‘Sir, you need to get out of this van! We’re trying to save a life here!’
‘No way.’ Whitt took Tox’s wrist and slid the evidence bag over his hand. He was passed out now. The wrist was limp.
Whitt grabbed a roll of bandages from the shelf beside him and began winding them around and around his partner’s wrist, sealing the bag around his hand. ‘He’s got forensic evidence under his nails. I’m preserving that evidence until we can get it tested.’
‘How can you be so selfish?’ one of the medics snapped as the doors shut behind her and the engine roared to life. ‘This man is dying!’
‘Not without reason, he’s not,’ Whitt said.
Chapter 116
THERE WAS A whump sound, like a fist hitting a taut stomach, and Dez’s body bucked backwards in the chair, tipping it onto its hind legs. His head sprayed upwards, a mess of blood and skull and teeth and brain matter lost in a yellow ball of flame that vaporised as quickly as it had ballooned. The headless body rocked forwards, taking the chair with it, and collapsed onto the tiles. I hadn’t made a sound. I had no voice. The air was trapped in my lungs, and only when Dez fell did it ease out in a short, harsh yelp.
Blood was everywhere. On the ceiling. On the furniture. On my face.
I like to think I’m pretty tough. But nothing I’d ever experienced had hardened me enough to bear this as coldly and emotionlessly as Bella. I went from understanding and sympathising with her to suddenly being so terrified of her that I could scream. I’d thought I understood. I didn’t understand at all.
I watched, frozen with terror, as she took another plastic water bottle from the pile of things on the table.
‘Oh God, please. Please don’t. Bella, Jesus.’
I’d stood. But she had the gun again and was ushering me back down into the chair with the soothing motions of a mother. She took the roll of duct tape and tossed it at my feet.
‘Strap up,’ she said.
Chapter 117
WHITT STOOD IN the hospital hallway, motionless. To his left down the stairs was the triage unit where Tox had been taken. The man had died in the ambulance and been resuscitated right in front of him, a pulse lost, a pulse encouraged to return. Whitt supposed that was death. He wasn’t sure. A paramedic had clamped another mask over him and sat squeezing a rubber bag, forcing air into his lungs. Another had shone a torch in his eyes, stuck him with needles, strapped things to his limbs. All the while the hand with the evidence bag tied to it remained flopped down by Tox’s side, untouchable. Some silent understanding had come over everyone, after the panic of the first moments, that the hand held the evidence of who had done this. Whitt hadn’t said anything. He couldn’t find the words. But after an hour or so in the emergency room one of the nurses had come out and handed him a glass slide in a little pouch. Whitt had thanked her and run it up to a lab on the third floor. He’d commandeer the lab. Whatever it took. There was no time to waste getting the sample to a police forensic unit.
Now he was in between those two places, the lab where the nail scrapings had gone for testing and the triage department where Tox was fighting for life. He took out his phone and called Harry, but the call rang through.
‘Hi,’ he said after the message tone. He only noticed, at that moment, that his hands were covered in blood. In fact, his clothes were spattered all over with it. People were staring at him as they walked past, alarm in their eyes. ‘Um. Call me … uh … when you can. We got a DNA sample from the Georges River suspect. It’ll be three hours, they think, before they can give us a result. I’m, um, I’m not sure what to do now. Tox is … He’s … Just call me back.’
He sat down in a plastic chair beside a vending machine filled with high-sugar snacks. He had to focus now. There were units out there in the night searching for the killer, trying to track down the twelve men who’d been identified by their fingerprints at the abandoned hotel. They were now also checking emergency rooms and medical centres for anyone wounded, knowing Tox would have done at least some damage to his attacker. The killer wouldn’t have been expecting a man at Harry’s apartment. He must have seen the lights on, wondered if she might be there. What had he wanted with Harry? The same thing he wanted with the girls he had taken?
None of it made sense. No, it didn’t make sense if the theory was that this man was Sam Blue’s partner. Because if Sam Blue was his partner, his friend, he’d have no reason to want to hurt Harry. And why go around and break into Harry’s apartment if his intentions for her were good? Had he broken in? There was no way of telling. The door had been smashed down, and neighbours in the building were saying they thought the dead man in the hallway had done it. Had he got in another way?
