Chasing Can Be Murder (25 page)

“Mmm…” Eyes thoughtful, Columbo watched Scuzz run a gentle finger under Lucky’s chin. He then pocketed his mobile and slapped his notebook shut. “If there’s nothing more you can tell me about Erin’s disappearance, I’d better check this robbery out.”

“Of course.” I smiled and took hold of his arm. “Sounds like you have some baddies to catch, Inspector.”

“Oh, and Mr. Ashton,” he called out over his shoulder, while I tugged more strongly on his arm, “when your ex-wife has finished her drink, I’d like you both to report to the Gawler police station. Bring a recent photo of your daughter and we’ll get straight onto finding her.”

While Dan nodded, I maneuvered the Inspector in the direction of the front door. I’m not sure whether Columbo suspected me of knowing more about Erin’s disappearance, Scuzz of masterminding the Munno Para robbery, or he was merely captivated by the pungent aroma of Ben’s special brew emanating from the direction of the kitchen. Whatever the reason, he seemed rather put-out when I bundled him through the front door and closed it firmly behind him.

I figure cops are like boulders. It’s no good
asking
them to move—you have to give them a good hefty push in the direction you want them to go.

24

The message on my answering machine clicked off.

Through the deathly hush that followed, Tanya gazed at me, eyes wide with raw terror, face drained of any natural color. Beside her, Dan stood ramrod straight. The sound of an empty VB can scrunched in his hand. He snarled and his fingers closed more tightly around the tin receptacle. By the twist of his mouth and the way his brows hooded his eyes, I figured he wished the flattened can was the kidnapper’s throat.

“I’m sorry, Tan,” I said as I moved toward her, fearing she’d collapse. “That’s why we couldn’t tell the Inspector.”

She gazed at me. Her face ashen, the dark shadows under her eyes making her appear gaunt. And when she eventually spoke, her voice seemed to be coming from deep inside a well. “That man said he’s going to cut out my baby’s tongue.”

I tried to hug her but it was like hugging a cement post.

“Why would he want to do that?”

I shook my head and with one arm around her uncooperative body led her across to the couch.

“I don’t understand what’s happening.” She perched on the edge of her seat and stared up at me. “Kat, you won’t let Lofty win, will you?”

Oh, God, if only it was that easy
.

I shook my head and began kneading my fingers into her shoulders, even though I knew no amount of massage would ease the knotted muscles beneath her jacket.

“Listen, Tan,” I said, continuing to work on her shoulders. “Don’t worry about Lofty. We’ll work that out later. First, we need to come up with a plan to rescue Erin. Okay?”

“No. No. No.” Tanya pushed my hands away, her voice rising in panic. “Just do as he says. He’ll let Erin go if you do as he says.”

“I don’t think we can trust—”

“You
have
to follow his instructions, to the letter. Do you hear me? Otherwise...if anything bad happens to Erin...it will be your fault.” Her ruinous eyes met mine then filled with tears. “And…and I’ll never see my little girl again.”

A slab of guilt the size of a basketball court lodged in my stomach. I watched Ben remove the mug from Tanya’s fingers, slide it onto the coffee table next to the bloated gargoyle statue my sister sent me for my twenty-first birthday, and hunker down in front of her.

“Trust me on this, Tanya,” he said holding her face in both hands. “There’s no way you can believe a mongrel kidnapper. Even if Kat gives Lofty a sedative and he loses his race, how do we know he’ll let Erin go afterwards? How do we know she hasn’t seen this guy’s face?” He kept his hands on her face as she tried to pull away. “We can’t take that risk. I go along with Kat and say we find Erin and get her out of the kidnapper’s clutches
before
Lofty races.”

I caught Ben’s eye and gave him a thumbs up of approval. In return he sent me a lopsided grin that had my heart skipping several beats.

Dan, his voice almost unrecognizable, spoke for the first time since we’d played the message on the answering machine. “And when we do find the bastard who took my kid, I’ll put a hole in his head big enough to drive a semi through.”

Ben straightened. “I know where you’re coming from, mate, but we need to stay calm if we’re going to get Erin back.”

“Calm?” Saliva flew from Dan’s lips as he fired his snarl at Ben. “Easy for you, Taylor. She’s not your kid.”

“Dan…” Tanya shook her head.

“Sorry. Sorry.” Dan threw up his hands and sank onto the lounge, his body shrinking as though someone had recently deprived it of air.

