I didn’t do this, Harry.
They’ve got it all wrong.
I couldn’t wait to hear my brother say those words, to identify himself as someone completely apart from the monster plastered on the front pages.
Tell me you didn’t attack these women, Sam. Tell me you didn’t abduct them, torture them, rape them. Tell me you weren’t out hunting them. That you’re not what they say you are.
‘We’ve got three young women who have made fresh claims against your brother,’ the Chief said. ‘They’re saying they were afraid to come forward before now, but they saw him on the front page of the paper and they know he’s the guy. The third woman just sat down to make her report. Some items of interest were confiscated from his apartment last night. DNA samples and the like have been taken, both from Sam and the women who have made the allegations. We’re organising our material to lay formal charges. Right now, he’s still in processing. That’s all I can tell you.’
‘Who are these women? What are they saying?’
‘Blue, I said that’s all I can tell you.’
‘I want to speak to him,’ I said. ‘I want to speak to his lawyer, and I want to see a brief from Nigel on the case. Who’s representing Sam? I want his number.’
‘Harriet, when it comes to this case, you are a member of the accused’s family.’
‘I’m his only family!’
‘Listen to me. You are family, and that means you’re not a cop,’ Pops said. ‘You can’t go demanding to speak to people. You can’t go demanding briefs. We have to preserve the integrity of this investigation, and that means you have to wait in line just like any other civilian.’
‘Wait in line? I’m waiting in the dark, Pops. I’m waiting in the dark in the middle of fucking nowhere.’
‘That’s right. I’m glad you are. Because if you were here, you’d be kicking down doors and punching journalists,’ he said. He was right. His voice softened when he spoke again. ‘I will call you the moment any contact is allowed. Either with Sam, or the lawyer. I promise you that. OK?’
I requested the phone, email and bank account records for Hon, Danny and Tori, and listened to the Chief writing my requests down. The familiar sounds of my old office were in the background. Phone calls and quiet voices. If I’d been in Sydney over the previous twenty-four hours, it would have been far from quiet. My skin was burning with rage. I’d chewed my nails to pieces.
Whittacker was standing on the steps of the administration building, admiring the giant crane that marked the centre of the camp, a fourteen-storey tall structure that was capable of lifting whole demountable buildings from one side of the camp to the other.
‘One more thing before I go,’ I said to the Chief. ‘Has Nigel got someone keeping an eye on me?’
‘I gave Nigel full administrative clearance on this case, Blue,’ the Chief said. ‘His surveillance manoeuvres have been completely up to him.’
So that’s a ‘yes’, I thought.
Chapter 20
IN A CUPBOARD in the administration building, Whitt and I discovered shelves of discarded objects labelled by the date they arrived. The oldest was the ‘six weeks’ shelf, which held items about to be thrown out completely. None of the items would be Hon’s. I started pulling things out of the more recent shelves and spreading them over the floor, categorising them. There were patterns in the types of objects miners left behind. The women left underwear, T-shirts and beauty products. Men left magazines, sporting equipment, shoes. There were the odd exceptions – a Monopoly set that Whitt looked good and hard at, a trumpet, and some origami paper.
I pulled a notebook from the ‘two weeks’ shelf and opened it. There was no name on it, but I recognised Danny’s awkward, square handwriting from the safety training forms he’d left behind in his donga.
‘This is him,’ I said, and sat down. Whitt crouched on the dusty floor beside me so he didn’t ruin the seat of his pants.
I felt the prickling in my fingertips that I get when I think I’ve discovered something important to a case. Adrenaline climbing up into my throat. All cops feel it at some point. They look the killer in the eye. They find the bloodied knife. And that rush sweeps through their veins, as dizzying as a drug.
The first few pages were notes on safety briefings from Danny’s arrival at camp. Then there were lists of scores and initials in what looked like football rankings. There was a crudely drawn picture of a miner smoking a fat joint and the inevitable pages of sketched naked women you find in the diaries of schoolboys. I guess Danny’s teenage years weren’t all that long ago.
And then, on the very last page, a row of words.
Killer. Dark. Hunter. Vengeance.
