Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(42)

Chapter 57


‘WHAT?’ TOX GRUNTED.

Whitt’s mind was rushing. He struggled to form words.

‘What?’ Tox repeated.

‘How do we know it was a white van?’ Whitt asked.

‘Linny Simpson said the guy tried to drag her into a white van.’

‘But has anyone else ever said that? Has there ever been a white van connected with the other missing girls?’

‘Well …’ Tox thought about it. ‘No.’

‘It’s always a white van, isn’t it?’ Whitt’s heart was beginning to race in his chest. ‘In the movies. People are always abducted into black or white vans. What if Linny Simpson was right about everything that happened to her except the vehicle?’

Whitt closed his eyes. Remembered Linny sitting before him at the cafe table.

‘She said the van door was closed,’ he looked at Tox. ‘When the guy, the abductor dragged her over to the van, he didn’t manage to get her into the back of the vehicle. It was closed. That doesn’t make sense.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’d have left it open. Surely he didn’t plan to grab her, drag her all the way over to the van, drop her on the ground and expect her to lie there while he pulled the door open.’

‘How sure was she that the van door was closed?’ Tox asked. ‘She took a blow to the head. She fainted afterwards. That’s one of the main reasons the police rejected her story, because they think she was confused.’

Whitt shrugged helplessly. Tox considered Whitt’s words. Then he walked back to the group of students and plucked up the camera again.

‘Hey, we need that!’ one of the girls cried. ‘It’s due next week!’

‘It’s worth a shot,’ Tox said. ‘Let’s get a BOLO on the green sedan. See what turns up.’

Whitt was rubbing the bridge of his nose as they ascended the fire stairs, a headache pulsing behind his eyes.

‘Oh shit!’ he said. ‘My glasses!’

He jogged up the stairs, remembering the clatter of his glasses as Tox knocked him sideways in the struggle for Sandy. He searched between the cars, bent low and looked under greasy tyres. He spotted them deep under a blue Camry. Before he could get down, Tox put a hand on his chest.

‘Not in that fancy outfit.’

Whitt watched as Tox crawled under the car, dragging himself forwards on his belly on the asphalt. He seemed to linger under the vehicle a little too long, the legs of his filthy jeans unmoving.

‘ You alright under there?’

Tox scrambled out from under the car, threw the glasses at Whitt’s chest. He jogged around the back of the Camry, head low and eyes narrowed, like a hound.

‘What is it?’

‘This channel,’ Tox said. ‘This drainage channel.’

He pointed to a narrow drainage channel cut into the asphalt, covered with a blackened and oil-covered grille. Tox all but dove under a car two down from where they had stood. Whitt heard the scrape of iron.

Tox reappeared, grinning triumphantly, smeared with grease, and holding a broken phone.





Chapter 58


IT WAS TIME to go. Time to risk it all. Caitlyn had tried to bargain with her captor. She’d tried to reason with him. Hell, she’d even tried sympathising with him, attempting to understand the kind of sickness a mind like his must have. She understood that she had become an animal to him. An inconvenient pet. He didn’t speak to her. His eyes hardly ever found hers anymore. He was beginning to feed her only every second day. It was clear to Caitlyn that her captor didn’t know what to do with her now. She wouldn’t survive waiting for him to decide. This was it. She would have to put everything on the line. Fight or die.

Fighting meant lying as still as she could on her belly in the middle of the floor, the wine bottles smashed all around her. The sour, eggy smell of expired alcohol was making her eyes water. She lay for hours before she heard the footsteps in the corridor. Hesitant, soft. She heard him shifting back the things he used to block the doorway, the scrape and thump of the biggest thing, the rattling and jangling of the smaller things. His hands on the locks. Caitlyn closed her eyes and eased a long breath into her aching lungs, let it slip through her lips. Softly, softly, she thought. If she screwed this up, it was all over.

She felt no fear. One way or another, it was about to be over.





Chapter 59


I SAT UP in my fold-out bed on Snale’s porch, listening to the sounds of the night-birds and clicking away at my laptop. I was sending enquiries about Sam’s case. Whitt had emailed a list of leads that he and Tox were working on. A green sedan. A broken phone. The fight with Jace Robit’s people, and the optimistic tone of Whitt’s email, had lit a fire in me. Earlier, I’d managed to get a fifteen-minute phone conversation with Sam, and my brother sounded healthy, and calm despite the catcalls in the background. I sent a request to my chief, Pops, to have the security guard from the car park re-interviewed by Nigel’s team. I wanted to get in touch with the detectives in the Gold Coast chasing down sightings of Caitlyn McBeal, to find out if there was any truth to the rumours.

From a thin mattress on the floor beside my bed, Zac Taby spoke up, breaking my concentration.

‘So you work on the town’s case all day, and you work on your brother’s case all night,’ he said.