“But that’s all made up for by the friendliness of the guard,” Ngaire said, her voice deadpan. Deb snorted, but Ngaire kept her laughter internal. The last thing she needed was him hearing and deciding that they could spend the rest of the day down here.
“Shannon Rickards,” Deb announced, finding a cabinet drawer that matched. “You look up the two boys.”
Ngaire searched for Jessie Collingwood and, finding nothing, moved onto the second boy, George Kenton.
“Bingo,” Deb said. “They’ve got more of Sam Andie’s missing person’s case in here than in his own folder.”
“I’ve got a file on George Kenton,” Ngaire said. “It’s got an offense for burglary and then a whole heap of interviews from after his murder.”
“Christ. I really hope this tangle happened after the mess with the earthquakes and not before,” Deb said with disgust. “Imagine if this was the state of them beforehand. It would have been a miracle that anyone ever got a conviction for anything.”
Ngaire scanned through the pages quickly, looking for anything relevant. “This is a juvenile conviction,” she said. “It should have been destroyed when his record was expunged.”
“Maybe they didn’t bother since he was dead already,” Deb said, coming up and reading over Ngaire’s shoulder. “Either way, pretend you didn’t see that and bring it along in any case.”
Deb had a whole box full of information, while Ngaire’s haul easily fitted into an expanded drop folder. “Do you want a hand with that?” she asked, as Deb struggled to press the buzzer for release.
“I’m good if you keep the door open for me.”
The guard was quick to respond, this time, not making himself a cup of coffee when he should have been alert. The gates opened and Deb staggered through while Ngaire signed the register for what they were taking, then ran to catch up.
“You know,” she teased, “if you hand me the keys I can open the trunk up for you. Of course, then I’d have to drive.”
“Drive whenever you like,” Deb said. “I don’t care. It’d be good to hang out in the passenger seat for a change instead of having to pay attention to the road all the time.”
“Really?”
“No, but I do need that trunk open, and I was just planning to wrest the keys back off you later.” Deb laughed and shook her head. “I’m pretty sure I could take you even if my arms are about to fall off.”
“Turn sideways, you idiot,” Ngaire ordered. She tucked the drop files under her arm and slid her hands underneath the massive filing box, helping Deb to lift it. As they approached the car, she started giggling. “Of course, now neither of us can open the trunk, damn it!”
“Just put it down on the sidewalk for a second.” Deb groaned with relief as they put it on the ground, then she felt in her back pocket for the keys. Two beeps and the trunk opened.
Ngaire saw the photographs on the top of the box and lifted them up for closer inspection. “My goodness, he was gorgeous,” she said, shuffling through the grainy prints. Sam Andie dressed in full makeup, transformed from a schoolboy to a confident woman, absolutely stunning to behold.
Deb lifted the box up to shove it in the trunk before snatching the photos out of Ngaire’s hands. “If I looked like that,” she said, “I don’t think I’d ever stop staring in the mirror long enough to work.”
Ngaire laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure. And you’d have to forego your rugby in case you chipped one of your inch-long nails.”
“Sports be damned.” There was a hint of regret in Deb’s voice that made Ngaire look at her more closely. “When they were talking about his sexuality, I think I had more of Mrs. Brown on my mind than this. If Sam went out looking that stunning at night, it’s easy to imagine that blokes would have been hitting on him all the time. If one of them copped a feel and took offense…”
“Except he had a girlfriend,” Ngaire reminded her. “We need to chat with Shannon again and see whether their relationship was genuine. If Sam really was into women, then it might take that back off the table.”
“Yeah,” Deb said and laughed. “Because no man ever stuck his hand where it wasn’t wanted.” She tipped the photograph up, so the sunlight illuminated it with a sullen glow and sighed. “What a waste.”
As she left the station, Ngaire checked over her shoulder to see if anyone was close enough to hear her. The coast was clear. While looking through the preliminary case files for Shannon Rickards, Ngaire had spotted a familiar name. She pulled her mobile out of her pocket and dialed a number she’d never thought she’d have to use again.
