Chapter 19
EVAN
I sat in my car in the forensics centre’s car park, too annoyed by Officer Yang’s typing to hang around in the waiting room.
Maybe I was procrastinating logging in to the New South Wales transport authority’s Police Control Intranet to view the cams coming in and out of Redbelly, dreading seeing my son there.
But I went immediately to the photographs on my phone, of the notebook the tech had found in Chloe Lutz’s handbag.
I had drafted a message to Russell on the walk back to the car about the discovery, but some childish desire for his approval stopped me from sending it.
I wanted to go to him in person and tell him about the find, to be able to brief him on what the book contained, my theories about it.
See the look on his face. I’m a good little cop, aren’t I, big brother?
I cringed at myself and went to the pictures.
I opened the first image and zoomed in on the loopy upright handwriting of Chloe Lutz. The first page was titled FORD CAPRI.
Initial questions:
What colours do they come in?
Was racing stripe standard?
Were they loud cars? Able to fit muffler? Chase down muffler dealer?
How many ever imported into Australia?
Weird to own one of those in a rural area? Dirt roads?
Similar cars Ford Capri might have been mistaken for?
I sat staring at the words, running over them a couple of times.
The list had me thinking, in the beginning, that I was looking at a series of idle questions written by a kid journo who was planning to write an article about a vintage car.
The final two questions in the list knocked me a little off that course.
Was she planning to write about a specific car?
Maybe someone out in Redbelly who owned an old Ford Capri?
But what relevance would the ‘mistaking’ of this person’s car for similar cars have?
I googled a couple of the phone numbers scribbled at the margin of the page and found one was listed on the webpage of the Vintage Ford Enthusiasts of Australia.
The other number I followed to the landline of an administrative assistant at Ford Australia.
On the following page, a vague diagram expanded across one of the notebook’s small pages: a house with what looked like two sheds; a road that began and ended with two labels, Into town and Towards city.
There was what appeared to be a stopping bay off the road, shielded from the road proper by little scribbled trees.
A box labelled FC, which I supposed must be the aforementioned Ford Capri, was parked in the bay.
This was good stuff. I didn’t know how it was good, but it felt juicy.
Like I was holding the key to something, just needing to find myself the right lock.
I looked at the diagram of the house and the sheds.
The larger-sized building was a basic cartoon of a peaked-roof structure with little square windows.
The two smaller buildings had crosshatching across their lower sections.
Chicken coops? Dog runs? Garden sheds? I was looking for a house with two smaller structures accompanying it.
So, essentially, every house from Dural to Mangrove Mountain.
I reached into the back of the car and grabbed the backpack I’d haphazardly tossed in there that morning when I left the house, abandoning Delle with the gaggle of teens.
I drew out my laptop, logged in to the New South Wales transport authority’s Police Intranet.
With the state having long ago abandoned the laborious process of police officers seeking individual approvals from government-employed traffic authority staff to access motor registrations, I could now search fifty years’ worth of car registration history using my own log-in.
I put some search terms in, looking for owners of Ford Capri vehicles in the Hawkesbury region.
There were none. No one living local to Redbelly currently owned a Capri, and from what I was seeing, no one ever had. I chewed my lips, went back to the photographs of Chloe’s diary. There was a new list on the next page entitled FB MARKETPLACE CARS.
Leonard Yi—FC MK1—Bought new by father in Prospect, 1969. Originally and still is pale blue. No muffler.
Donna Hickson—FC MK2—Previous owners from new all within family, sending list. No muffler.
Fred Galloway—FC MK1—Mustard yellow but no racing stripe. No muffler. Asked for prev. owners. No answer. Chase up.
The list went on for a page, random names, descriptions of cars, mentions of whether the cars had a racing stripe or a muffler.
There was a determined focus on whether the car was, or had ever been, mustard yellow.
Heading to Facebook, and with some difficulty, working out how to open up the marketplace section, I searched for Ford Capris and saw that indeed some of the people on Chloe’s list were trying to sell such a vehicle.
At some point, Chloe’s written list switched to Gumtree, then to .
au. Chloe seemed to be searching for a specific car.
I went back to the diagram of the house, the sheds or chicken coops or whatever they were, the car parked in the stopping bay.
Whose house was this drawing of? And if Chloe knew the house, what relationship did that homeowner have to the missing Ford Capri?
The lists broke off into a stream of words that made no sense to me, and seemed not to be connected to each other, separated as they were by large gaps or slashes with the pen.
Inquest proceedings—Freedom of Information request—Is the requester name made public on the website?
NSW Media Team—Alison Black—[email protected]
Trove newspaper archives—possible old car ads, buying and selling in months before and after?
‘Before and after what?’ I asked aloud. I scrolled further through the photos of the notebook.
At some point the dread and confusion peaked, and I put the phone down, held my face, took a breath.
Only half my brain was focused on Chloe’s diary.
And that wasn’t good. I needed to get it over with.
Switching from the registry search to the section of the intranet related to traffic cams, I ran a search for monitoring cams around Redbelly.
I selected a camera and set a time period for 3 p.m. the previous day to 9 a.m. this morning, a wide expanse of time with the murder of Chloe Lutz stationed smack-bang in the middle.
The screen filled with a list of car registrations and times.
I noted Chloe Lutz’s Toyota hatchback, recognising her registration number, travelling north into Redbelly at 3.
51 p.m., not long before she arrived at the check-in counter at the pub.
I scrolled down the list, not sure exactly what I was looking for.
Chris couldn’t drive, and the evening before had been like any other, the kid announcing, ‘I’m going out, back later!
’ and neither Delle nor I being bothered to get up from our evening wine at the kitchen counter to look out the front windows of the house and see who he was getting into a car with.
We’d done that very thing when he was younger, looked out, noted down numberplates, gone out a few times and spoken to cagey cars full of teens.
But the pathetic feeling the surveillance gave us won out, in the end.
The sense that we were being helicopter parents, curtain-twitchers and pearl-grabbers.
By the time I was sixteen, Russell was out of the house in the police force, and I’d been living as an adult on the farm at Maroota while Dad disappeared for several days at a time without explanation.
I drove myself to the shops. I paid the electricity bills.
I mowed lawns and did odd jobs for the neighbours to keep myself going.
A thought occurred to me, and I took up my phone, opened Uber and set my location to my house in Mangrove Mountain.
I ordered a ride to Redbelly, and waited while the map expanded and contracted and tiny cars puddled around the screen.
I saw that there were two Uber drivers currently operating in the town.
One of them accepted my job. I opened the notes app on my phone, copied down the numberplate, then cancelled the ride.
Waiting a few minutes, I ordered the ride again, and the other Uber driver in Mangrove Mountain accepted it this time, now that I’d probably deeply annoyed the first one by dumping his job.
I noted down this numberplate too, and went back to the list on my laptop, my heart in my throat.
There, at 7.54 p.m., was an Uber driver heading south into Redbelly on the night Chloe Lutz was murdered. I scrolled up and toggled the list so that the accompanying images taken by the camera would show the vehicle itself on the road beside the listing.
A silver Mazda. The occupants in the two front seats were clearly visible. The driver, a muscular, shaven-headed guy. And beside him, my son.
Every part of my brain was saying that I was looking at my child.
The posture. The thin slice of jaw that I could see under the black ball cap.
I was sure I could discern the shape of his hair against the blackness of the seat’s headrest. My jaw locked into place, and I slammed the laptop shut and tossed it aside.
‘Fuck this,’ I said, starting the car and heading out of the lot.