I noticed Kash hadn’t asked me for my name, or a long-winded explanation of my position within the police. I let it go.
“Who exactly are you talking about?” I asked. “We’ve got a dead guy and a bomb. How do you know who else was involved?”
“You’ve seen the diary?”
“Barely,” I said.
“Well, you’re behind.” Kash sighed. “You can get a debriefing once we’ve established a secure boundary. We need to act now and ask questions later. Get going. I’ll take charge here.”
I suffered the same verbal slap to the head, the phenomenon of compliance sweeping over me like a spell. I found myself walking back toward the road, thinking I’d move Snale’s truck, put lights on the road, see if she had some traffic cones in the back to guide any passersby onto the shoulder so we could question them. I didn’t further analyze Kash’s resolve that a dangerous suspect was behind this, and that it was possible he or she was somewhere around here.
The spell wore off before I hit the roadside. I stopped, frowned, tried to get my thoughts in order. Snale bumped into me from behind. She’d been jogging up the path behind me.
“Sorry.” She sniffed. “I’ve got to get to the radio and call in the team from the next town over. We need more people. This is bad. This is really bad.”
“It’s OK.” I jogged alongside her. This was probably the most terrible crime to ever happen in Last Chance Valley. Maybe the only serious crime they’d ever had. “Agent Dickhead’s got it all under control.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “I just found the victim’s head. I know who he is. He’s my chief.”
Chapter 13
HE CAME EVERY second night when the temperature began to sink, at what Caitlyn assumed was sunset outside her concrete room. The first few times, she tried to brace herself for what was about to happen. She visualized it for hours on end, her skin crawling and stomach turning, trying to decide how she would endure the rape or torture or prolonged death he had planned for her. But after a week, when none of those things had happened, a deep, sickening confusion set in. And then there was the rage. Caitlyn sat on the mattress in the dark and boiled with a quiet, dangerous rage.
The man with the shaved head came and unlocked the door, walked down the steps and put her supplies on the floor. Two packaged sandwiches, one chicken and one roast beef, the kind a person buys at the service station. Two bottles of water. Two chocolate bars. One roll of toilet paper for the bucket in the corner. He wouldn’t look at her. The ritual was always the same. He came, he dropped the supplies, he changed the bucket, and he left, locking the door securely behind him.
Caitlyn had tried everything she could think of. She’d waited by the door and swung a wine bottle she’d found in the crates at his head, missed her target by centimeters. The wine was expired and tasted foul, but after breaking a couple of bottles she’d come up with a good, shiny dagger that she came at him with the next time, again to no avail. He’d shoved her hard down the stairs, and she’d lain crying, the back of her head bleeding on the cold stone floor.
The next time, she’d been a bit trickier. Caitlyn had pulled lengths of fabric from the old mattress and woven them into a strong trip-wire, pulled this across the doorway. He’d tripped, and she’d launched herself at him, clubbed him hard in the back of the skull with a lump of wood broken from one of the crates. She’d got through the doorway and looked down the dark hall that led to wherever she was before he’d grabbed her ankle and dragged her back into her prison room. Down the hall she’d seen a long concrete walkway, stairs to the upper levels, and plenty more heavy trash that he dragged in front of the door after he locked it. Caitlyn glimpsed flyers on the ground, warped and yellowed, a box of molded brass numbers, the kind a person would screw to a door or the front of a house. An old hotel? The power must still be turned on for her television to work. Why couldn’t anyone hear her cries? Was she underground?
Caitlyn didn’t know if her captor was just unusually strong or if the rations and the lack of sleep had left her weak. She was no match for him. As the days passed, it became harder for her to wake. Harder to think. Harder to cry. In the daytime, she screamed for help. At night she sat and watched the television in the corner, pulling at strands of her hair.
Caitlyn recognized this for what it was. A holding pattern. Something had gone wrong with his plan, whatever it had been. Now he was simply keeping her alive. Uninterested. Out of ideas. If he didn’t want sex from her, and he didn’t want to torture her, and he didn’t want to talk to her, why the hell was he doing this?
When the news came on, it was more often than not about the Georges River Killer’s arrest. Sam Blue had featured in the media for months.
She sat chewing her nails and remembering the first night in the concrete bunker, one of the only times she’d seen her captor show overt emotion. Surprise and rage at the image of Samuel Blue on the screen. He’d said it wasn’t finished yet. That this wasn’t the plan.
What wasn’t the plan? Caitlyn knew she hadn’t been her captor’s planned victim. That the girl she’d interrupted him trying to abduct had been the one who was supposed to be here now. But was it more than that? Caitlyn remembered the man standing before the television screen, running his fingers up the back of his skull, gripping at the muscles in his neck as they locked, rock hard, with anger. Sam Blue’s arrest. Did that have something to do with it all?
Was this man the Georges River Killer’s partner?
Chapter 14
EDWARD WHITTACKER STRAIGHTENED his tie in his reflection in the courthouse windows, smoothed down a cowlick at the side of his narrow head. He felt strangely lonely without Harriet, although she’d been so detached since the beginning of the Blue hearings that sometimes he’d forgotten she was there beside him, fidgeting in her “pretty sister” getup.
She’d been impossible to talk to in the weeks since their return from the desert, when Whitt decided he’d leave his home in Perth and come to Sydney to support the new partner he’d learned to admire. She was a hard creature, Harriet Blue. Unpredictable and sharp edged. When he’d met her on their case in Western Australia, her brother had just been arrested, and she’d been stripped bare of the minimal friendliness she managed to maintain in order to get on with others. But in their time in the Outback, fleeing a sniper who was hunting young men and women like dogs, the Sex Crimes detective had grown on him. She was a good person, even if that goodness was buried deep under plenty of bad behavior. He wanted to help her. And now that she’d gone and got herself banished from the courthouse altogether, he had no choice but to be her representative. It was what good friends did.
