Hindsight (9781921997211)

by Casey, Melanie

  ‘So what makes you so sure it’s the same guy?’

  ‘It was the way he talked. I heard him talk to Janet Hodgson and Old Mick.’ I shuddered at the memory. ‘There was something eager in his voice. He enjoyed what he did. He seemed more nervous about Marcy. With Mick and Janet he was a lot surer of himself, almost cocky. You have to catch him, Ed. He really enjoyed killing Old Mick.’ The last few words came out as a whisper and all of a sudden the apple pie was sitting like a stone in my stomach. I felt physically ill at the memory of the killer’s laughter as he’d taunted the old man.

  Ed was looking down at his hands, which were clenched so tightly into fists that the knuckles almost glowed white. In a flash I remembered that his wife was one of the victims too. How hard must it be to know that someone so perverted had taken his wife? I couldn’t even begin to imagine how that must feel.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ed.’

  ‘Sorry?’ He looked confused for a few seconds until he got my meaning, then he sighed heavily. ‘Cass, you have nothing to be sorry for. You’re the only person who has given me anything that might help to find Susan and the man responsible for taking her away from me.’

  He looked at me with a fierce burning in his eyes.

  A gentle knocking on the French doors broke the tension.

  ‘Yes?’ I called.

  ‘Cass, it’s me,’ Mum said. ‘Are you both all right in there? Can I get you anything?’

  Typical Mum, Gran would have told her to leave us alone but worry would have got the better of her and she just had to make sure I was OK. She poked her head in.

  ‘Come in, Mum, I think we’re pretty much finished.’

  Mum came into the room and sat on the couch next to me, looking at my face and reading the weariness.

  ‘Was there anything else, Cass?’ Ed asked.

  ‘No, nothing that I can remember right now. If you like I’ll spend some time tomorrow writing both of them down for you, just to make sure I haven’t forgotten to tell you anything.’

  ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘No, it helps to get things out of my head if I put them down on paper.’

  ‘You look exhausted, Cass,’ Mum said. No points for subtlety there. Ed took the hint and stood up.

  ‘I’m going to get going. Cass, I’ll ring you from work tomorrow to see how you are, OK?’

  I smiled tiredly. My temporary burst of energy had worn off and the lead was creeping back into my limbs. I had to get to bed. I looked at the clock — it was only 9 PM. It felt like the middle of the night.

  Ed headed for the door and Mum saw him out. I heard her bid him goodnight and then the sound of the door closing solidly behind him. A few moments later Mum came back in.

  ‘Let’s get you upstairs.’ She helped me up from the couch and, like a person looking after someone very old and infirm, she walked me up the stairs. Every step took supreme effort. I honestly don’t think I would have made it if she hadn’t been there with her hand under my elbow, propelling me on. I got to my bedroom and collapsed on the bed. Mum gently took off my shoes, socks and jeans, peeled back the bedclothes from one half of the bed and eased me into it, tucking me in like a small child. She smoothed back my hair and gave me a tender kiss on the forehead.

  ‘I’m proud of you, Cass. You did a good thing today.’

  I don’t think the door was even shut behind her before I slipped into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  CHAPTER

  22

  Ed left Cass’s house full of nervous energy. It’d been a full-on day, but Cass’s revelations about the killer had fired him up. He wanted to get the guy and he wanted to do it now. He thought about calling Phil but he didn’t want to disturb her down-time with Grace. He couldn’t bear the thought of going home; sleep was out of the question.

  He decided to head to the station. He wanted to look back through the case files and see if there was any mention of the other women attending expos. What he needed was the women’s diaries, if they kept them. The Marcy Lucas case was a no go, all the evidence would be in Adelaide. Janet Hodgson’s and Susan’s were local though. Any evidence on their cases would be boxed up in the evidence room.

  He remembered Phil picking up something that looked like a diary when they searched Janet’s flat. Hopefully she was a religious user of it. He also wanted to check back through Susan’s diary. Hers was definitely boxed with other bits and pieces that the investigating detectives thought were relevant. Thinking back, he was sure that she’d gone to some sort of fair or expo in the summer with one of her friends from work, but he couldn’t remember what it was.

  He drove away from Jewel Bay to Fairfield barely aware of his surroundings. For the first time in a long time he actually felt hopeful that he might find an answer to Susan’s disappearance. It was not knowing that ate away at his insides night after night. For months he’d woken up at three in the morning and stared into the darkness, wondering. He’d played out so many scenarios in his head to explain what had happened — including Susan being the victim of a serial killer.

  Now it was almost a certainty, he felt strangely numb. It was weird; facing his worst fears, surely he should feel horrified and appalled, not detached, like he was wrapped in cottonwool and it was happening to someone else. Maybe he’d expended all his sorrow imagining the worst so that there was nothing left to feel now? No, it wasn’t that. One thing he knew for sure was that sorrow could be infinite.

  Cass was partly responsible for him feeling like he’d suddenly fallen down a rabbit hole. He still couldn’t believe that he was working with a psychic — it beggared belief. Hard facts and good detective work were the keys to solving crimes. There just wasn’t room in his universe for the intangible, airy-fairy world of sixth sense mumbo jumbo — until yesterday.

