words were much feistier than her appearance.

  ‘Your son hasn’t done anything wrong, Mrs Taby,’ I said. ‘Not lately, anyway. Not that we can see.’

  ‘Yeah, not that anyone can see,’ she scoffed. ‘Half the trouble he gets into, I only hear about it three weeks later when someone makes some snide remark to me about their dead cat or their burned-out shed. He didn’t kill Mr Campbell, Officer, but I can tell you he hasn’t been out there collecting funds for charity. I haven’t seen him in three days. He needs a smack on the behind.’

  ‘Well, after you’ve smacked his behind, we’d appreciate it if you locked him up for a couple of days,’ I said. ‘Just until everything settles down.’

  ‘Where is Mr Taby?’ Kash said.

  ‘Mr Taby doesn’t have time to be running around after our little monster.’ Zac’s mother rolled her eyes. ‘He works remotely for Ektor Corp. His hours are strange. He has to be up all night sometimes talking to his divisional partners. He’s locked to that computer sixteen hours a day.’

  ‘Ektor Corp.’ Kash nodded. ‘Huh.’

  ‘Your son’s in a lot of trouble, Mrs Taby,’ I said. ‘We’re going to need you to keep an eye on him. There are people in this town who would just love to get their hands on him.’

  ‘They’ll have to wait till I’m done with him first,’ she said, marching towards the interview room.

  Chapter 34

  ‘I REALLY THINK I ought to seek medical attention.’ Whitt touched the back of his skull tenderly as he sat at the bar Tox had taken him to, looking at the blood on his fingertips. Tox put two shots of Scotch on the counter before them.

  ‘I hate working with people,’ Tox said. ‘Don’t make me work with a pussy.’

  Whitt drank the Scotch greedily. His mouth was dry, his nerves rattled. And this ‘Tox’ person was doing little to settle his apprehension. Nothing about the man he was sitting beside convinced him that he was as he said: an active police officer, someone who had worked by Harry’s side on a major case.

  ‘Harry has been responsible for most of the hard work on Sam’s case,’ Whitt said. ‘In my briefcase, I had a copy of her notes. Whoever hit me might have been someone working for the press. Someone looking for fresh story angles on Sam’s case.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Tox grumbled. ‘I think it was whoever framed Sam, trying to get ahead of our game. Trying to know what we know.’

  ‘So you think this whole thing is a frame-up, too?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But why on Earth would someone do this?’ Whitt shifted closer, intrigued. ‘Kill three innocent girls, just to get revenge against Sam?’

  ‘Whoever this is, they were going to kill those girls anyway.’ Tox waved a dismissive hand. ‘All three girls were the same type. White, young, ambitious brunettes. No, that was someone’s fantasy. It was ritualised. Same kill technique. Same dumping ground. Whoever murdered those girls, he’s done it before.’

  ‘That doesn’t fit Sam Blue.’ Whitt sipped his Scotch. ‘He’s got a record, but none of it’s violent or sexual. Petty theft and drug charges in his teens. He’s been good as gold for a decade at least.’

  ‘Mmm-hmm,’ Tox grumbled. ‘But Harry’s got the violent streak, so the public will assume Sam’s just better at hiding his.’

  The two men watched their drinks.

  ‘You ask me,’ Tox said, ‘we’re looking at two possibilities. The killer has decided to pin his crimes on someone, and he’s chosen Sam Blue, whether it’s for vengeance or whatever the hell. That, or the police investigating the killings have decided they need a patsy, and Sam Blue’s it.’

  ‘The police?’ Whitt scoffed. ‘Now you’ve lost me.’

  ‘You know the guys on the task force? Nigel Spader and his team?’

  ‘No,’ Whitt said.

  ‘I knew them way back when. In the academy. They’re cowboys. I got a bit of a history, myself.’ He glanced at Whitt. ‘You’ll learn about it soon enough. So I’ve seen these guys with their claws out. It might be that they came upon Sam by accident. It might be that they’ve got some beef with Harriet, and her brother naturally made a great suspect.’

  Whitt sighed. ‘What the hell are we going to do to clear this up?’