Chapter 21
THE SOLDIER SAT in the rear compartment of the sedan, wedged behind the second row of seats, his legs out flat and his hands in his lap. It was easy to recall the strategies he’d relied upon in the grasslands outside Kabul, standing sentry for his camp in the sweltering nights. In television programs, sentries wandered back and forth, smoked and talked, but in reality a good guard was as hidden and as lethal as a snake. He would stand with his hands on his thighs and his head up, eyes scanning the horizon, watching for the tiniest flicker of movement. He didn’t move his head unless he needed to. His arms remained still, his breath rhythmic. He was a man made out of stone.
Sweat rolled down his temples now as he listened to the sounds outside the car. The two detectives approached with heavy footsteps. The vehicle rocked as they climbed into the front seats a metre or so from where he sat.
They drove, and the Soldier closed his eyes and tried to pick out the woman detective’s breathing against the rumble of the tyres. His body twitched and tightened at the sound of her voice, but he didn’t move. He remembered lying in the shade of a tree in the desert in Janda, picking off young men coming down the mountain side with his Barrett. Giant black ants had wandered over his fingers, up over the back of his neck. He’d never flinched.
The gift of stillness was good for close combat, too. His platoon had stalked the alleyways through Peshawar in the fragrant evenings on lone agent reconnaissance missions and he’d taken down henchmen with his hands. In close quarters, surrounded by rooftops guarded by enemy soldiers, guns were impossible. Only silent deaths sufficed. He’d been the one to introduce the zip-tie method to his platoon. The zip-tie was simply looped over the enemy’s head and yanked tight. Pulled hard and fast enough, the thick translucent band compressed the windpipe completely, trapping air inside the lungs before it was forced upwards in a scream. Strangulation was usually such a loud and dramatic death, because of the weakness of human hands.
The only trouble was putting the enemy soldier down before they ran off, gripping madly at their throats. If you could get them on the ground quickly enough, he’d told his commanding officer, their focus would go to getting air before getting away.
The Soldier listened to the detectives talking and thought about what might happen if he crept over the seat in front of him and looped a zip-tie around Detective Whittacker’s neck. What would be Detective Blue’s priority? Saving her partner, or keeping the car on the road? To whose life was she loyal – her partner’s, or her own?
Loyalties in times of war are so very interesting, the Soldier thought.
Chapter 22
WE TOOK A table in the corner of the crowded pub, placing two glasses of red wine between us. The pub, one of only three buildings comprising the town of Bandya, was well equipped, with huge television screens showing the football, comfortable couches and vending machines full of snacks not available on the mining site. The prices were horrifying. I had a hot rush of guilt spending as much on a glass of wine as I would have on a bottle in Sydney. But then I realised there had been a strangely troubled feeling lying over me that had nothing to do with the wine, an unsettled tension in my stomach. I felt like I was being watched, and decided it was my natural instincts warning me about the traitor in my midst, the stranger posing as my p
artner.
A packet of anti-inflammation drugs I kept on me at all times was missing from my toiletries bag. I knew I had the drugs when I arrived on the camp. As a long-time boxer with a couple of vicious bouts under my belt, I suffered the telltale aches and pains from shocked and torn joints. When it rained, my wrists and knuckles flared with burning pain, my elbows and my knees ached and swelled. They could rebel against me at any time. The drug was prescription, so I was deeply annoyed at whoever had taken it. There’d be no replacing it out here in the middle of nowhere.
Gabe Carter arrived and was standing at the bar with some of his friends watching the football, a cold beer in his hand. His face spread with a kind smile at his friend’s joke.
‘Alright, you,’ I told Whitt. ‘Let’s break down these missing miners.’
I laid the photographs of Danny, Hon and Tori on the table.
‘What have we got?’
‘Well, if we’re looking for a pattern, we don’t have much on face value,’ Whitt said. ‘Hon’s Vietnamese but the other two aren’t, so that dismisses a racial motive. There’s no gender pattern. Or age bracket. Tori was nineteen, Danny twenty-one and Hon thirty-one. Their backgrounds have no similarities. Hon was very well-to-do. Danny was your average working-class boy, and Tori comes from a long line of welfare cheats.’
