Chapter 9
Nine
Penn parked his car right outside the community centre.
The boss had told him to retrace Ashley’s steps and that’s what he intended to do.
His plan was to walk fifty metres at a time and then take a panoramic video of his location.
He was looking for too many things all at once to rely on the naked eye: cameras, dashcams, side roads for access, parking spots, possible witnesses, hidey-holes.
This way he could study every video and ensure he missed nothing.
He took his camera out and shot his first panorama.
No cameras, no access points and no witnesses.
He walked approximately fifty metres and took another video.
Two offices that wouldn’t have been open, no cameras and one side street that ran between the two buildings.
He moved forward another fifty metres. Two more side roads and a small warehouse. No cameras.
Half an hour later, Penn took his last video at the cordon of the crime scene with a sinking heart.
The boss had been right when she’d said there wasn’t a lot to go on.
He was tempted to nip in under the cordon and ask for an update but thought better of it.
If the forensic team had found anything more, the boss would already know about it.
He was considering his options when his phone tinged receipt of a message.
Stacey’s face appeared beside the text.
Killer may have MSGD on FB for details of netball club. She told him everything. Also abusive messages.
He sent a thumbs up and put his phone away.
That knowledge slightly altered the task he’d been set.
It had been a natural assumption that the killer had followed Ashley as she’d left the community centre and attacked her upon reaching this spot.
But if he’d known the times she left and her route home, he could have already been waiting in place.
Meaning he could have come from the other direction, which gave Penn another eight hundred metres and a lot more to look at.
He maintained his system and walked forward another fifty metres and took a panoramic view. He checked the footage and nothing jumped out. After fifty metres, he did the same.
As he reviewed the clip he’d just taken, the frame swept across a ground-floor window in a small block of new flats set back from the road.
He played the clip again, noting that something had either fallen from the window or was dropped right before it was pulled shut.
Penn retraced his steps and crossed the road. He reached the window and looked to the ground. A still-smoking cigarette end stared back at him.
More interesting was the fact it had fallen onto a small pile of similar butts.
He found it unlikely that he could be that lucky, but it was worth a knock on the door.