‘Well. Looks like we’ll have a circus on our hands,’ he said. ‘How many people are they sending out?’
‘Oh, there’ll be a coroner, an extraction team, couple of photographers. Most likely they’ll get the bodies out of there quick smart and chuck them on a chopper back to Perth. It’ll all be very quiet. They won’t want to scare the rest of the camp.’
‘I think I’ll get back to work,’ he sighed. ‘I don’t want to be anywhere near here when they start bringing them out. Do you think there’ll be journalists?’
‘I don’t know. They might not have reason to come, if the team gets the bodies back to Perth quick enough.’
I wasn’t sure the forensic team would be able to get out and back and beat the press. Already miners were standing nearby, taking pictures of us on their phones. They’d alert the press for the sheer fun of it. Looking to give interviews, have their ten seconds on camera. Boredom with life will do that to you. Make you a reality TV star in waiting.
Gabe was examining my expression. I knew what he wanted to talk about, but I wasn’t sure I could go there at that very second.
‘I’m sorry about your brother,’ he said. ‘If the press come –’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll be fine.’
I wandered away from him, too confused by what we’d done, and too terrified by what I’d seen down there in the earth, to speak to him any more.
Chapter 67
IT WAS NIGHTFALL by the time the extraction team arrived. Whitt and I spent the afternoon by the desk at the mine entrance, reviewing our notes and watching who entered the area. The leadership team had approved a complete shutdown of the north mine, but that didn’t stop people milling about, some pretending to check equipment or working on the trucks nearby. I saw Richie briefly among their number, and Linebacker. News of the discovery did a fast circuit of the mine and came back around to us, greatly distorted. Someone had brought us coffee and lunch. While I sat there trying to eat I listened to a small knot of miners halfway up the hill, voices travelling across the dusty earth bowl towards us.
‘. . . said she found like ten bodies down there.’
‘No no, she fell down there. While they were rescuing her they found an arm. But that’s it, there are no bodies.’
‘Davo heard from Richie . . . bits and pieces, like, fingers and stuff. And a rope and some duct tape.’
I gave the miners a dark look and they withdrew. But by the time the mine had been lit with orange sodium lamps and the sun had fallen below the horizon, dozens more had returned, standing on the hill in groups. When the chopper came, they pointed and took pictures.
No one from the leadership team came to watch the extraction.
‘You’d think they’d at least have one guy down here looking mournful,’ I told Whitt. ‘In case the press show up.’
‘They’ll say they were up in the offices consoling the families,’ he said. ‘If they’re down here when the press come they’ll have to answer difficult questions about it.’
I recognised one of the women who hopped down from the helicopter. Taylor Fink, orange-haired and cream-skinned, set her heavy bag down and shook my hand. For such a beautiful woman, she had a terrible nickname, ‘Finkles’, which followed her everywhere. It reminded me of wrinkles and freckles, which was unfair, as she didn’t have many of either.
‘Detective Blue,’ she said. ‘What horrors have you got in store for me now?’
I’d worked with Taylor on a couple of bad human trafficking cases in Sydney. We’d raided a brothel in Campbelltown together and found two dead sex slaves in the basement. We hugged. I might have held her a little too long.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘You’ve left Sydney?’
‘Yeah, I’m in Perth now.’ She grinned. ‘The only thing that’d make me move that far would be money or a man.’
‘Should I guess from that smile which one it was?’
She winked.
I led the pathologist and her team to the hole and left them there.
When the moon was high, and the curiosity of most of the camp’s population had worn away, three of the male forensic officers emerged from the mine entrance with a stretcher covered by a sheet. The shape beneath was not flat, but lay scrunched on its side, arm up. It was Hon.
Taylor walked towards me wearing a white paper suit and blue gloves, her camera around her neck. Neither of us really wanted to hear what she had to say.
‘There were three of them down there,’ she said. ‘Two young females and a tall Asian male.’