‘Did you get onto the families?’ I asked.
‘I called Danny and Hon’s families this afternoon,’ Whitt said. ‘They’re devastated, of course. There was no stable number for Tori’s parents. We’ll have to catch her sister tomorrow and get the lowdown.’
‘Did either family mention anything about the guys’ mental state the last time they spoke?’
‘Hon’s parents said he was a pretty stoic person, so if he’d had a problem he wouldn’t have shared it with them. Danny’s sister said he sounded edgy but she didn’t know why. He didn’t mention anything specific. I asked her what she thought the words in the notebook meant. She didn’t have a clue.’
Gabe wandered over to our table and sat down beside me, aligning the pictures of the missing miners before him. Through the windows beside us I spotted Richie standing further along the building with two of his crew members, smoking under the porch lights.
‘What’s the news, team?’ Gabe said.
‘The news is dismal,’ I said. ‘We don’t know how Danny died, or if Hon and Tori are dead at all. We’re waiting on a forensic report, which we’ll get from Perth, and phone, email and bank records for all three, which we’ll get from Sydney. Right now we have no bodies, and no suspects.’
‘Oh dear,’ Gabe said.
‘So let’s talk suspects,’ I said. I turned and pointed through the window at Richie. ‘I want to know everything you know about that guy out there.’
Chapter 23
GABE LOOKED OUT the windows at Richie.
‘Richie? He’s the camp drug dealer,’ he said.
‘You actually have a designated camp drug dealer?’
‘Well, there have been rivals in the past, I think,’ Gabe said. ‘But it’s just nicer and neater if there’s just one dealer servicing the entire camp. Things just get messy if there are multiple guys for that sort of thing.’
‘How are the big bosses alright with there being a drug dealer hanging around?’
‘Hey, some guys are going to do drugs.’ Gabe shrugged. ‘That’s a reality. If they don’t have someone out here supplying them, they’ll bring it back from Perth, or they’ll fly it in from Sydney, and that raises the risks significantly of the camp losing miners to arrests and the mine getting more attention it doesn’t need.’
‘So the bosses just endorse it?’ Whitt asked.
‘They don’t endorse it, but they don’t try to stamp it out. It just happens, and it’s going to happen whether the camp bosses like it or not. You get a whole bunch of guys, and you isolate them and give them absolutely nothing to do in their downtime, and they’ll do drugs. It happens in the military. It happens in prisons.’
‘Richie and his crew stopped us on the road outside Bandya,’ Whitt said.
‘Oh yeah, they’ll do that. The Bushranger’s Outback Welcome. I’ve heard that if they catch travellers they’ll rob them. If they catch people on the way to camp they generally leave them alone – but they send their message, that visitors are not to mess with them. Richie must have realised you were on your way to the mine?’
‘No, he realised we were cops,’ I said.
Gabe laughed. ‘That must have been awkward.’
‘It was. Do you know the guy well?’
‘No,’ Gabe said, ‘I don’t have anything to do with him. I’m too old for that crap. I’ve got too much responsibility.’
A news bulletin took over the television screens, replacing the green football field with the cool grey of a reporting desk. Whitt put his glass down and got up, heading directly for the bathroom.
The first story was about Sam. I was afraid to look. I closed my eyes and listened.
‘Tonight we bring you a Network Ten exclusive as more information surfaces about Samuel Jacob Blue’s dark past,’ the reporter said. ‘We talk to a long-term foster parent of Blue and his sister, and reveal the pair’s traumatic childhood in state care.’
I gave in and looked. There were pictures of my brother and me as children, playing in the yard of some foster family or another. I don’t remember how many homes we were shuffled through after we were removed from the filthy drug den in which our mother kept us. A picture of her flashed over the screen. I tried to remember if the picture was true to her, but she’d always been a blur of thin arms and slurring lips to me. I was three when they took me away. Sam was seven. We didn’t know our father.
I was frozen by the shocking detour into my past in the thirty-second news preview. All eyes in the bar were trained on my history, my private world. Luckily, there were no recent photographs of me, and no one seemed to make the connection with my surname. I knew it was only a matter of time before the dots were connected.
