The unprofessional look of the device added to the already deep lack of comprehension I was experiencing. I stood before the man in the chair and looked at the thing around his neck and couldn’t believe that it was in any way dangerous. It was so messily constructed, so awkward, that my only concern at that point was the gun on me and the man’s rapid breathing, threatening a heart attack.
I looked at the girl with the gun. Of course it had been her all along. From the moment I met her, she’d been desperate to make me and everyone around her aware of her searing dissatisfaction with the town, its people, her father, everything.
She was more than dissatisfied. She was angry. Over dinner her disgruntlement at her father’s racism tumbled off her lips like spittle. Her eyes had implored me from across the table. But I’d been uninterested. And that’s the automatic reaction she’d received most of her life, I imagined. A default dismissal of whatever bugged her. Pretty girl. White girl. Student. What could she possibly have to complain about? She flicked the gun towards a nearby chair and I went to it and sat down.
‘I decided I wanted to use you for Day Zero when I found out you were in town,’ Bella began, smoothing her hair down with long, slow strokes. ‘It was so amazing, you coming, you being right in the middle of all this. I knew it was a sign. I’ve been watching you and the case with your brother from the beginning. I watched the footage of you going up to the courthouse for the first day of proceedings. You looked so distressed. I remember thinking at the time – you’re going to be the victim in this that nobody understands. You’re going to be the forgotten one. The forgotten victim.’
She glanced at her father. I followed her eyes, watched sweat rolling down his temple.
‘There will be people who sympathise with your brother,’ Bella said. ‘And there will be people who sympathise with the dead girls. Their families. But right in the middle of it all, there’s you. Nobody sympathises with you. Nobody believes you. I know what that feels like.’
She went to the dining-room table and carefully plucked up a tattered yellow envelope, thick as a dictionary. I noticed another gun on the table. Theo Campbell’s gun. Bella must have taken it the night she stopped the older officer on the road on the hillside, probably with a ruse similar to the one she’d used on me. Helpless, Bambi-legged. The one who needed management. She tossed the envelope onto the ground at her father’s feet. Dez winced. The liquid in the bottle at his throat sloshed.
I took the hint and slowly went to the envelope, picked it up and returned to my chair. Calm movements were essential. Don’t antagonise her. Don’t challenge her. Just listen, keep alert for something you can use. Something you can bring out, nurture, the key to stopping it all. Because this was a clever young woman. Cunning, manipulative. Not the kind of killer who would have carelessly left her diary full of murderous plans in a blazing red backpack at the local rest stop. That’s why the bag was red. Why the bag was otherwise empty. It was a red bag or a fucking neon sign. STOP ME. She wanted to be caught. She wanted to be listened to. She had chosen me to stop her.
I opened the envelope, only now realising how badly my hands were shaking. The photographs inside were jumbled together, corners sticking out everywhere. I slipped my fingers in, pulled out a handful.
The first picture was of a young boy sitting with his back against a bare rock wall. He couldn’t have been older than ten. Naked. Legs splayed. Another young boy had his head resting on the boy’s thigh, face turned inwards, just centimetres from his genitals. Both were clearly unconscious.
I let the pictures fall to the floor one at a time. The same faces. Different faces. Boys and girls in their teens. Some youngsters, tweens. Some of them were simply splayed out, on their own, mostly in the light of a fire. On sand. On rock. Curled on their sides on beds of dry grass. Some of them had been entwined awkwardly together. Heads leaning sloppily on bellies and shoulders, gaping mouths in the dark.
A man began appearing in the photographs. His bulging, white, bespeckled belly. His pale thighs. Dez.
A sickness was rising steadily in my stomach, pressing at the back of my throat. I’d seen pictures like this many times in my work.
‘What are you going to use me for, Bella?’ I said.
‘To get my message out.’ She smiled.
Chapter 111
THERE WAS A thump at the door, a fist bashing, a shouting voice.
