Limbo (12 page)

‘I think I need some more coffee.’

‘Me too please,’ Dash said distractedly as he studied the board.

Joy escaped to the office and the coffee pot. Far away from a board full of depressing images and way too many question marks. The most depressing thing out here was Ralph, still staring at a piece of pathetic, bright green plastic weed like it was a long-lost lover.

‘Next time Ralph, I promise,’ she said as she poured two coffees from the percolator then made her way back into the lounge.

‘So,’ she said as she handed him his mug and sat back on the lounge. ‘What else is on your macabre whiteboard of death?’

He chuckled as he took a sip. ‘You work as a cadaver make-up artist and what
I
do is macabre?’

‘At least there’s some emotional connection in my work. You work on a dead person for a while you kind of get to know them, you know? This all just seems so…’ Joy scanned the board. ‘Clinical.’

‘Yep. It has to be. It’s how crimes are solved. You can’t let emotion get in the way, blur your judgement. You might miss something.’

Joy looked at Dash over the rim of her mug. He seemed so matter-of-fact. ‘And you really managed to do that?’

He averted his gaze. ‘Mostly.’

‘Mostly?’

He shrugged. ‘Sometimes it was harder than others.’

‘Some got to you more than others?’

‘Some.’

Joy wanted to push more. She got the feeling that Dash had cared a lot more than he was letting on. But he didn’t give her a chance. ‘You develop an immunity to it after a while though. You look at shit like this,’ he gestured to the board, ‘graphic pictures of fucked-up crime scenes, day after day, you do develop a certain immunity to the horror.’

‘
That’s
fucked up.’

He lifted his mug to her in salute. ‘Yep. No arguments from me.’ They drank their coffees in silence for a few moments, both of them gazing at the whiteboard.

Joy couldn’t help it. It was the crime-solving equivalent of a car crash.

‘So, that’s about it really,’ Dash continued. ‘We know Hailey and Isabella disappeared on the eighth of January.’ He tapped both of their pictures. ‘Probably abducted although whether that was by a stranger or someone known to them, we don’t know. We know Hailey turns up dead on the twelfth of July six months later and six hundred kilometres north of where her car was first found abandoned.’

He tapped the picture of the site where her body was found.

‘So, where was she for those six months? We know that prior to finding Hailey’s body the police were working on two theories. An abduction by a complete stranger, but…why?’

He drew a big black question mark in the middle of the white board.

‘What’s the motive? The other theory is that Martin has set it all up to get rid of Hailey and have Isabella all to himself. But again, why? From all I’ve been able to glean they had a good marriage and loved each other. And where is he keeping his daughter stashed?’

Joy sat forward in the chair. She couldn’t believe that Martin had anything to do with it — his misery seemed utterly genuine. And if it wasn’t he deserved an academy award for best actor.

Dash threw the marker into the gutter then plonked himself down next to Joy on the lounge. She turned her head to face him. ‘Well the cops must have some reason for arresting Martin other than him being a statistical probability, surely?’ she said. ‘What did they argue about? That night, before Hailey went to the shop?’

Dash pushed a hand into his hair. ‘Martin stated they’d argued about starting solids for Isabella. He thought it might help with her reflux and help her sleep through the night more and Hailey wanted to wait for another two weeks. She wanted to exclusively breast feed Isabella for six months.’

‘She had reflux?’

Dash nodded. ‘Bad apparently, needed over-the-counter medication. Martin said she was a difficult baby with poor sleeping patterns. They were both sleep deprived. He admitted that it caused tension between them and that they’d been arguing a lot since Isabella had been born.’

Joy raised an eyebrow at him. ‘You sound sympathetic.’

‘Katie didn’t sleep more than three hours for the first year of her life. I have never been so exhausted in my life. I can understand how that would drive anyone to domestic disharmony.’

Joy couldn’t help but agree. She hadn’t yet felt inclined to add to the world population counter and she doubted she ever would. She liked children well enough — Katie seemed like a cool kid — but the thought of being responsible for one seemed kind of daunting. And a year of no sleep just about sealed the deal.

‘So,’ she murmured keen to move on, ‘if we add in the stuff I know we have to go with the abduction theory. We know there’s a
they.
We know whoever
they
are they love Isabella.’

