‘None,’ Freda Unger said.
‘Does she have a boyfriend? Could he have called her?’
Freda Unger made a wide gesture with both arms. ‘Who knows? We never met any, if she did have boyfriends. But she was young still.’
‘Twenty?’
‘Twenty-one in March.’
Kurt Unger coughed. He said, ‘I overheard a policeman say the windows were broken on her car.’
Challis cursed under his breath. ‘Yes.’
‘She locked her doors but he broke her windows with a rock and dragged her out,’ Kurt Unger said fixedly. Nothing moved, only his bottom jaw.
His wife crumpled. ‘Oh, Kurt, don’t.’
‘We don’t know what happened,’ Challis said. ‘My feeling is, it’s not related to her disappearance. All of the windows were smashed, suggesting vandals, and the radio had been ripped out and the boot forced open. Someone saw her car there and decided on the spur of the moment to break in.’
‘But what was she doing there?’
‘It’s possible your daughter’s flatmate will know,’ Challis said. ‘We’re tracking her down now.’
As he spoke, Scobie Sutton entered, holding an envelope in his long fingers. The flap was open; there was a letter inside. ‘It’s from this Denise character’s mother,’ he said. ‘There’s a return address on the back, somewhere in East Bentleigh. Do you know where the phone is, Mrs Unger?’
‘The kitchen.’
‘Right.’
‘Excuse me,’ Challis said, and he joined Sutton in the kitchen nook. ‘Scobie,’ he muttered, ‘if the girl’s there, ask her what Trina’s car was doing on the highway.’
Sutton looked as though he’d just remembered his manners. He held out the handset. ‘You want to make the call, boss?’
‘No, I didn’t mean that. Ask her the obvious questions, Trina’s movements over the past couple of days, any boyfriend, was she aware Trina was missing, that kind of thing, but we must know about the car.’
Challis returned to the sitting room. The parents were whispering to each other. Reluctant to intrude, he crossed the room to the front door, stepped outside, and wandered across to the police car that had been parked in the driveway for most of the morning. A uniformed constable sat in the driver’s seat with the door open, eating a sandwich. She swallowed hurriedly. ‘Do you need me inside again, sir?’
‘Not just yet. They’re holding up for the moment.’
‘Sir, we just got word a walkman and a sweatband have been found near the car.’
‘How near?’
‘A few hundred metres away.’
Jogging, Challis thought. That’s what she was doing there. But when? Yesterday? The day before? Why hadn’t the flatmate noticed her missing?
Sutton joined him. He tried for some humour. ‘Denise has been hitting the Christmas champagne pretty hard. Hard to get any sense out of her. But she said Trina Unger likes to go jogging on the highway. Used to jog around the park, but got scared off by a flasher a few months ago, and now jogs on the highway because it’s quiet.’
‘What time of day?’
‘Early morning. Daybreak.’
‘Never in the evening?’
‘Not according to Denise.’
‘When did she last see Trina?’
‘Friday night. On Saturday she went to stay with her parents in East Bentleigh to help her mother get ready for Christmas. She noticed that Trina hadn’t come back from her run, but didn’t think any more about it.’
‘Boyfriend?’
‘She didn’t know of one.’
Challis stared unseeingly over the rooftops. Young men and women left home to lead their separate, secret lives, and some of them didn’t make it. ‘Scobie, go home, spend some time with your wife and kid. I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Thirteen
On Boxing Day the Age and the Herald Sun carried stories about the missing girl. At 8 a.m., Tessa Kane came to the station and told Challis that she was bringing out an issue between Christmas and the New Year after all. ‘We received another letter. It was hand-delivered to the box we have next to the main entrance.’
Challis spread it out inside its clear plastic slip case and read: Like you, my eyes are everywhere. But mine know what to look for. Do yours?
‘Fancies himself,’ Challis said. ‘Well, that’s true to form.’ He sighed. ‘You’ve taken a copy?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll send this to the lab.’
‘We go to press tomorrow night.’
‘Tess, you’re inflaming the situation.’
‘Try and stop me, Hal. I’ve had legal advice.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Challis said. ‘You’re scaring people, and in danger of attracting crackpots, not to mention copycats.’
‘That doesn’t negate the fact that there’s been two murders and a possible third.’
‘At this stage it’s an abduction.’
‘Hal, come on.’
Challis said, ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t publish, that’s all.’
Ellen parked her car. Rhys was waiting for her again. Working on Boxing Day? Talk about keen. He crossed to where she was standing and handed her an envelope. ‘Your quote.’
She opened it, saying, ‘Rhys, this is the season to be jolly. It’s also the season to get the phone bill, the gas bill, the electricity bill…’
She said it with a grin, but there was a flash of irritation and he said, ‘I thought you were serious. I kept the costs down as much as possible.’ He turned toward the shrubbery border to cross into the grounds of the courthouse.
‘Rhys, wait.’
She caught up to him and said, ‘Look, I didn’t mean to offend you. You must be wondering what you’ve got yourself into with my family.’
He was still prickly. ‘I got the distinct impression the other day that your husband doesn’t want aircon fitted.’
Ellen said, keeping it light, ‘Oh, he’ll come around eventually.’
‘He didn’t seem to like me much. That I can do without.’
There was no point in avoiding what had happened. Rhys had stayed for a barbecue lunch, but it had been a disaster. ‘Alan gets like that sometimes. It’s not a pleasant job he’s got, he sees terrible road accidents.’ She grinned. ‘But yeah, I don’t think another barbecue is a good idea just now.’
She saw the tightness go out of him a little. He looked at his watch. ‘I’d better get back to work. Why don’t you look over the quote and I’ll catch up with you later in the week.’
She said, ‘A drink would be nice.’
He hesitated. She seemed to wait for a long time for him to smile and say, ‘Good idea.’
Challis briefed them at eight-thirty, saying: ‘Unger, curiously, was snatched at dawn, when she’d gone for an early morning jog. But what does that tell us? Not much. Does our man prowl up and down the highway for hours every night, to see what he can find? Was he coming home when he saw Unger, or on his way somewhere, to work perhaps? Was it opportunistic, or had he seen her jogging before?
‘Which brings us to his psychological make-up. A loner, according to one of our shrinks. Probably smart, in his thirties, a normally functioning citizen on the surface. You’d live next door to him for years and not know he liked to rape and kill young women. Probably some trouble in his childhood. Drunken, abusive father, unhealthy attachment to his mother. Unable now to relate easily to women, beyond surface pleasantries. We’ve heard it all before, there’s no point knowing these things unless to have them proven after the fact. The point is, he looks, and behaves, like the man next door, he has no work, family or other link to his victims, and so we’ll simply have to rely on luck and chance along with good old-fashioned detective work.
‘I won’t kid you, things have stalled. Not much forensic joy from the bodies, and nothing on the letter sent to the Progress. The paper comes from laser printer paper available at any newsagent and many supermarkets. The printer was a Canon, and they’re a dime a dozen, found in businesses and homes all over the country. The envelope was post office issue. There are prints on the envelope, but they’re smudged and likely to be from mail-sorters and posties. We’re checking that now.’