by Garry Disher
They watched. Challis felt a curious kind of excitement. It came when the stages of the detection, the methodology, the science and the technological tools were all working together.
He saw the tread pattern enlarge on the monitor screen. The technician isolated one segment, then another, enlarging and cross-matching with the plaster cast.
Finally he said, 'It's a Cooper. I'm afraid I can't say more than that.'
'It's enough to go on with,' Challis said.
Back in the Displan room, Ellen said, 'How do we play this?'
'Very carefully. There may be an innocent explanation. It may be coincidence.'
'I don't trust coincidence.'
'Neither do I.'
'Well then . . . ,' she said.
'We need to break his alibis,' Challis said. 'Go back and question everybody he worked with, neighbours, the usual.'
Ellen said, 'Groan.'
'We also need a warrant that stipulates our right to search the house and any other building that Ledwich may own, plus his place of work and all vehicles he or any member of his family may own. And meanwhile we'll go and pick him up for questioning.'
The phone was ringing somewhere in the incident room. It was distracting. The room itself wore an air of too many dead ends, of long airless days and nights, of cooped-up tempers and hurried meals. What a mess, Ellen thought. She tilted back her head. 'Somebody answer that, please?'
But there were only three officers in the room, their sleeves rolled, hunched over the telephones or their computer screens, so she crossed to the offending telephone and snatched it up.
'Destry.'
'Ellen?'
It was her husband. 'Alan?'
'Is Larrayne with you?'
Long afterwards she would remember that her first response was one of irritation. Her husband had been falling apart for days, in a low-level way, often emotional, forgetful, apt to misjudge things. 'Alan, it's her tennis lesson.'
'I know that. I've been waiting around to take her.'
'She's probably at Kathy's. She's done this sort of thing before. Just wait for her.'
Ellen's tone was: Do I have to do everything?
Her husband said, 'I rang Kathy. She said she hasn't seen Larrayne at all today.'
Ellen felt a crawling chill on the surface of her arms. Her heart seemed to shut down. Then she was shouting:
'Why the fuck didn't you say so!'
He sounded hurt. 'It's school holidays, you cow. Why would I be worried she wasn't here? I thought I'd understood it wrong and you were taking her to tennis.'
She found herself sniping, 'Then why did you ring me?' when she should have been slamming the phone down and taking action.
'I just thought I'd double-check, that's all. More than you would do, you fucking bitch.'
This time she didn't respond. She stood there, frozen, and something in her face and manner must have alerted Challis, for his hand closed over hers and he was taking the phone from her and taking charge of her fears.
TWENTY-FOUR
'I'll kill him,' she said.
'No you won't,' Challis said.
'If he's got her and he's hurt her, I'll kill him, Hal, see if I don't.'
Two sedans and a divisional van. Three detectives, four uniforms and two forensic officers. They were converging on the housing estate where Lance Ledwich lived. Scobie Sutton had taken a fourth car to detain Ledwich at his place of work and take him to the house.
'Don't jump to conclusions,' Challis said. 'His Pajero was destroyed, remember, so how did he snatch Larrayne?'
She seemed to fill with relief, then immediately tensed again. 'His wife's got a car. A station wagon.'
'Ah.'
She pushed her hands back through her hair. 'I don't understand how it could have happened. He must have snatched her on her way to Kathy's. But how? I mean, the kid of coppers, she'd never willingly go with a stranger.'
Then she seemed to understand the implications of what she'd said and groaned and put her hands over her face.
There were other explanations, but Challis didn't offer them. Your daughter is a ratty teenager. Your daughter hates you and has run off with a boyfriend. Somehow he knew that there was only one: Your daughter was smacked over the head with a tyre iron.
'He's shifted his locus, Hal,' Ellen said, taking her hands away from her face. 'All that publicity, we've driven him away from the highway. Now he's preying where people actually live. God.'
Challis heard the rising note in her voice, the fear, outrage and hysteria. 'One thing we've got going for us, it's daylight,' he said. 'Now calm down and think like a copper.'
