‘Look for him then,’ said Challis curtly.
‘Boss,’ Scobie said.
In his experience, you didn’t often catch crooks through detection and investigation but through chance or luck. Cops aren’t necessarily smart, he believed, but the bad guys are often dumb. You catch them red-handed, or they give themselves up, remain at the scene, punch a loved one who informs on them, find themselves arrested for a different crime, or draw attention to themselves by breaking the speed limit with a body in the boot, for example.
But now and then you got to detect, and Scobie went looking for Andy Asche on flight manifests. Assuming that Andy would not be flying under his real name, it was a process of elimination. First he rejected women’s and unlikely names like Aziz, Hernandez and Nguyen. Then he rejected reservations made some time ago (Andy had left in a hurry, leaving his wheels behind), return reservations, credit card purchases, Frequent Flyer purchases, and special requests (Scobie doubted that Andy was a vegetarian, and in too much of a hurry to request a special meal even if he was). Scobie also couldn’t see Andy trying to leave the country-unless he had a false passport, and that didn’t seem likely-or flying to a small regional airport. Andy would seek out a big place, a place where he could lose himself. Finally, Scobie concentrated on tickets booked and used recently.
He could feel the panic in Andy Asche. Maybe I’m a good cop some of the time, he thought, or good in some ways. And maybe that’s sufficient.
Andy was on the beach, working on his tan, blending in, another dropout or backpacker amongst thousands of them on the Gold Coast, where the sun never set. Except how many beach bums his age went on-line at the local library to read the Melbourne newspapers?
And how many had twelve thousand bucks in their pockets? Twelve grand, his total savings. He could maybe string that out for almost a year, but kiss goodbye to his dream of buying a BMW sports car.
The way everything had conspired against him. First, that cop, Scobie Sutton, asking if he was Natalie’s boyfriend, telling him she was missing. Missing? Andy seriously doubted that-old Nat was off somewhere getting coked out of her brain-but it unnerved him to have the cops sniffing around. Then, a day after sending out the blackmail demands, he’d been reading an old copy of the Progress in the shire canteen and there, on the front page, had been a photograph of a guy in one of the photos he’d found on the laptop. Robert McQuarrie. A cop’s son. A senior cop’s son. And, according to the story, grieving husband of a woman who’d been shot dead.
So anyone sending this guy a blackmail demand is going to find himself a murder suspect, right?
Time for the lad to make himself scarce.
It had been a low-speed rather than a high-speed escape. Andy had gone straight to High Street and cleaned out his savings account, all twelve thousand. He’d debated going home, but what if they were watching his pad? He stood on the footpath, trying to do a casual scan of High Street. Trouble was, everyone had looked like an undercover cop on stakeout.
So he hadn’t gone home. Instead, he went to the travel agent and bought a $99 Virgin Blue one-way flight to the Gold Coast. That was the high-speed part. Getting to the airport was strictly low-speed. He’d walked to the station, waited an hour for a Frankston train, got to Frankston, walked through the shops to the Nepean Highway, waited ninety minutes for the airport mini-bus, ridden the bus for another ninety minutes, then waited another two hours for his flight to leave. Wandered around the airport shops while he waited, almost bought a change of clothes, then told himself not to be stupid, nothing’s cheap at the airport. He’d go to a jeans and T-shirt place on the Gold Coast and get kitted out there.
He’d stay a week on the Gold Coast, and then head to somewhere north of Cairns. He could keep drifting north. It didn’t cost much to sleep on the beach.
53
Ellen appeared in the incident room just after lunch on Wednesday, a plaster on her neck, moving stiffly, all of her loose-limbed grace vanished, fatigue lines and pallor marking her face. But she was cheerful and itching to work-and itching to know how Challis was. She couldn’t read him; he put her with Scobie Sutton, checking the public’s responses to Joe Ovens’s descriptions of the Commodore and the driver. Before very long she was sighing. It was soon clear that-as usually happened when photofits and vehicle descriptions were released by the media-the investigation had moved from a position of no help from the public to too much.
‘Here’s a good one,’ she said, reading from a message slip. ‘To quote: “Hypnosis takes the subject into another dimension, and so anything Mr Ovens saw relates to a different time and place.”‘
Scobie grunted. Like her, he’d divided the message slips that had come in since Monday evening into two piles: ‘immediate attention’ and ‘maybe’. All would be checked, however: even the crazy and the greedy tell the truth sometimes. ‘Half of these want to know if there’s a reward,’ he said.
‘And the other half want to do the dirty on their husbands, brothers or ex-boyfriends,’ Ellen said. She paused. ‘Here’s another, female caller, wouldn’t give her name: “The man in the picture is a well-known al Qaeda operative. He is wearing white face paint to disguise his dark skin.’” She caught Scobie’s eye, hoping for a chortle, but Scobie merely looked sad, as if he wanted to help all the crazy, lonely people in the world. She wished she were doing this with Challis. With Challis you could have a giggle. She put the woman’s message slip on the maybe pile, muttering, ‘Your TV is talking to you again, love.’
She glanced across the room to Challis’s partitioned office. The door was ajar; he was going through a list of numberplate combinations and matching them to 1980s Holdens. He looked drawn.
She kept sorting, then stopped. ‘Ah,’ she murmured.
Scobie looked up. ‘Another sad creature?’
She ignored him, went straight to Challis, knocking and pulling the spare chair up to his desk. He was on the phone, saying, ‘I deny that. She was good at her job,’ and hanging up. ‘The super,’ he said.
Ellen understood. ‘He read Tessa’s profile of Janine.’
Challis nodded tiredly. ‘What’s up?’
‘Something promising. A call early this morning from a mechanic in Safety Beach. Until about six months ago he used to service a 1983 Commodore, off-white in colour, one pale yellow door. In fact, he sourced the door for the owner from a wrecked car.’
‘Owner’s name?’
‘Nora Gent, an address in Safety Beach,’ Ellen said.
She watched Challis scan a list, and was relieved to see his mood lighten. ‘Here it is, Nora Gent, registered owner of a 1983 Holden Commodore, QQP-359.’ He paused. ‘Registration has lapsed. It was due for renewal four months ago.’
‘She sold it? Dumped it? It was stolen?’
‘Who knows? But we have to talk to her.’ He reached for the telephone directory and leafed through it, muttering, ‘Gent, Gent, Gent. Not listed.’
‘She moved away? Got married and changed her name?’
‘Useless to speculate,’ Challis said. ‘I’ll take Scobie and have a word with her.’
‘No,’ Ellen said.
‘No?’
‘Take me.’
‘Your neck…’
‘I’m fine.’
He shrugged. ‘Grab your coat.’
Challis drove, headlights on, heading towards the other side of the Peninsula. It was mid afternoon on a day that would struggle to reach 13 degrees. Another sea fret, the fog mostly burnt away but hanging in dismal patches here and there over the highway and in the hollows of sodden paddocks. Ellen hunched deeper into her coat, wishing Challis would say something. The recent past seemed to fill the space between his seat and hers like an intrusive backseat passenger. It was made up of guilt, embarrassment and desire that she knew was reciprocated but could not-and should not-play itself out.
I have to grow up, she told herself. I’m married. I have responsibilities. And workplace romances are tawdry and clichйd.