Vanished by James Delargy (free novel 24 TXT) 📕

There was a momentary pause before Son shrugged, seeming to accept the conversation was headed down a blind alley. Lorcan breathed a sigh of relief. He had expected more of an interrogation. Son pointed at the tablet. Lorcan wondered if he had ever seen one before.

‘You want the password?’

‘You have Internet?’ asked Lorcan.

A frown crossed Son’s previously unconcerned face. ‘Hurton’s remote, man, not ancient,’ he said, taking the tablet and dashing a number into the settings before passing it back. ‘For customers only, mind.’

‘Customers only,’ repeated Lorcan before refocusing on what he needed.

16

Emmaline

It could have been mistaken for a rock poking through the dust.

As they waited on Forensics to arrive – ETA was an hour – the four officers scoured the area near the patch of blood. The priority was locating a weapon. That’s when Emmaline had reached out for the sand-covered rock only to find that it was metallic and almost perfectly rectangular.

A phone.

Holding it with her thumb and forefinger only, she pressed the button on the side of the Samsung. The screen lit up asking for a swipe code. There was no signal and the battery read ten per cent. This meant that it had been on the ground long enough to have been camouflaged with a dusting of sand but not so long for the battery to have run completely out of charge. Maybe a week ago and clearly dropped in a hurry.

The other officers stood around her, staring at the phone.

‘Check it for prints?’ asked Barker.

‘Do you have a kit with you?’

‘I have an older kit for latents,’ said Anand, making for the police-marked 4x4 he had arrived in.

While they waited, Emmaline aimed the phone towards the sun, studying the screen.

‘Put an evidence bag on that,’ she said, pointing to a large, flat-topped rock. Rispoli followed orders and placed the bag on the rock. Emmaline placed the phone on top of the bag.

‘I think I know whose phone this is.’

‘How?’ asked Rispoli and Barker in conjunction.

‘The repeat pattern on the main screen. The grease and sweat from the owner’s fingers as they unlock it. Over and over again. Pressing too hard. Instinct or anger. Reinforcing the pattern. An L.’

‘For Lorcan,’ said Rispoli.

Emmaline nodded as she lightly swiped an ‘L’ pattern on the access screen. The screen altered to a photo of Naiyana and Dylan Maguire, the mother swinging the child by the arms, both of them happy. A photo taken from the Kaarta Gar-up lookout, high on Kings Park, Perth CBD visible in the background.

Amongst the text messages there were a few Lorcan had sent to his family before Christmas, confirming that they were okay and trying to settle in. Nothing about the state of the house, just updates about the family. There were a few calls from anonymous numbers that would have to be checked but zero in the last seven days. Amongst the videos there were a number detailing the family’s previous existence in Perth, at their old home, a fancy detached house that diametrically contrasted the hovel they had lived in before their disappearance. Videos of the family on the beach and on holiday. More recent ones had Lorcan Maguire exhibiting the house explaining what he was going to do with it, from putting in windows to painting, plus a couple focusing on repairing the gable wall and roof. Clearly an attempt to catalogue building a life from scratch. Another YouTube generation family, happy and smiling on the outside but striving for a dream that was built on unsafe foundations. Especially given the territory. The videos were part of the con, dreams narrated to obscure the reality.

The documents folder contained a bevy of saved Internet pages and downloaded How To manuals but it was amongst the voice recordings that she found the most important clue. The last thing recorded on the device. A garbled incoherent message, the voice male – probably Lorcan’s. There was real terror in his tone, his sentences clipped, his breathing short and sharp.

‘We have to leave, Dylan. Before they come back.’

In the background there was a fainter voice, that of a child crying and resisting. Dylan.

‘We’ll go to town. Quick!’

‘Where’s mummy?’ asked the fainter voice.

‘She’s gone.’

After that was silence. Until the recording cut out.

The deathly hush of the town was unnerving. As if in mourning for Lorcan and Dylan’s lives.

Emmaline looked at the others gathered around her. Their expressions suggested they were almost too scared to break the continued silence but, like her, analysing what they had heard. Like, who was the ‘they’ Lorcan had mentioned, and what did he mean when he had said that Naiyana was ‘gone’? Did he mean taken? Or killed? When was it recorded and why had it cut out? And finally, who were they running from?

What wasn’t in doubt, with this recording and the quantities of blood, was that this almost certainly was a major crime.

Anand returned with the fingerprint kit only to be greeted with silence.

‘I wasn’t gone that long,’ he protested.

‘Copy that recording and everything from the phone for me,’ she said to Barker. ‘Ask Forensics to retrieve any relevant fingerprints from it. Then get the data to our Tech team. See if we can build a timeline.’

17

Emmaline

The sun was going down fast, racing for the horizon as if fleeing in shame. Or maybe it had an engagement later. Emmaline would have liked one too. Something quick and meaningless. No pressure, no commitment. Open-ended. There was something liberating about open-endedness. Especially in a profession where the pressure was always on to tie up everything.

Forensics had been and gone in two hours. Efficient. Dr Rebecca Patel’s forte. Conversation was strictly for discussing facts. And without the test results she didn’t have any yet.

Anand and Barker were driving the couple of hours back to their families in Leonora. Rispoli was heading in the same direction.

‘Need a lift?’ he asked.

Emmaline looked at the Maguire house in front of her. She had nowhere booked in Leonora and