‘Ladies.’
‘Holy crap, you scared the shit out of us,’ Shamma said. ‘What happened to your head?’
‘I got a bonk on the brain from our suspect,’ I said, feeling the stitches. ‘None of your people were on the camp last night, were they?’
The girls looked at each other. Shamma opened her mouth to speak, and her friend cut her off.
‘Ocean says we’re not to assist in the investigation,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘We’ve got to go.’ She pulled at Shamma. The purple-haired girl stood fast, staring at her sandals in the dirt.
‘Whoever it was, they killed Danny,’ Shamma murmured.
‘Were you and Danny a couple?’ I asked.
‘Shamma, we gotta go.’ The friend was backing off.
‘Sort of,’ Shamma said, her eyes finding mine. She clung to the diamond wire between us, and when she finally spoke, her words were low and fast.
‘Ocean and a couple of the guys were out looping last night,’ she said. ‘They also have stuff on the camera system. You know, for the blog? Stuff that might help. But I don’t know if they’ll give it to you. They think you’re after them.’
Chapter 62
I SAT OUTSIDE the leadership team meeting room beside Whitt, browsing the internet on my phone.
‘Looping,’ I read. ‘Environmental activist term describing the practice of looping heavy chains around equipment deemed detrimental to the cause, and attaching industrial padlocks. Activists will sometimes chain large pieces of operational equipment together, or chain essential buildings closed in an effort to slow production.’
‘They’re a crafty bunch, aren’t they?’ Whitt said.
I couldn’t help wandering further through the internet, looking for signs of Sam. I knew that, for a few days, information about the evidence gathered should shut down as the prosecutors prepared for the committal hearing. There’d be no point showing all their cards at this early stage. But some information would always leak.
I flashed my eyes across a few headlines, unable to take in more.
BLUE CRYING IN CUSTODY, GUARDS SAY.
‘HE TOLD ME HE WAS GOING TO KILL ME’: BLUE BIKE PATH VICTIM TELLS ALL.
TORTURED ANIMALS, WET BED UNTIL LATE TEENS – BLUE FOSTER PARENT REVEALS.
I clicked on the last link, then stopped myself. I couldn’t focus on that now. It would drive me into a rage, and if I was going to convince the leadership team to support us in finding the missing miners, I needed to maintain my cool.
‘What are we doing sitting here like a couple of schoolkids waiting for the principal?’ I said. I stood and shoved open the meeting-room door.
Twelve men and women in suits were sitting around a long pine table. Burns was the only man standing.
‘. . . a work of pure fiction,’ he was saying. He almost choked when he saw me.
Gabe jogged to a stop in the hall beside Whitt. ‘I miss anything?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Whitt sighed. ‘You’re right on time for the show.’ ‘Good morning! Well, isn’t this a sight? Look at you all.’ I swept an arm around the table. ‘You look immaculate. Nice earrings there, Miss. Very stylish. I’m glad you all spent so much time getting dressed for this meeting while the bodies of four of your employees lay rotting in the ground, waiting to be discovered.’
‘My God.’ The woman with the earrings clutched at her chest, looked to Burns. ‘Is she serious?’
‘This is exactly what I’m talking about.’ Burns rolled his eyes.
‘Twenty minutes we waited out there.’ I pointed to the doorway. ‘That’s twenty more minutes their families waited to hear what’s happened to them. Would you pompous morons stop messing around and approve a search, please?’
‘We’d just like to get our heads around the situation, Ms Blue,’ an older man said, his hands open reasonably. ‘Mr Burns was just briefing us. We understand so far that this is all connected to the disappearance of Daniel Stanton?’
‘It’s Detective.’ I felt my jaw click. ‘And yes. Daniel Stanton. Hon Lu. Tori and Amy King.’
‘You see, I was given the impression by the Perth police that there was no suggestion any harm had come to these miners.’ He looked around the table. ‘We were told that Hon Lu, for example, was deeply distressed that the food storage block was raided by the activists, and may have left the camp in embarrassment for not having stopped it. We’re told Tori King left because she was having relationship problems, and that her sister went in search of her. Now, although some of Daniel’s remains were recovered, so far there’s no sign in any of these cases, including his, of –’
‘Of foul play?’ I pointed to my head. ‘This isn’t foul enough for you?’
