Violent Exposure (11 page)

‘Nothing.’

‘Say it or I’ll have to shoot you.’

He didn’t smile. ‘One of our friends was losing weight like that and Donna told me it’s a common sign of cancer.’

His wife was a professor of nursing.

‘But,’ Ella said, ‘there’d be pain or something else too, right?’

‘Well, sure. Probably.’

Ella looked
into the box and saw trophies. She lifted the first two out. ‘Suzanne Sheppard, Best and Fairest 2001. B-grade Finalists 2002.’ The little plastic girls held hockey sticks. ‘How is your friend?’

Dennis hesitated. ‘She died a year later.’

Ella pulled the rest of the trophies out and piled them on the floor. Nine in all, dated from 1999 to 2004.

‘I’m sure your dad’s fine,’ Dennis said.

‘Mum
would tell me if it was serious.’
Wouldn’t she?

‘Absolutely.’

Ella lifted the layer of newspaper on which the trophies had rested but there was nothing underneath. She tried to concentrate. ‘If Suzanne was a bit of a collector, we should find memorabilia from the wedding.’

Dennis tipped up an envelope and sorted through the contents. ‘Like this?’ He held up a photo of Suzanne in a tiara and
pink dress, Connor in a suit, holding each other and smiling against a background of palm trees and a sunset. He looked at the back. ‘Key West, May fifth, 2007. Catt was right.’

Ella packed the trophies back in while Dennis delved deeper.

‘Check it out,’ he said. ‘Hotel stationery complete with love notes.’

Ella made herself focus on the hearts and hugs and kisses scrawled across it.

He dug
further. ‘Jackpot.’ He handed her fight itineraries for the trip. ‘He travelled as Connor,’ Ella read. ‘So his passport has to be in that name.’

Dennis took out his mobile and called Sylvie Catt to pass on the information. Ella was reaching for the next envelope in his box when her phone rang. She grabbed it up.

‘It’s me,’ Detective Steve Mitchell said. ‘Is that your car outside the address?’

‘Yep,’ she said. ‘We’re upstairs.’

‘Come next door. You guys need to hear this.’

The Crawfords’ neighbour was a pale woman in her early forties, dark circles under her eyes, her brown hair in a loose ponytail.

Steve introduced Ella and Dennis. ‘This is Tanya Pigeon.’

Tanya shook their hands. ‘Sorry I wasn’t here when you came past last night. I feel bad I wasn’t here when it happened, too,
because maybe I could’ve done something.’

‘Tanya works in Emergency at St Vincent’s,’ Steve said.

‘That’s where you were last night?’ Ella asked.

Tanya nodded. ‘I finished at seven this morning.’

‘Tanya called triple 0 when the Crawfords were having that domestic, night before last,’ Steve said.

‘I heard screams,’ Tanya said. ‘You work in my job, you know the difference between mucking about
and serious, and these were serious.’

‘Had you ever heard screams from their place before?’

Tanya shook her head. ‘That was another reason I rang. It was so out of the blue.’

‘How well do you know the Crawfords?’

‘Not all that well, considering we’ve been neighbours for almost a year,’ she said. ‘They were friendly enough when I moved in, but since then nothing more than a smile or a wave;
you know, one or the other will be going out and I’ll be coming home and we’ll see each other for a moment. I don’t think we’ve spoken directly for months.’

Ella nodded.

‘Anyway, this morning when I got home I was talking to Margo across the street, and she told me about the brown car that was parked there for ages last night – she thought it was the guy’s who found Suzanne?’ Tanya said. ‘I’ve
seen that car here a lot. I saw it again about an hour ago.’

Stewart Bridges’ car.
‘An hour ago,’ Ella said. Well after he’d been dropped back.

‘Yep. He drove past really slowly, staring at the house. I saw him because I was pulling the blinds down before going to bed.’

‘You said you’ve seen the car a lot?’

‘At least once a week.’

‘What time of day?’

‘All different times,’ she said. ‘Evening,
mornings, late at night. The man parks and heads straight in.’

‘Have you seen him on the street with the Crawfords?’ Dennis asked. ‘Walking out to have dinner or something?’

‘Nope. He goes in and that’s that. Stays a while, maybe an hour, then he leaves.’

