‘She’s gonna die!’ the man howled through the tape. ‘Please!’
CHAPTER 6
HEADING TO THE crime scene, I drove through the quiet streets of Picnic Point and up through the national park. The dark hills were spotted here and there with the gold porch lights of suburban mansions. I’d spent some time out here as a pre-teen with one of the foster families who had taken on my brother Sam and me. That is, before their adoption dream had ended.
There had been so many young families who’d attempted to integrate us that it was difficult to decide which one it had been. All I remembered was the local school and the crowds of teens in green and gold uniforms, the curious glances we’d received as we entered midway through the semester.
As usual, Sam and I had only been at the school for a few weeks. As a pair of kids who’d been in the system since we were practically toddlers, we didn’t make life easy for our foster parents with our bad behaviour. It was probably me who had broken the spell by running away in the middle of the night. Or maybe it was Sam setting something on fire, or running his mouth at our potential new parents. We’d both been equally bad at school – fighting off kids who wanted to give us grief, trying to show our new teachers who was really boss. Once our new mummies and daddies realised we weren’t grateful for being ‘saved’, the fantasy usually died. In truth, Sam and I had always preferred the group homes and institutions they shipped us to between potential adopters. More places to hide. I dreamed as I drove by the lamplit houses of what it might have been like to grow up here, if I’d been a more stable kid.
The police tape started at the edge of the main road. I was stopped by a young officer in a raincoat and flashed him my badge, only then realising that my knuckles were still wrapped.
‘OK, Detective Blue, head down to the end of this road where it turns to dirt and go left along the river. You’ll see the lights,’ the cop said.
‘The river? Shit!’ I felt the fine hairs on my arms stand on end. ‘Who’s the victim?’
The cop waved me on. Another car was coming up behind me. I stood on the gas and zipped down the slope, almost swerving on the corner where the dirt began. I couldn’t wait to get to the crime scene. If the victim was a young woman, it meant the Georges River Killer had struck again.
And I was going to get him this time.
CHAPTER 7
I PARKED CLOSE, unwrapped my knuckles and strode up to the crime scene with my heart pumping in my ears. I didn’t even bring my scene kit. I had to know as much as I could, as fast as possible, so that I could get Pops to put me on the case. The Georges River killings were splashed all over the newspapers, and so were the idiots who had control of the case – a group of loutish guys from Sydney Metro Homicide who wouldn’t give me so much as a whiff of what they had.
I didn’t want the notoriety these cops seemed to enjoy so much. I wanted to be involved in catching what was probably the most savage serial killer in our nation’s history. Young, beautiful university students were going missing from the hip urban suburbs around the University of Sydney campus. Their savaged bodies were turning up on the banks of the Georges River three or four days after they disappeared. My brother spent two days of his working week teaching undergrad design students at the university, and lived in their midst in the hip suburbs around Newtown and Broadway. I’d talked to Sam about it a lot, about how the girls in his apartment building were terrified, begging the landlord to put cameras up outside the block, walking each other to and from their cars in the late hours.
It might have been arrogant, or naive, but I felt as if there was something I could contribute. Though my conviction rate in sex crimes wasn’t good, that was part of the culture of the court system. I was a good cop, and I could practically smell the Georges River Killer haunting the women of my city. When the police came knocking on that evil prick’s door, I wanted to be right there to see his face.
The first thing I noticed that was wrong with the scene was the edge of the police tape. It was far too crowded. Half the officers who should have been in the inner cordon were standing at the outer cordon, talking and smoking in the dark. I recognised a photographer from my station loitering uselessly by the lights rigged up over the scene. A fingerprints specialist was sitting under a tree eating a burrito out of a paper roll. What the hell was everyone doing? I ducked under the tape and came up beside the only officer in the crime scene. He was crouched over the body.
When he turned around, I saw that the man by the body was Tate Barnes.
The walking embodiment of career suicide.
CHAPTER 8
THE EFFECT OF seeing Tate Barnes right in the middle of what I already considered my crime scene was like being maced. My eyes stung and my throat closed with panic. I’d never met the man before, but I knew the shaggy blond hair and the leather jacket from stories I’d heard. There were hundreds of variations on the story of Tate Barnes. It was a terrible tale about a crime the man had committed that he’d tried to hide from the bosses during his academy application. It was said that, as a child, Tate and a group of his friends had murdered a mother and her young son.
I turned away and grabbed at my face, tried to suppress a groan. I needed this guy out of my crime scene. Now. He straightened and offered me his hand.
‘I’m Tox Barnes,’ he rasped. It sounded as though his throat was lined with sandpaper.
