Before It Breaks by Dave Warner

Author:Dave Warner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fremantle Press
Published: 2015-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

While his father’s fate hovered in the background like a good soundtrack, present not intrusive, on the flight back Clement crammed all the things they knew about Schaffer’s killing in a blender and hit go. The killing had been brutal but careful. There was none of the detritus that a mad impulse killer might have left. No, it had been planned. If the killer had chosen Schaffer for a reason, they had more chance of snaring him but for now the reason was obscure. Why change the shirt? Had the killer felt a sudden pang of guilt and grabbed the first thing available? What of Rhino’s idea that Dieter Schaffer took the shirt to impress a woman? Well, she’d probably have to be German or a soccer nut. Could there be a woman in league with somebody else? Maybe they were trying a shakedown of some sort on Schaffer? The young woman at the café, Selina, popped into Clement’s head. Selina and her boyfriend working as a team? Clement hated this part of himself. Trust nobody, turn over the rock of people’s lives and see what crawled beneath.

It was a little after midday, Sunday, when he stepped off the plane. The air was so much thicker here, rain imminent. Scott Risely was waiting, fresh from a game of golf. Clement’s immediate reaction was that something in the case had broken but it was simply Risely checking in face to face. They sat in Risely’s car and, after he’d answered the usual polite inquiry about his father, got down to the case. Risely had one piece of new information.

‘We got a call from a truck driver heading to Derby last Wednesday. Says he saw Dieter Schaffer’s vehicle around two thirty p.m. heading towards Derby, one person in the cabin as far as he could tell or remember. The car overtook him and he thought it was dangerous, so he filed it away.’

‘If he’s right then it wasn’t somebody along with Dieter who did him in.’

‘If he’s right.’ Risely emphasised the conditional ‘if’. ‘He wasn’t certain. Of course Schaffer could have arranged to meet somebody there.’

‘True but then there was no need to park so far away. What about Perth with the CCTV footage, did they spy the biker anywhere?’

‘No. They’re looking again just in case. They did pick up Schaffer’s Pajero once, Sunday before he was murdered, just driving down the main street but there was no sign of the bike.’

Running through what he’d learned from Rhino, Clement saw Risely become gloomier by the second. The window to apprehend the criminal was shrinking fast.

Clement tried to sound more hopeful than he felt. ‘Maybe the DNA from the shovel will turn up somebody.’

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