Never Never

  Chapter 91

  WE TOOK TURNS standing at the top of the ladder, listening for sounds in the desert outside, periodically yelling for help. Both of us were drenched in sweat within an hour. The holes in the top of the tank provided air, but that air was hot, and soon condensation was dripping down the ribbed walls. Now and then wind brought red sand raining down.

  While Whitt seemed beaten by the structure, I was convinced there was a way out. I tried turning the lid of the water tank, but it seemed levered shut with something and would only shift by mere millimetres. I found a knife on the uppermost shelf and went about carving up the black rubber rim of the lid, dropping pieces down on my increasingly angry partner.

  ‘This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever experienced,’ he said, wiping sweat from his face. ‘Why didn’t he just kill us?’

  ‘Because that’s no fun?’ I said, jabbing at the lid with my knife. There had been plenty of opportunities for the killer to take either of us out since we arrived in Bandya. There were only two reasons I could think of for leaving us alive. One, his victims were very specifically chosen, and he was unwilling to kill anyone other than them. Or two, that Whitt and I upped the stakes of the hunt, put a couple more predators on the field as competition in his pursuit of his quarry. I cut out all of the rubber lining of the lid of the tank and found it made no difference to its operation. Still, I felt some weird satisfaction knowing Richie and his crew were going to have to re-line their tank.

  ‘Let’s keep working on connections between the victims. We know there’s no age connection, or racial motive. But they’ve got to be connected somehow. Where did Danny Stanton work?’

  ‘Construction,’ Whitt said. ‘Under Gabe Carter.’

  ‘Hon worked in food stores,’ I mused. ‘Tori and Amy in electrical, and Lenny and Mick on the diggers. So it’s not their placement on the mine that connects them all.’

  ‘No.’ Whitt perked up, seemingly happy to have something to distract him. ‘No, that’s not the line of connection. Hon was single and looking online for girls back in his home town. Tori had a boyfriend, and Danny was in some sort of relationship with that purple-haired girl. So it’s not a love-triangle or anything like that.’

  ‘Danny and Shamma,’ I murmured, leaning back on the ladder. ‘Danny would have been visiting the EarthSoldiers a lot if he was familiar enough with that girl to become infatuated with her. Amy said Tori used to go out there a lot, so maybe Amy went there too. That’s half of our victims right there.’

  ‘And the other half show no connection to the Earth-Soldiers whatsoever,’ Whitt said. ‘Hon was no weed smoker. He was straight as an arrow. Mick and Lenny looked a bit past it, didn’t they?’

  ‘If the victims were selected deliberately, something must connect them all,’ I insisted. ‘What else could get all of these totally disconnected characters together? I mean, they vary in age from nineteen to fifty. What did they all do that might have put them in the path of the killer? What activity unites them?’

  ‘Mining,’ Whitt said.

  I sighed at him and slid down to the bottom of the tank. The silence stretched for an hour or more, in which we waited, sweated. When the email alert tone on my phone sang it startled us both.

  ‘You can get emails?’ Whitt grabbed at the lit screen in my hands. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I didn’t know I could get emails!’ We fought stupidly for the phone in the dark. ‘Give it to me!’

  I checked my coverage. Still nothing. How could an email possibly get through? I composed a message directly to Pops, the subject header ‘URGENT! HELP!’ My fingers trembled as I described our situation. When I pressed send, it went straight into my outbox, and a message appeared on the screen.

  ‘Network coverage error?’ I read. ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘You must have just had coverage for a second or two,’ Whitt said. ‘Must have been a satellite going over or something.’

  I opened the email I’d received. It was from a journalist. She’d attached a photo of the front page of the Herald.

  We’d love to be the first interview on this, Harry, she wrote. Any comments? Just one will do!

  The cover was a picture of my brother, his hollow-cheeked face as he passed between doorways at police headquarters. The headline read BLUE GIVES FULL CONFESSION.

  ‘Anything important?’ Whitt yawned.

  ‘No.’ I tucked the phone away. ‘Nothing.’

