If she wasn’t even brave enough to bring it up with her direct superior, then she could hardly blame Gascoigne for not seeing any potential in her. Ngaire jogged up the stairs, taking two at a time, to work her frustration off.
She could have stayed in the stairwell for another hour and still not burned away the feeling of inferiority but, mindful of the time, Ngaire walked out into the floor and looked around her.
The compartmentalization of the Central Station meant that she didn’t venture far from her floor unless required. Now, she stared around her, letting the floor plan and her eyes work out where she should go.
Although the floor was the exact same size and shape as downstairs, the pod configuration and desk setups were different. Still, once Ngaire worked out the differences between meeting rooms and offices, she had it down and headed off toward the main office where she expected the DI sat.
Before she got halfway there, a voice called out, “Ngaire Blakes?” She turned and saw a middle-aged woman with the chevrons of a Detective Senior Sergeant holding out a hand in greeting. Two steps and Ngaire shook her hand.
“I’m DSS Harmond,” the woman said. “I’m running this investigation from the floor while the DI is out in the field. Come with me, and I’ll take you around the rest of the team.”
A dozen officers’ names went in and out of Ngaire’s head as she followed the DSS around the floor. Everyone they spoke to was interrupted in the middle of a task. Compared to the times when Ngaire and her fellow officers could sit and talk a case out, searching for the next appropriate line of inquiry, it seemed very different indeed.
Not that Gascoigne’s style didn’t yield results, as well.
“If you take a seat here,” the DSS said, indicating an empty desk. “Then you should have time to log-in and get set up before we start the debrief. You took the phone call from the surgeon down south, didn’t you?”
Ngaire looked up, a bit startled and unsure if a reprimand would follow. “Yes, that’s right. I tried to put him through, but he just kept talking…”
Harmond held her hand up, stop. “We all know how that goes. If you could give the team a rundown summary of what he said, though, that would be great.”
As Ngaire nodded and turned back to the computer to get it started, her face began to flush. A pre-embarrassment flush that might soon be joined by mid- and post- blushes.
She’d barely managed to get herself logged in and call the notes up before the team was summoned into the center of the room. Some members slouched on pod walls while others dragged their chairs over. Thinking ahead, Ngaire pulled her chair with her, so she didn’t need to stand and talk.
“We have some new faces today,” Harmond started. “And tomorrow we’ll probably bring around some more recruits. DI Moimoi wants this case sorted and off the headlines every night, so the teenage boys’ families don’t have their grief drawn out longer than it has to be.”
“Do we have intel on when the father’s going to be ready for an interview?” one detective called out, earning himself a fierce stare. Ngaire swallowed and felt for the man as some of the team members, used to a different protocol, shook their heads.
“Bob Rickards will be at the station later this afternoon, unless something drastic changes,” Harmond said. “During this meeting, think of anything relating to the case that you want to be answered during that interview. We can craft the questions together at the end.”
“Who’ll be doing the interview?” the same officer called out, undeterred by the previous reaction.
“I’ll be leading the interview, either in the room or through the observation channel. I’ll assign tasks to everybody at the end of the debrief, including the interview positions.”
She raised her eyebrows in query, but the answer seemed to have settled down the officer who pulled out his notepad, ready to jot the salient points down.
“Ngaire?”
Ngaire gave a small start at her name, feeling her heart speeding in her chest. “Yes?”
“You’ve met Bob Rickards before, haven’t you?” When Ngaire nodded, she continued, “What impressions did he leave with you?”
Ngaire flipped back through her notepad, more to gain time to think the question through than for the value to be had in her scrawled notes from the day.
“He’s protective of his daughter, Shannon,” Ngaire said slowly, thinking back to her first impression. “He’s fiercely proud of her, even through all that’s happened. When we were talking to her about the Sam Andie case, he interrupted whenever he thought we were pushing too hard.”
There was a snicker from another officer, and Ngaire ducked her head down so that the curls of her fringe hid her eyes from view.
“Anything else?”
“He’s not house-proud,” Ngaire added. “They live on a poor street, but they still stuck out like a sore thumb because they were the only ones not trying. The same with his personal appearance. He dressed and acted like he didn’t care for social conventions.”
“Okay. So, whoever ends up interviewing Rickards, remember those details. If you want to rile him up or get him on the defensive, go after his daughter. That will put him on the back foot. One officer can dress up, one dress down, in the hope that he gravitates to the disheveled interviewer. We can use that for our version of a good and bad cop routine.”
Ngaire’s mouth fell open at the discussion while all around her the team nodded their heads and scribbled down notes. She clamped her jaw shut against a protest and awaited further instruction.
“Daniel? Where have you got to with the boys’ school records?”
A young detective stepped forward, notebook at the ready. “Both George and Jessie weren’t great in school. They scraped through for school certificate, but it was a close thing. From the records still available, it seems that they were both a favorite of detention. There are notes on a parental meeting for Jessie Collingwood that might have been laying down the groundwork for an expulsion.”
“Did they have any jobs after school? Stuff like that?”
