Bound, page 21
67
‘We got the iPhone, Sam.’ Paul was looking as pleased as punch. ‘Recovered it this morning.’
He paused like he was expecting me to ask the next logical question. He even did a little ‘come on’ hand gesture. I humoured him.
‘Where?’
‘I played a hunch. The perpetrators seem to have left a trail of objects around Seacliff and on their trip back to Dunedin: clothes in the wheelie bin, tape at the little train station, shotgun in the culvert, almost like an Easter egg hunt. I thought, okay, what if they discarded the phone on the way too? It was a needle in a haystack. I figured it would be in the vicinity of the road, but the regulars had already had a good search around there. We needed to improve the odds, so I got a sniffer dog unit on to it.’
‘Since when could they sniff out electronics? And it’s a bit long after the fact for a scent trail, don’t you think?’
He beamed. ‘You’d think that, wouldn’t you? But that’s where John’s iPhone was unique. Remember the scene photos, the sofa arm with the nice atomised blood spray and the clean white patch.’
‘You’re a clever boy,’ I said, twigging onto his line of thinking. ‘The phone had John’s blood on it. Something strong for the dogs to sniff.’ Although the weather hadn’t been that flash, and the phone would have been exposed to the elements somewhat. That dog must have had an amazing nose.
He looked extremely chuffed with himself. ‘Found it up in a macrocarpa hedge, only a couple of hundred metres from where we found the shotgun. The hedge was as dense as hell, so you couldn’t see it from the outside. They had to dig into it.’ The density would have protected it from the weather, to some extent.
‘So they offloaded everything quite close to the crime scene? That’s a bit odd, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps they were worried Jill might manage to work herself free and call the police, so they wanted to get rid of anything incriminating before they hit the highway.’
‘Yeah, but there’s plenty of road between Seacliff and the turn-off onto State Highway One,’ I said. ‘Unless they were concerned with Declan arriving home and calling for help. From their level of planning, they must have known he existed, and seeing he wasn’t there when they committed the hit, perhaps they made the reasonable assumption that he might turn up sometime soon.’
‘Who knows what goes through the heads of people like that?’
‘Greed, money, power, death, destruction, mayhem, to name a few.’
‘Good point,’ he said.
‘So what has the iPhone revealed?’
‘The SOCOs have got it as we speak. We’re also hoping for prints. If they discarded their gloves earlier up the track, they might not have thought to put on fresh ones. They might have got sloppy. We could get lucky.’ God only knew a bit of luck would be handy right now.
68
Monday morning’s squad meeting was sparking with energy. It had been a bad weekend for crime as far as Dunedin was concerned, but as far as I was concerned it couldn’t be better. As the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum, and we were starting to see the effects of one of Dunedin’s largest crime organisations having a sudden vacancy at the top. The Armed Offenders Squad had been called out to two separate incidents involving rival gang members, and there had been several other brawls reported that required a police presence. It was amazing who was coming out of the woodwork. It was the result of one of these brawls that had led us to the whereabouts of Mikey Chadwick. He was currently nursing a fractured skull in Dunedin Public Hospital. He wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, so a deputisation could wait until after the meeting.
The buzz was diminished somewhat with Paul’s report on the recovery of John Henderson’s iPhone.
‘The only fingerprints found on the device were those of John Henderson and Jill Henderson. Mrs Henderson confirmed she had used the device on the night of the killing to make a call to her father. The perpetrators did not leave a trace, other than smearing the blood on the front plate, which did not reveal a print.’ I noted that Paul had gone from naming Powell and Sandhurst when referring to the case, and had moved to the more generic ‘perpetrators’. It made me smile.
‘And what of the contents, Detective?’ DI Johns asked.
‘We found little of interest. The telephone, text and email logs had been cleared. We have recovered most of these from his service providers, but at this point none seem to be of significance, and there was the usual string of unidentified prepay numbers. They’re still being examined. It would seem there was something of interest recorded on the phone that the perpetrators thought may incriminate them. We’ll find the connection.’
That was mighty optimistic of him. I hoped he did.
‘Thank you, Detective Frost.’
DI Johns resumed his front-and-centre position, then looked around the room before his eyes settled on me. The way he looked gave me a portent of impending doom.
‘Detective Shephard, do you have anything you would care to share with the group at this point with your…’ he paused, ‘…alternative course of investigation?’
Bugger him, bugger him, bugger him to hell. I felt the familiar flush crawl up my face as every set of eyes in the room turned to look. Some looked most expectant – probably people waiting with relish to see if I would have another go at The Boss. Some looked smug – the ones who knew damn well I had been put on the spot and were delighted by it. And DI Johns knew bloody well I had nothing concrete I could give them right now, not even crumbs I was prepared to throw to the birds. I hadn’t received the computer report from Toddy and I knew better than to talk about anything I couldn’t back up with evidence. I’d just be shot down in flames.
‘No, sir, not at this moment,’ I said.
‘Pardon, Detective, I didn’t quite hear that. Can you repeat yourself?’ I could hear the snigger go around the room.
‘No, sir, I don’t have anything to report.’