Tox ignored it, stood over Regan as he writhed on a fallen couch cushion, trying to scramble away. Tox stabbed down, got the inside thigh of his jeans, the cushion, some carpet. He put a boot into the man’s leg and tried to hold him still. Tox was making this man feel what his victims had felt. It was so good.
The door burst open. A tall, broad figure in a dark polo shirt, hands out. A neighbour on his way home from work, walking past the apartment door, hearing the scuffle within. Tox was distracted for barely a second, and in that time Regan slipped out from beneath him.
A blow to the side of his head, the smash of something porcelain. Tox stumbled. The knife was gone. He twisted, arm up to ward off another blow, but his enemy had risen and encircled him in a tight embrace.
Tox didn’t even feel the first entry wound. The knife slid into him like butter. Practised killer, jamming it under the ribs at the front, into the softness of his abdomen.
Tox gripped Regan, tried to hold him, to make another blow awkward. But the knife came again, sinking deep, pushing the air out of him.
His legs went. Tox hit the floor. His bodily control was gone but his mind was crystal clear. It wasn’t over. Couldn’t be over. He focused, opened his eyes wide, found the killer moving past him in a dark blue blur of shoes and jeans. He was heading for the good Samaritan in the doorway, a neighbour who’d thought he was breaking up an ordinary everyday domestic scuffle, who had then watched the stabbing, frozen in horror.
Tox reached out with all his strength. Careful now. Don’t miss it. The killer’s ankle breezed by. Tox grabbed on, under the hem of the jeans, above the low black sock, as Regan bent his knee, exposing the tiny slice of flesh. Tox gripped Regan’s ankle. Clamped down with his nails. Held on for as many of the precious passing milliseconds as he could.
Regan hardly noticed the scratch.
The neighbour in the doorway was backing away from him as he advanced.
Chapter 112
I PUT THE photographs on the ground. I’d seen enough. Bella was keeping an eye on me as she readied things on the table, duct tape and three small plastic mobile phones, the kind bought at supermarkets for thirty bucks. Dez was watching the floor, his eyes wandering over tiles, trying to distance himself from what was happening.
‘It started when I was fourteen,’ Bella said. ‘Just after Mum left. For the first couple of leadership camps, he left me at home. But I guess he decided he needed an accomplice, someone to disarm the mothers who didn’t want to send their teenage girls away with him into the desert. He had a really good routine going, didn’t you, Dad? He’d wait until the second night, after he’d made everyone do the Morse code exercise and report back to their families that they were all having a great time. The second morning starts with a big trek, so by the time we made camp in the evening everyone was always hideously tired and dehydrated. That’s when he’d have me spike the water bottles.’
Dez squeezed his eyes shut and burst into tears. The stuff in the water bottle at his throat washed back and forth to the rhythm of his sobs.
‘It worked so very well with me,’ Bella said, watching him cry with disinterest. ‘I was the spectacle. The measuring stick. Everyone would wake up the next day and talk about how dazed and tired they still were. And how they couldn’t remember anything after the camp fire. I’d be there to reassure them everyone fell asleep so quickly – we all must have been so tired. When we got back to Last Chance Valley I’d prance around and tell all the parents what a great time we had. What choice did I have but to be his accomplice? I was a kid.’ She looked at her father. ‘I was a kid when he st
arted this.’
‘Bella,’ I said, ‘I can understand your anger.’
‘Can you?’ she asked. She took a seat at the dining-room table, by her little pile of equipment, and looked at me. ‘I guess you’ve probably seen stuff like this before, doing what you do. You’ll know that sometimes the boys and girls who have been drugged, they start to remember. It’s not like they’re completely unconscious. You can’t give them too much, or you might snuff one of them out. So sometimes they’d recall things. Someone pulling off their pants …’ She looked at Dez. Her lip curled in a snarl. ‘Someone pushing up their training bra.’
‘Bella –’
‘But I was there,’ she said. ‘I was the alibi. I’d wrestle the genie back into the bottle. You were dreaming. You were having nightmares. It wasn’t real. After a while I got so good at it I’d have them believing they hadn’t even dreamed it. Especially the littler ones. You just make them feel ridiculous. And then they never mention it again. Not even to their parents.’
