‘That’s right. Seen it a couple of times, but I didn’t see any folks around. It was empty both times.’ Clint gestures to the reports in Rick’s hand. ‘It’s all noted down in there – times, descriptions and all that jazz.’
Clint keeps looking at the logs. There’s intensity to his stare, and a rigidity in his posture that wasn’t there before in the workshop. There’s something he’s not telling them, Rick’s sure of it. ‘Anything else you think we should know?’
‘Look here, I haven’t forgotten that poor young woman.’ Clint looks from Rick to Philip. ‘Whatever you might think. It’s just a bit complicated.’
Philip stays silent.
‘Did you see something?’ asks Rick.
‘Maybe,’ says Clint. ‘But I don’t want to get no one into trouble.’
Rick nods, hoping to encourage Clint to keep talking. ‘Okay . . .’
‘But, well, there’s been a few occasions, real late at night, that I’ve seen a person in the distance, crossing the border between my patch – quadrant three – into quadrant two. I never got a close look at them, and always saw them from behind, but I’m thinking it could have been the poor woman who was killed at Manatee.’
Philip steps closer to Clint. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘There’s a couple of reasons. Firstly, the person I saw kinda looked like a woman. They were wearing pants, sure, but the shape of them, you know what I mean, looked female. Then there was the hair. You said the woman who died had long black hair, well so did this person. They had black hair that came almost to their waist.’
‘You record this in your log?’ asks Philip.
‘Of course,’ says Clint. ‘It was just a few times, and it was real late. After midnight, sometimes way after.’
‘And you didn’t remember this or think to tell us back in the patrol meeting?’ Philip’s tone is disapproving.
Rick wishes Philip could get a grip on himself. ‘Clint, look, what he means is how come this didn’t come to mind straight away?’
Clint looks embarrassed. Sighs. ‘So look, I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure and I wanted to check my reports first. Also, I didn’t want to make another patroller look bad or some such. If they said they’d only seen the woman the once, then who was I to—’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘If the woman I saw was the woman who was murdered at Manatee, then she walked right through patrol quadrant two a whole bunch of times. I know the cameras around that area are unreliable, but the patroller had to have seen her.’
‘You check the logs for quadrant two?’ asks Rick.
Philip looks grim-faced. ‘Double-checked them this morning.’
‘And?’
‘There’s one mention of the murder victim – on that night a few weeks back that they spoke about at the meeting. No other mentions.’
Rick looks from Philip to Clint and then down at the logs in his hand. If what Clint is telling them is true, the murder victim walked through patrol quadrant two on at least two more occasions, but there’s no record of that in the patrol logs. That’s not good.
It looks like one of the patrollers is lying.
46
MOIRA
It has to be the victim’s phone – that much is clear from the picture of her and a young guy on the home screen with ‘Kristen hearts Mikey’ above it. There’s no passcode or biometrics enabled so Lizzie taps the messages icon and they read the messages as fast as they can. The new ones are from a saved contact – Mikey – the Graften kid, Moira assumes. All the recent ones are variations of ‘where are you?’。 First they’re jokey in tone, then angry, and later worried. But it’s the chain of messages with an unlabelled mobile number that are more interesting, and more important.