‘Fuck.’ I sighed.
‘One of the females is very recent,’ she said. ‘Twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Her rigor mortis broke easily. From the lividity on all three bodies, it looks like they were chucked down there within two hours of death.’
She sat on the edge of the desk and showed us a sketch she’d drawn of the bodies as they lay in the hole. One of the girls was on her side in a sort of foetal position, her legs bent. Hon had fallen on his knees in the curve of her body, one arm raised on a protruding rock. Another of the girls had fallen between these two bodies, flopped on her front across Hon’s knees. Tori must have gone first, then Hon. The girl on the top of the pile was Amy. In the sketch, they were faceless, featureless people, their hands and feet rounded and limbs bent at odd angles. I watched as the team shifted another stretcher to the chopper.
‘Any signs of what killed them?’
‘Plenty,’ Taylor said. ‘One of the girls has got a chest wound like that.’ She made a circle with her hands the circumference of a tennis ball.
‘If I were you,’ Taylor said, tucking her notebook under her arm, ‘I’d start rattling the cages to see which one of these guys has got a big, powerful gun.’
Chapter 68
THE SOLDIER WATCHED Detective Blue as the chopper sailed away into the night. He saw the red landing lights reflected off her high cheekbones, making the whites of her tired eyes a glossy pink. As the aircraft disappeared, her face became a hard mask of determination. He stood in the shadow of a nearby digger and chewed his lips.
Yes, Detective Blue. Harden again. Feel the hollowness pulse in you. You are a soldier. You will avenge your fallen.
Every death became a hardening. A slow concentration of the muscles and bones, the same petrification that turned wood into stone. At the same time, the insides were worn away, until the Soldier became a shell that could not carry the useless cargo of love, terror, desire. There was no room for pity inside. When gunshots sounded, they echoed around his inner walls so that there was never any quiet.
When her eyes lifted to her partner, they sparkled in the dark with hate.
‘We’re going to start searching the accommodation areas,’ she said. ‘We’ll confiscate Linebacker’s weapon and have it checked. Call Perth. We need more men. A team to go out and search the EarthSoldier camp. A team to search the mines.’
She was the mad king. The commander so ruined by battle that she refused to see the limits of her power. The leadership team was going to refuse all her directions. But that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered now was the call of war.
As her partner jogged off into the night, the Soldier followed Detective Blue around the side of the digger, down a gap between two trucks and into the shadows behind the mine entrance. There he watched her standing in the dark, her fists clenched by her sides.
That desire to cry was in her again, he could see. She hadn’t had a spare moment to let her guard down since she arrived. He’d enjoyed watching her feelings about her brother’s situation play on her face whenever she stole a spare second to look at the headlines on her phone. He enjoyed seeing the strain in the taut muscles of her throat, her troubled swallow when each piece of dark news was presented to her.
Oh, to cry. What a guilty pleasure that would be. To let go, and let the hurt wash over her.
Detective Blue cleared her throat, set her jaw, and turned back around. Not a single tear fell.
Chapter 69
I SLEPT IN fits and starts, trading nightmares with myself. I dreamed I was calling out from the bottom of the hole in the mine, howling up towards the tiny grey circle of light far above, my legs trapped beneath Amy’s body. When I wasn’t in the hole I was in my bed, but my body was paralysed with terror. A dark figure moved about the room, touching my things, standing over Whitt as he slept. I tore myself out of my dreams as a hard knock came on the side of the demountable. Whitt was gone.
I got out of bed and flung the door open in my underpants and singlet. Shamma with the purple hair was there, a cap pulled low over her face.
‘I could get in deep shit for this,’ she said, glancing towards the end of the accommodation yard. She thrust some papers into my hands.
‘Come inside,’ I said.
‘No.’ She bounced impatiently on the balls of her feet. ‘I’ve got to split before Ocean finds out I’m on the camp. She’s pulled everyone in. We’re not to talk to anyone from the mine until further notice.’