  Sitting in the dark, listening to my partner’s breathing in what was possibly going to be my death chamber, I wondered if it was OK to cry yet.

  Chapter 92

  WHEN THE NOISES came, it was dark. Whitt was humming, trying to take his mind off how much he needed to pee, he told me.

  ‘Shut up! Shut up! Listen!’

  ‘Oi!’ someone shouted on the wind. ‘Oiiiiiii!’

  ‘Help!’ I cried. I shimmied up the ladder as fast as I could, my whole body tingling and numb from sitting cramped in the heat. ‘Help! We’re in here!’

  I thumped the inside of the tank lid. Whitt stood up and bashed the ladder onto which I clung.

  ‘Are you sure we should do this? What if it’s them?’

  ‘I don’t care if it’s them, I’m getting out of here,’ I said. ‘Help! Help!’

  There was silence. I kept wailing, hoping the visitor could hear me. Sand dripped from the bullet holes in a steady stream. I thumped and thumped, listening to the sickening quiet between my efforts.

  ‘Where the hell are you?’ a girl said.

  ‘Oh God, we’re in here!’ I cried. ‘Help! We’re under the car!’

  Two voices, curious and a little frightened. Then the sound of sand being pulled and scratched away from the lid. I was surprised how much had blown in while we’d been trapped. After a minute or so, a single blue eye appeared, staring in at me.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’

  Shamma lifted the rock out from where it had jammed the lid shut. She twisted off the covering and fell back as I scrambled out of the tank.

  ‘Oh God, thank you. Thank you so much.’ I sprawled on the sand beside the young EarthSoldier’s friend. ‘Oh, you’re the best people in the whole world.’

  ‘What the hell were you doing in there?’ Shamma asked. ‘Where’s Richie?’

  ‘He’s been arrested.’ I breathed the clean desert air. ‘He’ll be back soon. We went down there to snoop and got trapped. What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘We came to get weed, what else?’ Shamma laughed. ‘We can’t get onto the mine. Something’s gone down.’

  ‘What’s gone down?’ I asked.

  ‘I dunno.’ The girl shrugged, curling a purple dreadlock around her ear. ‘The alarms have been going off all afternoon.’

  Chapter 93

  THE CAR WE’D borrowed from the mine rumbled and bumped over dry rocks on the way back to the mine. Darkness was falling, lighting the horizon blood-red and sending plumes of tiny desert birds up from the spinifex towards the rolling clouds. Whitt sat beside me in the dimly lit cabin, going through his missed calls and emails. On the camp in the distance I could see lights gathered at the gates, more than there should have been. The press camp had grown.

  ‘Linebacker’s criminal record came back,’ Whitt said. ‘Clear.’

  ‘I’ll bet his military service record isn’t,’ I said. ‘Have you got that yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  At the gates the media swarmed around the car, absurdly glamorous women with hard, sculpted hair battered by the desert winds, their silken shirts clinging to their bodies with sweat. I heard the alerts as soon as the gates shut behind us, pumping through the camp’s PA system.

  ‘Harriet Blue and Edward Whittacker, contact the administration office immediately. Valerie Beckett and Julia Shae, contact the administration office immediately.’

  ‘Beckett and Shae.’ I glanced at Whitt. ‘Those are the two –’

  ‘The two officers we assigned to Linebacker,’ he
said. His face was hard.

  I pulled the car onto the dirt strip in front of the administration office. David Burns burst out of the doors of the building just as we exited the car and came striding towards us. For once, he looked ruffled and mildly stressed. I was almost pleased.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he snapped. ‘Two of your officers are missing. There are another four in there who are just about beside themselves.’

  I didn’t bother explaining what had happened to Whitt and me in the desert. I wanted to know what had happened to my officers. Hanging nervously around the counter I found three of the men and one of the women who had been sent from Perth to assist us. A cop named Hellier grabbed me by the arm as soon as I got within reach.

  ‘Where are Beckett and Shae?’ His words were so fast they were almost slurred.

  ‘You tell me,’ I said. ‘You’ve tried them on radio?’

