‘Back the fuck up, murderer!’
‘There’s no need to be so hostile.’ Whitt came between the two men. ‘We’re cooperating with you, Detective Spader. We let you know as soon as we had a lead on Caitlyn’s possible whereabouts so that your officers could be on the scene if she was found. That was a goodwill gesture. Now return the favour and let us have our time with Caitlyn.’
‘I don’t know how good multiple interviews are for her right now,’ Nigel mused, his eyes never leaving Tox. ‘She’s very fragile.’
‘You know what else is fragile?’ Tox said. ‘Your neck.’
Tox and the much shorter detective stared at each other. The door to Caitlyn’s room opened and another officer walked out. Whitt took the opportunity to slip through the gap as the door closed.
Chapter 77
THE ROOM WAS full of people. Caitlyn lay against the pillows, talking softly to a police EFIT specialist who sat beside her, scrolling through selections of eyebrows for the composite image of Caitlyn’s captor. In the chair on the other side of the bed, Caitlyn’s mother sat quietly crying, talking on her phone. Whitt understood Mrs McBeal had arrived a week earlier to put extra pressure on the investigative team.
‘I can’t believe it either,’ she was saying. ‘No. No. I just can’t believe it. I tried to tell them. I tried to tell them all along.’
‘Caitlyn, I’m Detective Inspector Edward Whittacker,’ he said, shifting awkwardly between two men standing in the doorway, detectives or counsellors, family members, Whitt didn’t know. ‘I’m, uh, I’m part of the team who found you.’
‘You’re Detective Barnes’s partner?’ Caitlyn looked at him with tired eyes.
‘Yes.’
‘Come here.’ She patted the bed beside her. Whitt moved around the bed, squeezing between people, and settled on the edge beside the girl. Her strength was incredible. As Whitt looked about the room, he noticed more than half the people here were crying. Though Caitlyn looked exhausted, a tiny fire seemed to be burning in her, brightening her eyes. She was being strong for the people here, her family and friends and those who had been searching for her. They needed to know she was alright.
‘I know you’ve answered a lot of questions already,’ Whitt said. ‘But I just need to know anything you can tell me about your captor’s connection to Sam Blue. Did the man who kept you ever say anything about Sam? Did he ever say his name?’
‘He was very shocked and angry at his arrest,’ Caitlyn said. ‘We watched it on the television in the room together that first night. He said they weren’t finished yet.’
‘They weren’t finished yet?’ Whitt swallowed. His mouth was bone dry. ‘Are you sure those were his exact words?’
Caitlyn reached over and held Whitt’s hand. Her fingers were cool and hard, rough from long months in the concrete cell, slowly dying in the darkness.
‘He said he needed him. See, he didn’t touch me,’ Caitlyn said. ‘Not once. He didn’t even speak to me. He was just holding me. He didn’t know what to do. His partner, Sam, was gone and he didn’t know what to do without him.’
Whitt tried to breathe. His throat was tight.
‘I saw Sam Blue a lot while I was locked up,’ Caitlyn said. ‘The TV was my only company. I’d see him walking to court. See footage of him giving evidence. I looked at his eyes. There was a deadness there. It was the same deadness that I saw in the eyes of the man who held me. It was like something inside him had shrivelled up and there was only emptiness left.’
Whitt felt a chill come over him.
‘They killed those girls, Detective,’ Caitlyn said. ‘That man and Sam Blue. They’re the same kind of monster.’
Chapter 78
THE SMOKING HUSK of Snale’s four-wheel drive had been screened off from the public eye by a white tent. I saw the flashes of the Forensics officers’ cameras as we pulled in to the driveway, their ghoulish silhouettes augmented by protective suits. All the front windows of Snale’s house had blown out. Glass crunched under my feet as I made my way up the drive. Again the townspeople drove by slowly, pressing their faces against their car windows. Others gathered in huddles at a safe distance some metres down the road, to gawk and mutter, some still in their bedclothes.
There was a moustachioed officer talking to Snale as I walked into the house. The guy gave me an odd look as I entered. Snale turned away from him and threw her arms around me.
‘Oh, Harry.’ She squeezed me painfully, smoothed down the sides of my hair. I could see she had been crying. She examined me all over, the cast, my face, the torn remnants of the clothes I’d worn during the blast, still reeking of smoke. ‘I can’t believe you’re here. They released you already?’
‘ The bomb,’ I said, ignoring her mothering and turning to the Forensics officer. ‘Any traces? Anything we can use?’
‘Nothing biological,’ he said. ‘Everything burned to a crisp. Hot and fast, those gas-bottle jobs. Our main concern now is recovering everything we can of the boy for the parents.’
My stomach twisted. I must have made a face, because Snale reached up and continued patting my hair.
‘Did you speak to them? Zac’s parents?’ I asked her. ‘What did they say? Are they OK? We should get them into counselling. On suicide watch, maybe. They’ll be fragile. They might –’
‘Just give it a break for a while, Harriet,’ she said. ‘You look like the walking dead. You smell even worse. Have fifteen minutes off, and then we can get back to it.’
Chapter 79
I WALKED NUMBLY to the bathroom and stripped, pulling off a bunch of soft layers of skin from my forearms and neck. Looking in the mirror, half my face appeared badly sunburned, already peeling at my temple. I must have turned away at the last second, put my hands up to try to shield myself from the blast. The tender flesh on the underside of my forearms had taken the worst hit. The edges of my cast rubbed at the irritated skin, causing it to burn anew.
I held my arm up out of the stream of cool water and closed my eyes, raked back my singed hair. Against the back of my eyelids I could see the outline of Zac’s mangled corpse in the front seat, the flames twisting around him, flaring out over the roof.
I screamed as something brushed against my leg. The pig had muscled his way into the bathroom and nosed open the shower door.
‘Vicky! Vicky, help! Oh God!’ I hollered, trying to shove the beast away. It weighed half a tonne. Snale rushed into the room, horrified, trying to shield her eyes from my naked form.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry!’ Despite everything, we were both almost laughing. ‘He likes to drink the water. I think it’s the soap. It tastes different. Oh Jesus, I’m so sorry. Jerry! Jerry! Come here, you idiot!’
The pig was snorting and snuffling at the few centimetres of water at the bottom of the shower. Eventually Snale gave up trying to haul the animal out of the shower with me. I got out and she handed me a towel.
‘I’m seeing stuff on the news about Sam,’ she said. ‘The girl they found. Caitlyn? Someone got some footage of her being carried to an ambulance. She looked terrible.’
‘Nothing about us out here?’ I asked. ‘The bombing? Zac?’
‘No. No way. We’re small fry.’ She sat on the toilet seat near me.
I wrapped the towel around my body, felt exhausted.
‘The girl,’ Snale cleared her throat, ‘she’s saying –’
‘I know what she’s saying,’ I said. ‘It isn’t true.’
Snale shifted uncomfortably.
‘Would anything make you believe that it was?’ she asked.
I took a comb from the edge of the sink and pulled it through my hair, looked at my own eyes in the mirror. Sam’s eyes.
‘No,’ I answered.
Chapter 80