‘Why is she trying to hold you all back?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t she want us to catch whoever’s doing this?’
‘I don’t know, man,’ Shamma sighed. ‘I never know what’s going on. I’m only out here in the desert because I want to stop the mine. I’m trying to follow my dream, you know? I don’t want to get mixed up in fucking murders and shit.’
‘Shamma.’ I grabbed her shirt before she could take off. ‘Do you think there’s anyone out there on your camp who’s dangerous enough to be responsible for this?’
The girl squirmed. ‘Look, mate, the mine’s where the dangerous people are,’ she said. ‘I was here looping maybe a month ago and some guy caught me and threw me on the ground. Like, threw me hard, man. The guy spat on me.’
‘He spat on you?’
‘On my face.’ She glanced towards the fence again. ‘Called me a Harshee.’
‘What’s a Harshee?’
‘I don’t know. But I never been handled like that before, you know? Like I was worse than scum. I been in a few protests in my time, and they’re always rough, but not that rough. This guy, he would have really hurt me if we weren’t in the middle of the mine, I reckon. It was like he took it personally.’
‘Did you see his face?’ I asked. ‘Can you tell me anything about him?’
Shamma twisted out of my grip and ran off.
I looked down at the papers the young woman had thrust into my hands. They were low-quality printouts from two of the EarthSoldier camp cameras. One of the cameras was angled out from the back of the cave, looking over a group of EarthSoldiers sleeping on mats on the ground, some grouped together, some splayed on their own. At first I couldn’t tell what the purpose of the image was, until I discerned a shape from the cliffs visible through the mouth of the cave. It was the dark figure of a man walking across the camp between the trucks, carrying a large gun by his side.
Chapter 70
AS IS THE way with big corporations in times of crisis, most of the mine bosses had disappeared. A grave-faced David Burns walked the camp grounds with us, simultaneously wanting to look like he was cooperating with us and wanting to keep me away from the offices so I couldn’t break down any more doors. He’d brought us cappuccinos in immaculate paper cups. I wondered what the coffee rations were for the elite.
Within minutes it was clear that the long walk and the boutique coffees were all the friendly gestures we were going to get.
‘We’ll start with checkpoints for entry into and out of the mine,’ I said. ‘Shut off all the smaller exits, restricting the flow of people and trucks to the two main gates. I’ll need some of your people to do searches.’
Burns listened quietly, staring at the ground.
‘Whitt and I will conduct a search of the accommodation blocks today. I have some targeted interviews to conduct, as well. We’re going to need to confiscate Aaron Linbacher’s weapon and have it sent away for ballistics tests, along with any other weapons we uncover.’
‘We’ll need to see your police history checks for all your personnel,’ Whitt added. ‘Weapons offences, violent assaults . . .’
‘I’ll need you to surrender all the mine’s CCTV from the past couple of weeks,’ I continued.
We came to a stop by the administration building.
‘Well.’ Burns straightened his tie. ‘Unfortunately, you’ve only named one direct action that I agree with.’
I opened my mouth, but found I had no words.
‘The interviews.’ He nodded. ‘You can conduct the interviews.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll take your plans to the leadership team, obviously, but I can tell you now, their response will be the same. Your proposal breaches a number of our core principles here at the mine.’ He shrugged helplessly. ‘We cannot restrict the movement of people on and off the mine. Slowing down vehicles as they pass in and out of the gates for exhaustive searches is going to bring this place to a grinding halt. It’s just not practical. That’s not to mention safety. We need to ensure we can get emergency vehicles to different parts of the mine at a moment’s notice.’
I looked at Whitt. His face was impassive.
‘The background checks? Well, I’ll have to go to the global franchise team for that. And the accommodation block searches? No way. There are activities that go on around the mine that are hardly legal.’ He put his palms out. ‘These are hardworking family men and women who live in a high-stress environment. I can’t let you go through and arrest a good portion of the mine population for minor drug offences in the search for someone –’
‘We’re not looking for drugs! We’re looking for guns!’