“Jessie had a milk round every evening. The detentions might have started to interfere with that if he was getting out late all the time. I couldn’t find George on the books officially anywhere, but workplaces don’t need to keep records beyond seven years, so it doesn’t mean he wasn’t.” Daniel paused for a moment. “He could also have been working under the table. It was more of a cash society back then.”
“Any points of intersection with Sam Andie?”
“Yeah. Sam was a few years ahead of them, but when he first arrived at the school, they all shared an orientation class together. After that, the Academy streamed them out of contact. Nothing to indicate that their paths intersected again.” He shrugged. “They would have known him visually, even if they never spoke.”
“Considering that Sam Andie was the only African American student at his school,” Harmond said. “I think that any pupil from there would have known him visually, even if they didn’t know his name.”
Ngaire frowned, the muscles in her shoulders tightening. “I don’t think that any student in Sam’s school would necessarily have known it was him,” she said. When blank faces stared back at her, she sighed and explained further.
“If there was a line-up of black kids from the US then it’s doubtful the whole school would pick correctly. These boys”—she nodded at Daniel as a stand-in for the two teenagers—“they might have. They might also have known him well enough to recognize him in drag.”
Harmond inclined her head. “Point taken.” She turned back to Daniel. “What else do you have on them?”
“There’s a paper file on a burglary, but the record should have been expunged. Nothing’s left on George or Jessie’s criminal record according to the mainframe. Naughty boys perhaps but not bad.”
“What was your team’s feeling?” Harmond said, turning to Ngaire. “Did you get the sense that they were somehow culpable in their own deaths?”
Ngai
re stared at her, wide-eyed. Tell me she didn’t just say that! “My Sergeant,” she said, with emphasis on the word my, “said to steer clear of investigating the two boys killed because that wasn’t the case we were prosecuting. Unless we had something solid to bring to him, we weren’t to touch it.” She waited for a beat. “We didn’t find anything solid.”
“Fair enough,” Harmond said, the words rolling off her back. “The focus of the cases has changed a bit since you started, thanks to Mr. Rickards’ confession. Until we can sort out the original mess with Shannon’s murder charges, we won’t be able to advance the Sam Andie case.”
“I think we can work them in tandem, surely,” Ngaire said. The room stilled, and Harmond cocked an amused eyebrow at her. It was accompanied by a smile that didn’t reach up to her eyes.
“The chances of ever solving Sam Andie’s murder case is slim,” Harmond said, “given the time elapsed and the lack of solid evidence.” Her mimicry stung, but Ngaire straightened up her back. “With only two suspects in the Kenton/Collingwood case, we have a much better chance of securing a conviction.”
“Another one,” some wit at the back of the room whispered. Ngaire ducked her head forward to hide a silent laugh.
“Angel,” Harmond called out loudly. A man at the back stepped forward. “You were investigating the movements of Bob Rickards on the day in question?”
The officer gave a broad smile. “We haven’t found any records of him being caught on CCTV,” he said, earning a groan from the team. “He didn’t have tickets to the match that Sam and Shannon attended. We also couldn’t find him on the DVD recording sent up with the archive files. TVNZ had archive footage that we’re halfway through at the moment. No sign of him so far.”
“What about later?” Harmond said. “It was three days after the game that the Kenton and Collingwood murders took place.”
“The area of town that it happened isn’t well-populated, and all the stores down there have changed hands a dozen times over in the interim. He had no parking tickets against his name at all, not even so much as a speeding camera snap. We’ve checked with his old neighbors, but they’ve either died or can’t remember.” He gave a wry smile. “It didn’t stop them talking.”
“What about his local shops?” Harmond asked. “Was there a local pub he might have frequented?”
“Not that we can track down without asking him,” Angel said, frowning. “But we can certainly add that to the list of questions for the interview. He lived in a highly populated area, suitable for couples with young kids. They had three shopping centers roughly equidistant from his house. They won’t be anything like they were back then.”
A few of the assembled team members started to issue small huffs of frustration. Ngaire felt a sense of de ja vu waft over her. An old man confessing to a crime that had already been sorted. Four decades of interim events to wipe the slate of memory clean.
“There was never any motive established for Shannon to kill those boys,” Ngaire said. “At the time, no one pressed for one to complete her conviction. No one seemed to want to upset the case with her confession so readily at hand.”
Harmond gave a short nod in agreement. “What of it?”
“If her father was the one who killed those boys, then sorting out a motive might be possible. Shannon was there, she’s the one who called the police. If Bob now places himself in the old warehouse and the boys are there too, then it raises the possibility of a killing in defense.”
“You think that the teenagers were attacking Shannon?”
Ngaire shrugged. “It makes sense. She was only a year older than those two. They didn’t go to the same school, but they did know Sam Andie. Shannon would have been out of her mind with worry about her boyfriend. By then, he’d been missing for three days.”
Daniel put his hand up. “Those detentions at the school? A lot of them were for fighting.”
Harmond nodded. “So, we have two teenage boys who like to give other kids the bash. They get mixed up with Sam somehow—”
Ngaire interrupted, “Or Shannon just thinks that they know something more than they do.”
