There Is More Light Than Dark

Chapter Forty Eight

Monday Aug 15

Harper Lewis was at the station by 6:30 am, raring to go after she had spent most of the weekend at her apartment, musing on all of the possibilities last week's work had shown up.

Dean McCoy rolled into work on Monday morning feeling like he'd never left.

Once the phone call to Doug Prosser was done they made a point of working through what McCoy had managed to sort over the weekend before turning thir attention to Prosser's car and the determination of what really had gone on that night in April.

He'd sorted the box into piles of 'important', 'not important' and 'may be important'. There wasn't much in the first two piles but what was there was savage. Most of it was old – secondary school stuff – and related to his mother. Scribbled words, drawings, caricatures. And that name kept on coming up – always written hard, intense; deep. It was written under pictures of a plain room with only a bed, on the edges of newspaper clippings of his football scores and across the inside cover of every school or text book he had kept.

Mason Stepper.

A quick search of the system showed Mason Stepper had no record – McCoy had his team look into any past he had on anything. He asked for it to be pronto and the team knew that meant yesterday.

As he placed each pile on the table adjacent to his, still full of old burg folders thatnone of the rest of the team had bothered to reach for yet, unsolved minor crimes and updated protocol booklets, he noticed the email had come through with the bank details of Peter and Vincent Sampson.

McCoy clicked on the pdf and sat to have a look. His next coffee could wait for this.

He sat back in his chair and pulled up Peter Sampson's first – he still hadn't been able to work out why he had closed his Vet clinic so suddenly, although the increasing suspicion he had been a large part of whatever had happened with Avery seemed relevant. McCoy had someone watching Sampson's place in Malvern around the clock but there had still been no sign of him. McCoy and Lewis still needed to get down to Barwon Heads in the next day or so but were hoping for a break to point them towards which of the two locations would offer the greatest chance at progressing the case.

As the file opened on his screen, he checked his watch to make sure he had the date correct – Monday August 15th.

Dean McCoy squinted his eyes and screwed up his face – the numbers on this guy's statement were extraordinary, even for a posh prick from Malvern.

But the one that stood out, apart from the balance still remaining, was the cash withdrawal of $200,000 on April 11th. There had been nothing apart from regular direct debits for the four months since. McCoy shook his head. 200 grand? Then the guy's a ghost?

He checked his notebook – sure enough the business has closed on the same day.

'Lewis – have you heard back from either of Peter Sampson's employees?' He shouted across the room to Lewis who was running her own view of what had just come through.

'Only one, Detective. The other one isn't answering or returning my calls. I can tell you that the one I have spoken to is happy he's not her boss anymore but the other is just not around. I'll keep trying.'

'What did the one you spoke to say?' He banged his fist lightly on the desk, frustrated that these people could leave such little trace of their whereabouts behind.

'Her name is Joan Freestone. She worked for him for twelve years. Says he was fastidious, a difficult boss. I got the impression she wanted to say a lot more.'