Whitt needed to find this guy. Going to Harry’s apartment had been a bold act. Caitlyn McBeal had escaped him. His face had, presumably, been on the television – even if it was buried among the faces of other suspects. Now he was on the run, probably wounded. The killer must be in crisis mode. He would do now what killers in trouble always do. He would go home. Go to where it was safe. Not literally to his place of residence – the police would be covering the houses of the twelve men. He’d go where his heart lived. Where it had all begun.
But where on Earth was that?
Whitt stood. He had an idea.
Chapter 118
THE LIGHTS OF the town swirled in my vision, the black arms of the cliffs around us. The wind was making me shiver, but I knew it couldn’t possibly be as cold as I felt. I tried to walk slowly, to think. The bottle under my chin felt heavy. Bella had rolled the duct tape around and around my neck. It was pulling at my hair. Awkwardly tugging at the skin behind my ear. It was hard to walk with my hands behind my back. The tape there was too tight, jamming my unbroken wrist up against the cast on the other arm. When Bella had asked me to strap up, I’d been pleased with how awkward it was, taping my own hands behind my back. I had started the roll on my good wrist and given myself a little gap between my wrists, hoping she’d think I’d done it by accident. No luck. When Bella had taken over, she’d made sure the bind was nice and secure. My fingers tingled with numbness.
‘Speed it up, slowpoke,’ Bella said, jabbing the pistol into my ribs.
‘I’m going to trip if I go any faster.’
‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ she said. ‘You pull one of those wires out of the cap and the thing will blow.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s fertiliser,’ she said. ‘Ammonium nitrate and gasoline, a couple of other things. Swimming in the middle is a cheap mobile phone. Well, the guts of one. I pulled apart the phone and isolated the circuit that comes alive when it rings. When I ring the number, the circuit will spark the fuel. And you’re dead.’
‘When?’ I stopped walking. Stood before her, looked her in the eyes. ‘When you ring the phone? If you’re going to kill me, Bella, you might as well do it right here.’
‘That’s not the plan, honey.’ She smiled. She waved the gun at me. ‘It’s in your interest to just keep following my directions.’
‘Why?’
‘Because otherwise I’ll put a fucking bullet in your leg and you’ll have to drag yourself to town. That’s why.’
She shrugged, the gun in one hand, a phone in the other. I turned and kept walking. Soon we’d come into the reach of the lights. I could see the people standing in the street, hear the clink of glasses.
‘Where did you learn to do all this?’ I was rambling now, trying to get her talking, even if it was about her devastating plans. I needed to reason with her. She couldn’t stay locked in her own irrational mind. ‘How did you figure out how to build these things?’
‘It’s all over the internet,’ she said.
We’d checked the IP addresses and searches of everyone in the town. But Bella didn’t live in town anymore. She was visiting.
‘You can find a plan for anything you want,’ she continued. ‘You don’t need complex chemicals or big exciting machines. I killed Zac with the ti
mer from Dad’s oven.’ She sighed, looked up at the stars. A smile crept over her features. ‘Do you have any idea how wonderful it feels to say that? I killed Zac. I. Killed. Zac.’
‘He didn’t do anything to you. He was never a part of this.’
‘They’re all a part of this,’ she said. ‘You still don’t get it. It’s a system. You think bad things happen in the world because a couple of people decide to do them? You’re even dumber than I thought, Harry. Bad things happen because a couple of people do them and a bunch of people do nothing about it.’
Eric and Dylan. Elliot Rodger. Seung-Hui Cho. Each of them had been willing to take down innocents. People who hadn’t wronged them personally. When Day Zero came, it was all about rage. Consuming as many people as possible with it, making the point with suffering, whether those who suffered were innocent or guilty. I shivered. Bella walked close to me. We were two friends taking an evening stroll.
‘You think you and your brother got into the mess you’re in because of the actions of a couple of people?’ she asked.