‘You actually introduce yourself as “Tox”?’
‘I find it minimises confusion.’
I’d heard the nickname, but I hadn’t expected him to embrace it. Officers called Barnes ‘Toxic’ because any officer who agreed to work with him was essentially committing themselves to a lifetime of punishment from their fellow officers. General consensus was that Tox Barnes should never have been allowed into the force. Those who had worked with him were harassed relentlessly by their peers. He was the fox in the henhouse. Aligning yourself with him meant you were on the side of a predator.
I’d heard that there was nothing the administration had been able to do to stop Barnes being a cop. He’d aced his application, and he’d committed the murders so young his record had been expunged. But that didn’t mean the rest of the force was going to sit by and let a murderer operate in their midst. He was the enemy, and if you joined him, you were the enemy too.
‘Listen, Tox, I’m Detective Harriet Blue.’ I shook his rough hand half-heartedly. ‘I’m going to need you to clear out of this scene. Chief Morris has put me on it.’
‘Meh,’ Tox said, and returned to crouching.
I waited, but nothing further came, so I bent down beside him and glanced at the body.
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that.’
‘I said “Meh”,’ Tox replied. ‘It was a dismissive noise.’
I was so shocked, so furious, I hadn’t even taken in the sight of the girl on the sand before us. My eyes flicked over her naked chest, unseeing, as I tried to get my mind around the reality of the situation. She looked mid-twenties, beautiful, dark-haired. She was wearing only a pair of panties. She was a Georges River girl. I knew it. I needed to get this parasite of a man off my case.
‘You don’t understand,’ I said, ‘this is my crime scene. This is my case. And I don’t work with partners.’
‘Neither do I,’ he said, as if it were a matter of choice.
‘Right.’ I sighed. ‘So you can give me a brief on what you’ve observed, and then I need you to beat it and take your dismissive noises with you.’
Tox seemed to smirk in the dark, stood and walked around the back of the body. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me or not. At the edge of the police tape, twenty yards away, my fellow officers were watching carefully to see if I’d cooperate with their nemesis, thereby giving them permission to make my life a living hell. I noticed some journalists among the crowd. The uniformed patrol officers securing the scene were so interested in Tox and me that they weren’t even pushing them back.
When I turned around, I saw that Tox had a poc
ket knife. He flicked open the blade with a snap, and slashed at the girl.
CHAPTER 9
‘WHAT THE—’ I stood up, tried to shield what Tox was doing from the press, who’d started snapping pictures. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Tox didn’t answer. He flipped the girl onto her front and pulled the underpants he’d slashed from her hips off her body. I watched in horror as he poked at the corpse’s backside with the butt of the blade. He leaned in close and examined the surface of her skin. Someone at the edge of the crowd sneered.
‘Sicko,’ somebody said. ‘Someone say something.’
‘Nah, man. Leave him. Let him mess up all the evidence.’
‘Detective Barnes,’ I said, ‘I’m ordering you to stop what you’re doing right now.’
Tox put both his hands on the corpse’s back and pushed down hard, just once. He pulled the hair away from the girl’s face and stuck his third finger between her lips, pushed it deep inside her throat. The dead girl’s cheeks puckered obscenely to allow his finger to push down. He extracted the finger and looked at the tip in the torchlight, grunted thoughtfully. I watched him take the girl’s wrist and give it an exploratory wiggle before he stood up and dusted off his palms.
‘Mmm,’ he said, and strode away from me towards the riverbank.
I followed, grateful to be out of earshot of the vile things the cops at the tape were saying about him. I caught him at the water’s edge and shoved him hard in the back. He stumbled in the sand.
‘What was that for?’ he said in his strange whispery voice.
‘Jesus, I don’t know, for violating the corpse of a young woman in front of all the nation’s leading newspapers and half the police force?’ I snarled. ‘What is wrong with you, man?’
‘I wasn’t violating the corpse, I was testing a theory.’ He looked towards the mouth of the river. ‘The kids who found the body said they thought they recognised the girl from a party last night, a few streets back from the river. I wanted to find out if that was bullshit before we go off interviewing all the morons who attended the party. She wasn’t there. So we can forget that.’
I felt as if I were dreaming. This man seemed to have no idea how inappropriate his handling of the body had been. He was looking off towards the river and talking to himself as though I wasn’t standing there.
‘Of course she wasn’t at the party,’ I said. ‘Are you that stupid? She’s a Georges River girl. Right river, right age, right placement of the body. I could have told you that before you stuck your finger in her mouth.’
‘Are you that stupid?’ Tox looked at me finally. ‘She’s not one of the Georges River Killer’s victims. No. She didn’t die anywhere near here.’