‘Ah, yes. David has relayed your . . . claims of having been attacked by a man you believe was responsible for the whereabouts of the missing miners. Ms Blue, really, I must ask –’
‘If one more person calls me Ms Blue I’m going to lose it,’ I said.
‘You haven’t lost it already?’ Burns said, smiling.
‘Oh, sweetheart.’ I smiled back. ‘I haven’t even begun.’
‘Without further corroboration of your story, Detective Blue, I’m afraid I can’t approve such an expensive and time-consuming use of our resources.’ The older man clasped his hands on the table. ‘The mine was shut down for five hours last night after your . . . accident. This cost in the ballpark of seventy-five thousand dollars. Alongside difficulties we’ve had in the early hours of this morning with local activists disabling some of our equipment, our focus for the present has to be getting this place up and running again. There’s no evidence to suggest Daniel Stanton or any of the other young people you mentioned have been deliberately targeted by anyone, on or off the mine. And that’s that.’
‘That’s that, huh?’
They all stared at me, a human wall of defiance clad in silk and expensive wool. There was one young man, obviously the junior in the leadership team, who looked decidedly guilty. I took his quiet shame as a small triumph, a big enough win to get me out of the room without punching something.
I stood outside the boardroom and listened to them lock the doors behind me.
I wasn’t even out there long enough for Gabe and Whitt to figure out what to say to me. I looked at them, and then I turned and kicked the boardroom doors back open.
Chapter 63
THE WOMAN WITH the nice earrings screamed. Four or five people stood. Eyes and mouths were agape. I don’t think anyone in the room had seen an act of violence in a very long time. I was gambling on the idea that it was exactly what they needed.
‘That’s not that,’ I said, nudging aside the lock that had smashed out of the door and bounced on the carpet. The leader ship junior looked secretly impressed. Whitt rushed in and started babbling, trying to apologise, to calm the situation, but I silenced him with a look.
‘Samuel Jacob Blue is my brother,’ I said.
The room was silent, all eyes fixed on me. Burns rose sharply from his chair, his face purple with rage.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Holy shit,’ the leadership junior said. ‘Samuel Jacob Blue? He’s the Georges River Killer!’ He threw looks around the room, but none of his colleagues knew what he meant. ‘It’s all over the news. He’s just been arrested in Sydney.’
‘I’m out here in this godforsaken craphole you call a mine because my commanding chief wanted to keep me away from the media frenzy about my brother’s arrest,’ I said. ‘He was arrested five days ago on three counts of aggravated sexual assault and murder. There are more charges to come. So far, I’ve been holding off the dozens of journalists who are trying to get a comment out of me. They’re at my police station. They’re at my house. They’re cramming my phone with calls, messages and emails. Right now, I’m the most sought-after interviewee in the country.’
I caught Gabe’s eyes. His mouth was hanging open. I couldn’t think about what I was s
acrificing as my words spilled forth. I couldn’t think about what this would mean once the miners got hold of it, once the likes of Richie and his crew and any number of other menacing characters wandering around the mine discovered who I was. Right now, I needed to find those missing miners, and it was sheer desperation pushing me on.
‘If you don’t conduct a search of the mine for those young people,’ I said, ‘I’m going to start taking calls from journalists. I’m going to tell them where I am. They’re going to come out here looking for me, and before you know it you’re going to have the entire nation, possibly the world, with their eyes trained on this very spot. If you think they’re interested in me, they’re gonna love the case I’m working on.’
A heavy silence fell again, and it was only in the quiet and the stillness that I realised my whole body was shaking with anger.
I’d given up everything now, and whether my threat worked or not, there’d be nowhere to hide.