I could hear the distant music from the town pub. A bass beat, the occasional cheer. The big windows that looked out onto the fields were pitch black. What I would have given for someone to arrive unexpectedly, Kash or Snale, someone who would know instantly what to do. Even if it was just to distract her so that I could grab my gun back. But she followed my glance, smiled a little, pitying. We both knew no one was coming.
Chapter 113
IT HAD BEEN her plan. All of it. She’d taken great pleasure in the planning, relishing as she counted down the days. Day Seventeen of the countdown to oblivion. Day Ten. Day Zero. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had counted down to their Day Zero from more than a year out. They’d woken up on the day of the massacre with the excitement of Christmas morning buzzing in their brains. No one had listened to them before. But they would now.
‘The first time I ever told someone outright, it was Chief Campbell,’ Bella said. ‘I thought about going to Sergeant Snale first but I didn’t think I’d be able to stomach her pity. She’d have been so … understanding. So gentle with her questions. You know? I couldn’t deal with that. So I marched right into Soupy Campbell’s office one day and just told him outright.’
‘He didn’t believe you,’ I said.
‘No, he didn’t,’ Bella said. ‘And then I knew Snale was off limits, even with all her sickening fucking sympathy. The Chief would have told her to disregard anything I said. She’d have listened. He was her mentor, and he thought I was lying.’
Of course he did. She’d picked exactly the wrong person to try her first sexual abuse confession on: an older man in a position of authority, someone who didn’t know her, someone obviously more than willing to get involved in serious illegal activity himself. Theo Campbell would have been well-versed in the angsty drama of the teenagers in his town. They were trapped. Futureless. And here was the daughter of one of the most upstanding men in town making a ridiculous claim with no evidence and no witnesses. Admitting to having been complicit, herself, for years. He’d have fobbed her off as the angry daughter of a selfish dad who didn’t want to pay her university fees. She was the hot young student who flirted for top grades and made sexual assault claims against her professor when she didn’t get them. The girl next door who undressed before open windows, pretending she couldn’t see her neighbour watching, until she was caught, pleading ignorance. She was a dangerous temptress, beautiful liar, the scourge of middle-aged men.
I knew her from my work. She was the unbelieved. Shamed and guilted into keeping quiet or hammered quietly with undermining reasoning until she just couldn’t believe herself anymore. She was the one who kept quiet. Waited until she couldn’t stand it anymore, then wrote a note and killed herself.
But Bella wasn’t going to kill herself. Her gesture was going to be on a much grander scale. A spectacle. Terror we would have a good long while to think about before we all died, cut down by her bullets, running for our lives. She was planning a Carrie-style showdown.
And no one would be laughing now.
Chapter 114
‘I TOLD REBECCA Greene, my old teacher,’ Bella counted on her fingers. ‘She promised she was going to do something. A week later she transferred out. Took a posting in Darwin. I never saw her again. When Brandon Skinner overdosed last year, I tried to tell his mother, Mary.’ She thrust her arm out again, to the north of us. ‘She insisted it was an accident. Nothing had happened. He was a happy boy.’
I lost a child, Mary’s words came back to me.
It’s all gonna come out.
It’s all coming to an end.
‘I had no proof. I couldn’t find the photographs. He’d hidden them too well. All I had was my story. I told one of the girls who’d been out there with me in the desert on one of the camps.’ Bella’s eyes had glazed over. ‘Mara. I saw her at uni, in Sydney. We got drunk together. She didn’t want to know anything about it. It was too many years ago. She was happy and she didn’t want some weird story from back home, about something she didn’t even remember and only half believed, ruining her great new life. They were just pictures, right?’
We both looked at Dez. His eyes pleaded with his daughter.
