Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(10)

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’ get-up.

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 behaviour. 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 forwards 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 favourite 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.