He stood there looking triumphant. The bastard had eviscerated me in public yet again.
69
I was sure Dickhead Johns was doing it as a punishment. Not content with making me look like a prize idiot in front of my peers, he had now lumbered me with Smithy, who was just as thrilled as I was at the privilege. I’d wanted Paul to come along for this conversation, but that manoeuvring bastard had made sure he had some other urgent task that required Paul’s instant attention.
‘So why are we going to see this moron? Why isn’t the drug squad on this one?’ he asked, as we walked into the Dunedin Public Hospital foyer. The fact we had been sent on a wild goose chase to ask Jimmy Clarke about this clown well over a week ago wasn’t lost on him.
‘Mikey Chadwick was the third in command in Powell’s organisation. As far as I’m concerned, he had the most to gain from Powell and Sandhurst’s exit from the scene. Word from drug squad is that this guy is as cunning as a weasel and he has done a very good job at not only keeping out of the clutches of the law, but keeping us in the dark as to who he was actually involved with. It’s only the information we got from Sheila Sandhurst that confirmed he was even a part of Powell’s crew, and a high-up part.’
‘And you believe a word that bitch says?’ he said. His tone told of his opinion on the matter.
We were walking past the café. I saw a young guy with a stethoscope around his neck look at Smithy with a spark of recognition and come over. He looked all of about eighteen. I was sure they were breeding the doctors around here younger and younger. I wasn’t even sure if this one had to shave yet.
‘How’s that cut coming along? Have you had the stitches out yet?’ he asked.
‘Not yet. Must get onto that,’ Smithy mumbled.
‘You should, they will need to be removed.’ He headed off in the direction of the emergency department.
‘What the hell did you do to yourself this time?’ I asked.
Smithy’s tendency towards the Kiwi can-do attitude had led him to the A&E department relatively frequently in the past, although this had slowed down somewhat since his accident. Not that being shot up by Powell’s thugs could have been called an accident.
‘You don’t want to know,’ he said. ‘Lift’s here. I’m not taking the stairs. Keep prattling.’
I didn’t think I prattled. I was merely stating the facts as I saw them.
‘I think Mikey Chadwick is a likely candidate for the murder of John Henderson and Jacob Sandhurst.’
‘You’re not still clutching on to that idea are you?’
‘Well, I’ve got DI Johns’ blessing to investigate it.’
Smithy gave me a look that made it quite clear my use of the word ‘blessing’ had been a vast exaggeration. The serene yet annoying elevator voice informed us we had reached our floor.
‘By all accounts he’s smart; he’d have the nous to plan the whole setup; he was high in the organisation, probably involved in the manufacturing, so would have had access to things like the discarded gloves, hair samples, all of that stuff.’
The constable on door duty nodded as we walked into the room. Mikey Chadwick was lying in the bed, his head swathed in a bandage, his left eye black and swollen, ECG monitor stickies on his chest and a variety of other cables wiring him for sound. He wasn’t looking a particularly healthy specimen right at this moment.
‘And he’s a bloody big unit,’ I whispered to Smithy.
Smithy just stood and nodded.
Mikey Chadwick was a big boy – tall and big, and not just lardy big, but muscular big as well. He was positively Powellesque.
70
Smithy was particularly quiet on our walk back to the station. In fact, in my opinion he was pulling an almighty sulk. When confronted by the physical similarities shared by Gideon Powell and Mikey Chadwick, even Smithy had to concede that there might be some merit in the they-were-framed theory. I could see why he would be disappointed. He wanted Powell to be done for this murder, for him to finally get a conviction on the kind of scale that would satisfy our need for justice for the murder of Detective Reihana. But it looked like Teflon man was going to get away scot-free again. Even if he was dead, he went to his grave without the irrevocable label of murderer. That galled. I left him to his lumbering silence.
As we got closer to the station I could see a familiar form in the distance. She spotted me and as we approached I could see the anxiety that was boiling beneath her skin. Even closer and I could see her pallor and the look of fear upon her face.
‘Jill, what is it? What’s happened?’
She didn’t say a word. Instead she handed me an envelope.
71
I was standing outside DI Johns’ office, taking a Zen moment to breathe and calm myself before entering the lion’s den. There was a swirling hollowness to my stomach that could have been due to a number of reasons. My hand was poised to knock when the printer behind me in the corridor whirred to life, making me fair jump through the roof. After I scraped myself off the ceiling, I laughed at my own stupidity. What was I worried about? I held two articles in my hands to support what I was about to suggest. He could like it or lump it.
I knocked.
‘Enter.’ So formal. So typical.
He saw who it was and frowned. I think it was an automatic response, kind of like Pavlov’s dog salivating to a whistle.
‘Detective Shephard.’
‘Sir.’ We hadn’t talked one-on-one since that moment in the hallway, and, judging by the plummet in room temperature, time hadn’t made his heart grow fonder, as it were.
‘What do you want?’
There was nothing for it but to plough in and simply present the facts. I stepped forward and placed the two objects on the table. One was a wad of paper. The other an envelope in an evidence bag. He looked down at them, and then back at me. His cold, reptilian eyes bored into me, adding to the chill.
