Take Out (12 page)

Stevie kept her eyes on her glass of beer. ‘And Mrs Hardegan thinks she was murdered.’

There was another long silence as they considered Skye’s last words, both floating in their own private bubbles of misery. Everyone else in the tavern seemed to be laughing and flirting, roaring at the soccer game, getting on with having a bloody good time. Someone put a coin in the jukebox. The noise hammered at her ears and sank into her chest.

‘I thought the old lady was talking crap,’ Fowler shouted above the racket. ‘But I’m not so sure now—she might be right.’

Stevie pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘I can’t think in here. Come outside.’ He followed her into the street where she turned and asked abruptly. ‘You still on the Pavel case?’

Fowler leaned into the brick wall of the tavern as if he needed it to stay upright. ‘Only helping out now. When the pathologist IDed the body and confirmed that it belonged to Delia Pavel, I handed the case over to the Serious Crime Squad. The officer in charge is an acting DI called Angus Wong; he seems very efficient. I’ve been delegated some
tasks. ’

Stevie ignored the bitterness of his words; she had enough problems of her own without worrying about Fowler’s shattered career and flimsy ego, although she did agree with his assessment of Angus’s efficiency. ‘He’s Monty’s right hand man, “acting up” while Monty’s on sick leave.’ She paused, rested her hands in the back pocket of her jeans and considered the possibilities. ‘What tasks have you been given?’

‘Mainly reinterviewing the neighbours and the people Jon Pavel worked with. I think it’s worth mentioning the disappearance of Ralph Hardegan to Wong, even though the man might just be away on business. He was interviewed when Pavel first disappeared, but not by me. I don’t think he was able to shed any light on it. I’ll see if I can get clearance for an APB and a nationwide search. We need to talk to him again.’

Stevie nibbled at her bottom lip; maybe it was time to put aside some pride. Through the closed tavern door she heard The Panics singing ‘Don’t Fight It’—maybe they had a point.

‘Need a hand with these tasks?’ she asked, keeping her gaze fixed on the dirty slabs of the pavement.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Fowler pull away from the wall and straighten. He looked at her suspiciously, as if she must have another agenda, as if maybe she’d organised this whole thing for the sole purpose of spying on him—some people,
Jesus.

‘You’re on leave,’ he said.

‘Mont’s officer in charge of the SCS, I know the guys there well—used to work with them.’

‘Going to pull some strings?’

Stevie gave a non-committal shrug.

He relaxed slightly and reached inside his jacket pocket. ‘Well, you’re not the only one with contacts. There’s got to be some perks to the job,’ he muttered as he punched numbers into his phone.

Stevie listened as he spoke to a mate in the Major Crash Investigation Squad, one finger in his ear to lessen the din from the tavern. When the phone was back in his pocket he pointed in the direction of their parked cars at the back of the building. ‘C’mon, I’ve made an appointment to see someone about this.’

It occurred to Stevie that Fowler was as determined to get to the bottom of Skye’s death as she was. Like her, he seemed to believe what Mrs Hardegan had said about Skye being murdered. As she followed him along the pavement to their cars, she recalled what else the old lady had said.
In love with him, stupid boy—
maybe Mrs Hardegan had been right about that too. (Image 11.1)

Senior Constable Tony Pruitt met them outside the locked yard. The blue police overalls with the single stripe on the shoulder did nothing to complement his physique. Short, fat and balding, he looked about ten years older than he probably was. Perhaps this is what working in the MCIS did to a person, Stevie reflected. God only knew it was a joyless branch of The Job.

Pruitt unlocked the gate and she and Fowler followed him into the yard, threading their way through the morgue of wrecked cars: countless, inanimate reminders of death. Over the years, she’d seen her share of grisly and unusual forms of death, and more murder investigations than she cared to count. But there was something about the very randomness of death through car accident that made her bones turn to jelly. You might be the safest driver in the world, but if fate puts you on the same stretch of road as someone over the limit, or whacked out, or asleep at the wheel, or simply not concentrating, there’s not one single bloody thing you can do about it. And most people faced these risks on a daily basis without giving the matter a second thought.

