Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(52)

A photograph of Caitlyn McBeal in her current state would have been worth a lot of money, Whitt thought. It was guaranteed front-page news. Over the four and a bit months she had been held captive, Caitlyn had lost a good ten kilos, and her hair had thinned by half. The girl Tox had carried to the ambulance outside the abandoned Pinkerton Hotel had looked like a cancer patient. Sunken eyes and yellowed teeth, her neck and arms covered in bedsores. Her lips had been dry and cracked and bleeding. Tox had described finding her in the alley outside the hotel, desperately trying to crawl towards the street, the exertion of escaping her captor having reduced her almost to unconsciousness. The doctors were saying that, had the unfortunate homeless man Ronnie Hipwell not stumbled upon her makeshift prison cell and initiated her escape, she would have been mere days from death. It was both a miracle and a tragedy that Hipwell had ventured down to the lower basement level after rain flooding the ground floor had pushed aside the trash that had been obscuring the door leading downstairs. Caitlyn was free. Hipwell was dead.

Detective Nigel Spader emerged from the room and closed the door behind him, eyeing Tox suspiciously as he tucked his notebook into his back pocket.

‘Five more minutes,’ he said.

‘You said that an hour ago,’ Tox said.

‘Yeah. Maybe I did. What are you going to do about it?’

‘I’m going to go in there.’ Tox stepped forwards, pointed at the door behind his fellow officer. ‘And if you try to stop me, you’ll find yourself downstairs in triage.’

‘You’re lucky you’re getting access to the witness at all, Barnes,’ Nigel spat. ‘You are not on this task force. Neither of you are. And I can deny an interview any time I want.’

It was the first time Whitt had seen Tox almost lose his cool. ‘Let me tell you a few things,’ Tox said, jerking a thumb at Whitt. ‘This two-man investigation right here, we’ve got enough to get a mistrial and bail in the very least.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘We’ve traced the camera from Sam Blue’s apartment to a hock shop in Bondi,’ Tox started listing on his fingers, ‘and we’ve got video of a man purchasing the camera who digital imaging analysists say is far too tall to be Blue. You yourself admitted that your people muscled Blue to extract the confession. We found Caitlyn McBeal’s mobile phone at the crime scene you guys released. Your ten-man crack team of task force cockheads is going to look really stupid when the press gets wind of this. You need to fuck off and do some damage control, and leave Caitlyn McBeal to us.’

The bigger man had all but backed Nigel into the wall. Nigel shoved Tox’s chest.

‘Back the fuck up, murderer!’

‘There’s no need to be so hostile.’ Whitt came between the two men. ‘We’re cooperating with you, Detective Spader. We let you know as soon as we had a lead on Caitlyn’s possible whereabouts so that your officers could be on the scene if she was found. That was a goodwill gesture. Now return the favour and let us have our time with Caitlyn.’

‘I don’t know how good multiple interviews are for her right now,’ Nigel mused, his eyes never leaving Tox. ‘She’s very fragile.’

‘You know what else is fragile?’ Tox said. ‘Your neck.’

Tox and the much shorter detective stared at each other. The door to Caitlyn’s room opened and another officer walked out. Whitt took the opportunity to slip through the gap as the door closed.





Chapter 77


THE ROOM WAS full of people. Caitlyn lay against the pillows, talking softly to a police EFIT specialist who sat beside her, scrolling through selections of eyebrows for the composite image of Caitlyn’s captor. In the chair on the other side of the bed, Caitlyn’s mother sat quietly crying, talking on her phone. Whitt understood Mrs McBeal had arrived a week earlier to put extra pressure on the investigative team.

‘I can’t believe it either,’ she was saying. ‘No. No. I just can’t believe it. I tried to tell them. I tried to tell them all along.’

‘Caitlyn, I’m Detective Inspector Edward Whittacker,’ he said, shifting awkwardly between two men standing in the doorway, detectives or counsellors, family members, Whitt didn’t know. ‘I’m, uh, I’m part of the team who found you.’

‘You’re Detective Barnes’s partner?’ Caitlyn looked at him with tired eyes.

‘Yes.’

‘Come here.’ She patted the bed beside her. Whitt moved around the bed, squeezing between people, and settled on the edge beside the girl. Her strength was incredible. As Whitt looked about the room, he noticed more than half the people here were crying. Though Caitlyn looked exhausted, a tiny fire seemed to be burning in her, brightening her eyes. She was being strong for the people here, her family and friends and those who had been searching for her. They needed to know she was alright.

‘I know you’ve answered a lot of questions already,’ Whitt said. ‘But I just need to know anything you can tell me about your captor’s connection to Sam Blue. Did the man who kept you ever say anything about Sam? Did he ever say his name?’

‘He was very shocked and angry at his arrest,’ Caitlyn said. ‘We watched it on the television in the room together that first night. He said they weren’t finished yet.’

‘They weren’t finished yet?’ Whitt swallowed. His mouth was bone dry. ‘Are you sure those were his exact words?’