‘– someone that we’re not even sure is on the mine at all.’
‘We understand that there are drugs on the mine,’ Whitt said gently. ‘We’d turn a blind eye.’
‘I’m not just talking about drugs. We know there are prostitutes here. There are likely pirated DVDs and pornography. And what if you do find guns? We’re in the Outback. There are staff here who like to go out wild pig shooting and roo shooting. The place is probably riddled with guns.’
‘We’re looking for a very specific weapon,’ Whitt explained. ‘It’s not some pig-hunting peashooter.’
Burns waved dismissively.
I struggled for words. ‘Do you grasp that there’s a maniac on the camp? There’s a fucking maniacal serial killer on this camp. He’s here, somewhere. I have pictorial evidence of him stalking the EarthSoldier camp not two kilometres away. We pulled the bodies of three young people out of your mine. They’d been shot from a distance. They’d been . . . hunted . . . like animals.’
Burns stared at me. ‘You’re not telling me anything I don’t know, Detective Blue.’
‘You’re actually hindering our search,’ I said. ‘I mean . . . I can’t believe you’re not doing everything you possibly can to find the person who’s done this.’
‘I guess the difference between you and me, Detective Blue, is that I’m a Big Picture man.’ He stood square-on to me, waved his arms out wide. ‘I’m managing over five thousand personnel here. I’m . . . I’m like a father to them. I’m in charge of their safety. Their happiness. Their productivity. Try to imagine that. The big picture. Try to imagine what it’s like to have five thousand children who all need you very much.’
He moved his palms together so that they were only an inch apart.
‘You’ve got a very specific job to do. It’s an important job, I understand that. But it’s a Small Picture job. Now, I can’t sacrifice my care of the Big Picture to meet the needs of the Small Picture.’
Heat was creeping up my neck. My knuckles cracked as my fingernails bit into my palms. Whitt instinctively moved, putting one foot into the space between Burns and me, in case I lashed out. But for once I was so angry I couldn’t move.
Burns shrugged for a third time, physically off-loading the burden I’d tried to put on his shoulders. It slipped off. He was a man nothing could st
ick to, not even the deaths that I was sure would come from his refusal to act.
Chapter 71
I BURST INTO the rec room, Whitt following. The men at the gaming spot paused and turned around. The crowd gathered around the couches began whispering. I found the Bilbies right where the miners I’d asked had said they would be – working out on the gym machines. The little blonde, Jaymee, was sprawled on a mat on the floor, doing half-hearted crunches, while tall and dark Beth was bench-pressing a good sixty kilos. She was being spotted by a nervous-looking girl in sparkly leggings. I went over and slid in front of the girl spotting Beth, taking the weight bar from her and putting it in the rack.
‘Hey!’
‘I need you,’ I said, leaning over the bar, upside down to Beth.
‘I knew you’d come around eventually.’ Beth smiled and chewed her bottom lip. ‘But generally I take appointments.’
‘I need all of you. Outside. Now.’
Whitt met me on the yard. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Bending the rules,’ I said, waiting as the prostitutes assembled around me.
‘What’s going on, sugarplum?’ Beth brushed some desert dust off my shoulder. She looked at the stitches in my forehead. ‘Someone need an arse-kicking?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I’m deputising all of you. Unofficially. I need help in this murder investigation and I’m just not getting it from the top brass. I should have guessed that and gone to the underdogs first. But here we are.’
‘Oh, deputies!’ Jaymee cried, clapping her sweaty palms. ‘Murder deputies!’
‘I want you to put the story out that you’ve been robbed,’ I told Beth. ‘Tell the miners you’re looking for a big bundle of cash, and go door to door searching for it. The guys should be happy to let you look through their things if you lay on the charm a little bit, right? Just be quick, casual and friendly, and get a look in as many dongas as you can.’