'Daylight? How does that help us? He snatched her in daylight and no-one noticed.'
'But he won't—'
He was about to say, won't dump her body in daylight. He said, 'Ledwich has a job. He's accountable to people during the day. He won't do anything until it's dark.'
'Keep her tied up all day? God, bad as that is, I hope so.'
They were creeping over speedbumps now. Challis pointed. 'Scobie's already here. That was quick.'
The CIB Falcon was parked across Ledwich's driveway, effectively blocking off the station wagon, which was parked at the side of the house. Ellen was peering at the figures in the Falcon. 'I don't see Ledwich anywhere. Don't tell me he's done a runner.'
Then Sutton was at Challis's window. 'He wasn't at work, boss. Called in sick yesterday.'
Ellen Destry seemed to crumple. She began to bite on her finger. 'Oh God.'
'Have you tried the house?'
'Waiting for you, boss.'
They got out and approached the house. Challis pushed a button next to the front door, which was a heavy, carven thing, varnish peeling from its daily beating from the sun. Challis itched to pick at the varnish strips. The door opened.
'Mrs Ledwich?'
'Yes?'
Challis motioned Sutton and two of the uniformed constables to make for the rear of the property, then pushed through, into the house, followed by Ellen Destry and the other officers.
'We have a warrant to search these premises and any vehicles that you may own. Is your husband here?'
Ledwich's wife looked tired and distracted. 'He's in bed. Summer flu.' Then she stared from one to the other. 'Why don't you leave him alone? He almost lost his job over you lot coming around and asking questions. Give him a break.'
'We just need to talk to him,' Challis said.
Beside him, Ellen was fuming. She pushed forward. 'Look, are you going to take us through to him or not?'
'Keep your undies on.'
The house was depressing. The ceilings and walls were designed for a small race of people. The furniture was too big for it, as if composed of intrusive angles and surfaces. Challis saw a massive television set and an exercise machine. A radio somewhere was tuned to a talkback show. They came to the bedroom. Ledwich was lumped under a sheet and a pink blanket and he looked wretched, his features red and sodden, his breathing rattling with phlegm.
'What do you bastards want?'
Challis introduced himself but knew that something was wrong. He wasn't looking at a man who'd gone out earlier that day and abducted and raped and killed or at least hidden a teenage girl.
Ellen Destry knew it, too. Challis sensed her disappointment. She said, 'Lance, where were you this morning?'
'Right here. In this bed. Been here since yesterday.'
Challis looked around at the wallpaper, the gleaming white built-in wardrobe, the lace curtains. There was an odour of illness and stale air in the little room. The bed was a costly, vulgar monstrosity, fitted with a silvery-gold vinyl headboard! Rows of brass studs dimpled the vinyl, and there was a radio and a pair of speakers set into it.
He turned to Ledwich. 'You haven't been in Penzance Beach?'
'I'm flaming crook, I tell ya.'
'Okay, let's try this. Can you account for your movements on the nights of the twelfth and the seventeenth of December, and around
dawn on the twenty-third?'
I already told this bitch here—'
Ellen stepped close to the bed and neatly clouted him at the hairline.
'Ow.' He rubbed his head.
'Answer the question, Lance.'
'Like I told you, I was at work.'
'According to the foreman, you were often liberal with your hours.'
'Yeah, but not enough to go out and grab and kill someone and stash her somewhere. And if you arseholes done your homework you'd know I started day shift on the twenty-third. Six a.m. start. The wife's got it written down on the calendar. I know, because I double-checked after you done me over the last time. So I couldn't of killed whoever it was that time, and I didn't kill none of the others.'
Challis nodded to Ellen, who left the room.
'Before your Pajero was stolen, had it ever been used by another person? A friend, neighbour, member of your family?'
'My sister, my brother-in-law.'
'I understand your brother-in-law's been in Thailand for the past month. Who else has had access to it?'
A blush and a twist of sullenness under the red chapped skin. 'Look, I know it wasn't registered, I know I'm not licensed at the moment, I'll cop to that, but I was desperate, I had to get to work.'