  ‘From my understanding, Harry’s been working on the girls, checking out their autopsies, the crime scenes, their abductions, trying to look for clues there. I reckon we find out what’s happened with this Caitlyn McBeal girl. Find out what Linny Simpson’s final version of events is. Where is Caitlyn? Why isn’t she answering her phone or accessing her accounts? It’s weird. And the police reaction to it is even weirder. The cops just don’t want to admit something’s wrong there because it fucks with their Sam Blue theory.’

  ‘OK.’ Whitt sat up. He felt tingles of exhilaration rush through him. Hope. Dangerous hope. ‘We can do that. We can find her.’

  ‘Don’t get too excited.’ Tox sipped his drink. ‘We want to find her alive. We find her dead and all we’ve got is more unanswered questions.’

  Chapter 35

  ‘THE VIDEO CAMERA they found at Sam’s. That’s weird, too,’ Tox mused.

  ‘It is,’ Whitt agreed. ‘The task force found the camera just sitting there at the end of the bed on a tripod. No files on it. Totally blank. And there isn’t a single fingerprint on it, or trace of DNA. How does the guy use the thing for a prolonged period of time without leaving a trace of himself on it? It didn’t have anyone’s prints on it. It had been wiped clean. Why wipe your prints off it if you’re just going to leave it sitting in your apartment?’

  ‘It’s a prop,’ Tox said. ‘It’s been planted. For sure. The magazines, too.’

  ‘And where are the video files?’ Whitt shrugged. ‘Nothing was found on either of Sam’s computers at home. Nothing on his work computer. Why take all the time to record your deeds and then destroy the files?’

  The two men considered the glasses on the countertop some more.

  Whitt fiddled with the gash in the back of his head. He wasn’t sure what would happen now. The man beside him looked tired, ragged, almost bored with the whole thing. But something told Whitt that he might be the kind of man who always looked that way, a sleepy old python not easily aroused into showing its fangs. Whitt wasn’t sure if this man was a police officer or a private investigator. He was itching to call Harriet and check out if he even was who he said he was.

  ‘It might be that we’re completely wrong about all this,’ Tox said. ‘Maybe there is evidence to convict Blue. Lack of prints, lack of DNA – it doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means the Forensics guys haven’t found them. Maybe Blue wasn’t acting alone. And whoever he was acting with, that’s where all the pieces lie. That’s how it all fits together.’

  ‘What makes you think a partner might be involved?’

  ‘Look, it doesn’t make sense that Blue’s the killer and he left that evidence in
the apartment the way it was,’ he said. ‘Innocent or guilty, Sam Blue did not leave a set-up like that on purpose. No way. Maybe Blue is innocent, and the whole thing has been planted on him by someone. Or maybe Blue is guilty, and he has a partner. And his partner knew the two of them were going to go down. He sacrificed Blue so he could go on killing. Make a fresh start.’

  ‘How would he have had time to plant the evidence?’ Whitt asked. ‘Surely Nigel’s team went straight to the apartment after arresting Blue on his way to work.’

  ‘Nope,’ Tox smirked. ‘They arrested Sam at eleven am. They didn’t get into the apartment until six that night. Nigel’s team. Bunch of excited schoolgirls. Everybody wanted to be in on the Blue interrogation. Only dragged themselves away when they started hitting a wall. Could be someone snuck into Blue’s apartment after the arrest but before the raid. I don’t know.’

  Whitt thought about the shaven-headed man in court. The image of him suddenly popped into his mind, a flash. He dismissed it. His battered brain playing tricks, speculating.

  ‘Blue had scratches on him that the team photographed after the interrogation,’ Tox said. ‘Nigel tried to say they were from the girls trying to fight Blue off. But Blue was in that interrogation room for twenty-two hours. I reckon he might have copped them in there. No one photographed him at intake. That’s dodgy. We gotta figure out what’s going on here, one way or the other.’

  ‘I guess we’re looking at two very interesting possibilities,’ Whitt said. ‘Blue’s either completely innocent …’

  ‘Or he’s a very dangerous psychopath,’ Tox said. ‘The kind who wears sheep’s clothing.’

  Chapter 36

  IT WAS MIDNIGHT. I sat at Snale’s kitchen table, listening to the sound of Jerry’s snoring coming from the room nearby. Photographs of Theo Campbell’s various remaining body parts had been emailed through to us from the morgue in Orange. Was Theo Campbell’s death indeed a part of some grander plan? Were there more bodies to come?