“You’re hundred percent right,” Ben told Dan. “I can’t begin to imagine how you and Tanya must be feeling right now.” He paused, determination visible in the set of his jaw, the fire in his dark eyes. “But what I
d
o know is—we must find Erin. And fast.”

“I’m with Katrina and Benjamin,” Scuzz told Dan. “It is imperative we find your little girl before anything bad happens to her.”

“And do we agree—not a word to the police?” Ben’s question was directed at Dan and Tanya.

“No police,” whispered Tanya.

Another tense silence followed. It was finally broken by my dude-helper, Jake, who’d sloped through the front door as the Inspector left. With his long spindly dreadlocks falling over his face, he voiced the number one question on everyone’s lips.

“So…where do we look?” He pushed his hair from his eyes. “No one’s seen or heard a cat’s lick of Erin. We’ve, like, combed the area totally man, and found nada.”

Jake was right. All very well to say we’d find Erin, but we had no idea where to start. May as well hunt for a square grain of sand on the beachfront at Semaphore.

“Play the message again, Kat,” advised Scuzz. “See if there are any clues to the little girl’s whereabouts in the kidnapper’s words.”

Tanya scrambled from her chair, eyes wild. “No. I can’t,” she gasped. “I can’t listen again. He’s going to kill her—I know.” A sob choked her words. “And I-I’ll never see my baby again.”

I held her in my arms, rocked her in time to a silent rhythm in my head. I’d never felt so helpless. And what made it worse—Tanya was right. If we didn’t find Erin soon she might die. Hell, she might be dead already. The kidnapper could have killed her straight after he left his message.

Tanya clung to me, shoulders heaving, tears running unchecked down her face. She was my best friend in the world and yet there wasn’t a thing I could do to ease her pain.

Ben gently removed Tanya from my arms, hugged her then steered her towards her ex-husband. “Dan, take Tanya home and look after her. If we haven’t found Erin by the time Lofty races tomorrow night, believe me, he will come in stone motherless last. Kat will see to that. But whatever happens,” he went on, his eyes bright as he watched the couple lean on each other and shuffle brokenly towards the door, “I promise we’ll do everything we can to find Erin and bring her home, unharmed. You have my word.”

“Mine too,” I added, scrubbing at my eyes.

“And mine,” put in Scuzz, his bottom lip caught between his teeth.

“Go home and stay by the phone in case we need to get in touch with you.”

There was no cheerful “Mary had a Little Lamb” toot from Tanya’s horn today. I imagined her driving home through a curtain of tears. She only lived in the next street, but even so, I worried about her safe arrival.

“Let’s listen to the slimy maggot again.” Ben reached for the play button on the answering machine. “Like Scuzz says, we might be missing something.”

It didn’t matter how many times we played the message the voice on the other end had the same effect on my bowels. After the fourth replay I shook my head and sighed. There was nothing to hear but a psycho, a terrified little girl, and a few scratchy background noises. We were wasting valuable time when we could be out searching for Erin.

“We know he used Erin’s mobile phone,” I said blocking my mind from the still playing message. “But is there any way to track where the call came from?”

“Yes,” Scuzz answered, nodding at me. “But there’s no time for that. And unless you know an expert in the field, we’d need to bring the police in on the case.”

Ben frowned. “No police.”

“Hang on dudes.” Jake, who’d been concentrating so hard his eyes were screwed shut and the tip of his tongue poked from the corner of his mouth, held up one hand to shush us. He moved his head closer to the answering machine. “Hear that noise in the background?”

I forced myself to listen to the message again, trying to disassociate myself from the chill it espoused and concentrate on background noises instead. Yes, there it was. A grunt? And was that a squeak during the pause before Erin spoke?

But who or what had caused the sounds?

Head tipped to the side, Ben absently stroked his chin. “Could be puppies.”

“Sounds more human to me.” Scuzz frowned in concentration. “Perhaps the kidnapper had the little girl gagged before she spoke on the phone.”

Jake, his eyes still closed, tugged gently on his nose ring. “That’s pigs,” he said. “I’m sure of it. My uncle owns a piggery at Port Wakefield and whenever we visit, it’s not only the smell that drives us home early—it’s the noise. Pigs never know when to shut up.”

Of course!

“Good one Jake,” said Ben doing a complicated dude handshake with my kennel assistant. “You’re the man!”