Whitt now stood watching at the edge of the crowd gathered around the New South Wales Police Commissioner on the courthouse steps, a tall, broad man wearing a uniform laden in red and silver buckles and stars. Microphones bobbed and swayed as Commissioner Sorrell moved his head. A petite journalist at the front of the crowd was trying not to be pressed against the man by the bigger journalists behind her shoving forward to catch quotes.
“We have faith that Caitlyn McBeal will be located safe and well,” Sorrell said. “We know that she has not fallen victim to the Georges River Killer, because our primary suspect in that case was under surveillance the entire day she disappeared. At the approximate time of Caitlyn’s last confirmed sighting four months ago, Sydney police detectives already had Samuel Jacob Blue in custody. That’s all I can say right now.”
Whitt knew some of the inside information about the Caitlyn McBeal abduction. The supposed incident at the University of Sydney hadn’t even made the news right away. Television screens across the country had been flooded with images of Sam Blue’s arrest from that morning. But way down the list of items on online news sites, a vague story was emerging. A young student from the university, Linny Simpson, was claiming someone had tried to abduct her from a car park and she’d managed to escape, passing an African American girl as she ran to safety. That African
American girl fit the description of the now-missing Caitlyn McBeal.
Whitt had been exhilarated. Was this the Georges River Killer, trying to nab another victim only hours after Sam had been arrested? If it was, then surely Sam would go free! The nightmare for his friend and her brother would be over. All they had to do was find Caitlyn McBeal.
Then problems started to emerge with Linny and her tale. Linny admitted she’d fainted after reaching the bottom of the stairs of the car park, terrified by her ordeal. She’d hit her head and suffered a concussion. Details of her ordeal were inconsistent across her interviews with police. Her abductor had tried to get her into a white van. No, a green van. He’d been tall. Maybe not so tall. There had been another girl in the car park. Caitlyn and one other. Two others, maybe.
Then Linny’s history was exposed. Her teenage drug use. A stalking report against an ex-boyfriend that had been entered and then withdrawn. The police were still searching for Caitlyn McBeal, and were heartened by reported sightings of her in Queensland. Maybe she’d just run off. That was the solution in most Missing Persons cases. The stress and struggle of daily life simply got too much. They dropped their belongings and fled, started again somewhere new. Whitt had seen it plenty of times during his career. He’d seen mothers lock the front door on their children and simply wander off, turning up years later with a new name, a new job, halfway across the country. Caitlyn was young and alone on the opposite side of the planet from her life back home. She had no serious commitments. Disappearing, even just for a while, would be easy.
Whatever had happened to Caitlyn, Linny Simpson’s explanation for it wasn’t anyone’s favorite lead, because she was inconsistent. Confused.
But if she was right, even somewhere close to the truth, it meant two things that no one on the Georges River case wanted to admit.
That Sam Blue was innocent.
And that the killer was still out there.
Chapter 15
I STOOD BY the side of the road, watching the sun rising on the distant edge of the crater, a depthless black in silhouette against warm pink. The temperature was coming up fast. Soon the town below me would be swirling with gossip about the explosion in the early hours. Already, local farmers who had heard the bang and become curious had started to line the roadside, eyeing me cautiously as they met with Snale to get the lowdown.
The town’s only police officer was barely keeping it together. Snale’s chief, a man in his sixties named Theo “Soupy’ Campbell, owned the bloodied, dirt-clodded head she had found about ten meters from the center of the blast zone. I assumed he’d owned the arm we’d seen hanging from the tree, and the various other bits and pieces of human that had been strewn about the bush. We hadn’t done too much more wandering around in the crime scene. It was best to leave it for Forensics, who would soon be boarding a helicopter back in Sydney. The entire police force from the nearest town, Milparinka, were on their way to help us secure the scene and the dead police chief’s truck, which we’d found parked in the bush on the opposite side of the road to the blast. Milparinka’s force comprised two officers, bringing our total to five. I felt drastically out of my depth. I was used to securing crime scenes with the help of dozens of people, patrollies covering doorways with tape, chiefs standing about looking important before the cameras, forensics experts donning their gear.
I went to Snale’s truck and sat in the front passenger seat with the door open, brought out the photocopy of the diary and began reading through it again. I didn’t want to leap to any conclusions about the connection of the bomb to the book. Yes, what had happened to Chief Campbell looked like murder. The duct tape on the wrist was a sure sign, even if one accepted the highly improbable idea that he’d chosen to commit suicide by bomb when he likely had a perfectly good gun in his possession. I needed to find something in the diary that connected the idea and the crime.
The first pages were all about guns. I spread a page over my knee and looked at the photocopied pictures of two handsome teenage boys.
The page was a study of the Columbine killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who’d gone on a shooting spree at their local high school in Colorado, killing twelve students and a teacher and injuring twenty-four others. I knew the story, had read a couple of true crime books about it. The diarist had made a list, beside a doodled sketch of the wolfish Harris, entitled “Successes.”
Kept the circle of conspirators small.
Surveillance of victims for maximum impact.
Covert weapons purchases.
What was this? A list of the things the Columbine killers had done right in their evil plan? Was the diarist comparing and contrasting the massacre plans of high-profile shooters to come up with the perfect kill plot? I flipped the page. More about the Columbine killers’ work, excerpts from the boys’ diaries and maps of their school. There were five pages dedicated to the Columbine shooting in the diary. A sickly feeling was creeping up from the pit of my stomach. I ran my fingers over a note at the bottom of the last page on Columbine.
Thirteen victims, it read. I can beat that!
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James Patterson, Home Sweet Murder
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