Limbo (11 page)

‘You’re so old school.’

He raised his mug in salute. ‘Thank you.’

‘That wasn’t a compliment.’

‘I figured. Is there any particular reason you came today or was it just to flaunt greenery in Ralph’s face and bust my balls?’

‘I came to see what you and your mouse learned yesterday about the case but as you’re looking really shite at the moment maybe you should go to bed for a few hours.’

‘Are you going to tuck me in? Or sing me a lullaby?’

Joy shot him her very best sardonic smile. ‘Not likely.’

He shoved one hand through his hair, pushing the thick tangle of salt and pepper curls back then rubbed the same hand over his jaw. The rough scrape of whiskers caused a tiny little pang somewhere in Joy’s lower half.

She ignored it. That half of her had never been very reliable. It was
no
t her better half.

‘Sorry,’ he grimaced. ‘Late night.’

‘I’m not surprised with all that nuclear-strength caffeine running around in your system. I’m surprised you don’t scare clients away or that you have any at all if this is how you dress for work.’

He shrugged. ‘This ain’t the fifties. People like their P.I.s to look —’

‘Shady?’

Dash glared at her. ‘Resourceful.’

Joy threw back her head and laughed. ‘Is that what you call it?’

He turned his chair on her. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’ he grouched.

Joy smiled at the back of his head. ‘Couple days off.’ She walked around the front of his desk and plonked herself in the chair. ‘Not on again til Saturday. Thought I’d hang out with you and help you with the case.’

He snorted into his coffee mug. ‘Lucky me.’

‘Well? How’d it go? Any theories?’

He put the coffee mug down and studied her face. ‘Come on,’ he said, standing, grabbing his mug again. ‘Follow me.’

Joy dutifully followed Dash next door into his lounge room. It was sparsely furnished with a large three-seater lounge made of some kind of overly stuffed fabric that had seen better days and a seriously fucking huge wall-mounted television.

She hoped it was for sport and not porn.

But none of that was what really drew her gaze. Over against the far wall sat a large mobile whiteboard with photographs and newspaper clippings and names and dates and lines and arrows and question marks all scrawled in thick black marker.

Dash strode over to it and dragged it in front of the television to the centre of the room. ‘I pulled everything I could find about the case online and through contacts yesterday and last night. Everything about Hailey and her disappearance. Everything about Martin. All the clues from the police end of it and everything that you told me.’

Joy stared at the board trying to take it all in. It was like a storyboard — a storyboard of Hailey Richardson’s murder — boasting an intricate web of information, clues and relationships.

‘Aren’t there computer programs for that these days?’ she asked absently as her eyes roamed around trying to absorb it all.

He nodded. ‘Yep. But I’m old school remember?’ He looked down at her and she smiled back at him. ‘I like to be able to sit back at a distance and mull over it.’

To prove his point he sunk down on the couch behind him and did just that, sitting forward, bent at the hips, poised for action in case something jumped out at him.

Joy followed suit. ‘Alright then, talk me through it.’

‘Okay.’ He stood again and picked up one of the markers that were sitting in the metal gutter attached to the whiteboard.

‘Hailey,’ he said, jabbing the pen at her picture, one of the ones that had appeared numerous times on the six o’clock news bulletins. Hailey beaming at the camera in her wedding dress just eighteen months before. So happy and alive. Very different to the picture that Joy had of her in her mind’s eye. To her Hailey would always be a dead woman with a hole in her head or a frantic ghost begging for help to find her daughter.

‘She disappeared on the eighth of January this year. She left the house just before eight-thirty that night in her white Prado four-wheel drive with Isabella, who was five and a half months old at the time.’

Dash tapped on the picture of baby Isabella.

‘Hailey and her husband Martin,’ he tapped on Martin’s picture, ‘had just had an argument and in Martin’s statement he told police that Hailey was going down to the local shops to buy some bread and milk because they were running low and she hoped that the car drive would put Isabella to sleep. Isabella, according to both Martin’s statement and some neighbours who were across the road at the time, was apparently screaming as Hailey strapped her into the car.’

‘And they were never seen again,’ Joy said.

