Regan put a hand on the window and bent low, focused on the tiny pixels that made up the man’s face.
Sam. His soulmate.
Chapter 91
KASH AND I drove back down the main street after our surveillance on the Robit property. There were patrol officers in the town, borrowed from towns all around, talking to people at their fences. Mick the bartender was leaving his house with an armful of towels, watching us roll by, his big belly making a single circle of sweat on his T-shirt where the flesh dipped inwards at his navel.
I pulled Kash’s arm, gesturing for him to stop. From the street outside the little house across from Victoria Snale’s property, I could hear children playing inside. As I went to the door, the young mother I’d seen the night Zac Taby lost his life shouted from somewhere towards the rear of the building.
I knocked and two young ones, maybe three and four years old, ran to the screen door and stared expectantly up at me. I’d seen these golden-haired children that night in their pyjamas. The mother was tired when she came to the door, uncomposed, expecting someone else. She remembered me.
‘I’m Harriet Blue,’ I said. ‘This is my partner, Elliot Kash.’ She opened the door. The kids tumbled out, seemingly very impressed with Kash, a thickly muscled superhero towering above them. There was no sign of a dad here.
‘Mary Skinner,’ the mother said, smiling. ‘You two, get back in here.’
The kids giggled and ran into the cool, dark hall. I followed Mary past a wall of framed photographs, backpacks hanging on hooks, a wooden rack inadequately small for the dozens of dusty shoes piled onto it. We went to the kitchen and she didn’t offer us coffee. She was uncomfortable. Picking at fingernails split from nibbling.
‘You probably know why I’m here,’ I said.
‘The bombings.’ She glanced towards the door as something crashed in one of the bedrooms. ‘It’s terrifying. Have you got a suspect yet?’
‘We’ve got some leads,’ I said. ‘But I think maybe you could lengthen them for me. I don’t know if you remember what you said to me two nights ago when I was out there on your porch.’
Mary had tucked one arm into her ribs, the other tight against her chest. She opened the fridge to give herself somewhere to look.
‘I don’t remember anything much except the blast,’ she said. ‘I was watching out the window when it happened. I saw you fall. Are you OK? I mean,’ – she examined my broken arm – ‘nothing permanent?’
‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘You told me that it was “all gonna come out”. You said, “It’s all coming to an end.”’
Mary looked horrified. Kash was sitting on a stool by the kitchen bench quite near her, measuring the response on her face. She took a bottle of water from the fridge and set it on the counter, turned away from us both.
‘I didn’t say that,’ she said quietly.
‘Yes, you did.’
‘Look, I’m alone here.’ She threw me a hard look, on the edge of snapping. ‘I lost a child. I lost a husband. I say weird things sometimes that I don’t necessarily mean.’
The silence that fell was heavy. I could hear the children whispering beyond the door. I looked at them and they squealed and ran away.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘My husband left. He’s up north. Cairns.’
‘I mean to your child,’ I said. ‘You said you –’
‘Brandon overdosed.’ Mary’s gaze was locked on me. ‘It was an accident. He and his friends had been messing around with stuff brought in by the truckers. He was seventeen, child of my first marriage.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘I don’t have anything else for you.’ Mary shut the fridge door hard, made jars rattle inside it. ‘That’s it. Now, I’ve got things to do here.’
She let us walk ourselves out. The sun seemed somehow closer, more foreboding. I felt I’d disturbed something, shifted a rock off an insect I didn’t recognise, something dangerous. Something better left alone.
Chapter 92
ALL HIS LIFE, Regan had enjoyed ruining beautiful things. It was a strange sort of instinct, an impulse, the same kind of impulse that drove people to fix pictures hanging crookedly on walls or scrub single greasy fingerprints off of otherwise blessedly clean windowpanes. When new toys came into the youth care facility playroom, he’d break them. Shiny and glossy and smelling of plastic, with their bubbly eyes and stupidly grinning mouths, they seemed painfully perfect. He’d pull out a teddy’s eye. Snap off a robot’s arm. Cut a doll’s hair so that it stuck out of the bulbous rubber scalp in ugly tufts. The broken, dirtied things gave him joy. Maybe he felt they were more like him when they were torn and crooked. He was only small. He couldn’t know.
