Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
Gary knew what he had to do. He got his phone out and scrolled.
“Sir? Have you got a minute?”
“Barely,” Travers responded. “You’ve just caught me. I’ve got a meeting in five minutes with the chief. What’s up?”
“You said you wanted to be kept in the loop.” He told Travers about Wilmer’s recording, the interview with Sherrie Thomas, and Wilmer’s connection with Dr. Phillips.
“I agree with you. That theory about Wilmer being killed because he was about to expose the goings-on in a fertility clinic? No. Not unless the clinic was owned by the DiFanetti family.”
“That was a joke, wasn’t it?” The DiFanettis hadn’t been much out of the public eye since one of them had been arrested on several counts of murder, and Gary was glad to put the case behind him.
Travers snorted. “No one ever gets my sense of humor. But I also agree Dr. Phillips’s disappearance is suspicious. Has anyone filed a missing person’s report?”
“I checked. No.”
“Well, see if you can find out if she’s done this kind of thing before—gone off without telling anyone, staying out of touch for days. Because if she hasn’t—”
“Then a prominent scientist has just vanished,” Gary finished.
“Exactly. Look into her finances. Find out if she’s used a credit card recently, and if so, where. Locate her next of kin. See if they know where she is. Someone has to know.”
“Her car isn’t here. She left in it.”
“Then that’s another avenue of inquiry. Find the license plate and circulate it, see if it turns up someplace. Because wherever she is, she will have left a trail for us to follow.” Travers hung up.
“We’re going back to the precinct, aren’t we?” Dan glanced at the phone. “Should we take that as evidence?”
“Not right now. We need to find out first if we’re all suffering from overactive imaginations.”
He wanted to be proved wrong.
He wanted to discover Samantha Phillips had taken a flight somewhere warm and tropical on a whim, for an impromptu vacation.
He wanted her to provide him with answers.
Gary put down the phone. “Things just got weird.”
Dan looked up from the page where he’d been doodling, except he hadn’t drawn meaningless squiggly lines.
He’d written a series of statements that he was trying to pull together into a cohesive theory.
“Weird in what way?”
“I spoke with her bank manager. There’s been no movement on her credit card—she hasn’t used it in a couple of weeks. But there was a large withdrawal from her account on September twenty-six. They checked the CCTV footage from the bank. It was definitely her.”
“Do we have a photo of her?”
Gary held out a sheet of paper. “This was in a scientific journal from last year.”
Dan got up from his chair and went over to Gary’s desk to take it from him. Samantha Phillips was a striking woman, with long auburn hair and green eyes. “Not the kind of woman you could easily forget,” he remarked. “This withdrawal—how large is large?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
Dan blinked. “A vacation? Shopping spree?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Have you contacted her family?”
“I spoke with her father. He said she called him Sunday and that she sounded fine. He did say one interesting thing. He didn’t recognize the number.”
“So whatever phone she’s using, she didn’t use the SIM. She didn’t say where she was calling from?”
“He assumed she was calling from home. She didn’t say anything to the contrary.”
Dan returned to his chair. He sat, staring at the scribbles he’d made.
“What’s on your mind?” Gary asked.
Dan propped his head in one hand. “I’ve been looking at what we have so far. Her car’s missing. No one has seen her for five days. Okay, her father’s heard from her. She took a wad of cash with her. She left her phone.” He met Gary’s gaze. “And let’s not forget what I felt in that house.”
“Have you come to any conclusions?”
Dan nodded. “Only one, not that it makes sense. She’s cleared out. And she doesn’t want to be found.”
“What’s your reasoning?”
He leaned back, tapping his steepled fingers against his lips. “Are we agreed that Wilmer’s death is looking less like a robbery gone wrong and more like a hit?”
“I think so. But what about Eddie Ray?”
Dan frowned. “Did SecureCo ever get back to us about the video? Did their facial recognition software turn up anything?”
Gary searched through a pile of paper in front of him. “We had an email this morning from Chambers. No results. Neither of the men were on their system.”
“And that’s weird too. Eddie did time for housebreaking, so he’d be in the system, but the software couldn’t positively identify him?” Dan expelled a slow breath. “Do you want to know what I think?”
“Of course.”
“He was hired because he had previous experience of housebreaking. He was there to make the shooting appear plausible, to give the police a motive for those men being in Wilmer’s place.
But I’m not convinced he took part in the shooting.
I don’t think he was ever there. I think they found someone who looked enough like him to get away with it, and dressed him in the same kind of clothes Eddie was wearing.
I don’t know how he ended up in that BMW, but I’d bet a lot of money he wasn’t the one who drove it away from the house. ”
“So what if you’re right? What if the aim of this whole charade for the CCTV cameras was to kill Jonathon Wilmer?” Gary leaned forward. “Why?”
“That’s the part we don’t know. We’ve followed the evidence, and it’s led us to Samantha Phillips. Maybe she’s the missing piece.”
“Right now she’s led us into a dead end.”
“But don’t forget when she went missing. The day she learned Wilmer was dead. That has to be significant, don’t you think?”
“And what about Leo Deakins? Our original cold case? How does he fit into all this?”
“I don’t know!” Dan flung back. “Do you have any ideas? Or are we going with that old ‘it’s a coincidence and we don’t like those’ argument?”
Gary’s phone rang, and he glanced at it. “Travers,” he said as he picked it up. “Yes, sir.” He frowned. “Now? … Okay.” He put the phone down, got up, and walked over to the TV sitting in the corner of the office. He hit the power button and grabbed the remote.
Dan shivered. “What’s going on?” The hairs on his arms stood to attention, and that was never a good sign.
“Travers said to watch a news report on Channel 4.” He aimed the remote and clicked. The screen burst into life, showing a reporter standing at a roadside. Behind him were ambulances and fire trucks, and behind them, smoke billowed. In the background a helicopter droned.
“Witnesses report seeing the car being pursued by another vehicle,” the reporter shouted into his mic. “The car then veered off the road and plunged down an embankment. Moments later, it exploded. Firefighters say there are no survivors, and the car has been identified—”
Dan stopped hearing the reporter’s strident voice. All he could see was the photo they’d flashed up on the screen.
It was Samantha Phillips.