‘I take it you’re going to explain the significance of these.’
I pointed first to the wad of paper, the report from Craig Todd.
‘This is a report of the computer use of Gideon Powell on the night that John Henderson was killed. It shows that from eight o’clock at night, at regular intervals he was looking at internet websites and at the Free Market internet trading site. He continued to use the computer until eleven o’clock.’
‘This was on his personal computer? This wasn’t in the report from the techs when we examined it with the initial warrant.’
‘That’s because this wasn’t on his computer, it was on Angela Powell’s laptop. Her computer and his children’s computers weren’t covered in that warrant. No one looked at them.’
‘So, that just means Angela Powell was surfing the internet while her husband was off murdering people, Detective. You’ll need to be more convincing than that. What else have you got to show me.’
I’d expected this response. I flicked open the file to a copy of an email. ‘Angela has signed an affidavit to say Gideon was at home that night, and using her computer. We have taken prints from the computer that belong to both Angela and Gideon.’
‘Still not enough. He could have picked it up at any time. And who would believe a word the wife of a major criminal says, anyway?’
Ignoring his protestations, I continued. ‘From eight-thirty to just after nine-thirty, Gideon Powell was bidding on a listing on Free Market. He was bidding on a limited-edition City of Coventry Princess Coronation Class Model Train, 00 gauge, in red. He placed four bids on the train, including his final bid, which won the auction at 9.28 p.m. Seven hundred and eighty dollars.’ I couldn’t believe someone would spend that much money on a toy. I could have bought my entire winter wardrobe for that, or had a weekend away in Melbourne, or four weeks’ worth of groceries.
‘This could still have been Angela Powell, Detective,’ he said. His voice told of how unconvinced he was. But I still had the trump card to play.
‘Yes, but at 9.35, the time when John Henderson was already dead, and his killers were tying up his wife and doing everything they did out at Seacliff, Gideon Powell was sending an email. This email.’ I pointed to the copy in front of him. It read like a very excited boy having just purchased his new toy: ‘I’m delighted to have won your auction, I have been wanting this train for ages, please send bank account details and I will pay immediately, here are my postal details,’ etc., etc., and, most importantly, typed at the bottom, ‘Cheers, Gideon Powell.’ In a way, when I first saw this, I felt quite emotional. I didn’t know whether this was relief that I’d been right, or if it was just the hormones. But it had humanised Gideon Powell for me. There had to be some redeemable features in a man if he could find such pleasure from something so fanciful, so whimsical.
There was a moment of silence.
‘This still doesn’t mean it was him.’
‘No, it’s not absolute proof, but, it does raise doubt. And this raises more doubt.’ I pushed the evidence bag in front of him. The envelope inside bore the name Jill Henderson, handwritten in a scrawly italic style. You could just see the top half of the Russell Road, Seacliff address line before it was obliterated by a large, bright yellow ‘redirected by New Zealand Post’ sticker that had her Moray Place apartment address on it.
‘And this is?’
‘This arrived for Jill Henderson in today’s mail. It’s a demand.’
I handed over one more piece of paper I had inside my jacket pocket. A copy of a letter. It was typewritten on an A4 piece of 80gsm printer paper, not handwritten like the envelope. I unfolded the creases in it and flattened it out for the DI to see. The message was simple, its meaning clear.
$100,000.00 cash.
You have three days.
Await instruction.
Don’t go to the police or we kill the boy too.
Fail to deliver?
The boy dies.
72
Jill and Declan Henderson had been placed into protective custody. They were in one of our safe houses, biding their time, playing Scrabble while their lives were turned upside down once again. Declan had been pulled out of school and hadn’t been too thrilled. I thought it had been brave of Jill to come forward with the letter. But then, what choice did she have? Her son had been threatened. And where would she have been able to dredge up a hundred thousand in cash? Most people didn’t have that kind of dosh sitting around in their wallets. She’d also probably realised that even if she did pay up, there was nothing to stop them coming back for more. People that ruthless and greedy weren’t likely to stop at one milking of the cash cow.
The letter didn’t give much in the way of information. It had been postmarked with the number for the Dunedin Postal Centre – sent locally, no surprise. The paper was negative for prints, but the envelope provided several. No doubt two sets would belong to Jill Henderson and the mailman, but we hoped there would be some extras. The likely contenders were in the process of being eliminated. Some poor New Zealand Post employee would be having their fingers ink-stained about now. Mine were absent because the moment I’d looked at the envelope when she proffered it, I’d frog-marched her straight into the station to get it properly put into evidence for processing. I didn’t need the embarrassment of my fingerprints contaminating it.
The letter had been printed on a laser printer. Considering there were thousands, no, tens of thousands of them in Dunedin, this fact didn’t help much, but the techs hoped to narrow the range down more. The forensic handwriting folk would be working their magic on the envelope.
The tide had turned. People were starting to believe me now, starting to realise that this was in fact one hell of a setup. I felt delighted and vindicated on behalf of Angela Powell and Sheila Sandhurst. I even felt the unusual sensation of being glad for the sake of two of the men I despised most in this world.