“Is this Stanley Robinson?” Ngaire asked when a voice answered with an abrupt “Yes?” as though she was interrupting something important.
“It’s Stan. Who is this?”
“Detective Ngaire Blakes, sir. I used to work in your law offices for a short time last year.”
There was a humph, Ngaire imagined it covered up a complete lack of recognition.
“I’m retired now,” he said. “If you’re looking for a reference, you’ll need to speak to someone else from the office. Mr. Thomas is still there, try him.”
“Wait!” Ngaire said, scared he was about to hang up on her. “I’m not looking for a reference. I’d like to speak with you about a case you handled a long time ago if that’s okay.”
“What case?”
“Shannon Rickards.”
There was a pause long enough that Ngaire double-checked that the call was still connected. She resumed her walk toward her car, hoping that she wouldn’t be driving directly home.
In the front seat, with more privacy from eavesdropping colleagues, Ngaire tried again. “Her name has come up in connection with a missing person from back in 1981. It may not be connected with her subsequent murder convictions, but there are still a lot of alarm bells ringing when I look at her old case. Do you remember her?”
“Of course, I remember her. She was my first big case. I went in there all gung-ho thinking we could get an acquittal for sure.” He sighed, making the receiver on the phone vibrate like a downsized vuvuzela. “Shannon wouldn’t even let me try.”
“Do you know why she was so anxious to plead guilty?” Ngaire asked.
“Listen, detective. Do you have a warrant for this information?”
“No, I don’t, sir. This would be strictly off-the-record. I’m not asking for official information on the court case, I can get that from the files. I’m after an impression of what was actually going on.” Ngaire paused to gather her thoughts. “An idea of what might have happened because I don’t think what is recorded in evidence is anything close to what went on.”
He snorted and the silence extended out again. Ngaire wanted to push him, force him into telling her everything, but she knew if she opened her mouth again the only result would be no.
Finally, he gave another long sigh. “I won’t be able to tell you much, and none of this will work in any cases you have pending. I’ll be upfront with you about that. But, come over, and I’ll tell you what I can.”
“Thank you, sir.” Ngaire noted down the address and got her car moving as quickly as possible. She wanted to get to Stan’s home before the retired barrister changed his mind.
Chapter Twelve
“Shannon Rickards was my first big case ever,” Stan Robinson said, showing Ngaire through into his lounge. The house was enormous, hidden back behind a leafy frontage that protected the large bay windows from the peeping eyes on the street.
“Did she ask for you, or were you assigned?” Ngaire said, taking a seat on the ottoman where Stan indicated.
“Oh, no. I was appointed by the judge when she insisted on representing herself. He pulled my name off the list of legal aid lawyers. I think my dad may have pulled a few strings to get me near the top.”
“Your dad was a lawyer?”
Stan nodded. “He was close to getting a judgeship about that time, but a car accident took care of that. Rammed into the backside of a truck and lost half his m
emory and most of his cognition.”
“I’m sorry,” Ngaire said, leaning forward. “That must have been hard.”
“On my mother mostly,” Stan said and shrugged. “I was so invested in building my career up, I didn’t help out as much as I should. Money was the most that I could give to help her, and my parents were already rolling in that.”
He rubbed both hands along the top of his trouser legs, an unusual gesture that Ngaire remembered from staff meetings.
“Shannon made it very clear that she didn’t want or need my help, right from the moment I first met her.” Stan smiled and shook his head. “She was full of determination, all right. There was no way I could steer her away from certain destruction.”
“She wanted to plead guilty from the start?” Ngaire asked.
“Oh, yes. Shannon basically called the police and met the responding officers at the door of the club with her hands out, ready to be cuffed. Often, people go through a bit of indecision, even when they’re caught out.” He rubbed his legs again and leaned back in his chair, eyes drifting up toward the ceiling. “Not her, though. Shannon wanted to plead and go to jail for her crime, and there wasn’t any swaying her.”