If she were Pruitt, she probably wouldn’t drive at all.

‘The wrecks in here have all involved fatalities,’ Pruitt explained in a tired voice, the oily gravel crunching under their feet as they walked. The spring sun had quite a kick today, a taste of the coming summer. Stevie peeled off her denim jacket and slung it across her shoulder.

‘We conduct our investigations on behalf of state or district coroners,’ Pruitt went on. ‘And keep the wrecks until the investigations are finalised and the cause of death determined. Once we’re finished with them, they’re usually released for scrap.’

They reached Skye’s crumpled Hyundai lying next to a burned out Lamborghini. The strip of cartoon graphics on the side panel of the small white car stood out jolly and bright from the twisted metal surrounding it. Stevie swallowed hard, reading the Silver Chain logo: ‘Every minute, every hour, every day.’ Not any more, she thought, not for Skye.

‘I’m sorry,’ Pruitt said awkwardly, looking from one to the other of them. ‘She was a friend, yeah?’

Stevie nodded. Someone had tied a large white label to the crumpled bumper and it reminded her of a toe tag.

Fowler put on his mirrored sunglasses, not only to protect his eyes from the glare of metal, Stevie suspected. ‘What happened, Tone?’ he asked.

‘She was driving fast, but the speed, according to the intermittent skid marks, was pretty erratic. It was a dark night, but the road was dry. According to the truck driver, one minute her lights were on the correct side of the road, the next they were heading straight for him.’

Stevie noticed then that the roof of the car was missing, sliced through like the top of a boiled egg.

Oh, Christ, no, not that.
She felt herself begin to sway.

Pruitt put his hand out to steady her. ‘It would have been very quick,’ he said softly.

Fowler kept his face like a mask. ‘Any other witnesses?’

‘The truck driver did see another pair of headlights, but the other car didn’t stop,’ Pruitt said. ‘We’ve put out a media bulletin with no luck so far.’ The Senior Constable regarded them through brown, hound-dog eyes. ‘Let’s get out of the sun, have a cuppa. I’ve got some other things to show...’

‘Wait on,’ Stevie said. She’d moved to the other side of the car while he was talking. ‘What’s this from?’ Squatting on her haunches she pointed to a slash of green on the driver’s door. The surrounding dent had been circled in black marker pen.

‘Yes, we thought the dent looked recent, last couple of weeks, anyway—that’s why we highlighted it,’ Pruitt said.

‘Can you take a paint sample?’ Stevie asked.

‘Not at this stage, no.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because everything points to this being an accident. Tests like that cost money.’ He hesitated. ‘Let’s get out of here, continue this in the office.’

Stevie and Fowler exchanged glances and followed him to a demountable in the middle of the yard next to a large tin-roofed workshop with open sliding doors. ‘That’s where we do the inspections,’ Pruitt explained. A pair of booted feet stuck out from underneath a jacked-up concertina of metal. The frenetic sound of a horse race from the radio followed them into the adjacent office until the closing door cut it off.

The air in the room was oily and close. It would have been more comfortable outside. Stevie flopped into a worn swivel chair.

With the flip of a wall switch an air conditioner rumbled to life and Stevie took a gulp of musty cool air. Pruitt poured them tea from a thermos flask. ‘Kettle’s broke,’ he apologised as he rested the thermos on a grey filing cabinet. An out-of-date calendar hung on the wall above it. Faded and flyspecked, Miss November 2001 had seen better days.

Pruitt must have seen Stevie glancing at the nude. ‘The public don’t get to come in here,’ he said, colouring slightly.

The tea tasted of unwashed thermos, the milk suspect. Pruitt, sensing her squeamishness, slapped his thigh as if to say bad luck and all that, and gave her a look as suffocating as the office in which they sat. She knew the man meant well, but like any morgue technician, he wasn’t used to handling grieving friends and relatives.