‘Almost right,’ Dash nodded.

‘Almost?’

‘This,’ he said, tapping a photo of a grainy picture of a Night Owl, ‘is the local shop that Martin assumed Hailey had gone to. There’s no CCTV in the shop but there is a dodgy one outside that had been tampered with at some stage without the shops owners knowing. It managed to capture a ground-level view of a white Prado pulling in that night around eight-thirty.’

‘You’ve seen it?’

He nodded. ‘I have. It’s on my PC, I’ll show you later.’

‘How’d you manage that?’

He shrugged. ‘I was a cop for seventeen years. Let’s just say I know people who owe me favours and I’ve called every one of them in.’

Joy supposed that should be disturbing but she was just grateful that Dash
had
favours he could call in. ‘So, when you say ground level, what do you mean?’

‘The image only shows the driver’s side to about half way up the door and a partial plate which matches the Richardson’s Prado.’

‘So it was Hailey?’

Dash nodded. ‘Yes. We see feet and legs to just below the knee get out of the car. The feet are wearing thongs with white plastic daisies along the straps and Martin confirms in his statement that although he hadn’t taken any notice of the shoes his wife was wearing, she did indeed own a pair of thongs with white plastic daisies which couldn’t be located anywhere in the house. Apparently they were her favourite.’

Joy glanced at Martin’s picture, the one from the wedding day. He looked so happy and content. Like he’d just gotten everything he could ever want. She recalled his face from Sunday. He’d looked like a man who had been to hell and still hadn’t found his way home.

‘We don’t see Hailey go to the back door and open it to get Isabella out of her seat. Isabella’s car seat was directly behind the driver’s seat.’

‘She left her in the car?’

‘It would appear so.’

‘Maybe she was finally asleep and Hailey didn’t want to disturb her?’ Joy doubted she was the first mother to do that and she felt like she had to defend Hailey for some reason. She may have only met her that once but she could tell Hailey loved her daughter. There had to be a good reason for her to leave Isabella unattended. ‘Was she in the shop long?’

He shook his head. ‘Less than a minute later we see the same legs with the daisy thongs come back and get into the car.’

‘So she could have just ducked in and quickly got what she needed?’

Dash nodded. ‘But the shop assistant on that night denies that Hailey bought anything from him. He admits she could have come in while he was out the back. There was music playing over the PA system which makes it difficult apparently to hear out there but she definitely didn’t buy anything, he said. And about thirty seconds after she gets in the car it backs out and drives away.’

‘And that was the last actual sighting of her?’

‘Yes.’

‘Martin’ — Dash tapped on his picture again — ‘starts to get worried when Hailey hasn’t show up an hour later. He rings her several times with no answer. He rings her mother, her sister, some of her friends. No-one has seen her. He figures she might just be driving around trying to blow off some steam but when it gets to ten-thirty and she hasn’t shown and she hasn’t rung or answered her phone he’s really concerned and rings the police. He’s worried she’s been in a car accident. They tell him there’s been nothing logged in the Brisbane metropolitan area. He expresses his concern at this unusual turn of events, they tell him to ring back if she’s not home in the next couple of hours. Four hours after she left, after continually trying to ring her to no avail he rings the police to report her as missing.’

Hailey looked at the image of Martin. ‘He must have been going out of his mind.’

‘At two that morning the police track Hailey’s iPhone to bushland just off the Bruce Highway near the Pine River. They found the car’ — he tapped on a newspaper image of the white Prado — ‘abandoned. No Hailey. No Isabella. No car seat. The phone was inside the vehicle. With dozens of missed calls and frantic messages from Martin. There was no evidence of foul play but the car and the phone were completely wiped of prints.
All
prints, including Hailey’s and Martin’s. No prints found
whatsoever
inside or on or around the doors on the outside. Some on the bonnet and the boot area are all either Hailey’s or Martin’s.’

‘That’s suspicious?’

‘Yes.’

Joy let that sink in for a moment. ‘Wait…how do they even know Hailey’s prints? Were they already in the system?’

Dash shook his head. ‘No, the house was dusted and cross matched with the ones they lifted from the boot of the car.’

