‘Whoever this is, they were going to kill those girls anyway.’ Tox waved a dismissive hand. ‘All three girls were the same type. White, young, ambitious brunettes. No, that was someone’s fantasy. It was ritualised. Same kill technique. Same dumping ground. Whoever murdered those girls, he’s done it before.’
‘That doesn’t fit Sam Blue.’ Whitt sipped his Scotch. ‘He’s got a record, but none of it’s violent or sexual. Petty theft and drug charges in his teens. He’s been good as gold for a decade at least.’
‘Mmm-hmm,’ Tox grumbled. ‘But Harry’s got the violent streak, so the public will assume Sam’s just better at hiding his.’
The two men watched their drinks.
‘You ask me,’ Tox said, ‘we’re looking at two possibilities. The killer has decided to pin his crimes on someone, and he’s chosen Sam Blue, whether it’s for vengeance or whatever the hell. That, or the police investigating the killings have decided they need a patsy, and Sam Blue’s it.’
‘The police?’ Whitt scoffed. ‘Now you’ve lost me.’
‘You know the guys on the task force? Nigel Spader and his team?’
‘No,’ Whitt said.
‘I knew them way back when. In the academy. They’re cowboys. I got a bit of a history, myself.’ He glanced at Whitt. ‘You’ll learn about it soon enough. So I’ve seen these guys with their claws out. It might be that they came upon Sam by accident. It might be that they’ve got some beef with Harriet, and her brother naturally made a great suspect.’
Whitt sighed. ‘What the hell are we going to do to clear this up?’
‘From my understanding, Harry’s been working on the girls, checking out their autopsies, the crime scenes, their abductions, trying to look for clues there. I reckon we find out what’s happened with this Caitlyn McBeal girl. Find out what Linny Simpson’s final version of events is. Where is Caitlyn? Why isn’t she answering her phone or accessing her accounts? It’s weird. And the police reaction to it is even weirder. The cops just don’t want to admit something’s wrong there because it fucks with their Sam Blue theory.’
‘OK.’ Whitt sat up. He felt tingles of exhilaration rush through him. Hope. Dangerous hope. ‘We can do that. We can find her.’
‘Don’t get too excited.’ Tox sipped his drink. ‘We want to find her alive. We find her dead and all we’ve got is more unanswered questions.’
Chapter 35
‘THE VIDEO CAMERA they found at Sam’s. That’s weird, too,’ Tox mused.
‘It is,’ Whitt agreed. ‘The task force found the camera just sitting there at the end of the bed on a tripod. No files on it. Totally blank. And there isn’t a single fingerprint on it, or trace of DNA. How does the guy use the thing for a prolonged period of time without leaving a trace of himself on it? It didn’t have anyone’s prints on it. It had been wiped clean. Why wipe your prints off it if you’re just going to leave it sitting in your apartment?’
‘It’s a prop,’ Tox said. ‘It’s been planted. For sure. The magazines, too.’
‘And where are the video files?’ Whitt shrugged. ‘Nothing was found on either of Sam’s computers at home. Nothing on his work computer. Why take all the time to record your deeds and then destroy the files?’
The two men considered the glasses on the countertop some more.
Whitt fiddled with the gash in the back of his head. He wasn’t sure what would happen now. The man beside him looked tired, ragged, almost bored with the whole thing. But something told Whitt that he might be the kind of man who always looked that way, a sleepy old python not easily aroused into showing its fangs. Whitt wasn’t sure if this man was a police officer or a private investigator. He was itching to call Harriet and check out if he even was who he said he was.
‘It might be that we’re completely wrong about all this,’ Tox said. ‘Maybe there is evidence to convict Blue. Lack of prints, lack of DNA – it doesn’t mean they’re not there. It just means the Forensics guys haven’t found them. Maybe Blue wasn’t acting alone. And whoever he was acting with, that’s where all the pieces lie. That’s how it all fits together.’
‘What makes you think a partner might be involved?’
‘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.