Chapter 64
I WAS AWARE of Gabe somewhere in the huddle of people around the desk outside the entrance to the mine, but I didn’t acknowledge him, and he didn’t come near me. I didn’t know when we’d talk, but he’d probably insist on it. I was embarrassed at having jumped him in the middle of the desert, used him to sate my desperate, primal need to be held, distracted from my life. There was also the humiliation of Sam’s situation, of how as a Sex Crimes detective I’d managed to do exactly nothing about my brother either committing, or at least being arrested for, some of the most horrific deeds in the country’s history. I stole a glance over my shoulder at Gabe as he loitered at the back of the crowd around the computer table. He was looking at something on his phone. Was he scanning the headlines with this new understanding? Was he reading about my past?
At the fold-out table before us, two large laptops had been set up to display the video feed from a GoPro that was being lowered into the hole in the mine. I’d identified the exploratory tunnel the killer had lured me into, telling Burns and his crew, as well as the workmen he’d detailed, about the screams I’d heard coming from within. There were two sets of footprints in the sand and dirt leading to the hole, and clear signs of where I’d been struck, where I’d wrestled with the man who attacked me. A smear of my blood on the wall. But when I tried to show Burns these, his torch beam wandered off. The man was too stubborn to take me seriously even now.
Whitt and I watched the laptop screens as the GoPro was fed into the hole. Its torch showed only a black circle, rocky walls receding as the camera plunged deep into the earth. The hat I’d seen a mere three or four metres down the hole was gone.
‘How deep is it?’ I asked.
‘This one’s probably about a kilometre deep,’ a young miner said. ‘That’s how far we went on each hole on that side of the mine before we moved on.’
‘If it’s not collapsed,’ another said. ‘There’s nothing bracing them.’
We all stood and watched the black hole. Miners going in and out of the mine stopped now and then to ask people at the back of the crowd what was happening. Before long, a shape began to emerge. The circular bottom of the hole. The blue, red and white hat.
‘There’s the hat!’ I cried.
‘And there’s the bottom of the hole,’ Burns said, barely able to contain the triumph in his voice. ‘No bodies. Just as I predicted.’
I stood staring deep down in the earth, at the sand and dirt and tiny rock chips lying on the surface. Burns radioed back to the leadership team that we’d found nothing. There was a distinct loosening of the tension in the people around me. Two or three walked off.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘What’s that?’
I tapped the screen. There was a long, white object lying beside the hat. The men inside were radioed, and they lowered the camera slightly. The object wouldn’t come into focus. Burns came over to the laptop screen and bent so that his nose was inches from it.
‘It’s a rock,’ he said.
‘A single bright white rock at the bottom of a tunnel of mostly grey, black and brown rocks?’
Burns looked at me, grinding his back teeth. He swung quickly towards the ground and picked up a pale stone.
‘See this?’ he snapped. ‘This is a white rock. This, too, this is a white rock!’ He swooped a couple more times, angrily gathering up a handful of dirt and rocks. ‘There must be a thousand fucking colours of rock here.’
‘Hey,’ Whitt snapped. ‘How about you talk to my colleague with a bit more respect.’
‘Respect?’
‘Yeah, some fucking respect.’ Whitt moved forward, forcing Burns to back up. ‘I don’t like your tone. We can play nice, or we can start making further problems for you. You’re bordering on hindering a police investigation here, mate.’
‘You’re hindering my business. You’re on my property, without a warrant.’ Burns threw his hands up. ‘Since when does the curiosity of an individual police officer come before . . . before logic! Evidence! Fucking reality!’
‘Put me down the hole,’ I said.
Whitt and Burns both turned to look at me.
‘What?’
‘I said, put me. Down. The hole.’
Chapter 65
GOING DOWN HEADFIRST seemed like a good idea until I’d been lowered about a hundred metres. The circumference of the hole was such that I could reach out and touch the walls as they slid by me, my fingers trailing over the grooves the huge drill had left in the clay and mud. The blood swirled to my head. I hung there listening to my heartbeat pound in my ears, my stitches throbbing along the wound in my head.
This is where I would have fallen, I mused. This is where I would have died.