Ngaire inched forward, leaning so she bridged as much of the divide between them as she could. “Did you think she was innocent?”
Stan frowned and lifted his hands, palms up. “I don’t know either way for sure. She would barely speak to me, even if it were just to acknowledge the procedures I talked her through.” He stopped and looked out the window at the setting sun, glinting pinks and reds off the haze hanging in the air. “The whole case seemed weird to me. At the time, I didn’t have a lot of experience, but it appeared to be out of the ordinary. After I threw another forty years on top of that, I’m certain that nothing in that situation was anything like it seemed.”
The same doubt that had infiltrated each detective’s mind while Gascoigne gave them a rundown, Ngaire now witnessed on Stan Robinson’s face.
“Even just the ability to do that crime,” he said. “I don’t know of any female who could stomp a man to death. I know”—he held up his hand—“she was wearing heavy boots with steel tips. I had that point read back to me ad nauseum. It still didn’t make any sense.”
“How do you mean?” Ngaire asked as though the same thought wasn’t lodged firmly in her own head.
“The police had the crime scene laid out with the kicks and timings as best they could figure them. Most of that was from Shannon’s testimony, forensics back then wasn’t like it is now. She was five-foot-eight, tall for a girl, but still, nothing compared to those teenage boys. So, there were two of them, they’ve got a few inches on her, and yet she managed to knock them both to the ground.”
Stan sighed again, looking at his watch before cupping his chin in the palm of his hand.
“She alternated, that’s what she told the police. Shannon alternated between kicking one and then the other. While they’re both crying or screaming in pain, she’s just meant to have zig zagged back and forth, kicking them, drawing blood, stomping on their heads.”
A rush of nausea rose up the back of Ngaire’s throat, burning bile with a sharp acidic taste that clung even after she swallowed it down. When Gary Willis had questioned the ability of a girl to do that damage, Gascoigne’s answer had seemed reasonable. Lay it out like Stan just had, and reason flapped its wings and flew away.
“How many times was she meant to have kicked them?” Ngaire asked.
“Don’t you have all this?” Stan said. His tone changed to one of impatience, though the tears gathering in his eyes told the real story. His voice was rough with holding them back. “Shannon gave all the information straight to the police whenever she was questioned. They did question her, too,” he said, beginning a gentle rock back and forth. “Over and over again.”
“We’re trying to piece together the files now,” Ngaire said. “There’s a lot of stuff that still appears to be missing. Whether that’s misfiling or the earthquakes shaking them loose from where they should be, we don’t know.”
“They estimated at least two dozen times, each,” Stan said. He scratched at the bald patch on top of his head, leaving bright red marks behind. “I don’t understand how anybody could stamp on someone’s face until they were dead. I don’t know how they could look at what they were doing and just continue, but the police heard Shannon confess and just went ahead and locked her up.”
“What did you think happened?” Ngaire asked in a gentle voice. The images that he’d evoked in her mind were the kind that would stay to haunt her forever.
“It must have taken so long,” Stan said, ignoring the question. “Minutes, maybe as much as fifteen. Who would even have the energy?”
“Were there ever any other suspects for the killings?” Ngaire asked. “Any other motives that might have come into play.”
“Motives?” Stan snorted. “No one even attempted to look, I don’t think. Or, if they did, it didn’t make it through to the discovery. If Shannon hadn’t been caught there or hadn’t confessed, they might have tried a bit harder. As it was, they just followed up on what she said to prove the few circumstances matched up.”
“Like what?”
“Like checking with her mother and father that she wasn’t home, as though that proved she must have been out killing. Ridiculous, since the police already knew she was there.”
“Did you ever talk to her parents to try to work out what had actually gone on?”