Scuzz set the tape back to the pause before Erin spoke and we listened to the background noise again. It definitely sounded like the grunt and squeal of pigs. Did this mean the kidnapper had Erin hidden near, or at, a piggery?

I scrabbled under the phone table until I found the Northern area telephone book and with Ben, Scuzz and Jake peering over my shoulder, flicked the book open to P—then Pigs—and finally, Piggeries.

“Bloody hell!” groaned Ben. He stood so close I could feel his warm breath fanning the side of my neck. “I didn’t know growing bacon was
this
popular. Got to be at least thirty piggeries in the North.”

Scuzz pressed against me from the other side, his solid bulk comforting. “I think we should focus on the piggeries in a ten-twenty kilometer radius from home.”

“Why?” The inflection in Ben’s voice seemed to say,
what-would-you-know-about-the-situation-when-you’ve-just-dropped-in-from-biker-land?

“Because the kidnapper is a local.”

“And how do you come to that conclusion?”

Scuzz lifted one great hand and started ticking points off on his tattooed fingers. “One…our kidnapper knows Kat has acquired a new racing dog. Two…he knows this dog will start favorite in its first race for her. Three…he knows Tanya is Kat’s best friend, otherwise why kidnap Erin to use as blackmail against her? And finally, he knew where Kat kept her spare key.”

Ben gave Scuzz a friendly punch on the arm then rubbed his knuckles. “Sorry, mate,” he said. “I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

“But why is this all about me?” I wailed. Since the moment I’d given in and let Matt stay the night, my life had been on the downside of a roller-coaster ride.

“Maybe he’s not happy about you investigating your friend’s murder,” suggested Scuzz.

Ben shook his head. “I’ve been right beside Kat all the way. If that was the case, why isn’t he targeting me too?”

“Because he’s a coward?” proposed Scuzz.

“Would the steward on the starting box know Mr. Big’s identity?” Jake asked. “You know, man, the one they put in hospital?”

“Probably does.” Ben nodded. “But you won’t get him to talk. Barney’s scared shitless. And after the beating he took, who can blame him?”

“What about Big Mick Harrison, the bookie?” I mused. “I guess we can’t wipe him off our suspect list. His wife won’t corroborate his alibi for the time Matt was murdered. He swears he was home in bed with her at 3 a.m., but she says he didn’t get home until 4.” Funny thing, although Mick had threatened me, my gut told me he had nothing to do with Erin’s kidnapping. The man might be cheating on his wife or even a potential murderer but I couldn’t see father-of-the-year ever hurting a child.

“Or what about George Summers?” Scuzz rubbed at his wispy ginger beard, his dark eyes thoughtful. “He said Erin was gone when he came to collect her. Don’t you think that’s a tad suspicious? Should I go lean on him? See if he has a friend who owns a piggery?”

“You could, but I doubt Summers has the balls to be Mr. Big,” Ben told Scuzz.

“But he might know who is. Can’t leave any stone unturned, can we?” I said picturing George wetting his pants as he watched the giant biker approach. “Can I come with you when you lean on George?”

Scuzz’s lips twitched and then settled back to serious. “When you spoke to Erin on the phone, Kat, did you hear another voice in the background at any stage of the conversation?”

“Don’t think so. Although, at the time, she was making me so mad I probably wouldn’t have heard if a reincarnated Elvis started singing in the background.”

“Think hard. She told you someone was at the door. Did you hear anyone call out? If so, was it a voice you recognized?”

I shook my head. “No. Sorry.” And then I thought…maybe I’ll never hear Erin’s voice again. A steel band tightened around my chest threatening to cut off my air supply.
Devil’s Spawn
might be a pain in the butt—but she was
our
pain in the butt. With her sassy mouth and the freckles she tried to hide under her mother’s foundation and that air of bravado she carried like a flag. The steel band tightened another notch as I imagined a psycho getting his kicks from carving out her tongue. Maybe not stopping at her tongue. Maybe going further and slicing the knife across her throat.

Who was behind all this? Who was the faceless monster holding the greyhound industry to ransom?

For a moment I removed my rose-colored glasses, narrowed my eyes and peered across at Scuzz. What did I
really
know about Theodore Samuel Parkington the Third? The man-mountain with his shaved head and tattooed body. He’d arrived at Jake’s door out of the blue, supposedly on his way to meet a half-sister he’d only recently discovered.