‘Were there footprints or something around where the car was found?’

‘There may well have been but it had rained quite heavily in the area around midnight so anything that may have been there was washed away.’

‘Bummer.’

Dash nodded quickly as he kept his eyes glued to the board. ‘An extensive search of the bush area where the car was found was undertaken over the next two days and turned up nothing, but with the car being wiped of prints the police initially worked on the theory that Hailey and Isabella had either been abducted or Hailey had fled with her daughter.’

‘From what I’ve read in the last few days, the police seemed to move quite quickly to the abduction/kidnap theory, didn’t they?’

Joy had been away when all this had gone down but she’d been doing some online catching up too.

‘Yes.’

‘Because?’

‘Because of the prints being wiped and because it’s really very hard to hide anywhere these days unless you’re a criminal mastermind or you’ve been planning it long and hard, and by all reports, Hailey Richardson was a weepy, sleep-deprived mother. Hailey didn’t have a passport, neither did Isabella, so they can’t have left the country. Her bank account and credit cards haven’t been touched and there’s no record of her opening another one or having other cards Martin didn’t know about. She was on maternity leave at the time so she had no income. Forensics looked at her phone and computer and Martin’s and nothing raised a red flag. No strange searches or anything. All documents, like Isabella’s and Hailey’s birth certificates, have been accounted for. None of her or Isabella’s clothes appeared to be missing, no bags appeared to be packed.’

‘She could have squirreled away that stuff over a long period of time. Squirrelled away money too. Taken copies of important documents. She could have outside help. There could have been another man.’

Dash nodded. ‘True. All things considered by the police but all kind of moot now given that she turned up dead
here
on the twelfth of July.’

He pointed to a photograph of a section of road. Yellow police tape cordoned off an area of the dirt shoulder. Three police officers were looking down at what she presumed to be Hailey’s body covered in a sheet.

‘This is just north of Bajool and about thirty kilometres south of Rockhampton on a deserted section of the Bruce Highway. A truck driver, Tony Garner,’ —Dash pointed to another picture — ‘noticed her body on the side of the road around five a.m. He’d initially thought it was a kangaroo and almost passed her before he realised it was a body. The pathologist estimated her time of death to between midnight and four a.m. that night which means she’d been alive,
somewhere,
all this time. The truckie was heading south to Brisbane at the time and in his statement thought he’d only seen a handful of cars on the road for the previous fifteen minutes, none of which he’d paid any heed to.’

‘Does he have an alibi?’

Dash nodded. ‘He lives in Rocky. He’d been home in bed with his wife until he left at four a.m. to go to his shift. The freight place that employed him has him clocking on at 4.30.’

‘Okay. What about the gun?’ Joy said, nodding her head at the next picture along.

‘The gun used was consistent with a double-barrel shotgun similar to this one.’ He tapped the marker at the picture. ‘It appeared Hailey was killed at reasonably close range and almost definitely killed elsewhere and then dumped post-mortem on the side of the road.’

‘How do they know that?’

Dash looked at her. ‘There was no blood, no brain matter splattered all over the immediate area which, given the size of the hole in her head, there most certainly would have been had she been shot there.’

Joy knew that hole intimately. She’d packed it with putty and done her level best to restore the line of Hailey’s skull. Fixed her hair so it covered the fatal injury, made it appear as if it had never happened so Martin and her mother wouldn’t have to see the brutality of Hailey’s death the way she had.

Joy glanced at the picture of Hailey. How frightened must she have been? Did she know she was going to die that day? Had her last thoughts been about herself and how much it was going to hurt or had they only revolved around Isabella? Had she been as frantic about Isabella as she’d stared down that big ugly gun as she had been that day she’d stepped across the metaphysical divide and contacted Joy?

‘And of course, despite this,’ Dash said, breaking into Joy’s dark thoughts, ‘despite Hailey Richardson’s murdered body being located, it’s still only half the puzzle. There’s still one more pressing question.’

He tapped the picture of a little blonde cutie with cherub cheeks and curls.

Joy nodded. ‘Where’s Isabella?’

Joy stood, as haunted now by the question as she had been since Hailey’s ghost appeared.