Dash stood again. ‘So who are
they
?’ He grabbed the marker and drew over the question mark in the middle of the board. ‘And why did they abduct a mother and a daughter?’

‘Maybe they just wanted Isabella? Maybe it was…’ Joy swallowed, not even wanting to think about it, ‘…a paedophile?’

Dash clearly found the thought just as distasteful as his jaw tightened. ‘Who just happened to stumble upon Isabella in the car while Hailey was in the shop? An opportunistic crime?’

‘Why not? I read somewhere about paedophiles being opportunists. Maybe Hailey left the keys in the car? If she was
that
sleep deprived it could be possible?’

‘Hell yeah. I forgot to put a cuffed suspect in the back of the car one shift when Katie was a new baby. Cuffed him, patted him down, called it in then drove off without him. Left him standing on the side of the road.’

Joy laughed. ‘Bet they didn’t let you forget that one in a hurry.’

He grimaced. ‘Nope.’ He tapped the pen against the whiteboard. ‘It’s still a bit of a stretch though. We don’t see anyone else’s feet in the vision from the Night Owl.’

‘Maybe whoever it was got in the other side?’

‘So why not take off before Hailey came back?’

‘No keys? Maybe she didn’t leave the keys in the car, but she did forget to lock it? Do you see any of the lights flash in the footage to indicate she locked it?’

He frowned. ‘Not sure. I’ll have to go back and check it. But even if it happened that way, why keep Hailey alive for six months in that case? Why not kill her straight away? It’s not like he needed her, in fact she’d have been a huge liability to him or them…and you said that Hailey wasn’t concerned about Isabella’s safety. She said they loved her, right? Unless, you don’t think she meant
loved
her loved her, do you?’

Joy shook her head emphatically. ‘No.’ So that probably did rule out the paedophile angle.

Dash clicked and unclicked the marker lid as he looked at the board intently as if it would give him the answers if he stared hard enough. ‘So whoever abducted them, whoever
they
were, something
happened
after six months.’
Click click
. ‘Had somebody found them out? Maybe they killed them both?’
Click click.
‘Maybe Hailey is wrong and Isabella also suffered the same fate?’ His brow crinkled, and the lid clicked and unclicked. ‘But why not dump both the bodies together in that case?’

Click click.

Joy was dizzy from the rapid-fire questions. And if things weren’t so serious she might have appreciated the internal workings of his brain and sat back and watched him figure things out. But they just seemed to be going around in circles.

‘You seem to have a lot of questions and not a lot of answers,’ she murmured to the clicking of the lid.

Dash clicked one last time before throwing it in the gutter and sitting back down, his gaze staying on the whiteboard.

‘Solving a crime is like a big jigsaw puzzle. One of those really hard fuckers that are the same on both sides and one piece is always missing and you just have to keep searching, keep juggling the pieces around until they fit.

Joy almost groaned. ‘I hate jigsaw puzzles. I don’t have the patience.’

‘Well this is not going to be much fun for you then.’

Fun wasn’t a word Joy would have used to describe any of this. Hailey’s photo stared down at her. Joy looked around at all the other pieces of the puzzle. The grainy black-and-white image of the Night Owl was so haunting. Such a…nondescript place for such a shocking crime.

Suddenly Joy was struck by a thought. ‘Hang on, we’re assuming the abduction happened there, right?’ she clarified, pointing at the picture. ‘But couldn’t it have happened somewhere else?’

Dash nodded. ‘Absolutely. But I
do
think it happened there.’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘For the same reasons the cops do. Because she stopped at the shop just as she told Martin she was going to, she got out of the car but she didn’t go in to get what she’d gone there for. We have the sworn statement from the shop assistant and there was no bread or milk found in the car.’

‘Maybe the abductors took it with them?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe she just didn’t get a chance to buy it? I think something or someone stopped her before she had the chance to step into that shop.’

‘But why?’

‘That,’ Dash said as he stood, reaching for the marker again, drawing over and over the question mark, thickening it until it sat big and fat and pregnant, taunting them, ‘is the six-million dollar question.’

‘Okay so…where do we start?’

He turned and grinned down at her as he replaced the marker lid. ‘At the beginning.’

‘And that is where?’

He stabbed the marker at the whiteboard. ‘Here.’

‘The Night Owl?’

‘Yep.’