“—and then they attack her and good old Dad steps in to defend her against them and goes a bit too far,” Harmond finished.
“Why would she take the blame?” a male officer to Ngaire’s left-hand side asked.
She blinked her eyes, trying to think. “Her mother was ill at the time,” she said.
“And she spent fifteen years in prison to get out of nursing her mother?” the officer asked, raising his eyebrows.
“There was bad blood between Shannon and her mother. I can’t be sure, but my instinct is that she rejected Shannon’s identifying as male.” Ngaire rubbed the skin above her eyebrow, it was starting to twitch with excitement. “She already felt guilty because, without her connection with Sam, there wouldn’t have been a late-night meeting. Her dad came to her rescue, and if he went down for the crime, then her mother would have died alone.”
The mood of the room switched, plunging down into disbelief. Ngaire felt the exasperation of something dancing just out of her reach. An explanation that would make sense from all the different angles.
Before the contagion could take hold, Harmond rallied her again. “The surgeon from down south, what did he have to say?”
“Sam Andie wasn’t one of his patients,” Ngaire said. “Although he knew who I was talking about. He couldn’t say without breaking privilege, but I gained the feeling that it was Shannon who was seeing him professionally. The appointment card that Sam Andie had in his bag when he died was for his girlfriend.”
“Who was looking up the lease on the abandoned warehouse building,” Harmond asked. A woman raised her hand, at the same time looking as though she didn’t want to be called upon. Harmond nodded to her.
“The council records showed that it was formerly owned by Gill construction. They leased it out for thirty years before they couldn’t get a new tenant. The place was a death trap. It had been burned out so many times that the council was considering implementing penalties if the owners didn’t take steps to secure it.
“In 1980, Gill construction went under, and the property went into liquidation with McPhail Ferguson. They negotiated for remedial work, but the company that came in found significant structural issues with the building. It was in line for demolition when the murders occurred.”
“Okay.” Harmond paced back and forth, hands on hips, eyes staring intently down at the ground. “I’ve talked to the surviving parents of both boys today, but there’s very little new information to go on there. As far as they’re concerned, their boys never had any reason to be in that part of town. They’d never heard of Shannon before that night, and only one could remember Sam Andie.”
She turned her back to the room and strode over to a whiteboard, selecting a black and a red marker. “Questions?”
“Why did Bob Rickards go into a disused warehouse late at night?” Ngaire suggested.
Angel nodded and added, “And what was Shannon doing there? Did he follow her there or did they arrange to meet?”
Harmond wrote a quick series of numbers in red and then wrote the questions beside them in black.
The officer tasked with the warehouse lease called out, “Were they meeting the boys there? Did they all know each other?”
“How did he kill them?” Ngaire said, asking Harmond, “Did anybody tell him?”
“Fair enough,” she said, adding it to the list. “Mark? You were on the murder pathology, right? Were there any details of the killings withheld from the media at the time?”
Mark stepped forward. “One of the victims—George, from memory—had a cross in his mouth.”
Ngaire felt a cold hand brush across the back of her skull. The exact point where a crazed man who used religion as an excuse for control had once knocked her unconscious.
At the quizzical expression on Harmond’s face, he expanded, “it was wooden with a small hook, from a neckl
ace or a bracelet.”
“The killer placed it there?” Harmond clarified.
Mark shrugged. “The report doesn’t say, but that seems likely. Otherwise, he could have been wearing a necklace and holding the pendant in his mouth when the killer struck. The chain might have broken in the attack, leaving it in there.”
“Did they find a chain?”
“No, but from the photos of the crime scene, the place was an utter shambles. Homeless people were using it to doss down. Probably why there were so many fires.”
“Okay.” Harmond turned to look at everyone. “What else?”
Ngaire stared at the list, trying to frame the questions. In interviews, apart from the initial training, she’d often gone by instinct. She would head in with an open mind and wait to see where the suspect’s or victim’s statements led. The advantage of planning it out beforehand wasn’t lost on her. With no meandering paths to travel down, there was little chance of losing track.
“Why did he allow his daughter to spend fifteen years in prison for a crime he committed?” Ngaire said. “That’s what I want to know. Melody was at the front desk that day, and she says he only spat out the confession when he thought he was dying.”
Harmond turned to the board. What kind of father lets his daughter sacrifice her life for his? She turned back, eyebrows raised, and Ngaire nodded.
If Bob could answer that question to anyone’s satisfaction, then let him.
Chapter Twenty-Three
DSS Harmond walked into the small room and shuffled across to the far side, picking up the mic and headset. Ngaire squeezed in behind her. The observation room may contain state of the art equipment, but it was still built in an expanded closet. The walls pressed in from all sides as she sat and put on her own headset, fiddling with the controls.
“Have you been on the observation deck before?” DSS Harmond asked. Her voice was muffled to Ngaire’s ears until Harmond leaned over and clicked on a control. Suddenly, the sound fed in from the room she sat in rather than the interview room next door.
The Only Secret Left to Keep Page 14