Ella phrased her next question carefully. ‘Did you have any idea which one of them he was visiting?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ Tanya said. ‘I didn’t
see either of them with him, and the times he visited didn’t really match up with the little I could tell of their schedules. I think they work funny hours. Sometimes their car was there, sometimes it wasn’t. With their driveway and garage being right next to me, I hear them come and go, you know.’

Ella nodded. ‘And you’ve seen both Connor and Suzanne behind the wheel?’

‘Yep,’ Tanya said. ‘Also,
Suzanne once came into the Emergency Department with a guy, and when I walked past and saw her, I smiled and said hi, and she looked kind of worried and then ignored me.’

Hmm.
‘What was wrong with the guy?’

‘Chest pain, I think,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t looking after him but he was in one of the cardiac beds.’

‘She wasn’t simply so worried about him that she didn’t recognise you?’ Dennis asked.

‘No, she definitely recognised me,’ Tanya said. ‘I got the distinct impression that she wasn’t glad to see me either.’

‘How old was the guy? Any chance it was her dad?’

Tanya huffed a laugh. ‘No way. He was about thirty, blond hair, surfe type.’

Ella and Dennis exchanged a glance. ‘Did they seem close?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see any contact as such.’

‘Did you notice his name?’

‘Sorry,’ Tanya said. ‘I remember I was working an early shift after a late, though, so I can probably work out what day it was.’ She went to a calendar on the wall and flipped to the previous month. ‘Yeah. Must’ve been a Thursday. Wasn’t last week or the week before, and I was off sick this Thursday here,’ she pressed a finger to the day five weeks ago, ‘so it was one of the three straight after
that.’

‘You can’t narrow it down any further?’ Ella said.

‘It was around ten in the morning, if that helps.’

Ella wrote down the possible dates. ‘Did you say anything to Suzanne when you next saw her?’

‘The hospital’s crazy on confidentiality, so you’re not supposed to even mention to someone you know that you saw them there,’ Tanya said. ‘Besides, I think I only saw her a couple of times,
and she was always in her car or I was in mine.’ She shrugged. ‘There was no chance to talk, even if I’d wanted to.’

‘Guys just keep coming out of the woodwork,’ Ella said to Dennis as they returned to the Crawfords’ house. ‘Maybe the guy in hospital is Robert.’

Dennis checked his watch. ‘Stewart Bridges is the one I want to corner, but we’re due back for the meeting.’ Kent and Glenroy were
waiting empty-handed on the patio but Ella wasn’t ready to go. The passports had to be somewhere. She hurried upstairs and pawed through stacked papers in the unfinished archive box, praying for the telltale size and shape.

‘Just bring it,’ Dennis said.

She thought of the letter about the house purchase. ‘Do people store important stuff with their solicitors?’

‘Or in safe deposit boxes in banks.’
He glanced at his watch again.

Ella found photos of Connor and Suzanne in ski gear with sunburned faces, and smiling on the edge of a pool. She found a souvenir keyring from Florida, a child’s drawing of a bird surrounded with hugs and kisses, and then, hooray, a hefty envelope labelled
Certificates etc
. She emptied it on the floor and grabbed up the two passports that fell out. ‘Got them.’

‘Hallelujah.’

‘This might answer a few questions.’ She held one up to him. ‘Connor’s from New Zealand.’

In the meeting room, detectives were already waiting, some eating takeaway, most downing coffee, the smell of cigarette smoke rising from the clothes of a few.

‘First things first,’ Ella said. ‘We just found out that Connor Crawford is a New Zealander.’

Detective Sylvie Catt said, ‘Aha.’

Ella handed her the passports. Catt opened Connor’s. ‘I’ll get onto the Kiwis straightaway and we’ll find out about this guy once and for all.’

‘Results of the PM,’ Ella said. ‘Suzanne died from blood loss from the stab wounds, which were caused by the knife found in the hedge by the house. Any news on prints?’

‘No match to anything in the system,’ Detective Peter Hepburn said. ‘They’re doing
comparisons to what was found in the house.’

Detectives wrote quickly.

‘In one of the wounds the doc found a tiny bit of what looks like grey duct tape,’ Ella went on. ‘There’s no sign that she was bound prior to being stabbed, and no such tape has been found on the scene either.’

Dennis said to Hepburn, ‘What’s the response to the published photos of Connor and the CCTV guy?’