‘I believe you, Bella,’ I said, showing her the photographs at my feet. ‘I believe you, OK? I can help you. I’ll take these photographs and your testimony and we’ll prosecute him. We’ll send him to prison for a long, long time. And he will suffer in there, I guarantee it.’ I thought briefly of Sam. The kind of threats a man received when his crime was against women and children.
‘I think I’ve given this town enough chances to stop what’s coming,’ she said. ‘You read the diary. You know I’ve been looking into other people who have done what I’m going to do. The consistent thing among all of them is that they gave people chances to turn things around. I left the diary at the fucking rest stop. I was begging you to do something. Do something!’ She sighed. ‘And then here you were, sitting with him, lapping up his words over roast fucking chicken. I can’t let this go on.’
Bella picked up one of the mobile phones on the counter and looked at her father, lazily, the weary teenager tired of Daddy’s bullshit.
Dez writhed in the chair.
‘It’s time to go,’ Bella said.
She pushed the button.
Chapter 115
‘OH MY GOD,’ Whitt said as he walked down the hill from where he’d parked his car haphazardly across an alleyway. The street was blocked by police cars, ambulances, even a fire truck trying to find its way through the mess. Officers were redirecting traffic down a dead-end street and back up the hill towards Kings Cross. There were blockades being put into place. Officers trying to keep the crowds back from the entrance to Harriet’s apartment building.
He’d heard the call on the radio – possible sighting of one of the Georges River Killer suspects. One wounded, one missing, one dead. When Whitt failed to get Tox on the phone, and then heard the location of the incident come through, he knew. He grabbed his badge from his back pocket and started pushing through the people, approaching the police tape.
Upstairs, a broken window. Glass in the hall. Whitt was charging up the stairs when he was flattened against the wall by paramedics wrestling a stretcher around the tight corner. It was Tox, his blond hair slicked back, wet with blood, an oxygen mask clamped to his face. Blood all over his neck. He looked waxy, grey.
‘Get out of the way!’ One of the medics shoved at Whitt, leaving a big red handprint on his shirt. ‘Move!’
‘Is he alive? Is he alive? Oh God!’
One wounded, one missing, one dead. Whitt hadn’t prayed in many years. But he was praying now that this man, this strange creature he hadn’t even been sure he liked, wasn’t dead. Because he knew now he had indeed liked him all this time. He was badly behaved, callous, unpredictable. A lot like Harry. Whitt had taken a long time to realise he liked Harry too, and now he’d do anything for her. Further down the hall a big man in a polo shirt was sprawled out on the blo
od-soaked carpet, two paramedics pumping on his chest.
Whitt ran behind the paramedics carrying Tox’s stretcher.
‘Tell me if he’s alive!’
The paramedics were barking at each other, medical terms, directions. One of them seemed to be wrestling with Tox as they ran along, trying to pull his hands apart. Whitt caught up. Tox was indeed lying with one arm tucked tightly against his chest, the fist closed, holding the arm there with a tight grip on his own wrist. He was alive. Fighting for consciousness, unwilling to let his arm go. Whitt watched, his skin tingling with joy and relief, as Tox’s eyes opened, shifted to him briefly before rolling up in his head.
‘Sir, I need to get a line into that hand! Let go!’
‘Reverence!’ Tox moaned, the oxygen mask muffling his words.
‘What?’ Whitt shoved the paramedic on his side of the stretcher away. ‘What is it? What did you say?’
‘Reverence.’ Tox was struggling to breathe. He coughed, sprayed the inside of the mask with blood. ‘Rev. Er. Ence.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Whitt struggled. ‘I –’
Tox let his wrist go, reached out and grabbed Whitt by his shirt. The other fist was still balled against his chest. ‘EVIDENCE!’
Whitt heard the word through the mask that time. He looked at the fist on Tox’s chest.
‘Oh God. Oh Jesus. OK! I get it! I get it!’
Whitt dashed into the street, wrenched open the door of the nearest patrol car and grabbed an evidence bag. He ran back to the ambulance just as the medics were loading Tox into the back. Whitt jumped into the tiny space.