‘Okay then.’ Joy stood. ‘Let’s go.’

***

Ten minutes later they were ensconced in an old Volvo 340. It had mud splashed up the duco on the sides, and tinted windows.

Joy laughed and Dash turned his head to look at her as they manoeuvred out of Basin traffic. ‘Something funny?’

‘This is not what I imagined you’d drive at all.’

‘You’ve been imagining what car I drive?’

Joy rolled her eyes. ‘No. But if I had, this wouldn’t be it.’

‘Oh? What would it be?’

‘Something not quite as ancient for a start. Or if it was old, something more funky and retro like an MG convertible. Something that goes with a trench coat and a fedora.’

Dash shook his head. ‘You have read far too many books. I’m a P.I. I need to be
inconspicuous
. Nothing loud or flashy or memorable.’

‘You chose well.’

‘And,’ he said, ignoring her sarcasm, ‘I need it to be reliable. I need to know it’ll start when I need it to start and go when I need it to go.’

‘Ah,’ she murmured. ‘A simple man, with simple needs.’

Dash cocked an eyebrow. ‘You make that sound like a bad thing?’

All he needed in life was a roof over his head, a source of income and his daughter safe and well.

Although…

He thought back to last night, to the soft sighs and throaty laughter that had ironed out some kinks. Yep, a warm, willing woman every now and then wouldn’t go astray either.

Just to make him really appreciate the other things.

‘Nope.’ She shook her head and there was something suddenly dark in her voice that made Dash glance at her. He watched her force a smile onto her face before she sighed a little too dramatically and said, ‘You’ve just shattered all my P.I. illusions is all.’

‘Let me guess, you’ve always fantasised about doing a P.I. in his convertible MG while wearing his trench coat and fedora?’

She laughed then, a loud hoot of a thing that sounded very unladylike. But then no-one would ever have described Joy as a lady. A woman. A chick, maybe. Even a sheila at a stretch. But never a lady. ‘In your dreams, Dash Dent.’

Dash chuckled as he returned his attention to the approaching red traffic light. ‘You don’t look like the kind that suffers from illusions. I bet you never believed in Santa Claus or fairies at the bottom of the garden.’

‘No,’ she murmured and her voice got serious again as she turned her head to look out the window. ‘Just ghosts.’ He pulled up at the lights. ‘What do you suppose is the significance of the grapes of wrath?’ she mused.

‘I don’t know. I googled it. Is it to do with the book? Is it something biblical, to do with the hymn? Is it a wine? I didn’t turn up anything that helped. Have you got any ideas about it?’

She shook her head. ‘No. But I did borrow Steinbeck from the library yesterday to see if there might be a clue in that.’

Dash whistled as the light turned green and he engaged the accelerator. ‘I’m impressed.’

‘You should be. It’s one of the most depressing books I’ve ever read. Possibly one of the most depressing books on the entire planet.’

‘Isn’t it set in
the Great Depression
? Were you expecting lolcats?’

She blinked at him and then burst out laughing. ‘
You
know what lolcats are?’

‘Hey…’ Dash grinned. ‘I’ll have you know I’m
very
current.’

‘So Katie showed you, huh?’

He shrugged. ‘It keeps her amused when I have to work on the weekends.’

‘Well let me tell you lolcats sounds a hell of a lot more preferable to the trials and tribulations of the Joad family.’

‘I bet. Like I say, I’m impressed.’

‘Yeah, well, don’t get too carried away. I’m not sure I know what I’m looking for. I just figure one of us has gotta read it and it’s probably the one who doesn’t have a television the size of a small African nation hanging on her wall.’

Dash chuckled at her sarcasm. ‘You are a snob, Joy Valentine but I’m going to let that one go to the keeper because I’m just pleased it’s
you
taking one for the team and not me.’

‘Oh…’ She raised an eyebrow at him and a small smile played on that serious mouth of hers. ‘We’re a team now?’

He grinned at her. ‘When it involves you taking one for us, sure.’

‘So I’m like your…trusty sidekick? Like Robin?’

An image of Catwoman rose in Dash’s mind. Not very helpful. ‘I’m thinking more like…’ He stroked his whiskers looking for just the right word and trying not to think about her and that ass in a cat suit — all sleek and agile. He smiled as it came to him. ‘Minion.’