When I opened my eyes, I realised Gabe hadn’t been paying attention to any of it. He was watching Richie and his men outside. The sunset streaming through the window lit the dark red in his hair. I felt gratitude sweep over me in an irrational wave as I looked at the big man before me.
Thank you for not knowing who I am, I thought.
Chapter 24
GABE SUGGESTED I talk to the camp Bilbies, who might have heard something about the disappearances in pillow talk with the miners. I got out of the bar quickly and onto the porch where the prostitutes were grouped, away from the exclusive prime-time special on my life.
‘Good evening, ladies. Detective Harry Blue, Sex Crimes . . . and Missing Persons, at the moment. Homicide, maybe. I don’t bloody know anymore.’
‘Ooh! Hello!’ one of the girls cried, a redhead with pouty lips. ‘Homicide, did you say? How exciting! Who’s dead?’
‘Danny Stanton, Jaymee. Christ.’ One of the other girls slapped her own forehead. ‘Everybody on the camp’s been talking about it. She lives under a fucking rock, this one.’
‘Who’s Danny Stanton?’ Jaymee frowned. ‘Was he cute?’
‘He’s dead, honey,’ I said. ‘Right now he’s about as cute as a bag of maggots. I want to know who killed him, if anyone. Do you ladies mind if I ask you a few questions?’
‘This is just about the only time I wouldn’t!’ Jaymee said. ‘This is great. I’ve never been a witness before. Ask us anything.’
‘Did you all know Danny well?’
‘No,’ a tall, dark-haired girl said. She was wearing a silver necklace with ‘Beth’ written in cursive letters at the throat. She was so broad-shouldered and chiselled about the face I wondered if she was trans. ‘Stanton was a straighty-one-eighty. Too young for our clientele. Not that we didn’t try. We always try.’
‘Did he have any enemies that you know of?’
They shook their heads.
‘What about these two? Hon Lu and Tori King.??
? I showed them the photographs.
Jaymee gasped. ‘That’s the bitch what stole my hair straightener!’
‘I’m the bitch what stole your hair straightener, you moron,’ another girl said.
‘Oh. Right.’
‘You know, you’re hot for a lady cop.’ The tall one, Beth, ran the back of her fingers down the length of my arm. ‘You could make a lot of money out here. You got handcuffs?’
‘I’m presently engaged in gainful employment, thank you. But please, feel free to alert me of any future opportunities,’ I said.
‘Too bad.’ She continued to stroke me.
‘Look, I’m fresh outta suspects on this case.’ I slapped her fingers away with the photographs. ‘Who else should I be looking at? Anyone on the camp who strikes you as violent?’
‘Oh, there’s plenty of violence around,’ Beth sighed. ‘Some of the guys are ex-soldiers. They’re used to solving problems with their fists.’
‘The camp’s a good place to get a job if you’re just out of prison, too,’ one of the girls said. ‘They’re pretty laid-back about criminal history checks, so some of these guys are ex-cons. The bad food don’t bother them.’
‘They’re a bit freaky, the ex-cons,’ Jaymee said. ‘They like to play games. I’ll be the inmate, you be the guard. Urgh! Weird!’
‘Anyone around who particularly bothers you?’ I asked. ‘Ex-cons or otherwise?’
‘Well, there’s Linebacker. What he did to the dingo . . .’ one of them said. They all paused, remembering, their faces dark.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Aaron Linbacher,’ Beth said. ‘Everybody calls him Linebacker, which is funny because he’s such a weedy little troll. He’s head of security here.’
‘I think I’ve had an encounter with the man myself,’ I admitted.
‘Yeah, he’s a creep,’ Jaymee said.
‘He’s responsible for keeping the dingo population down around the camp,’ Beth explained. ‘His duty is to kill them quickly and humanely if they become a nuisance. Sometimes the miners feed them and the dogs get the idea that they belong, and Linebacker has to dispose of them. We were all sitting around one day and we heard a gunshot, and the next thing you know this dingo comes crawling around the side of the toilet block with its back legs shot off.’