‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘My favourite.’
Tox threw the Joker up and caught him in his palm, put the little man in the pocket of his leather jacket. He winked at Nigel as he ducked back under the garage door and out into the night.
Chapter 41
LINNY SIMPSON CUT a dejected figure at the back of the cafe, staring into a stained coffee cup as Whitt entered. He went to her table and stood there expectantly, perhaps a couple of seconds too long, before she broke from her reverie.
‘Ms Simpson?’
‘Hi,’ she said, watching him sit. The inch of coffee at the bottom of her cup that had so fascinated her looked cold. ‘I don’t have long to talk to you.’
‘That’s perfectly fine. I’m grateful for you giving me any time at all.’ Whitt caught the eye of the waitress and ordered for them both. ‘I understand you’ve stopped cooperating with the officers you’ve been dealing with. Detective Spader and his team.’
‘They don’t believe me,’ Linny said. Though it had been almost five months, Whitt could hear astonishment lingering in Linny’s voice. Flickers of rage. ‘No one believes me. My own family are starting to think twice about my story. I’m getting messages online from people I don’t know saying I’m lying about all this.’
‘ Are the messages threatening?’ Whitt asked.
‘They’re abusive,’ Linny said. ‘People think I’m making up what happened because I want to free Sam Blue. Or because I want attention. My fifteen minutes of fame.’
‘There are some difficulties with what you’ve said,’ Whitt said carefully. ‘Your story changed in subtle ways.’
‘Well, it was hard to remember,’ Linny pleaded. ‘I mean, in the beginning. I remember it clearly now.’
Whitt nodded though his thoughts were grave. That wasn’t how memory worked. The longer Linny waited after the actual event, the more degraded her memory of it would become. An inference here, a suggestion there, a few sleepless nights running the thing over in her mind, and the whole story would become unrecognisable.
‘Why don’t you take me back to that day?’ Whitt took out his notebook, slid a collection of papers across the page. ‘I have your police statement here. You say you’d just finished an ethics class …’
‘I walked over to the parking garage.’ Linny said. ‘Up the fire stairs. There was no one around, not on that level anyway. I think I’d seen some people before I went up, but I’m not sure. He was waiting just next to the door. When I came through, he grabbed me around my throat.’
Whitt made notes. Linny Simpson was the Georges River Killer’s type. Brunette. White. Slim, petite. Student of the university, a motivated, budding business undergrad. The way she described being grabbed was convincing. An inexperienced abductor might grab a woman around the middle, allowing her to scream, to throw her weight forwards, her centre of gravity keeping her upright. If he swept his arm around her throat instead, made a headlock, and yanked her backwards, he’d have her off balance and silent.
‘He tried to drag me towards a white van parked to the right of the door,’ she said. ‘I was screaming.’
‘How could you have screamed when he had you in a headlock?’
‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘I was so shocked. It happened so fast.’
‘Was the van indeed white?’ Whitt asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Your initial police statement says it was green.’
‘I was mistaken,’ Linny said. ‘I remembered later that it was white.’
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.