Bill nodded. ‘Told you. He reminds me of someone, or something, very strongly. But I can’t quite place it. Like it keeps sliding away when I focus.’
Dana smiled. ‘Yes, he has that kind of quality about him: not exactly slippery, more… hard to define. I don’t even think it’s deliberate. There’s something inside that makes him that way, something about his past.’
They walked slowly down the corridor. On each side were open doors and slivers of chatter; the clicks of typing and mouse-manoeuvre, low-muttering telephone conversations and the poppy chirp of personalised ringtones. Uniforms mingled with admin; whiteboards were crude mixes of handwriting and extravagant arrows. Too many shards of too many stories she didn’t know about. She needed her space. She needed to think.
‘Yeah,’ Bill said. ‘His past. About that. We’re having trouble finding anything after 2004. When I say “having trouble”, I mean of course we have nothing. Absolutely nothing.’
‘Maybe he went travelling or something.’ Dana entered her office and switched on the light. Recent emails from Central made it clear they were to become a low-carbon organisation. ‘I think he took off for a big reason. He denied it, but it felt like there was some kind of family problem; a dispute, maybe.’ She stood next to her desk and slipped off her shoes.
‘We’ve had officers check out the Whittler family home. But it’s not in the family any more: it’s an equestrian centre now. His parents died in 2007 – ravine versus car, ravine wins. Whittler may not know about that, I suppose.’ Bill sank into a chair and played with a stray thread on his trouser hem. ‘That only leaves the brother, Jeb. He’s travelling back from some business meeting or other, apparently. He’s…’ Bill glanced at his watch, ‘hopefully two hours away.’
He glanced beyond her shoulder to the wall. Most detectives – those who had their own office – used that as the Ego Wall. The venue for family photos, certificates, plaques swapped at inter-agency gatherings; a framed snap of the detective glad-handing or yukking it up with some minor celebrity. This wall had a fire-evacuation notice, a defunct taxi company’s business card and a stain of undetermined origin.
Dana defaulted to a fingertip-to-thumb tapping. Nathan’s talk about families prompted that particular reflex – a habit she couldn’t shake, from a time when that was the only thing she could do.
‘Okay, we’ll need to tread carefully about his parents. Some dark history there, I sense. So where the hell has Whittler been for fifteen years?’
‘All the usual channels are blocked. Lucy found no tax or credit trail, no phone records of any kind. His bank account has the same amount it had back then – never been touched. We can’t find any employment records, or social security. It’s like he’s been living off thin air, in thin air.’
Reaching for a drawer, Dana checked for her inhaler. There were seven, lined up like sentries. There should be six, because she should have one on her. It bothered her that she’d forgotten and simply gone into the interview room unarmed. She pocketed one, tapped each of the rest with her index finger and closed the drawer.
‘I got close, with those guesses about where he’s been living. Not quite, but close.’
Bill finally snapped the thread and rolled it into a ball. ‘My guess, if I hadn’t met him, would have been living wild. Not for fifteen years, obviously; just off and on. But hell, if you do that for even a few weeks, it’s blindingly obvious, you know? He’d smell; he’d be slightly dirty; his hair would be a wreck. And he’d have that leathery tan you see with winos and down-and-outs. He has none of that.’
Dana sat and clicked her emails. The most recent said Lucy would be arriving soon. ‘I know, I know. Especially in this weather, too, he’d want to be indoors. And yet, that’s the only kind of thing that fits, isn’t it?’
Bill nodded.
Dana stood to ease her knee and resumed her fingertip tapping. ‘Unless he’s been living a long way away, or under a different name, he has to have been basically off grid. Maybe he got paid in cash and lived in someone’s caravan, or above a garage; perhaps he was living rough for a while but he’s been crashing with someone and got himself cleaned up. There are a couple of trailer parks towards the refinery, for example.’
‘That’s possible,’ Bill admitted, then fell silent.
‘But?’
‘Look, it’s always possible that he’s a statistical outlier – a loner who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time, or whatever. We know murder’s sometimes like that. But I want to put it out there early, Dana: he could be something else entirely. He looks to have done all this deliberately. Assuming it’s the case, then, the isolation? It takes a whole raft of intent to keep hidden in the modern world. You have to stay away from mobile phones, from cars, from CCTV cameras, from people. You have to organise your life to be either very transitory or purposely kept from view. Cash in hand, never putting down roots, keeping on the move: however he organised it, he did it. And he did it consciously. There has to be a mighty powerful reason to make that decision and follow it up for that length of time.’
Dana’s gut reaction so far was that Nathan Whittler was too far off society’s radar to be a threat to that society. But then, the Unabomber had lived off grid. And gone undetected for decades.
‘Yes, I see that, Bill. Although, there might be many reasons behind it – not necessarily criminal ones. He could be hiding from someone, for example. We have witness protection for precisely that kind of reason – they’re often good people in a bad situation.’
‘Granted. But let’s keep the darker options in mind for now. I mean, he said himself – “terrible things… I kept going… had no right”… Let’s allow Whittler – or the evidence we uncover – to prove that it’s benign. If it is. I mean, if someone is ghosting around the region, they can do anything. We have six undetected homicides in this region over the past five years alone. Throw in the whole state, let alone across the borders, and the numbers multiply. He could be anything at this point in the game. It’s possible he killed Lou Cassavette for a trivial reason, or because capture by Lou might expose what he’s done in the past. As far as we can tell right now, no person in the state has fewer alibis than Nathan Whittler. No life is empty, Dana: he filled it up with something. Maybe something he doesn’t want anyone to know about.’
Bill didn’t say such things for effect. He was right, she thought, about what should underpin the investigation at this stage. She needed to avoid being drawn in too tight, too quickly.
Dana stared when Lucy came in; Dana thought it wasn’t obvious. She noticed that Lucy had her hair pulled back today: usually it swept down to her collarbone.
‘Hey, Dana,’ she smiled. ‘Stop your silly habit.’
Dana glanced down at her hand. Thumb and index finger were touching. A small thing to the others but for Dana a stepping stone from the past. That was why she’d asked Lucy to nag her about stopping it.
‘Uurrgghh, I was doing so well. Three weeks, I managed?’ It was also shameful, Dana felt: childish, like thumb-sucking. Thank God no one knew its true significance and saw only a nervous tic.
Lucy stepped back a shade. ‘I make it maybe four days, but who’s counting? I called in on Forensics.’
She thumped a set of papers down on the desk. So much for the shared drive, Dana thought. Bill leaned forward to see but everything was upside down and in an absurdly small font. Although all three knew that everything seemed to be in an absurdly small font to Bill these days: vanity prevented glasses, and squeamishness about eyeballs prevented contacts.