‘Nothing decent
on the CCTV image. People telling us what we already know about the Crawfords – they run a nursery and so on – and a couple of others: Suzanne apparently used a web cafe in the city according to a young female caller who then hung up; and Connor played a bit of lunchtime soccer in the Domain with a pal of his who did leave his details. Nobody’s called in to say they’ve seen him today though.’

Ella scribbled in her notebook. Her eyes hurt and her back ached, and concern for her dad was a weight in the back of her head, but she was far from stopping. They’d been on the case for only twelve hours. The first twenty-four to forty-eight were the most important – people out there were straightening their stories, burning or hiding evidence, getting further away. Detectives just upped the caffeine
intake and scoffed junk food for the carb rush and kept going. She blinked hard and pressed more firmly on the page.

‘Computer tech report came in too,’ Peter Hepburn went on. ‘They both had email accounts, which they accessed through the home and work computers, but there was nothing dodgy on either. Somebody was looking at porn on the work system, just generic straight stuff, and we have times
and dates if we need to correlate. They did a lot of browsing on the home system – news, celebrities, banking. Nothing weird, even in the deleted caches.’

‘Wonder if Suzanne was up to something in the internet cafe,’ Sylvie Catt said. ‘Something she didn’t want Connor or her employees to know about.’

‘If the caller was telling the truth,’ Hepburn said. ‘Problem is there are so many possible
locations. We can start to canvass but it’ll be like the proverbial needle. With any luck she’ll ring in again and give us a better description than “the city”.’

Ella said, ‘From what we’ve learned, Suzanne had a number of male friends and sometimes she didn’t seem to care that Connor or others could see what was going on.’ She ran through the information they’d got from Angie Crane at Streetlights
and the hospital lead Tanya Pigeon had given them. ‘So we need to look into those people deeper too. We also have somebody named Robert possibly in the mix.’ She told them what Aidan had said. ‘And Stewart Bridges was seen driving past the Crawfords’ house again this morning, and has apparently been a frequent visitor in the past – more frequent than he’d led us to believe.’

Detectives flipped
pages and kept writing, then took turns to give their updates: no trace on the car; no further results from the canvassing; no new images found of the man who walked away from the scene after allegedly arguing with Bridges.

Lola Murphy’s mobile buzzed. She answered, and a moment later scribbled a word in her notebook and held it up.
RTA.

The detectives went quiet.

‘Oh, that’s great,’ Lola said.
‘Can you email that through right now? Yes, the address I gave you before. Yes, thanks. And you’ll keep checking the other cameras? Particularly the ones between there and the airport. Thanks again.’

She hung up and looked around the room. ‘They caught an image of the front of the car,’ she said. ‘It’s from a camera on the southbound lanes of Southern Cross Drive just before four this morning.
Problem is, there’s two people in it.’

*

Carly Martens sat on the bus with her arms folded. The audition had gone longer than she’d expected, and then she’d been called back in to say the lines again, and been asked to wait, she and three other girls fidgeting together in a small office, hope rising in Carly like a temperature as she imagined mentioning the job oh-so-casually to the little shit
next shift, but then the tallest girl was called in and they heard a whoop and the assistant came out and said ‘Sorry’ and the rest of them were out the door.

Now she was late, and thinking about not going at all. But Linsey would be there, and together they would lead the kids in some good strong role-play acting, and by the end of the hour, as the tutu-clad five year olds gathered in the doorway
for their class, she would – hopefully – feel better.

‘Hey.’

‘No.’ She didn’t need to turn to see who’d spoken. There’d been two other people on board and it wasn’t the old lady.

The man got up from his seat and came to stand by hers. ‘I didn’t ask anythink yet.’

‘If you try to sit here you will regret it.’

He stood swaying with the bus’s rhythm, one hand on the back of her seat, the other
in his shorts pocket. He sighed beer fumes. ‘Got the time?’

‘No.’ She stared straight ahead. Her stop was close, but not close enough.

‘Got a boyfriend?’

She didn’t answer.

‘What are ya, a lezzer?’

Her phone beeped with a message. The afternoon sun streaming in the window made it impossible to see the words.

The man started to sit.

Carly said, ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’

The bus driver glanced
in her mirror.

‘You are, aren’t ya?’ The man swayed back to his feet. ‘A fuckin lezzer.’

She leaned forward but before she could press the bell the bus braked and pulled over. The man tripped and sat heavily in the seat opposite.

The driver put on the park brake, opened the door and came up the aisle. She stood over the drunk. ‘We’re at your stop.’