'So you stored it at your sister's house and drove it from time to time?'
'Yes. I had to get to work.'
'Couldn't your wife have taken you?'
'She's got her own work to go to.'
'You thought that if the police ever happened to check up on you here—checking you weren't driving around while unlicensed— they'd not see the Pajero, or see you coming and going in it, and they'd assume you were being a good boy.'
'Something like that.'
'Not too bright, Lance.'
Ledwich folded his arms sulkily on the bedclothes at his chest.
'I'll ask you again, did anyone else drive your Pajero?'
'No.'
'What about the station wagon?'
'The wife's car.'
'But you drive it sometimes?'
'Not often. Not while I was unlicensed. She had this thing about the police confiscating it if I drove it.'
'Did you take it out this morning?'
'The wife did. I needed painkillers. She was only gone ten minutes.'
'Getting back to the Pajero. Did you have occasion to fit another set of tyres to it before Christmas?'
'No. Why?'
'Do you own another vehicle?'
'Do I look like I can afford three?'
'I'll come clean with you, Lance,' Challis said. 'An investigator found a Cooper tyre track left by your Pajero in Chicory Kiln Road.'
'Wouldn't know what tyres I had on it. They were already on it when I bought it.'
'The vehicle we're looking for in connection with the murder of Jane Gideon was fitted with a Cooper tyre of the same size and type.'
'Bullshit.'
'Can you account for that, Lance?'
'Account for it? You're stitching me up. You're running around like headless chooks getting nowhere, so you think, hang on, let's frame old Lance.'
'A Cooper all-terrain tyre, quite uncommon, quite distinctive tread pattern.'
Challis saw Ledwich fight with the information, and then saw his face clear and heard him say, what any good defence brief would say: 'Yeah, but you're not saying my tyre's the exact same tyre that you're looking for, only that it's similar.'
'Where did you have your tyres fitted?'
'I told you, they were already on it. I didn't take much notice what they were. A tyre's a tyre to me. Anyhow, anything could have happened after it was stolen. Maybe those what took it fitted new tyres, or maybe the spare was a Cooper tyre and they had a puncture.'
All good defence brief arguments, Challis thought.
At that point, Ellen came in with the calendar. She looked drawn and pale and defeated. Challis huddled with her in the corridor, where she murmured, 'According to this, he did have a six o'clock start on the twenty-third.'
'That could have been written in since,' Challis said. 'But check with his employer again.'
'Meanwhile,' Ellen said, 'Lance has been in bed all day and clearly couldn't have nabbed Larrayne. So where does that leave us?'
Outside, Challis spoke into his mobile phone. 'Sir, a request. It will need to be quick.'
'Try me,' McQuarrie said.
'I need a team of uniforms and detectives at Penzance Beach. Sergeant Destry's daughter hasn't been seen since this morning.'
Silence. Then, 'Oh, Lord.'
'It might not be related, but we have to treat it as if it is. It's panic stations here.'
'I should have been informed the minute you knew.'
'Sorry, sir.'
'Okay, you can have your extra men,' McQuarrie said. 'Do you have any leads at all?' he added peevishly.
'Some,' said Challis coldly, 'and we're about to crack that arson death.'
'Keep me informed, Hal, okay? Regularly.'
'Count on it, sir.'
Challis pocketed the phone.
'Boss?'
Scobie Sutton had been tugging uselessly on the side door of Ledwich's steel garage. 'Locked, boss.'
'Forget it. We're going back to the station.'
One of the uniformed constables drove. Challis almost sat in the back with Ellen Destry, but her anxiety was too palpable. She spent the journey talking on her mobile phone, and from his position in the passenger seat he could sense her jittery body, hear her anguish, as she made her calls.
He heard her say, 'Anything from the hospitals?'
The last three calls had been to her husband. Was this another? No . . .
'Constable, I don't want excuses. Just do it.'
She flipped the phone off, and Challis turned around, about to talk to her, distract her, when she stabbed her fingers at the call buttons again. She had her notebook open in her lap, numbers listed in the back few pages.
