Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(31)

There had been no green vans in the car park lot that day. There had been a white one, but it had come and gone well outside the times necessary to line up with Linny’s story.

Whitt made a noise in his throat. It sounded more dismissive than he planned. He jumped when Linny banged the table with her palm.

‘Hey,’ she snapped. ‘I thought I was going to die, you understand?’ Whitt looked at her eyes, searing with furious tears. ‘When was the last time you thought you were going to die?’





Chapter 42


‘I DID SCREAM,’ Linny insisted. ‘I screamed my lungs out.’

Whitt glanced at the police statements lying on the page beside him. Beneath Linny’s statement was one from the security guard on the boom gate on the ground floor of the car park lot that day. He had not heard Linny’s screams, despite the car park making the perfect echo chamber, the building hollow down the middle through the ramps and the sides open to the buildings around it.

‘You say you fought him beside the van,’ Whitt said. ‘And you got free somehow.’

‘I don’t know how.’

‘Maybe you kicked him? Maybe you punched him?’

‘I said, I don’t know.’ Linny took her coffee from the waitress, hugged it with her hands as she had the other cup. ‘I was scared.’

‘Did he actually get you into the van?’ Whitt asked. ‘Did you get in and then somehow get out?’

‘The van door was closed,’ Linny said.

Whitt wrote furiously. His mind was churning, pumping like an engine. He dipped his shirt cuff in the coffee as he reached for the sugar, cursed himself.

‘OK. You struggle, you get free, and you run, and it’s then that you notice a girl watching what’s happening.’

‘A black girl,’ Linny said. ‘Caitlyn McBeal.’

‘Now, I mean, we’ve got to be careful here,’ Whitt warned. ‘You say it was Caitlyn McBeal. How do you know that?’

‘I’ve seen pictures of her. She’s missing.’

‘But you didn’t know her personally before you saw her there that day. You didn’t say to yourself as you ran past her, “Oh, that’s Caitlyn.”’

‘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.’