“Yeah, I’m afraid so.” Whitlam rubbed his thumb and index finger together in the universal symbol for money. “We’d have more if we could afford more.”
“Can we find Karen on her last day?” Falk said, although it wasn’t primarily Karen they were looking for. It was Grant Dow. True to their word, Falk and Raco had spent several hours grilling Dow’s mates over his alibi. They had backed him up to the hilt. It was nothing less than Falk expected, but it still pissed him off.
Whitlam enlarged the parking lot image so it filled the screen. “Karen usually drove in, so she’d probably be on this camera.”
He found the right recording and jumped through the timeline to the end of the school day. They watched the silent footage as pupils walked by in twos and threes, giggling and gossiping, set free for another day. A slim bald man walked into the frame. He went to one of the cars and opened the trunk. He rummaged for a moment before retrieving a bulky bag. He heaved it over his shoulder and walked back off screen in the direction he’d come.
“The caretaker,” Whitlam said.
“What’s in the bag?”
Whitlam shook his head. “I know he has his own set of tools. I’d say it was that, at a guess.”
“He worked here long?” Falk asked.
“About five years, I think. For what it’s worth, he seems like a good guy.”
Falk didn’t reply. They watched for another ten minutes until the trickle of pupils had all but dried up and the parking lot was quiet. Just as Falk was losing hope, Karen appeared.
Falk’s breath caught in his throat. She had been beautiful in life, this dead woman. He watched as she strode across the screen, her pale hair blowing back off her face. The low-quality recording made it impossible to read her expression. She wasn’t tall but had the posture of a dancer as she walked briskly through the parking lot, pushing Charlotte in a stroller from the direction of the day care.
Three steps behind her, Billy came into view. Falk felt a chill at the sight of the stocky dark-haired child who looked so much like his father. Next to him, Raco shifted his weight and cleared his throat. Raco had seen firsthand what horror was waiting for the boy.
Billy was pottering, fully engrossed in some toy clutched in his hand. Karen turned and silently called to him over her shoulder, and he ran to catch up. She bundled both children into her car, fastening them in, shutting the door. She moved fast, efficiently. Was she rushing? Falk wasn’t sure.
On-screen, Karen straightened and stood completely still for a moment, one hand on the car roof, her back to the camera. Her head tilted forward a fraction, and she brought a hand to her face. Made one small movement with her fingers. Then another.
“Jesus, is she crying?” Falk said. “Rewind that bit, quick.”
No one spoke as they watched it again. Then a third time, and a fourth. Head down, two small flicks of her hand.
“I can’t tell,” Raco said. “It looks a bit like she could be. But she could as easily be scratching her nose.”
They let the tape run on this time. Karen lifted her head, took what could have been a deep breath, then opened the driver’s door and climbed in. She reversed out of the space and was gone. The parking lot was empty again. The time stamp on the tape showed she and her son had less than eighty minutes to live.
They stared at the footage, skipping over long stretches during which no one came or went. The school receptionist emerged ten minutes after Karen, then nothing happened for about forty minutes. Eventually, the teachers started heading to their cars one by one. Whitlam identified each as they appeared. The caretaker returned, put his bag back in the trunk, and drove away just after 4:30 P.M.
Eventually, Whitlam’s car was the only one left in the lot. They sped ahead on the tape. Shortly after 7:00 P.M., Whitlam himself appeared on-screen. He was walking slowly, his head down and his broad shoulders slumped forward. In the seat next to Falk, the principal exhaled. His jaw was clenched tight as he watched the footage.
“It’s hard to look at this,” he said. “By then, the Clyde cops had called to tell me Billy and Karen were dead.”
They watched on as Whitlam slowly got into his car and, after a couple of false starts, successfully reversed out and drove away. They let the tape run for another ten minutes. Grant Dow was nowhere to be seen.
“I’ll be off, then,” Deborah called from reception, handbag clutched over her shoulder. She waited a moment but received only a vague grunt in response. Falk looked up and gave her a smile. Her manner toward him had thawed in the past few days, and he felt they’d had a breakthrough when she’d brought him a coffee as she fetched one for the others. He suspected Raco had had a word.
Raco and Constable Barnes barely reacted as the station door slammed behind her. The three of them were each at a desk, staring at their computer screens as grainy images played out. They had taken all the available footage from both cameras at the school, then headed into town.
There were three CCTV cameras in Kiewarra’s main street, Raco had told Falk. One beside the pub, one near the council offices, and one over the door of the pharmacy storeroom. They’d collected the footage from each.
Barnes yawned and stretched, his bulky arms reaching toward the ceiling. Falk was poised for the grumbling to start, but Barnes simply turned back to his screen without complaint. Barnes hadn’t known Luke or Karen, he’d confided to Falk earlier, but he’d given Billy Hadler’s class a talk on road safety a couple of weeks before his death. He still had the thank-you card from the class, including Billy’s crayon signature, on his desk.
Falk stifled a yawn himself. They’d been at it for four hours. Falk was concentrating on the recordings taken from the school. He’d seen one or two interesting things over the hours. A pupil taking a secret piss against the principal’s front wheels. A teacher scraping a colleague’s car with her own, then hastily driving away. But no sign of Grant Dow.
Instead Falk found himself repeatedly watching the footage of Karen. She had arrived and left three times that week—every day but Tuesday, which was her day off, and Friday, by which time she was dead. Each day was much the same. At about 8:30 A.M. her car would pull up. She would get the children out, gather backpacks and sun hats, and disappear off camera in the direction of the school. Shortly after 3:30 P.M. the process would be reversed.