  Anita Lehman had started the unravelling process and Cass had finished it. Any skerrick of a doubt he had left had been blown away when he witnessed her visions firsthand. He was more than a bit shocked at how the visions affected her. Now he got it. He understood how a bright and attractive young woman like her could lock herself away from the world. She wasn’t a nutcase, she was cursed. He felt a deep compassion for her.

  She also brought out a fierce protective streak in him. He’d felt like some old-fashioned hero rescuing a damsel in distress when he’d picked her up and carried her back to his car, and a big part of him liked playing that role. It wasn’t too often that he got to feel heroic these days.

  Ed pulled into the station car park and swiped his access card. He took the lift up to the squad room. There was no one around. He looked at the roster on the wall; Samuels and Matthews were on-call tonight. The Hodgson case had ground to a halt until the CS landed back on their doorstep in the morning and Sorenson would have sent everyone else home to rest up while they could.

  He booted up his computer. He liked working at night when there were no distractions — no phones ringing, no Sorenson looking over his shoulder asking what he was doing. He started by doing a search for expos held in 2009. The word ‘expo’ was what Cass had said and it was pretty specific. He thought it was unlikely that the vic would have used that word randomly.

  There were plenty: cars, house and garden, handyman, caravan and camping, sex and adult products, mind and body, and psychic. Although it was possible the vic was interested in cars, camping or handyman stuff, Ed ruled those out as less likely. From what he’d read of Marcy’s file he also thought the sex one was a bit unlikely although you never knew. That left the house and garden, the mind and body, and the psychic one. The psychic expo was only a week before she was killed and it instantly drew his attention. Maybe the killer was a stallholder? There could be some irony in that; was a fake psychic about to be caught by the real deal?

  He did a more thorough search for information on that particular expo and jotted down the name of the organisers. He would contact them tomorrow and
get a listing of the stallholders. Hopefully they kept that information. If he could get the list, he and Phil could start checking to see if any of them had a record.

  He printed out some info about the expo and shut the computer down. He headed downstairs to the evidence room. Maria, a uniformed officer close to retirement, was on duty at the front desk, which was where the evidence room log was kept. The room itself was through a door behind the desk, in full view of the CCTV cameras.

  Maria greeted him warmly. He’d known her since he first started in Fairfield Station. She’d always been a genuine and up front person. When Susan went missing she was one of the few people who’d approached him about it directly. She’d told him outright that she knew he’d had nothing to do with it. He’d been touched and very grateful for the show of support. When she saw him, her eyebrows shot up in surprise.

  ‘What brings you here at this time of night?’

  It was Maria’s way to know exactly who should be around at any given time. Ed felt a pang of guilt. He wasn’t going to be able to tell her the whole truth and he felt bad about it.

  ‘Two things, CS are here tomorrow about the Janet Hodgson case and I just want to go back over some of the evidence. Is it all here still or did they take it with them?’

  ‘Most of it’s still here. They were pretty confident they had their guy and they didn’t think there was anything very useful in the items you collected. They took all the crime scene stuff but, from memory, left the rest.’

  She shifted her considerable bulk off the stool she was perched on and waddled off into the room behind her. She was a fantastic cook who enjoyed her own cooking. She came back a few minutes later and plonked a cardboard box in front of him.

  ‘You said there were two things? What was the other one?’

  ‘A favour. I was hoping you would let me have Susan’s diary. It has the phone numbers and addresses of some old friends jotted in it.’

  ‘You going to run upstairs and copy the page straight away?’

  ‘Yeah, that’d be great.’ Ed knew he was pushing it. He didn’t want to get the woman in trouble but at the same time he didn’t want a record of the diary being signed out to him. Sorenson would go mad if she knew he was working the case. It was a small miracle that she’d let him work with Cass.

  ‘I’ll go get her box.’ She turned to walk back into the evidence room.

  ‘Don’t you need to look it up?’

  ‘There are some cases that I’ll never forget the location of,’ she said quietly and with such compassion that it brought a lump to Ed’s throat.

  She disappeared again and came back a few minutes later with the box for Susan’s case. She placed it gently on the counter. Ed looked at it. He rested one hand on the lid. How could something as ordinary as a brown cardboard box sum up the wonderful life that had been Susan? It didn’t seem fitting that the essence of her was bundled into something so bland and utilitarian. He wasn’t sure how he felt about diving into the contents. There were ghosts in there and he was afraid to let them out.

  He eased off the lid. A whiff of musty air escaped, telling him that it had been a long time since anyone had spent any time on her case. It wasn’t a cold case any more. He gently sorted through the contents, trying hard not to look too carefully at anything. It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for: Susan’s leather-bound diary. It was something she always carried on her; touching it felt like touching a part of her. He quickly lifted it out of the box. He couldn’t afford to get all sentimental now. He had work to do.

  ‘This is it, thanks, Maria.’

  ‘Make sure you bring it back tonight.’

  ‘Will do, thanks again.’

  ‘Any way I can help,’ she said. For others it would have been a throwaway line. Maria really meant it. Ed was grateful for people like Maria. Small kindnesses made all the difference.