‘You alright, Harriet?’ Whitt’s voice asked.
I pressed the button for the radio at my waist. ‘It’s hot down here.’
‘Adjust your camera a little bit, could you?’ he replied. ‘We can only see dirt.’
I straightened the camera on the front of my hard hat. The chinstrap cut into my jaw, where sweat had begun to slide towards my nose. Whitt’s radio crackled on and off between transmissions. I could hear Burns in the background, still whining about safety and money and time, the ludicrousness of the decision to let me go down into the hole.
‘You’re at about three hundred metres,’ Whitt said.
As the winch lowered me smoothly into oblivion, I wondered what death would be like if the shaft suddenly collapsed. A sudden crunch. The breath squeezed out of me. Dirt in my eyes and mouth. My eternal grave, deeper than I’d ever have imagined. I breathed slowly as I descended, watching the shadows bouncing off the walls.
‘Six hundred metres.’
The harness was bruising my shoulders. I didn’t dare wriggle to gain comfort. If I slipped, I’d plummet four hundred metres to the bottom, deep into the darkness.
‘Nine hundred and twenty.’
‘I think I can see the bottom,’ I wheezed. The heat was incredible. Sweat rolled along my forearms and off the tips of my fingers. ‘I see the hat.’
The winch kept lowering. I was coming up on the bottom of the shaft too fast.
‘Stop! Stop!’
The wire holding me ground to a stop, clanging and singing as it trembled in the faraway machine. I picked up Hon’s hat and tucked it into my harness.
‘Where’s your white rock?’ Whitt asked.
I turned my head and found it. A long, thin stone lying on the surface of the dirt floor. I reached out, only inches from it.
‘Lower me down a bit.’
Two large clanks, and I shunted downwards a foot. I grabbed the rock and pulled.
The finger snapped off in my hand.
Chapter 66
I BEGAN DIGGING down furiously, pulling the sand and dirt away from the hand, the arm, the shoulder buried there. Hon had flopped to the bottom of the hole with an arm raised over a mound of dirt, just the knuckle of one of his fingers showing above the surface of the dirt, looking like a pale, thin stone. The extreme heat in the hole and the r
ich soils had begun to degrade his corpse, loosening the skin and tendons around his finger, making him like dough.
I cleared the sand from around Hon’s face, his dead, gaping mouth vomiting a steady stream of it from his black lips. My camera relayed images to the desk up top crowded with people.
‘Oh Jesus, it’s them,’ I could hear Whitt saying via the radio. ‘Get back. All of you get back. Get these people out of here.’
I heard cries of horror on the radio. I stopped clearing away the sand and hung there, looking at the half-submerged body.
‘Pull me up, will you?’
Now I stood, still harnessed, at the entrance to the mine, grateful for the sun on my face. I bagged Hon Lu’s finger and handed it to Whitt. Perth was sending a proper crime-scene crew to go down the hole and excavate whatever was there, making sure to bag all the dirt and sand around the corpses in case there were fibres or hairs that would help identify the killer. There was nothing I could do now but wait to see what they would find.
The crowd around the table with the laptops had thinned, mainly, I suspected, because the people had rushed off to tell their friends what they’d seen. Already the news was spreading like wildfire. I looked up towards the fence line and saw a couple of miners talking to some EarthSoldiers through the diamond wire, pointing down the high mine walls at me. David Burns had disappeared completely. I was glad. I didn’t know what I’d have done if I’d seen him, having just climbed out of the hole in which we’d almost been forced to leave the bodies.
‘How many do you think are down there?’ Whitt asked.
‘I don’t know.’ I cleared my throat. ‘At least two. When I pulled back the sand around Hon’s shoulder I saw a foot that wasn’t his, wedged alongside him. The sand was too loose though. Kept falling in.’
Whitt gave me a pat on the shoulder and went to make some calls to Perth. I didn’t know Gabe was approaching me until his feet came to a stop in front of mine.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’ I looked up at his eyes, trying to gauge his emotions. There was no clue. He stuffed his hands in his pockets.