Stan Robinson shook his head. In the short time that Ngaire had been in his home, he had aged years. “They didn’t want to talk to anyone. I phoned her mom, thinking that she’d be the first to try to defend her daughter, but she didn’t want to know.”
Ngaire thought of Shannon’s father insisting that his wife would have been down at the station if she thought that Shannon had gone missing. The look of tolerant disbelief that had shone in Shannon’s eyes.
“Had her mother kicked her out?”
Stan shrugged. “I don’t know. Why?” He leaned forward. “What’s she been saying after all these years?”
“Nothing to me, not about the murders. I was asking Shannon about something else instead. She did say a few things that made me believe that the relationship with her mother was extremely strained.”
“What case is she involved in?” Stan stared at her intently and when Ngaire shrugged he poked his finger at her. “Turnabout is fair play. I’ve told you what I know, at least give me something.”
Ngaire thought of the news the night before. “You’ve seen that there’s been a body discovered up on the Cashmere Hills, the media connected it to the fire?”
Stan nodded.
“The body is much older than that. It’s pure coincidence that it’s been found now.”
Before she could say anything more, Stan leaned forward. “Sam Andie. You’ve found the body of Sam Andie.”
“What was left of it,” Ngaire agreed. “We interviewed Shannon because of her connection to the case.”
“I always wondered what happened to him,” Stan said, looking over Ngaire’s shoulder at the blank wall. “It didn’t sit right with me that he just happened to bugger off a week or two before the murders happened.”
He sat back in his seat and rubbed at the top of his trouser legs again.
“For a while, I thought that Sam Andie was the culprit that night and Shannon was just covering for him. A man would have had a far easier time doing the things that were done to those boys.” He held a hand up again. “Not the conscience, I’m not talking about that. Just physically.”
“It seems likely that by the time of the murders, Sam Andie had been dead for at least a couple of days.”
Stan gave a crooked smile. “Well, there goes my pet theory.”
“You’ve had a long time to think about this,” Ngaire said. She could sense that their conversation was coming to a close, but she seemed further from the truth of it than ever. “What other scenarios
did you come up with?”
“Just that. I thought that Shannon had walked in on something she shouldn’t have, and then took the blame upon herself. Now”—he shrugged—“your guess is as good as mine.”
As he showed her back to the door, Stan laughed again, a short sound full of bitterness. “Wouldn’t it be something if it turned out that all along, she’d been telling the truth?”
Chapter Thirteen
Matthew Jamieson stared at the television screen. He’d live-paused it on the photograph then left it, scared to press play again in case it revealed something more horrible than he could bear.
The face haunted his dreams and chased sleep away. Not the still version of a calm schoolboy having his picture taken that the news crew had chosen, but the face twisted in a rictus of terror while he advanced closer.
Missing Man’s Body Found, read the headline below it. This long after the event, Matthew had begun to think that it would never happen. That the hills above Christchurch would keep their bounty a secret forever.
“Come on, Matthew,” his wife yelled from the kitchen. “It’s almost time to eat.”
“Coming.” He turned the TV off, still frozen on the image, then walked through to the bathroom to wash his hands before the meal. Even though he hadn’t been doing anything but paperwork, sometimes he needed the appearance of cleanliness to remind him that he was clean.
His wife set down a casserole pot that contained meals enough for six. This long after the boys had gone from home, Emilia still hadn’t downsized the portions she cooked to reflect the changed status of the family. It was as though if she continued to provide for them, the boys would be beckoned home.
Fat chance. If George and Thomas wanted to pop in, they had an hour and twenty-minute flight down from Auckland first. If Steven and Augie wanted to attend, they’d have to uproot their families from San Francisco first.
Not that any of their boys showed the slightest interest in their parents any longer. Emilia was forced to follow their activities on Facebook along with every other virtual friend. Letters home had never been a thing, not even by email. Comments went unanswered, the click of a button to like beyond the attention span of any of them.
The Only Secret Left to Keep Page 8
