supplying Rohypnol, but to Brett Parker instead of Mackenzie. I think Stavely found himself dragged into a lot of things he didn’t really want to be involved in.”
“So, what…he led us there to get free of Brett Parker’s shit?”
“I’d guess so,” he said.
“What about Aleksy Nowak?” the sergeant asked. “Why didn’t he report Brett to the police when he found whatever he found?”
“I don’t think he knew what he’d found at first,” Jonah replied. “I’d lay money that it was a phone full of text messages to and from some of these girls. If you saw that stuff, you wouldn’t know their ages; you’d just think he was a cheat, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah, true,” O’Malley said thoughtfully. “But if he went ballistic at me, I’d probably start to wonder….”
“Yup,” he said. “I think he’d been worrying away at it for two weeks, and wanted Jojo to support him in going to the police. Hence the message he sent asking to talk to her. Brett must have realized how bad he’d made himself look, so he used one of his other phones to message Aleksy.”
“Jesus,” O’Malley said. “It’s…it’s Machiavellian, isn’t it? Everything planned for.”
“Yes,” Jonah said slowly. “Except for Stavely turning on him.”
There was a pause, and then O’Malley said, “The original crime. Killing Aurora. It wasn’t deliberate.”
“Yes,” Jonah agreed. “The other kids were regular drug users. They knew damn well how much would be deadly. It was Brett, who’d never tried anything before, who looked at that bag and thought it was only a small amount, and who was too unaware of the effects of an overdose to recognize them in Aurora. The morning after, Jojo and he went to hide the stash. But Jojo sidetracked to get a dead animal, and Brett went on to start covering the hideaway up. He was the one person who had the opportunity to find Aurora that morning. By the time Jojo came back, he’d realized what he’d done. That Aurora had crawled into the hole while overdosing, and died there. And he vomited. Not from the smell of the animal, but because he’d realized that he’d killed her.”
“So do we wait until Crime Scene have looked at that computer,” O’Malley asked, “or do we pick Brett up straightaway?”
“Hopefully he’ll arrive home to see his perfect plan in tatters,” Jonah said with a small smile. “All thanks to a two-bit drug dealer he thought would do anything for him.”
He wondered whether Stavely would resurface, or if he’d set up an escape route for himself. He badly wanted to ask him some questions.
But as he thought back over Stavely’s actions, he found himself troubled. Why the knife? Why would he turn up to Brett’s armed with a knife? Stavely must have known that Brett wouldn’t be there, or he wouldn’t have tried to create a crime scene. In fact, he must have known that he was being followed by Hanson, too. So why go armed, and make it much more likely that he would be forcibly arrested?
Perhaps to get Hanson’s attention, he thought. A man armed with a knife setting off somewhere was a fairly attention-grabbing thing. And then he felt a twinge of unease. Maybe that had been the point, but maybe it wasn’t Stavely who had thought of it.
What if Brett, who had clearly been directing his actions for a long time, had told him to pick the knife up? And if he’d told him to do that, it had been to make sure that he was getting a lot of attention.
There was a feeling of wrongness spreading through him. Whatever Stavely had done in the end, it looked like he had waited until he saw Hanson watching his flat, and then drawn her—and, by extension, Jonah and his team—off on a wild-goose chase. He hadn’t needed to go to a phone box to make a call. He could have taken a call on his cellphone, which was probably how Brett had got in touch with him for years. But taking a phone call was a good way of making his next actions seem significant.
He put another call through to Hanson. “Juliette, do you have Anna there?”
“Yes,” Hanson answered in a light voice. “Yes, she’s just here, and she’s doing fine.”
“Great. Can you just find out from her where her husband might be? We’d better warn him about the break-in.”
Hanson passed that on, and then there was a muttering from Anna.
“She says he’s gone for some trail running somewhere,” the constable