She turned back. ‘But?’
‘See for yourself. Weird.’ Bill pointed at a red rucksack to her left. It was well worn but still in good shape – in the gathering daylight she noted fresh dubbin recently applied to the seams. Through the open top she could see several paperbacks and two packs of mosquito repellent. Prising past these with a pen, she saw cans of beans and some chocolate bars. The rest was lost in the bowels of the rucksack. She’d get a full inventory later.
She ducked her head around the corner as Bill took out his phone. ‘Why was he stealing this? He could buy all this for next to nothing.’
‘Exactly. Why kill for that? Why be killed for that?’ Bill shrugged his shoulders and turned away to dial.
Dana took a glance back towards the exit and the preceding aisles. A couple of mountain bikes would be worth several thousand; she imagined fishing rods weren’t cheap. There were cigarettes for sale behind the counter, but they were secured by a roller door as per the law: she hadn’t seen any in the rucksack. The burglar seemed professional enough to enter seamlessly but amateur enough to steal cheap, largely unsellable items. The owner appeared ready to die for a minor point of principle – for stuff that wouldn’t even register on his insurance premium.
Halfway down the next aisle, splayed across the tiles, a packet of kitchen knives lay at an angle. The plastic lid had been ripped and one knife was missing. It seemed, from the indentation in the packaging, about the right size. She heard a murmur of Bill’s conversation, then his farewell to whoever.
‘Hey, Bill,’ she called over the top of the shelving. ‘Killer didn’t bring his own weapon?’
Bill leaned around the corner. ‘Yeah, looks pretty ad hoc, doesn’t it? Assuming that gap in the packaging turns out to be the weapon.’
She looked more carefully at the way the lid was ripped. It was still creased from the guy’s grip: rushed, but not frenzied. She wondered briefly why whoever did it had taken the third-longest knife and not the biggest one. Surely he would have wanted the best weapon he could get if the attack was spontaneous? And what had Cassavette done to make him feel he had to attack?
‘Did Cassavette have a weapon?’
Bill rocked his hand. ‘Maybe. Haven’t found one for him either. When Forensics get here they’ll search the whole place. But nothing yet.’
She realised she was wasting battery and switched off the torch. Golden light was now spearing in through the skylights on the eastern side of the building, glittering off the visible silver insulation in the ceiling. She could see cobwebs in the corners. Refrigerators hummed. The whole tone of the place was upbeat and direct – buy now, try this, grab one of these, limited time offer. All the colours on the walls, the packaging, the posters and special offers; they were lurid candy and cartoonish. Lonely, desperate homicide was a counterpoint.
‘So…’ Dana scuffed a foot against a kick plate below the shelving. ‘Guy comes in, ready to steal some beans, apparently. Gets halfway through; Cassavette makes himself known.’ She turned and went to the end of the aisle, pointing with the torch. ‘That’s our man’s escape route. I’m guessing all the doors were locked.’
‘Yup, and the lights were off. Someone opened the mains box and shut the power off before they came in.’ Bill joined her near a display of toys for kids of all ages. ‘Patrol switched it back on after they found the suspect and the body.’
‘This place doesn’t have back-up generators?’ Most did these days; the cost of replacing stock after an outage was horrendous.
‘They do, but they’re only wired to the freezers and refrigeration.’
Dana nodded. ‘So it’s totally dark. Cassavette comes out of his hidey-hole over there; the burglar’s only way out is back through the window he used. You have to assume Cassavette – either deliberately or accidentally – blocked the escape.’
‘Logical. He’s clearly been waiting up nights expecting a burglary; he figures help’s on its way because the silent alarm was activated when the window opened. All he has to do is contain the guy until the cavalry arrives.’ Bill went to the window and looked out at the parked vehicles. The uniforms were trooping back to three marked Commodores, disconsolate.
‘Yes. So why would the burglar go crazy? I mean, he looks like a pro – the forensic awareness, the very particular choice of what to steal. That isn’t random, it’s planned. So if he’s a pro and it’s all gone a little wrong, why fight your way out? Why so desperate?’
‘Maybe he’s on two strikes and this will send him away for a while?’ Bill turned back to face her and held his palms open. ‘I dunno. First sweep of the databases might tell us.’ There was a crunching of gravel outside. ‘Ah, proper search team.’
‘He was completely silent about what happened?’ asked Dana as they headed for the door.
‘He hasn’t said a word, as far as I know.’ Bill waved to Stuart Risdale, the head of the search team, who gave the thumbs-up as two others disgorged themselves from a darkened SUV. ‘Check that. The guy repeated one word.’
Bill turned to face Dana as the freezing air hit them from the doorway.
‘Guy said, “Sorry.” Several times.’
Chapter 3
It was fourteen minutes’ gentle drive from Jensen’s Store, down a series of backroads, to the Cassavette house on the outskirts of Earlville. Dana had time to find a classical-music station on the way.
Earlville was considered the less prosperous of the ‘twin towns’. It had a sneering, fractious relationship with Carlton; a kind of sibling rivalry between orphans. Marooned in a region of forests, swamps and lakes, the two towns were merely background noise for city dwellers three hours away. Earlville thought Carlton was full of snobs and the wasting of public money; Carlton thought Earlville should give up its nostalgia for low-paid sweat jobs and join the modern world.
Most of the properties along the route were large ‘lifestyle blocks’: homes set back among the gums and myrtle, surrounded by pony paddocks. Faux-hacienda, with terracotta tiles replacing Colourbond, seemed the look du jour. Well-tended horses chewed thoughtfully near the road, steam rising gently from blanketed flanks. Twice she saw puffing teenagers hoisting tack on to a shoulder. Maybe the first thing in their adolescent lives they’d shown consistent sacrifice for; perhaps that was why their parents indulged it.
Many homes on this road had ostentatious stone entrances; Dana could tell which ones had electric gates, too. She’d noticed a while ago that shuttering off the outside world – and thus implying that everyone was a threat – was something that had seeped gradually from the city to Carlton. Score minus one for the famous Aussie egalitarianism, she thought: now, just like in so many other places, ‘others’ were a potential risk to be managed.
Bill was now at the station, debriefing the first-on-scene officers and prepping the suspect for interview. Lucy was driving in from home. Mike was on his way back from Earlville Mercy hospital and would ride as first assist to her investigation. Mike was a completer-finisher. Thank God: Dana had proper back-up.
Too early for commuting SUVs, she had the road largely to herself. Her pre-dawn excursion to Pulpit Falls kept pushing itself to the front of her mind. She had enough strength to shove it back temporarily, but she knew it couldn’t be contained.
Even murder was just a displacement activity. Investigating a killing staved off the force and resonance of memory, the crippling panic and catastrophic damage it caused. She’d granted her blind-siding depression one Day of freedom, and now she was compromising that. It would exact a price for the betrayal.