Then he turned his attention to the other boys and girls. It had begun with pretty little Claudia, with her big eyes and golden curls. Claudia would be adopted in a snap. The carers were already talking about it. She was a doll, they said. Regan had snuck in to the kitchen and found a packet of matches. She wasn’t so perfect when he was done with her.
Regan became ‘difficult’. The word was mentioned around him in a lot of different ways between foster families and care workers. He listened to them chattering above him like he wasn’t there. There had been ‘difficulties’ at his last home. He was ‘difficult’ to place because of his ‘difficult’ behaviour. There were other words. Oppositional. Aggressive. Introverted.
Regan was sixteen when he met Sam. He’d been standing by the cake table at one of those pathetic Christmas events the Department of Children’s Services ran every year at the town hall. Sam had been a lanky, pale kid, his limp black hair constantly hanging in his eyes. He was the only other teen at the stupid party. Regan had watched him for a long while, bored, until he saw Sam observing the gorgeous Christmas cake someone had baked for the occasion. Perfect edges. Immaculate red and green icing. Sam had reached out when no one was looking and pushed one of the lollies on the top of the cake until it sank into the soft, spongey interior, leaving a gaping hole in the design. Regan had smiled. Sam had seen it.
Regan had found him. His perfect match.
But as always, it wasn’t long before that perfection was ruined. Soon there would be blood, and screaming. The adult Regan remembered now as he walked down the empty, dark street, his head low, the baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. Everything was so messy now. So dark, so torn. A beautiful and terrifying time, the very streets seemed awash with new life. Regan came around a corner and a group of young women swirled and ebbed around him. Perfume. He felt the muscles of his shoulders knot, the bones grinding in his neck. Marissa. Elle. Rosetta. His girls. His sacrifices to Sam. The women on the street passed him, a glittering flock of birds. There wasn’t time for that now. That part of his life was over.
Regan glanced now and then at the paper in his hand, the numbers on the buildings around him. He reached the pale blue building and looked up to the third-floor windows facing the distant water.
The lights in Harriet Blue’s apartment were on.
Chapter 93
PEOPLE THINK THAT in the Australian desert there’s nowhere to hide. That it makes the perfect hunting ground because for hundreds of kilometres there is no cover. Barren sand oceans, dotted here and there with clumps of thin, dead or dying trees. In truth the desert is full of holes. From where I stood with Kash, Last Chance Valley was almost invisible in the distance, but for a small rise where the rocky rim poked through the horizon. I knew that beyond where we stood, there would be cracks and crevices in the desert, some kilometres deep, reaching far enough down into the earth for a person to disappear into. It’s a treacherous place. A place not to be wandered into on moonless nights. It does make the perfect hunting ground, but not for its barrenness. It’s porous. Full of secrets.
It was here in the depths of the desert that we met the Forensics team. We had spent the day on the ridge, watching Jace Robit’s property.
Two men from the team who had dealt with the b
urned car at Snale’s house drove up to our spot in the desert now in a dusty four-wheel drive. The moustached one who had looked at me so strangely in Snale’s hallway.
‘I’m Glen. This is Wayne.’ He shook Kash’s hand, ignored me. ‘We just finished up with the vehicle. It’s all here.’ He handed Kash a report.
‘I might need you guys to stick around in the town, just be an extra hand if we need it. Something’s happening tonight at eight,’ Kash explained to them. ‘We’ve got some interesting suspects moving about. Harry and I will be on this group, and we’ll get Snale and some other officers on the town.’
Glen gave me another nasty look. I jutted my chin at him, a challenge.
‘What’s your problem, mate?’
‘Nothin’,’ he said, shrugging.
‘Come on. Out with it.’
