There Is More Light Than Dark

Chapter Fifty Six

Tuesday August 16

Dean McCoy slumped in his chair before the Tuesday morning coffee had a chance to kick in.

The afternoon before had revealed nothing. Absolutely nothing. No sign of Vincent, or of Peter Sampson. He was so sure they would find one or the other, alive or dead, but something told him probably not both, at one of the addresses.

He'd taken his wife's advice in the evening and not gone through the file. It was meant to freshen him up, make him hungry, maybe see something he hadn't seen before. But after a few beers and a restless night's sleep where he couldn't help but try and recite the entire file from memory, the well-meaning advice hadn't really had the desired effect in practise.

McCoy had a conflict; well in reality he had many. But the one that would be the most important for him was to decide whether to stick with his initial judgement of Vincent Sampson or consider his natural bias might have led him away from making a rational judgement on how he fitted around Avery's death.

The other thing hanging out there that he just had to get on top of was who the hell this Mason Stepper was.

He had Lewis looking into who he was, where he lived, what he did but so far there was absolutely nothing. Apart from the passport he'd used, a Medicare number and a single bank account, all only having a history of a few months. But his name had been in Vincent's school books from years ago.

And on that paper in his old bedroom only a month ago.

He sat on his desk and buried his head in his hands, rubbing his face as if it had ants all over it. Harper Lewis sat and watched from her desk only a few metres away. Like Frank Young had only yesterday, she saw the lines in his face deepen by the day. She reached down into the brown satchel and rubbed what was inside, bringing her hand up to her nose. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply.

She'd hardly touched it in the last five days but still it had sat there, just like it had for the last two years, rarely away from her side.

There were three people in the whole fucking world they were trying to find and so far they had no idea about any one of them. Two were somewhere in Melbourne as far as they knew and the other, if he even existed, was somewhere in Italy, but do you think they were getting any help from over there? The three messages McCoy had left with Rome Interpol had gone effectively unrequited but for an email saying they had been received and they were hoping to respond within the week.

And McCoy thought his department was ineffective.

By lunch time it was becoming obvious Mason Stepper was nothing more than an alias. A person with no history in the real world, not here in Australia anyway. The international register would take a little longer to search but the fact he'd managed to obtain an Australian passport spoke to McCoy about where his origins lay.

He had the file open on his desk and, on the one adjacent, all of the pieces of paper that had Mason Stepper's name scrawled across it so violently, so openly. Some were from more than ten years ago but some were from only the last few months. Had he been and gone in that time?

McCoy knew that if he were indeed a faked person it took knowing the right people, and some serious money, to get those documents. He had Lewis checking out the original forms to check handwriting, signatures, where they were lodged but before he even asked he knew that if someone had the smarts and the resources to get these things they would also know how to cover their tracks.

And Peter Sampson had the cash.

But he'd go through the motions because often the smartest criminal wasn't smart, or meticulous, enough.