Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(33)

‘It was fucking Caitlyn!’ Linny yelled. People at the tables near them stopped their conversations, stared. ‘This is bullshit! Yes, I was confused in the beginning. I’d hit my head. I got knocked out.’

‘Yes,’ Whitt said. ‘Initially you said there were two girls watching. Caitlyn and another girl. A blonde.’

‘No, the blonde wasn’t there,’ Linny said. ‘I made up the blonde.’

Whitt felt a muscle in his jaw twitch. When she was seventeen, the woman sitting before him at the cafe table had made a statement to police that her ex-boyfriend was stalking and harassing her. A couple of weeks later, she withdrew the complaint, her relationship with the boy obviously repaired. In her secondary statement, Linny had said that she’d ‘made up’ the stalking allegation.

Linny seemed to know what he was thinking.

‘I mean that my brain made it up,’ she said. ‘Not that I made it up … deliberately. Consciously.’

‘ You fled the scene and ran back down the fire-escape stairs,’ Whitt said. ‘At the bottom you slipped, and you sustained a head injury. You believe you lost consciousness temporarily.’

‘Yes.’

‘For how long?’

‘I don’t know,’ Linny said. ‘It couldn’t have been long, right? Someone would have found me.’

‘However long it was, no one found you. You regained consciousness on your own and went to the university’s administration office to report what had happened,’ Whitt said. ‘And in that initial report you didn’t mention that you’d seen Caitlyn or the blonde girl. You only mentioned her when police arrived, twenty minutes later.’

Linny didn’t answer.

‘In fact, I have a statement here from one of the administration ladies, Michelle Stanthorp, who says that she and another assistant sat you down behind the counter and while they were hearing your story, she received a call transferred over from the security department. It was from Caitlyn McBeal’s mother telling them she was trying to get in contact with the girl. She was concerned for her daughter’s safety, worried because Caitlyn had hung up on her unexpectedly and now wasn’t answering her phone,’ Whitt said. ‘Michelle Stanthorp says that while she was on the phone to Mrs McBeal, she drew up Caitlyn’s student file, including her photograph, on a computer in full view of where you were sitting.’

When Linny didn’t answer, Whitt looked up. The girl’s head was bowed into her hands. In all his determination to find the truth, Whitt realised he had slipped into interrogation mode. This girl was not a criminal. At worst, she was a liar. He reached over and took a hand down from her face, squeezed it.

‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ she said.

‘I believe something happened to you,’ Whitt said gently. ‘Something bad. And you didn’t deserve me to be so cold about finding out what it was. I’m sorry.’

‘It was supposed to have been me,’ Linny said. She was suddenly distant, staring out the cafe’s front windows to the busy street. Her teary eyes wandered back to Whitt. ‘Whatever happened to her, whether she’s dead or alive, it was supposed to have been me.’

Whitt closed his notebook. Sighed.

‘You’ve got to find him,’ Linny said. ‘Before he does it again.’





Chapter 43


THE DAY WAS filled with interviews. Zac Taby had said that there were four other Last Chance Valley kids who sat in on the explosives lesson with the visiting student teacher two years earlier. Of those four, one, Brandon Skinner, had died of a drug overdose the year before, home alone and experimenting with meth. The remaining three were called to Snale’s place, two of them with parents in tow. Snale and I sat them down on the couch and picked their brains. Had they participated in the spate of firecracker mischief that had ensued after the ill-fated lesson? Did they know anyone who had? How did they feel about the town and its people? How did their friends feel? Did they know anyone who owned a bright red backpack? The answers to our questions, from all of the kids, were a consistent no. These were the bored, hopeless rug rats of Last Chance. They got up to trouble. It was what kids did out here. None of them were going to admit anything.

Townspeople came to the door to drop helpful hints to Snale and me about locals they thought were responsible for the bombing. Most of the tips were about Zac Taby. There were a couple of mentions of a man named Jed Chatt who lived outside town, Zac’s ‘scary old man’.

Whitt started texting me at midday on a new number. I didn’t ask why.

The account you set up for Sam is empty. I visited. He’s nervous.

I eased air through my teeth. I’d known, as soon as my brother was arrested, that this was going to be an expensive time in both our lives. With his permission, I’d sold almost all of Sam’s possessions immediately after his arrest, and taken charge of his bank account. I’d sold my apartment, my car, and some collectibles of my own, and unlocked some term deposits of my personal savings. Within a week of his arrest, the spending started. I put some money into Sam’s commissary account at the remand centre so he could buy snacks and sundries, toothpaste and the like. Then, like clockwork, the threats on his life began. I started feeding protection money into his account, as slowly as I could manage, just enough to keep his enemies satisfied. I knew they’d want more in time. But all I had to do was keep Sam alive until the end of his trial. I’d take out a loan if I had to. Get a second and third job. Whatever it took.