He sighed, gave his offsider a look. ‘I know who you are. I was there at your brother’s apartment when they went in after the arrest.’
There was a meaningful silence among the men around me. I felt a weight steadily increasing on my shoulders.
‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘What’s your point?’
‘My point is that I saw the evidence, Detective Blue. The duct tape on the bed. The messy sheets. The video camera. It was sick. I have nightmares about what happened in that apartment. I find it mildly infuriating that you’ve stuck by your brother all this time, that’s all.’
‘Nothing happened in that apartment,’ I said.
‘Maybe we should just –’ Kash said.
‘What’s your explanation, then?’ Glen said. ‘I’ve heard you say your brother is being framed. You must believe he was framed by this guy the police are hunting right now, the shaven-headed guy, the one who abducted Caitlyn McBeal. The guy who told her he was Sam’s partner. So, what, this guy abducts these girls right from under your brother’s nose and savagely murders them and dumps them like pieces of trash. He waits until Sam goes to work and he says, “Ha ha! Now’s my chance to do it again!” He abducts Caitlyn, and he’s all ready to do his nasty business on her, when “Oh, hot damn!” Sam’s been arrested! Shit! Holy moly! This wasn’t in the script!’
‘Mate,’ – Kash stepped forwards, put a hand out – ‘just back down.’
‘So the guy thinks, Shit, I’d better high-tail it over to Sam’s place and plant that evidence I was going to plant before the police raid the place!’ Glen was waving his hands theatrically now. He waited for me to give him some kind of answer. But no words would come.
‘Isn’t it more likely,’ Glen said, ‘that Sam was going to go home that night and this man with the shaved head was going to be there, and they were going to kill Caitlyn McBeal together? You’re violent, Detective. Everybody knows that. Isn’t it more likely that your brother is violent, too, than the gentle, misunderstood innocent man you say he is? Let’s be real!’
There was an old and familiar Harry who would have stepped forwards and uppercut the man before me. A swift and hard skyward thrust. But when I called on her, I found her too tired to wake.
I turned and walked towards the car, heard Kash calling after me as I got in. This time, I didn’t have the strength to fight, to face my troubles. I ran.
Chapter 94
LET’S BE REAL!
I drove through the desert, being real.
Yes, my brother had confessed to the murders of three beautiful young women who studied at the same university he worked at three days a week. They’d disappeared, as Glen the Forensics arsehole had said, from right under my brother’s nose. It was ‘likely’ these things had happened because my brother had killed them.
Yes, an awful collection of violent sexual pornography was found in my brother’s apartment. It was ‘likely’ this was because Sam himself had acquired that material. Because he liked it. Because he’d used it to fuel his fantasies. Because he was a killer.
Yes, it was ‘likely’ that whoever the man with the shaved head was, he’d told Caitlyn McBeal that he was my brother’s partner because he was, indeed, my brother’s partner.
Yes, it was ‘likely’ that Sam was violent, because I was violent.
That he had a dark edge, a beast inside, that he could not control. A vicious internal guard dog, identical to the one that had started growing inside me almost from the moment I was born. It was a hellhound, a ferocious thing that I unleashed whenever I needed to. I’d let him free as a child when foster fathers and older brothers crept into my bedroom at night. When kids at new schools ragged on me. When the men I hunted in my job got away with what they’d done to their victims, and someone had to pick up the slack.
My dog was dangerous. It leapt out before I could stop it. Sometimes I could wrangle it back. But the beast had done such a good job over the years protecting me, it was too strong and wild now for me to ever hope to tame.
Did Sam have a beast inside? Had it gone feral on him? Got a taste for blood it couldn’t sate?
No. I would never believe that. Could never, ever believe that.
Because if it could happen to him, it could happen to me.
