'What was the guy's name?' Jill asked. 'The guy from the phone call? Henry someone? Asian name.'
'Nguyen, Henry. AKA Cutter.'
'That's it. Cutter.' Jill made a scoffing noise. 'Must've been real hard for her to come up with a name like that, given the stories all over the media,' she said sarcastically. 'The call's probably bullshit. Just someone who wants attention, knows nothing about the case at all.' She didn't know whether she believed that, exactly, but she was curious to know more of Gabriel's thoughts about it.
He grunted and kept reading.
Jill high-beamed a car doing eighty in the right-hand lane. It was a hundred zone, and she didn't feel like sitting on this motorway any longer than she had to. The Ford Laser stayed right where it was.
'What's in the file that's so fascinating, anyway?' she said, starting to seriously tailgate the guy in front of her. 'You've read the interview before.'
'It's not what's in here,' said Gabriel. 'It's what's not. You wouldn't believe the questions they forgot to ask this couple from Balmain.'
The truck in the lane next to her was too close to consider overtaking from the left, but the Laser could easily have moved over by now. Jill was considering putting the siren up on the dash and ruining this guy's day.
'So what did they miss out on?' She tried to curb her impatience. Scotty had hated driving with her when she was in this mood. Gabriel seemed not to notice at all.
'Well, a detailed narration of events, for one.'
'Yeah,' she said. 'I read through the interviews yesterday. They did seem a bit sketchy.'
'A bit? Reid did the Preston-Jones interview. He didn't get a description of any of the voices. He didn't ask about incidental sounds from the other room. For God's sake, there wasn't even a word-for-word account of the exact words the witness heard from each offender.'
'Mmm. Pretty sloppy, especially given they had few physical features to go on because of the balaclavas.'
'Don't start me,' he said. 'There's plenty bloody more they could have asked about physical characteristics.'
The Laser finally moved over. A young bloke in dark sunnies. He flipped her the finger before he took the River-wood exit. Dickhead. He probably thought she and Gabriel were a married couple out for a drive. She'd known how to spot an unmarked cop car from age thirteen. This fool had no idea how close he'd come to a five-hundred-dollar headache. He was lucky that Gabriel had finally started to talk and distract her.
'What questions would you have asked to get more from the witnesses about the physical details?' Jill was genuinely interested. All detectives had a different interview technique, and most tended to stick to the questions they had learned from their first supervisor. She'd always been open to learning more sophisticated methods of getting at facts.
'I always teach the witness to use their memory like a video-recording,' he said, suddenly animated. 'I tell them they can fast-forward scenes, or slow the action down. They can take it frame by frame, or just view still-shots. On any given shot they can zoom the camera in, or widen the lens to take in details at the corners of their vision.'
He closed the file but kept his finger inside, marking his place. 'Some witnesses aren't so good at processing visual information, but around a third are brilliant. You can get some people to change the camera angle to get almost any perspective, like a bird's-eye view, looking down from the ceiling, or shoe-view, the camera looking up at the action from the floor.'
'Wow. And that works?'
'Yeah. Like I said, not with everyone, but the least you'd do would be to say, "Stop the picture now. In your mind's eye, stop him right there in front of you. Okay, now tell me what he looks like from the top of his head all the way down."'
'That's good,' said Jill. 'I mean, I do try to get the most vivid descriptions possible, but I'll have to try some of those questions.'
'This,' Gabriel waved the file, 'is shit. He hasn't even asked the witness if he has any thoughts about the perps' motivations. You can get a lot of incidentals when you ask them to just let go and guess why the offenders might have behaved the way they did.'
'You want to know why the witness thinks the offender committed the crime?'
'Sure. You know that witnesses are always worried about saying something wrong, or making a mistake. They censor themselves. In a case like this, we can worry about errors in accuracy later; what we want from the witness in an interview is every little thing they can remember, even when they're not completely certain. They're our only eyes in there. They're the detective on the scene.'
'Interesting way of putting it. Do you ever say that to them?'
'All the time. You tell them you want them to guess the thoughts and emotions of the offenders. It widens their viewpoint. Opens them up. You can ask, "Why do you think he did that?", or "Do you think they planned it to go that way?" or even something like "Do you think any of them were angry with, or closer to, any of the others?"'
'Mmm.'
Jill drove silently for a while, her thoughts turning back to the anonymous phone call.
'Why'd you say the anonymous caller was feeling guilty?' she asked again.
'Well, she obviously wants us to investigate someone. You're right, it could be a bullshit call, but I thought her sentence structure was interesting when I listened to the tape this morning. She was really eager to put this guy in. And I don't think she just made up a name. If she did, it wouldn't take us long to find out he doesn't exist. Pretty pointless if it's a joke.' He pulled his finger from the file and placed the folder into the door pocket, turning towards her. 'Besides,' he said, 'I think this Henry Nguyen is real, and the feeling I got is that this caller can't live with herself without saying something to someone. She wants us to find him. But she definitely knows more about him than she's told us.'
'It could just be someone she's pissed off with,' returned Jill. 'Revenge – she might just want us to give some guy a hard time.'
Jill had listened to the call too, and she had to admit that she'd also thought there was something about it that demanded close attention. The caller's voice had been muffled; she really didn't want them to know who she was. At the moment though, Jill was more interested in the way her new partner thought than in discussing her own impressions.
'Could be,' he said. 'We'll have to wait and see. The details she gave don't sound right for that though – not just his address, but his Medicare number, where he's done time? And what she didn't say is just as important. Like, this is how I know what I know; this is why you need to get this guy; and more importantly, my name is…'
'Come on, we get heaps of anonymous tips. People don't want to get involved.'
'Yeah, but descriptive information like that is coming from someone who's just a little bit more than a helpful citizen. I think that call's for real and we're looking for a guilty woman. Guilt by association with something. And if she's got anything to do with this case, I'll know her when I talk to her.'
For some reason Jill believed him. That speech should've sounded arrogant, but instead Gabriel just sounded open, matter-of-fact.
She finished the last of her water as the traffic on the motorway slowed to a stop. There was obviously some holdup ahead. At that precise moment, she realised she was desperate for the toilet. Great. She sighed and tried to distract herself. She just wasn't used to these mammoth drives – maybe it was a conditioned response. It seemed like every time she got on this bloody road she had to go. Could be because there were no service stations: when she knew she couldn't go, she suddenly had to. Thank God, they were nearly at Moore Park.