  ‘They stopped responding to radio and phone around midday,’ the woman, Doyle, said. ‘They were assigned to Aaron Linbacher. We’ve talked to Mitch and Sully, they’re on their way back from Perth. They dropped your assault charges there.’

  ‘I know. I know.’ I tried to breathe. ‘No one’s seen Beckett and Shae? They didn’t say anything before they went missing?’

  ‘They reported to me at about eleven-thirty.’ Hellier was pacing. ‘Everyone did. We thought you must be out with the EarthSoldiers or something. They said everything was fine, they were just observing Linbacher on his rounds. Where were you? We called and called.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have left.’ David Burns puffed his chest out at me. ‘If anything happens to those officers it’s your head, Detective. Not mine.’

  Chapter 94

  IT WAS GETTING harder, but the climax of combat was like that. A soldier was tested in many different ways. His patience was tested. His mind was tested. And he was tested on what he was willing to sacrifice in order to take the campaign to the next step. If he faltered, if he hesitated, he proved himself ineffective to command – and, like fathers, the sole important goal of command was to raise the future generation and pick out the runts.

  The Soldier found it easier if he didn’t think. If he only acted, diligently and fiercely, when the time came.

  He’d hung around the group idly the night before, listening to their chatter, identifying them all. He knew their weaknesses. Now, after securing Detective Harriet Blue and her partner in the tank in the desert, the Soldier had gone back to the mine to hunt the two female police officers, Beckett and Shae. With his main quarry delayed for the final mission, his last task before entering the next glorious phase of his plan was to eliminate the two women. They weren’t a threat to him, of course, but what their demise would do to Detective Blue’s mindset would be profound. Vulnerable women had become her mission. Her life’s purpose. To strike two of them down right under her nose would continue his program of shattering the delicate strands of his adversary’s confidence. Mind games. They were so important.

  A sneak attack would do it. There was no need to lull these two into a false sense of security. He’d found the two of them leaning against a transport truck in the cool shade of the yard, lazy sentries laughing quietly together, one of them looking at the screen of her phone with serious interest.

  The Soldier had climbed stealthily up the narrow ladder on the back of the truck and crept across the aluminium top of the vehicle, pausing at the edge to listen to his victims, to smell their cigarette smoke.

  ‘Can you imagine that?’ Beckett was saying. ‘You wake up one morning and open the newspaper and whammo! Good morning! Your brother is a fucking sicko murderer.’

  ‘I don’t have a brother.’

  ‘Your sister, then.’ Beckett slapped her partner. ‘Your boyfriend. Your mother, for fuck’s sake. Play the game with me! Shit!’

  ‘It’s gotta suck. But what’s the difference between that, right, and thinking your husband loves you and then finding out he’s got, like, three other wives?’

  ‘Or that he’s gay,’ Beckett snickered. ‘You’re married to him twenty years and you’ve got three kids and then suddenly he tells you he likes guys. Whoops, sorry, I forgot to mention it!’

  ‘I guess everybody thinks that, at the very least, there are some people who they know. Truth is, nobody knows anybody.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Beckett said. ‘Nobody knows anybody. Isn’t that terrifying?’

  The Soldier slid the wire garrotte from the pocket of his trousers and let it uncurl, the natural twists in the weave straightening his makeshift weapon on the truck top. One half of the wire was insulated with plastic coating that would protect his hands, but the Soldier wasn’t taking any chances – he pulled on a pair of electrician’s gloves and made a wide wire loop that would accommodate the width of a human head. He crept to the edge of the truck and looked down at the two women. The neat, identical parts in their straight blonde hair reminded him of two angelic children. There was something about the top of the head, the vulnerability of that crown, the ease with which an adult might stroke or cup the top of a child’s head with their hands as they passed at waist height. For a second, he had to steel himself. This was war. There was no place for thoughts of children here.

  The Soldier lowered the wire carefully so that it hung just an inch or two above Beckett’s unknowing forehead. The loop bulged and sat out, ready to ensnare her. Holding both ends of the wire in one hand, the Soldier slid his hunting knife out from his pocket, gripped the very tip of the handle. He stretched his arm out, aiming carefully, the shining blade dangling down line a pendulum above Shae’s head.