No, I thought. She was right. Someone had killed those girls and set up my brother. I had to believe that. But there were other people who had made the whole situation complete. Nigel and his team had got it wrong and come after him, had squeezed a confession out of him, had locked him up and ignored other leads that had to have been there. Journalists had condemned him and the public had believed those journalists. Our own mother’s major concern had been making money from the situation. There was so much rage inside me, and I could share it among so many people. Including myself. I wasn’t there. I was in the middle of the road in some shitty town on the edge of nowhere about to die. I would be just another name in a long list of people who had not been there for Sam.
‘I think you want me to stop you, Bella,’ I said. ‘I think you left the diary for me to find. You took the plan page out, didn’t you? You didn’t want it to be too easy. You wanted to be able to carry on if I didn’t respond,’ I said. ‘But Bella, I’m responding now. You don’t have to go through with this.’
‘Shut up.’ She kicked me in the small of my back. I struggled not to fall. ‘The time for talking came and went a long time ago.’
Chapter 119
THE FIRST PEOPLE to notice us were a group of men I didn’t recognise, standing outside the pub, each with a beer glass in hand. They did what so many men do when they’re drunk and women come within orbit of them. They pointed and cheered. It must have been the expression on my face that shifted the mood. Cut the cheers short. Maybe it was the gun in Bella’s hand. I spied Kash outside the supply store with a pair of patrol officers. His mouth fell open.
People were coming nearer. Absurdly, bizarrely turning from their groups in the street and walking towards us, hypnotised moths attracted to a light. But Bella was nothing like the killer they’d imagined all along with her glittery heels and bright smile, her hair falling perfectly over her shoulders. Kash had his gun up in an instant. Bella waved the mobile phone high in the air. He understood. To the people around us, it was a stunt. A prank. They backed up, murmuring to each other, frowns, the occasional uncomfortable laugh.
I wanted to be sick, to cry out at the visions still flashing before me of Dez’s body slumping to the ground. Bella pushed me into the pub. It was crowded here, but quiet, a party ruined. She shoved me to the centre of the stage.
‘What a perfect place for this,’ she said. There was a strange self-consciousness to her now. Her plan materialising. How could it be this perfect? Surely something would bring it down. She was so used to her dreams being tugged back to Earth. ‘The pub, huh, Harry? We’ll do it here. This is where people come to forget about things, isn’t it? This is where we come to be together. Let’s all be together for this.’
‘Get down.’ Kash was waving people from the tables, directing them away from the stage. He kept his gun trained on Bella, his eyes never leaving her for long. ‘Stay calm, everyone. Move towards the exits.’
‘Do not move towards the fucking exits,’ Bella snapped, pointing my weapon at a group of people crouched by the door. ‘I’m running this show, you pathetic meathead. Get that fucking gun off me before I push this button and end your partner’s life.’
‘That device isn’t big enough to hurt anyone here but Harry.’ Kash pointed at me. ‘If you kill her, I’ll shoot you, and it’ll be over.’
‘Mmm.’ Bella nodded. Her bravado returned. ‘See, that’s where the plan gets interesting. This isn’t the only bomb in town.’
Chapter 120
WHITT KNEW HE was wrong when he turned the corner and came up against the blockade at the fork in the road. Huge red plastic barriers diverted cars off to the right, away from the river along Henry Lawson Drive. He pulled in slowly behind a driver who was checked and directed away, then flipped his badge open for the patrol cop manning the checkpoint. A light rain was beginning to fall.
‘Detective Whittacker,’ the cop read, shone the torch in Whitt’s face. ‘How can I help?’
‘I just want to do a quick check of the riverside. See if he’s out and about.’
‘He’s not.’ The young cop smiled. ‘We’ve got it blocked off from here to Timbuktu. They’re doing regular sweeps. But you’re welcome to go have a look.’
Whitt waved and rolled on, disappointed. Of course, someone got the idea before him that the killer might return to the Georges River, a place that obviously meant something to him. He got out and looked down the long, narrow stretch of parkland lining the black water. There were police everywhere, plain-clothes and patrollies leaning on trees, looking over maps, shining their torches along the muddy sand beyond the grey brick breakwall.