He hefted a cardboard box from the floor and placed it on the grey metal desk. ‘These are the possessions retrieved from the boot of her car.’ Professional once more, he was easier to take. Stevie watched him closely as one by one he withdrew an assortment of items from the box: a clipboard with patient files, a medical bag with an inventory of contents, all appearing to be there, he said. A small overnight bag held jeans, T-shirts, underwear and toiletries.

‘And these,’ he placed a large evidence bag upon the table, ‘were in the front of the car.’ He began to extract the bag’s contents, placing them on the surface of his desk. ‘We have a handbag found with the clasp still closed. In it were some cosmetics, a purse containing credit cards and ten dollars twenty-five cents in cash, a hairbrush, a near full packet of cigarettes and a Ventolin inhaler. The phone we got your number from, Sergeant Hooper, was on the passenger side floor, along with a takeaway food container, a towel and an empty can of Coke.’

‘The Ventolin was in her handbag you say?’ said Stevie..

‘Um, yeah.’

‘And where was the bag found?’ Fowler asked.

‘Also on the passenger side floor, though it could have easily fallen from the seat during the impact.’

‘And the autopsy clearly stated that an asthma attack was the cause of death?’ said Fowler.

‘No, not exactly, just that her lungs indicated she was having an asthma attack when she died—that’s what caused the accident. Her phone shows that she had attempted to call emergency services, but couldn’t get through. Death itself was by...’ he stopped, slapped his thigh again and sighed. ‘Well, do you want to read the report yourself?’

Stevie made eye contact with Fowler and they shook their heads simultaneously. She attempted to detach, to force herself to think like a detective. As she sat on the swivel chair in the poky office, she swung from side to side, running her ponytail through her fingers. ‘I’ve seen her have asthma attacks before. As soon as she feels one coming on, she reaches for her inhaler.’

‘But the inhaler was still in her bag,’ Fowler said. ‘And the bag was found closed. It’s like she didn’t even attempt to reach for it.’

‘Why didn’t she pull over to the side of the road and get it? Surely she would have done that before dialling 000?’ Stevie directed the question to both men.

Fowler shrugged. Despite the cool air rattling around them, crescents of sweat stained the underarms of his white shirt.

Something caught Pruitt’s eyes from the demountable’s window. He got up from his desk and peered through the security screen. Stevie followed his gaze. A police four-wheel drive towing a mangled wreck pulled up outside the locked gate. ‘Make yourselves at home, folks,’ Pruitt said as he thumped across the hollow floor to the door, opening it to a stream of sunlight. ‘Another delivery; I’ll be back shortly.’

The detectives sat for a moment in silence after he’d gone. Stevie’s mind travelled back to the mild asthma attack Skye had suffered in the Pavel house just before they’d discovered the baby. ‘Why would Skye have a sudden, severe asthma attack when she was driving?’ she asked.

Fowler shook his head. ‘I guess people get asthma for a variety of reasons: allergy, exercise...’

‘But she was in the car; there can’t be too many allergens in there. And driving could hardly be called strenuous exercise.’

‘What are you getting at, Hooper?’

‘Skye had her attacks when she was frightened or anxious. Something must have frightened her out of her wits when she was driving, making her too scared to pull over to get the inhaler from her bag. That’s why she had the crash.’ She looked Fowler in the eye. ‘Pruitt’s a mate of yours, right?’

Fowler opened his hands. ‘Well...’

‘Reckon you can get him to delay that report to the coroner for a few days?’ She eased off the swivel chair and felt in her jeans pocket for her penknife. The demountable’s floor bounced under her feet as she headed for the door, not waiting for Fowler’s answer.

‘Hey, wait, Hooper, where are you going?’ He moved to follow.

She indicated for him to stay put. ‘When he comes back, just tell him I’ve gone to find the ladies room, okay?’ (Image 12.1)