  He closed his eyes, counted to three, and let the knife go. It sailed silently downwards and, with hardly a sound, lodged handle up in Shae’s skull.

  ‘Direct hit,’ he murmured. ‘Target down.’

  Beckett was still talking as an unfeeling, unseeing Shae fell to her knees and flopped forward on the sand. The Soldier gave Beckett a second, no more, to wonder what was happening.

  Then he lowered the loop as swiftly as he could and pulled backwards and up, hooking the wire beneath the officer’s jaw and tightening it around her throat.

  He gripped the wire, wound it around his hands, and pulled.

  Chapter 95

  BURNS FOLLOWED US doggedly, his tie caught in the desert wind. Now and then he rambled to himself about our incompetence, lawsuits, and the media. We ignored him, passing through the centre of the mine to try to avoid the press cameras at the fence. The PA announcements were still ringing every few minutes for us and the two female officers.

  My phone had exploded with messages and missed calls as soon as I’d come within range of the mine’s mobile and internet servers. I glanced at the screen as we walked. For once, journalists weren’t bothering me about Sam. The messages were mostly the same, desperate writers trying to get something of value out before the evening newsreel.

  Channel Nine reporting you’re missing on the mine?! Call us!

  Harry Blue hav u gone 2 ground? On way back 2 Sydney? Comments plz!

  Harry, has Mine Killer killed you? If no text back, will assume yes! This is Joe @ the Enquirer.

  We found Linebacker by his security hut, filling out forms, the furrows in his brow darkened by tiny particles of red desert dust. As we approached he put one foot inside the doorway, leaning his body closer to where his gun was propped. Whitt reached out, his hand barely brushing my shoulder as I picked up speed.

  ‘Harriet, keep it together now . . .’

  I smacked the clipboard and pen out of Linebacker’s hands and grabbed his shirt, dragging him out of the security hut and throwing him away from me. He stumbled, his face almost purple with rage.

  ‘Where are my officers?’ I howled.

  ‘Hey? Running back to me about your fucking mess-ups again, are you, copper!’ Linebacker spat on the ground at my feet. ‘I should have expected this, shouldn’t I?’

  I drew my gun and pointed it at him. David Burns, who had been joggi
ng after us, put his hands in the air like an action-movie hostage.

  ‘Oh God!’ He looked around, trying to decide where to run. ‘Oh God, please! Don’t shoot him!’

  ‘Tell me where my officers are, Linbacher, or I’ll shoot.’

  ‘This is excessive force!’ Linebacker pointed a bent finger at me. ‘I’m not threatening you right now. Help! Help!’ He took a few big steps backwards to put himself in view of the press down a small corridor between the buildings. ‘I’m unarmed, and a police officer has a gun on me!’

  ‘I’m gonna give you five seconds,’ I said. ‘And then I’m gonna put one right in your guts.’

  ‘Help!’ Linebacker called towards the press. ‘I’m unarmed!’

  ‘Five.’ I actioned the pistol.

  ‘Harry, Jesus, put the gun down!’ Whitt yelled.

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Harry, I can’t let you do this!’ I heard Whitt draw his weapon. ‘Put it down!’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Help me! Someone!’

  ‘Please don’t!’

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Harry!’

  ‘One.’

  Chapter 96

  A SCREAM SPLIT the air, so high and shrill that it almost shocked me into pulling my trigger. I turned and saw Whitt with the eye of his gun on me. I holstered my gun and ran towards the sound, Whitt coming into line beside me. Miners who had been watching my standoff with Linebacker from the corners of buildings darted out of the way.

  The screaming woman was Officer Doyle. She was kneeling in the sand between two trucks, dressed in jeans and a sweat-stained shirt. Officer Shae was lying on her front, the black leather handle of what must have been a large knife protruding from the top of her head like a single radio aerial. There was no blood, but as I neared I could see Shae was certainly dead, all the colour drained from her face and her hands curled inward in the awkward claws of someone with a traumatic brain injury.