Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(25)

‘Look, it doesn’t make sense that Blue’s the killer and he left that evidence in the apartment the way it was,’ he said. ‘Innocent or guilty, Sam Blue did not leave a set-up like that on purpose. No way. Maybe Blue is innocent, and the whole thing has been planted on him by someone. Or maybe Blue is guilty, and he has a partner. And his partner knew the two of them were going to go down. He sacrificed Blue so he could go on killing. Make a fresh start.’

‘How would he have had time to plant the evidence?’ Whitt asked. ‘Surely Nigel’s team went straight to the apartment after arresting Blue on his way to work.’

‘Nope,’ Tox smirked. ‘They arrested Sam at eleven am. They didn’t get into the apartment until six that night. Nigel’s team. Bunch of excited schoolgirls. Everybody wanted to be in on the Blue interrogation. Only dragged themselves away when they started hitting a wall. Could be someone snuck into Blue’s apartment after the arrest but before the raid. I don’t know.’

Whitt thought about the shaven-headed man in court. The image of him suddenly popped into his mind, a flash. He dismissed it. His battered brain playing tricks, speculating.

‘Blue had scratches on him that the team photographed after the interrogation,’ Tox said. ‘Nigel tried to say they were from the girls trying to fight Blue off. But Blue was in that interrogation room for twenty-two hours. I reckon he might have copped them in there. No one photographed him at intake. That’s dodgy. We gotta figure out what’s going on here, one way or the other.’

‘I guess we’re looking at two very interesting possibilities,’ Whitt said. ‘Blue’s either completely innocent …’

‘Or he’s a very dangerous psychopath,’ Tox said. ‘The kind who wears sheep’s clothing.’





Chapter 36


IT WAS MIDNIGHT. I sat at Snale’s kitchen table, listening to the sound of Jerry’s snoring coming from the room nearby. Photographs of Theo Campbell’s various remaining body parts had been emailed through to us from the morgue in Orange. Was Theo Campbell’s death indeed a part of some grander plan? Were there more bodies to come?

Kash had tried to convince me all evening that Adeel Taby, Zac’s father, was a worthy avenue we needed to be looking into. Ektor Corp, the company he worked for, had its hands in oil and gas extraction in the Middle East, and there were rumours of the company’s interest in arms dealership. I reminded him that I was in charge. We’d made a deal. Taby’s parents didn’t interest me as suspects.

I pressed open the diary again and touched the tiny, fluid handwriting, ran my fingers over the printed images of mass shooters glued onto the pages. The handwriting didn’t look like Zac Taby’s. But I wasn’t an expert on that. The diarist and Zac shared a propensity to push overly hard on the paper, dent the pages, make it difficult to read the words in the left-hand side of every page.

The diarist had made a close analysis of the actions of Elliot Rodger, who’d killed six people and injured fourteen others on a rampage through Isla Vista, California. Rodger had stabbed his three housemates, then gone after young women in a sorority house nearby, punishing any women he could find for all the sexual rejection he’d faced in his life. The diarist’s commentary was more critical of Rodger’s killings than it had been for the other shooters. There was a list of ‘mistakes’ on the right-hand side of the page, under a map of the killer’s route of terror through the city.

Most victims random, not personal.

Undignified video confessional before shooting. Sounds desperate.

High-risk initiation – could have been caught after stabbing housemates.



I made a note to check what sort of counselling services were available in the area, both to teens and adults, and what the levels of depression and suicide were in the region. The diarist seemed particularly interested in leaving a good-quality manifesto of their ideas and complaints, their reasons for doing what they were planning to do. They would only plan on doing that if they didn’t see themselves being around to talk about those things in the aftermath.

Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold attacking kids at their high school who had taunted them. Elliot Rodger attacking girls who had rejected him. I googled Seung-Hui Cho and watched excerpts of his video manifesto on YouTube.

You have vandalised my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You forced me into a corner and gave me only one option.

These young men weren’t trying to inspire people. Each of them would kill themselves after their attacks. They wanted vengeance. It wasn’t terrorism. It was payback.

I shifted my papers around, found my phone and looked through Whitt’s email from earlier in the evening about meeting Tox. A tiny smile played about my lips. My heart had been aching to be home, and now I had a new reason to dream of myself there. The incomprehensible partnership of Whitt and Tox: a man who never went anywhere without a personal manicure kit, and a man who I’d seen walk around with blood all over his shirt for two straight days. Wherever the two went with the leads I had given Whitt, one of them would meticulously gather the tiny breadcrumbs of every possible scenario while the other walked ahead of him, kicking down doors and shoving people out of his partner’s path.

When my phone rang, I expected it to be Whitt, but it was a number I didn’t recognise. I walked out to the front porch and sat on the step looking at the stars.