The Dry (Aaron Falk #1)(60)
They watched on as Whitlam slowly got into his car and, after a couple of false starts, successfully reversed out and drove away. They let the tape run for another ten minutes. Grant Dow was nowhere to be seen.
“I’ll be off, then,” Deborah called from reception, handbag clutched over her shoulder. She waited a moment but received only a vague grunt in response. Falk looked up and gave her a smile. Her manner toward him had thawed in the past few days, and he felt they’d had a breakthrough when she’d brought him a coffee as she fetched one for the others. He suspected Raco had had a word.
Raco and Constable Barnes barely reacted as the station door slammed behind her. The three of them were each at a desk, staring at their computer screens as grainy images played out. They had taken all the available footage from both cameras at the school, then headed into town.
There were three CCTV cameras in Kiewarra’s main street, Raco had told Falk. One beside the pub, one near the council offices, and one over the door of the pharmacy storeroom. They’d collected the footage from each.
Barnes yawned and stretched, his bulky arms reaching toward the ceiling. Falk was poised for the grumbling to start, but Barnes simply turned back to his screen without complaint. Barnes hadn’t known Luke or Karen, he’d confided to Falk earlier, but he’d given Billy Hadler’s class a talk on road safety a couple of weeks before his death. He still had the thank-you card from the class, including Billy’s crayon signature, on his desk.
Falk stifled a yawn himself. They’d been at it for four hours. Falk was concentrating on the recordings taken from the school. He’d seen one or two interesting things over the hours. A pupil taking a secret piss against the principal’s front wheels. A teacher scraping a colleague’s car with her own, then hastily driving away. But no sign of Grant Dow.
Instead Falk found himself repeatedly watching the footage of Karen. She had arrived and left three times that week—every day but Tuesday, which was her day off, and Friday, by which time she was dead. Each day was much the same. At about 8:30 A.M. her car would pull up. She would get the children out, gather backpacks and sun hats, and disappear off camera in the direction of the school. Shortly after 3:30 P.M. the process would be reversed.
Falk studied her movements. The way she bent over to talk to Billy, one hand on the little boy’s shoulder. He couldn’t make out her face, but he imagined her smiling at her son. He watched the way she cradled Charlotte as she transferred her baby daughter from car seat to stroller. Karen Hadler had been a nice woman before she was shot in the stomach. Good both with children and finances. Falk felt certain Barb was right. He would have liked her.
He obsessively rewound the footage from the Thursday, the day Karen and her son had been murdered. He played and replayed the tape constantly, analyzing every frame. Was that a slight hesitation in her step as she approached the car? Had something in the bushland caught her eye? Was she squeezing her child’s hand tighter than usual? Falk suspected he was jumping at shadows, but he continued to watch over and over. He stared at the image of his dead friend’s blond wife and silently willed her to pick up her cell phone and call the number she had scribbled on the receipt. He willed his past self to answer. Neither event happened. The script remained unchanged.
Falk was debating whether to call it a day when Barnes dropped the pen he’d been twirling and sat up in his chair.
“Hey, check this out.” Barnes clicked his mouse, winding back the grainy film. He had been combing through the material from the pharmacy camera, which was trained on nothing more exciting than a quiet back alley and the door leading to their supply room.
“What is it? Dow?” Falk said. He and Raco crowded around the screen.
“Not exactly,” Barnes said as he set the footage running. The time stamp showed 4:41 P.M. on Thursday. Just over an hour before Karen and Billy Hadler were found dead.
For a few seconds the video looked like a still image, showing nothing but the empty alley. Suddenly a four-wheel drive flashed past. It was there and gone in less than a second.
Barnes rewound the footage and slowed it down. He froze the image as the car reappeared. It was blurry and at an awkward angle, but it didn’t matter. The driver’s face was clear. Through the windshield, Jamie Sullivan stared back at them.
The light was fading by the time Falk and Raco got to the alley, but there wasn’t much to see. They’d let Barnes call it a day after a job well done. Falk stood under the pharmacy’s CCTV camera and looked around. The small road was narrow and ran parallel to Kiewarra’s main street. On one side it backed on to the real estate agent, a hairdresser’s, the doctors’ office, and the pharmacy. On the other, parcels of scrubland had been turned into makeshift parking lots. It was completely deserted.
Falk and Raco walked the full length of the lane. It didn’t take long. It was accessible by car at both ends and connected with the roads leading east and west out of town. In rush hour it would offer a perfect rat-run to cut through town without hitting the main drag. But this was Kiewarra, Falk thought, and it didn’t have a rush hour.
“So why did our friend Jamie Sullivan want to avoid being seen in town twenty minutes before the Hadlers were killed?” Falk’s voice echoed off the brickwork.
“A few reasons come to mind. None of them good,” Raco answered.
Falk peered up at the camera’s lens.