'This is Sergeant Destry. I'm trying to locate my daughter. No, nothing to worry about. Has she been in the shop today? No? She said she might be going in some time to buy a CD. No? Okay, thank you.'
Challis faced ahead again. The calls were serving a useful function, keeping her occupied—if hyper—and, in a way, they constituted police work. Who knows, she might uncover a person or a memory that would lead them to her daughter.
TWENTY-FIVE
The woman at the front desk had a girl with her, seventeen or eighteen, hostile, sulky. Mother and daughter, the desk sergeant decided, and turned to the mother. 'Help you, madam?'
'I need to speak to someone.'
She was thin and careworn. Her hands were veined and knuckled, an old woman's hands, though she was probably no more that forty-five. 'Will I do?'
'It's about that backpack on TV.'
Orders were that anyone with information on the abductions was to be sent straight through to an interview room. 'Inspector Challis will be along to speak to you shortly,' the desk sergeant said.
They waited for five minutes. It was early evening, six o'clock. Challis was deeply fatigued. Ellen Destry had gone home to be with her husband, but he knew she'd be back again. The other detectives were occupied with the search for Larrayne Destry. So that left him to speak to the cranks and time-wasters.
'You told my sergeant that this is about a backpack, Mrs Stokes.'
'The one on TV.'
'Go on.'
'Megan—' she indicated her daughter '—well, she has a boyfriend.'
'A boyfriend. Go on.'
'He gave her a backpack.'
'Name?'
'Well, it had a brand name stamped into the leather. And a tag of some sort stitched to the lining, but someone had cut it off.'
Challis felt his skin prickle. According to Mrs Abbott, Kymbly Abbott had stitched her name to the bottom of the designer's label of her backpack. He remembered her teary face: 'I showed her how to do it, Mr Challis,' she'd said.
'We'll come b
ack to the backpack, Mrs Stokes. I meant, the boyfriend's name.'
'Danny Holsinger.'
Challis beamed across the table at the women. 'Now, there's a coincidence. Danny is helping us with our inquiries right at this very moment.'
'I bet he is,' Mrs Stokes said.
'Why don't you all leave him alone,' the girl said. 'He hasn't done nothing.'
'Tell me about the backpack.'
'Danny killed them girls, didn't he?' Mrs Stokes said. 'He killed them and souvenired some of their things and had the nerve to give the backpack to my daughter.'
^We don't know that it's the same backpack.'
'Course it is. I had a gander at it when he gave it to Megan. This is nice, I says. Then I see the tag's been cut off. I say, what's this? He goes, Oh, I bought it at a seconds shop, that's why there's no label. But I didn't believe him.'
Challis turned to the girl. 'Megan? Did Danny say where he got the backpack?'
She looked at the floor. 'He said he bought it.'
'In your heart of hearts, do you think that was the truth'' 'No.'
'He stole it, dirty bugger. Killed that girl and stole it.'
'He never! You're always on at him.'
Mrs Stokes faced her daughter. 'So? Twice I know of he's been done for stealing.'
She fished inside her handbag and tossed a videotape across the desk at Challis. 'Plus he's a pervert. Tried to make Megan watch this, people having sex with animals. No telling what sick things he's capable of.' She turned to her daughter again. 'You want your head read, going out with a scumbag like him.'
'How would you know, you frigid cow.'
Challis slammed his hand on the desk. 'This is a murder inquiry. There's nothing more serious on this earth. Quit your arguing and answer my questions or I'll have you both in the lockup so fast for obstruction, your heads will spin.'
Mrs Stokes composed herself and said, 'Carry on. I'm ready.'
Megan stared hotly at the floor.
'For the moment, let's forget Danny.'
'Hard to forget that little bugger.'
'Mrs Stokes, I'm warning you.'
'Sorry, sorry, I'm all ears.'
'A backpack comes into your possession, Megan. Where is it now?'
'Mum let it get stolen, didn't she? Stupid cow.'
