It was an obvious story line, nothing special, and Falk was about thirty pages in before his eyes started to feel heavy. He decided to put the book down at the end of the chapter, and as he turned a page, a thin slip of paper fluttered out and landed on his face.
He plucked it off and squinted at it. It was a printed library receipt showing that the novel had been lent to Karen Hadler on Monday, February 19. Four days before she’d died, Falk thought. She’d used the receipt to mark her place, and the realization that this mediocre thriller could have been the last thing she’d read in her life made him feel deeply depressed. Falk had started to crumple the receipt before he noticed the pen markings on the back.
Curious, he smoothed out the slip of paper and flipped it over. He was expecting a shopping list. Instead, he felt his heart start to thud. He pressed the creases out more carefully now and thrust it under the bedside light to better illuminate Karen’s looping cursive script.
At some point in the four days between when Karen Hadler borrowed the book from the library and when she was shot dead on her doorstep, she had scrawled two lines on the back of the receipt. The first was a single word, slightly messy, written in a hasty hand and underlined three times.
Grant??
Falk tried to focus, but his gaze was dragged down to a ten-digit phone number written underneath. He stared at the number until his eyes watered and the digits swarmed and blurred. The blood pounded through his skull with a throbbing, deafening roar. He blinked hard, then again, but the numbers remained resolutely in the same order.
Falk didn’t waste a single moment wondering who the phone number belonged to. He didn’t need to. He knew it well. It was his own.
23
They found Grant Dow the next morning on all fours under a woman’s sink. He had a wrench in hand and his fleshy crack on display.
“Oi, will he be back to fix that leak?” the woman asked as Dow was dragged to his feet.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Raco said.
The woman’s children watched in wide-eyed glee as Dow was led out to the marked police car. Their expressions mirrored Raco’s just a few hours earlier when Falk had produced the receipt. Raco had paced around the station, bouncing on the balls of his feet, the adrenaline pumping.
“Your number?” he said over and over again. “Why did Karen Hadler want to talk to you? About Grant?”
Falk, who had been awake most of the night asking himself the very same thing, could only shake his head.
“I don’t know. If she tried, she definitely didn’t leave a message. I’ve gone through my missed calls history. No match for Karen’s home, work, or cell number. And I know I never spoke to her. Not just recently. Ever. Not once in her whole life.”
“She would’ve known who you were, though, right? Luke still spoke about you. Barb and Gerry Hadler saw you on TV the other month. But why you?”
Raco picked up the office phone and dialed the ten digits. He looked at Falk as he held the receiver to his ear. Falk’s cell phone trilled loudly in his hand. He couldn’t hear the message as his answering machine clicked in, but he knew what it said. He’d listened to his own voice speak enough times overnight as he’d dialed the number from his room phone in disbelief.
“You’ve reached Federal Agent Aaron Falk. Please leave a message,” the recording said. Short and sweet.
Raco hung up and stared at him.
“Think.”
“I have.”
“Think harder. Grant Dow and Luke didn’t get along; we know that. But if Karen was having problems with him, why didn’t she call the station here?”
“Are you sure she didn’t try?”
“No calls made to police or emergency services from any phone owned by any of the Hadlers in the week before their deaths,” Raco recited. “We pulled the phone records the day the bodies were found.”
He picked up the novel and turned it over in his hands, examining the cover. He thumbed through the pages yet again. There was nothing else caught between them.
“What’s the book about?”
“It’s a female detective investigating a string of student deaths at a college in the US,” said Falk, who had stayed up most of the night speed-reading to the end. “She thinks it’s a disgruntled bloke from town targeting rich kids.”
“Sounds crap. Did he do it?”
“Oh, er, no. It’s not what it seems. Turns out it was the mother of one of the girls in the sorority house.”
“The mother of—? Christ, give me strength.” Raco pinched the bridge of his nose. He shut the novel with a loud slap. “So what do we reckon? Is this bloody book supposed to mean something, or what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think Karen got to the end, for whatever that’s worth. And I checked with the library as soon as it opened. They say she borrowed a lot of this type of thing.”
Raco sat down, stared blankly at the receipt for a moment, then stood straight back up again.
“You’re sure she never called you?”
“Hundred percent.”
“Right. Come on, then.” He grabbed his car keys from the desk. “You can’t tell us, Karen can’t tell us, Luke can’t tell us. So let’s haul in the only person left who might be able to explain why his bloody name’s written on a piece of paper in a dead woman’s bedroom.”
They left Dow to stew in the interview room for over an hour.
“I called Clyde,” Raco said, calmer now. “Told them some arsehole finance investigator from Melbourne had shown up to sort out the Hadlers’ paperwork. Said you had a couple of questions about a document found at the property, did they want to come and babysit you while you asked them? They’ve declined, unsurprisingly. We’re right to go ahead.”
“Oh. Nice work,” Falk said, surprised. It occurred to him that he hadn’t even thought to call Clyde in this time. “So what do we know?”
“Dow’s fingerprints weren’t found anywhere at the farm.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. That’s what gloves are for. How’s his alibi for the murders?”
Raco shook his head.
“Solid and hollow at the same time. He was digging a ditch in the middle of nowhere with two of his mates. We’ll check, obviously, but they’ll all swear blind he was there.”
“All right, let’s see what he says.”
Dow was leaning back in his chair, arms crossed, staring straight ahead. He barely glanced up as they entered the room.
“About time,” he said. “Some of us have got a living to make.”
“You want your lawyer here, Grant?” Raco said as he pulled his chair out. “You can.”
Dow frowned. His lawyer would probably come from the same theoretical firm as Sullivan’s, Falk thought. Property and livestock fifty weeks of the year. Dow shook his head.
“Got nothing to hide. Get on with it.”
He was angry rather than nervous, Falk was interested to note. Falk laid out his folder on the table and paused for a moment.
“Describe your relationship with Karen Hadler.”
“Masturbatory.”
“Anything else? Bearing in mind she was found murdered.”
Dow shrugged, unfazed. “Nup.”
“But you found her attractive,” Falk said.
“You seen her? Before she carked it, of course.”
Falk and Raco said nothing, and Dow rolled his eyes.
“Look. She was all right, I suppose. For round here, anyway,” he said.