‘The headlines,’ began Lucy. ‘No sign of the weapon yet, but they’re starting the fingertip search now they’ve done the big stuff. Your guy in custody? Well, he was wearing plastic bags on his shoes and he had gloves. So don’t expect much from footprints, fingerprints, or anything in the DNA.’
Dana flitted between the paper and Lucy’s eyes. ‘He had blood on his hands, though?’
‘Through the gloves. We haven’t found any bloody fingerprints on shelves yet. The store wasn’t heated, so I suppose he never got too warm and prickly. But there will be fingerprints generally – dozens of people. Might take a while to sift through and find the relevant ones.’
‘Great.’ Dana eye-rolled. Any store would have heaps of people prodding, testing, picking up, discarding: it was a forensic free-for-all that would hinder the investigation. ‘We can pretty much assume that he was the one who climbed in the window, though. It’s not like we need that.’
‘Assume, not necessarily prove. But yeah, he can’t deny being there, and he can’t deny he has no permission to be there. However’ – Lucy reached down and turned the page, tapping with a purple talon at the second paragraph – ‘the blood on him matches the victim’s type. DNA, as you know, takes longer. There’s no spread on the victim because there’s only one wound, so no arterial spray or anything.’
Dana sighed. ‘Okay, but he sort of knows that already. Must know that. He doesn’t seem particularly bothered.’
Lucy frowned. ‘Not bothered?’
‘Not at all,’ replied Dana, sliding herself into the chair. ‘I mean, most people in that situation – even those dumb enough not to have a lawyer by now – most of them would be calculating the odds. They’d weigh up what they think we have: motive, forensics, any witnesses, and so on. Then’ – she looked at Bill – ‘they’d try to get ahead of the game. Explain being in the store; why it wasn’t them; how the blood came to be on them, and so on. They’d get their retaliation in first.’
‘But he’s not?’ Lucy directed the question at Bill.
‘No, Luce, he isn’t,’ replied Bill. ‘As Dana says, he seems unaware of the repercussions. Maybe he knows that, by this time tomorrow, we’ll be struggling to get anything out of him. I mean, he could pretend to play ball today and misdirect us. Then his lawyer tells him to shut it. He looks like he co-operated, and we came up with nothing. Could be a strategy with a jury in mind.’
‘Or,’ interjected Dana, ‘he has other things on his mind that he thinks are more important. Might be more important.’
They all chewed on that for a moment. The notion that something could be more pressing to Nathan than being a murder suspect felt strange. He appeared to have other priorities, and his interrogation seemed a distraction. He behaved as if, at any moment, someone would see that suspecting him was laughable and would simply let him leave. It struck Dana that, if Nathan had committed other or greater crimes, that might be his reaction to arrest for this one.
Dana broke the silence. ‘Luce, a hypothetical.’
Lucy stood from her slumped lean against a wall. ‘Shoot.’
‘You’re early twenties, you want to drop off the radar. Completely. Totally. No communication with the family or anyone you know. Just drop out entirely. How do you do it and where and how do you live?’
Lucy smiled to herself and sat. Dana glanced at Bill, who raised a querying eyebrow that Dana didn’t quite follow.
‘So, it would depend on circumstance.’ Lucy bit her lip in a way Dana couldn’t stop noticing. ‘I mean, do I have access to a new identity? Do I know the kind of people who could do that? Getting a false driver’s licence, Medicare card, passport, and so on?’
Dana leaned forward and tried to focus on the paperwork in front of her. ‘I don’t think so, no. We’ve still to find any employment record, but he doesn’t really strike me that way, no. And I don’t think it was necessarily planned either. He might have simply upped and left.’ She looked to Bill for a confirmatory nod. ‘So let’s say you don’t.’
‘Then it’s not as if I can start again, as such. I have to stay me, with my identity. Which means either I have to move right away – so people don’t know me and I can start afresh. Or I stay where I am, but no one can see me.’
‘Moving away’s more plausible to me,’ offered Bill. ‘We simply haven’t widened the net enough. We’re near the meeting point of three states here.’
‘Confluence,’ said Dana. ‘“Confluence” would be the word.’ Lucy smiled to herself.
‘Pee-dant,’ grinned Bill.
‘It’s pronounced “ped-ant”,’ chorused Dana and Lucy, laughing.
‘Anyway,’ Bill continued with an exasperated hand-wave, ‘he’ll have slipped across a border or two, into another jurisdiction. Like I said: cash-in-hand employment, drifting. But maybe, in the last few weeks, staying somewhere he can get clean and neat. That would partly explain his appearance.’
Lucy raised a finger. ‘But if he’s clean and neat, and staying somewhere decent, why burgle the store? I mean,’ she went on, ‘he’s only in that store for one of two reasons.’ She counted them off on her fingers. ‘One, to burgle it. Or two, to kill the victim. If we’re assuming that he might not be a murderer’ – she looked pointedly at Dana – ‘and I think that’s how some of us are leaning, then he was going there to steal. Why do that if you’re already some place that’s comfy and you’re well looked after?’
‘There you go again, Luce,’ said Dana, ‘coming at us with your “facts” and your “logic”.’ Her smile faded quickly. ‘You’ve got a point. There’s another thing: the way he is with people. He doesn’t seem like he knows how to relate at all, or even fake it. It’s not all shock, or being arrested. I’m sure that’s part of it, but I think he’s this way anyway. I’m struggling to see how he could get a job, or hold one down, with those kinds of people skills. Something that involves zero interface, maybe? Hmm. In fact, the more I think about that, the less likely it seems.’
Lucy and Bill had no reply. It struck Dana that no one but her had spoken with Nathan since he had arrived at the station. Everyone else, including Bill, had spoken to Nathan. The doctor’s checks amounted to little more than a concussion test – Nathan had given single-word answers to direct questions. The custody officer, Simpson, had asked Nathan a couple of questions, but the replies had been nods or headshakes. Bill had run through the prisoner’s rights and got the legal waiver signed. But Dana had been the only one to get a word out of Nathan about anything other than his most basic details.
‘Okay,’ said Bill, ‘we need to move forward. I want Dana back in the room quickly, Luce. The court’s clock is already going, and there’s no telling when Whittler will change his mind and lawyer up, so we have to exploit the gap while it’s there. Wherever he’s been living, we have to find it. There might be crucial evidence there, but at the very least it’ll be a measure of the man – something we’re severely lacking at the moment. Check databases interstate to see if he shows up there. Run his prints across the state, and across the border – I want to know if he’s even been suspected of anything else. And I think Dana needs as much information as possible on the family, especially Jeb. Something under the waterline set Whittler off – would help to know what it is.’
Lucy gave a mock-salute. ‘All over it, boss.’ Dana watched her walk away.
After she left Bill turned to Dana. ‘When your head’s back, Dana?’
She looked absent-mindedly at him. ‘Uh? Oh. Yes, we need to get Whittler to open up on where he’s been living. That might give us a whole new ball game.’