Chapter 95
AGAIN I CAME upon Jed Chatt’s house without meaning to, and I pulled in to the driveway with horror, realising I’d probably been under the gaze of his rifle for the last kilometre without thinking about it. The crosshairs trained on my face. I wiped at my cheeks and found tears. This wasn’t good. I got out and walked up the rocky slope, still arguing with Glen in my mind. Digger the dog burst into a sprint from where she had emerged at the side of the porch, barking happily at me.
‘Oh, you.’ I wiped my nose. The dog jumped and pawed at my waist and I rubbed her furry head. ‘I’m sorry about before.’
Jed Chatt came out the front door of the house and stood watching me, a general look of disapproval on his face.
‘I told you to rack off,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ I said, leading the dog towards him. ‘People do that.’
He rolled his eyes, weary, and strode back into the house, letting the screen door slap shut. I noticed how remarkably the house had changed. The porch had been swept bare and the old barbecue was gone. The dog followed me inside.
The lanky, long-jawed man was sitting on the faded couch now with an assortment of plastic parts in front of him, tiny screws and brightly coloured joints. A baby’s play gym half-assembled, some of it still in the shipping box beside him. There must have been so much of this activity in the time since I had seen him last. Gathering up, sorting, squaring away his own things. Making room for the new life that had joined him.
Beside the couch on the floor the infant reclined in a fluffy pale-blue bouncer. Now and then Jed extended his leg and pushed on the bouncer with his big, bare toe, causing the baby to bob gently up and down. The man seemed mildly irritated by my presence, but not curious. I might have stood there an hour without either of us uttering a word.
I didn’t fully understand the ease I felt around this man, but I knew then that unconsciously I’d been planning to flee here the moment Glen started attacking me. What was it about this man and this place that compelled me?
‘You’re a strange one, you,’ Jed said after a time.
‘I get the feeling you might be the same.’
I looked at the infant in the bouncer. An awkward, gummy smile playing about perfect lips he couldn’t yet control.
‘Can I?’ I asked. Jed said nothing. I extracted the child carefully from his bouncer. He was heavier and warmer than I’d imagined. The baby swiped at my chin, my lips. I kissed his fingers.
‘His mother is my niece,’ Jed said eventually, glancing at the child’s chubby hand encircling my finger. ‘I don’t know her that well. Or I didn’t. Her parents died some years back, and I never was real good at keeping in touch. She wrote me a couple of months ago. Couldn’t call me. I don’t have a phone.’
Jed left the construction of the mobile and sat back on the couch, rested a bare foot on his knee.
‘She grew up over Bandelong way. Even
harsher than this, Bandelong. So when she got to the city she was real surprised, and so was everybody else, to tell you the truth. She did her degree, did the extra bits and pieces that come afterwards, whatever they are. And then, to top it all off, she got accepted into this … this extra-special legal program. Always wanted to be a lawyer, and this program, she says … There are something like three people in the whole country who get in. Well, she got in. First blackfella in the history of the world to get in. Kind of thing that usually goes to white boys from private schools on the Sydney Harbour there. The other two candidates were just that. They were pretty upset that they were up against her for the position that you get at the end of it. The … partnership, or whatever.’
The child had gone to sleep in my arms. Wisps of his soft black hair, finer than cotton, shifted in the breeze from the window.
‘Same morning my niece was due to go in and sign her big important contract, she finds out about this one.’ He nodded at the baby in my arms. ‘Everybody has a good laugh at her then. The two other candidates, they reckon they’re shoo-ins for the partnership at the end of the four-year program. One of the big lawyer types running the thing, he wants her chucked out of the program straightaway unless she gets an abortion. So she writes me asking what she should do. I’m about the last bit of family she’s got. And she doesn’t know me from a bar of soap. But she needs to talk to someone.’
‘What did you say?’ I asked.
‘I told her to do the program. And I told her to have the baby. I’d take him until she was through with it, until she found her feet. And if she never found her feet, well, that was OK. I figured if she’d dropped out, she’d have been all broken up about it. If she’d had an abortion, she’d have been broken up about that, too. This was the only way I could think of that she could get out of it without tearing herself in half.’