  He headed upstairs, settled back at his desk and opened the diary. Its gold embossed pages gave off the faint and unmistakable scent of Susan’s perfume. He tried to remember the name of it. Tears welled up in his eyes. He still missed her terribly. He flicked through the pages, looking at the scrawled entries in her crazy, loopy cursive. He flicked to the day of her disappearance and started working backwards. Every so often an entry would leap out at him, adding extra salt to the freshly opened wound. Ed’s birthday dinner! she’d written.

  He remembered the night. She’d surprised him with a dinner at his favourite restaurant, Russell’s Pizza House in McLaren Vale. Phil and Grace were there too. It was a night of laughter, good food and way too much wine. He dragged himself back from the memory; happy times.

  He kept flicking, trying not to let other memories crowd in. He had to go right back to March to find the entry he was looking for. There it was, the 25th; she’d gone to a mind and body expo in Adelaide with her friend Julia. He remembered it now. She came back talking about crystals and astrological charts. He’d poohed-poohed it all and she was annoyed with him for being so close-minded. He tried to imagine her face if he told her he was now working with a psychic. She would think he was taking the piss.

  He could feel his pulse racing. He now had two victims who’d been to expos in the months leading up to their disappearance. Was it just coincidence? He stood up and opened the Janet Hodgson box. There were a few things they’d taken from her flat and some bags of evidence from the scene but that was it. He rummaged some more. Tucked down the side of the box was her diary. It was small and black, the sort that was given away with magazines. He flicked through it, starting at the day she was murdered and working backwards.

  There was nothing. Disappointment made him sink back into his seat. Still, it didn’t mean she hadn’t attended one, it just meant she wasn’t good at keeping a diary. They would have to talk to her work colleagues again.

  Then there were the other three cases they could check. The one benefit of the CS being involved was that they would have access to the other files. If the expo angle really was the link between the victims it was something tangible they could start working on. If all or most of the vics had attended these things then they could start to look at stallholders, security and anyone else who’d been involved in all of the events attended by the victims. It would narrow down the search and, with luck, give them only a few likely suspects to focus on.

  He yawned. He’d been running on adrenaline for the last hour and it had finally worn off. It was time to go home. He couldn’t do any more today and he was a bit disappointed. Part of him had hoped for a miracle; that he would find the connection, access the list of people who had worked at the expos and come up with a possible suspect all before bedtime.

  Tomorrow CS would be briefed, they would take over the running of the case and Sorenson would boot him off it once and for all. It was maddening. Just when he felt like he was close to an answer to explain Susan’s disappearance he would be excluded. Phil would keep him in the loop, but there was only so much she could do, assuming that CS let her keep working the case.

  He sighed as he picked up Susan’s diary and Janet’s box. He took the stairs and dropped the items back. He thanked Maria for her help and then headed for his car. It was well after 10 PM and he just wanted to sleep. As he drove the dark streets on his way home he was acutely aware of how alone he was. He was the only person crazy enough to be out on such a bitterly cold and miserable night. At least he hoped he was. Please God, let the killer be home tonight.

  CHAPTER

  23

  When Ed got home he snacked his way through anything resembling food that he could find before crashing into bed. He expected sleep to come quickly but the minute he closed his eyes thoughts of Susan crowded in.

  Images flashed through his mind and he launched himself out of bed and rushed to the bathroom. He heaved, retching until his eyes watered and his throat was raw. He sat back against the bathroom wall. What they found cou
ld be worse than not knowing; still, he would rather know than live his life wondering.

  He got up and splashed cold water on his face then looked at himself in the mirror. It wasn’t pretty. He turned the light off and crashed into bed. Exhaustion finally won out and he was asleep within seconds.

  The next morning he was awake by seven, bleary-eyed, head pounding. He showered, took a handful of pills and headed straight for the station. He wanted to talk to Phil before Sorenson and the rest turned up. Thankfully Phil was already in, looking disgustingly perky.

  ‘Jesus, look what the cat dragged in,’ she said, looking Ed up and down, taking in rumpled clothes, mussed up hair and stubble. ‘Tough day yesterday?’

  ‘Yeah, really tough. I’ve got heaps to tell you. I need food and coffee if I’m going to face Sorenson today. Can we head for Enzo’s and I’ll fill you in?’

  They settled into their usual spot and Phil waited, not very patiently, while Ed wolfed down a bacon and egg sandwich. He was chewing the last mouthful when Phil’s curiosity finally got the better of her.

  ‘So? What did little Miss Freaky see?’

  ‘It was what she heard.’

  He told Phil about the expo angle and the research he’d done the night before.

  ‘You think our guy might be a stallholder at one of these new age expo things?’

  ‘He could be security or one of the organisers. We — sorry, you — can contact the organisers and try to get some lists of all the stallholders and anyone else involved. Also, with Janet you can canvass her colleagues again and see if anyone remembers her attending any expos recently.’

  ‘With a bit of luck we’ll get some common hits and I can run the names for any priors,’ Phil said.

  ‘Yeah, I got the names and numbers of the organisers for the expos that Susan and Marcy Lucas, the 2009 vic, attended.’