The stretch of river where the bodies of the girls had been found was no more than three hundred metres long. But Whitt thought that didn’t necessarily mean only that stretch was important to the killer. Much of the police presence was focused here, where the girls had been lain on the beach. Beyond this part of the river there was more parkland dotted with the occasional clearing where picnic tables and public toilet blocks stood, jungle gyms for the kids, public bins surrounded by thousands of beer-bottle caps and cigarette butts.
What was it about this place that meant so much to the killer? Whitt wondered as he walked in the dark between the trees, beyond the reach of the lights. He thought about critical places in his own life from his home in Perth, places that he could smell when he thought about them. Where the ghost of his child self still played on beaches, huddled into big armchairs in libraries and sifted through the crowded tables of treasures in public markets, his mother’s hand in his. Indeed, the only places he could think of that had any deep spiritual meaning for him had cemented themselves in his psyche during his childhood. The Georges River really was a boys’ wonderland. Dark forests that stretched for kilometres. Huge sandstone rock formations perfect for clambering on, hiding in and having secret conversations. The park was large enough that wild goats and deer populated its deeper parts, appearing on the road now and then. It would be a haven for teens smoking, making out, lighting fires.
Sam Blue had been fairly nonplussed about the place when Nigel’s team had asked him what associations he had with it. He said he’d hung out there now and then as a kid when placed with foster families in the area. He hadn’t been back in his adult years. It hadn’t struck the investigators as odd that the place where the three bodies of his victims had been found hadn’t meant much to their prime suspect. They’d assumed he was lying.
Whitt’s phone buzzed and he looked at the screen. A text message from the lab. He opened the image and looked at a face, one of the bearded men from the collection of photographs of suspects from the abandoned hotel. Regan Banks. Number eight. His DNA had matched the samples taken from under Tox’s fingernails.
Whitt spied a dark pier ahead reaching out into the water. There was a small boatshed near it. He headed that way, thinking he’d get out of the wind to make a phone call to Pops. He’d lost faith
in his idea that the killer might be here at the river, with all the police presence nearby. He was only thinking now of his next angle of attack. The danger lying ahead escaped him.
Chapter 121
‘SIT HERE, HARRY.’ Bella smiled, drawing a chair from the edge of the stage. I all but fell into it. My legs were weak, my mind spinning. It wasn’t just the bomb strapped to my throat. It was the stage, its height above the people cowering under tables and huddling in corners, unable to look away from me and my captor. We were a grotesque pantomime, a Punch and Judy show. It was all playing out exactly as she had intended it – better, in fact. Her spectacle was drawing people in from the street to the front windows, crowded at the glass, talking to each other, relaying events inside to those behind who couldn’t see. She drew another chair close to me, so that our knees were almost touching. I thought about the bomb, and how if it detonated now it would probably injure her grievously, maybe kill her. But like the spree killers she idolised, the girl beside me was probably suicidal. All her mental effort over the last few months, or years, had gone into the planning of this event. There was nothing beyond today, Day Zero, that really mattered. Everything had to go perfectly now.
‘It’s like we’re putting on a show, isn’t it?’ Bella said, rubbing my leg absurdly. I gripped the back of the chair with my bound hands. ‘A kind of interview. Harry, why don’t you ask me what’s going to happen next?’
‘What’s …’ I swallowed. My mouth was bone dry. Kash had cleared a path between the tables and the stage. He’d rush here when he had the chance. But for now he could only hold Bella in the sight of his gun. ‘What’s …?’
‘Well, you’re going to make a choice,’ Bella said. She only had eyes for me. ‘I’ve chosen you because I think you’re the best person to demonstrate my point. I’ve told you what the people of Last Chance Valley have done. What they’ve allowed to happen. You know what kind of people they are. I want you to really consider that. Weigh it objectively in your mind. Kind of like a jury member would, you know?’ She tapped my temple hard with her index finger, almost knocking me off balance.