‘You’re insane.’ I waved him away and turned back to the crime scene. ‘You don’t touch a body until forensics are done with it. That’s the first thing they teach you on the first day of forensics. You just … you’ve compromised the case.’
I could hardly speak I was so mad. His passive stare made it worse.
‘Forensics won’t find anything,’ he said. ‘She’s been in the water for hours.’
‘I’m not listening to you. I like my job too much.’
‘Heh,’ he said. ‘If you liked your job so much, you wouldn’t insist on doing it wrong.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘She wasn’t killed here. She was killed out to sea. She came here in the storm.’
I stopped walking and stared at him.
He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and looked back with the ease and calm of a madman.
‘Bullshit.’
‘Nope,’ he said. ‘She’s got mottled livor mortis on her ass and pulmonary oedema in her lungs.’
He waited, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking him to explain how he’d come up with that. He walked towards me and stood over me, as most men do.
‘Livor mortis,’ he said. ‘The settling and pooling of blood in the veins after de—’
‘I know what livor mortis is, asshole.’
‘Well, you’ll know that if a corpse is being tossed around in rough water, the blood doesn’t settle, so it never collects,’ he said. ‘Except in the ass. Fine skin. Lots of big juicy fat cells. I’d say she’s been in the water at least twenty hours. With the storm blowing a westerly, she was likely dumped out there, in the ocean.’
‘The rigor mortis? Not set?’
‘No.’
‘And the pulmonary oedema,’ I said, feeling my hackles rise again. ‘The foam in her lu—’
‘I know what pulmonary oedema is, asshole,’ Tox said.
‘She was alive when she went in,’ I whispered.
CHAPTER 10
I FOLLOWED TOX back to the body of the girl and stood facing away from the crowd. My mind was swirling. Sure, Tox knew his stuff. He’d already started developing a theory, helping my case enormously within only minutes of the scene being cordoned off. But as I glanced at the cops behind me, I knew I couldn’t keep him around much longer or I’d never get the thing solved. Working with Tox Barnes wouldn’t throw a spanner into the works. It’d throw a whole toolbox.
As far as I’d heard, people now and then were forced to work with him. But he was a burden that one took heavily, and offloaded as soon as possible. You found a way to transfer out of partnership with him, or soon enough you would begin to find your job almost impossible. People started avoiding you in the coffee room. Losing your reports, delaying your lab results. Accidents would begin to happen – someone would spill coffee on your laptop, bump your car on the way out of the parking lot, forget to include you in weekend get-togethers.
I’d just turned to him to ask him again to leave when I noticed he was smoking a cigarette.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘Put that out! You’re in my crime scene.’
He grunted.
‘You’ve just had that hand in a dead girl!’
‘That was this hand.’ He lifted the other from his pocket, waved it, pulled the cigarette from his mouth with the clean one. ‘For a detective, you’re pretty blind to details. Me? I’ve noticed everything there is to notice about your hands. Chewed nails. Swollen knuckles. No sign of a wedding ring, probably ever.’
‘Look.’ I leaned close. ‘I don’t like you. I don’t want to work with you. I’ve heard bad things, and they appear to be true. You should have waited for an autopsy to confirm your findings. There’s a process, and it’s in place for a reason.’
‘I don’t like to waste time,’ he said. ‘And that’s exactly what you’re doing now, jibber-jabbering at me. What station you work at?’
‘Surry Hills,’ I said.
‘Right.’ He clapped me hard on the shoulder as he turned to leave. ‘I’ll see you there first thing.’
He wandered off, and the police officers lining the tape watched him go. When he was a good distance away they ducked under the tape and started setting up to do their jobs. I stood stunned in their midst, no idea what I should do next. The photographer snapped a picture of me standing over the body, my arms folded.
‘That guy’s a murderer, you know,’ he said, adjusting his lens. ‘Killed a mother and her young kid. Beat ’em to death. Tox was seven.’
‘Yeah, so I hear.’ I was badly craving a cigarette of my own now. I hadn’t smoked in years. But no one around me was offering anything but hateful glances.
‘Guy like that’s gonna do it again,’ the photographer said. ‘You don’t start that young unless it’s in your bones.’
CHAPTER 11
MY HEAD WAS a mess by the time I arrived at Surry Hills police headquarters. It was 6 a.m. and the sun was rising. I’d stayed at the crime scene and orchestrated the evidence collection, got rid of the press and sent out a couple of detectives to bring the parents in. Within an hour we had preliminary identification. Until we could get the parents to ID the body, we weren’t sure. But it looked as though the girl was Claudia Burrows: her description linked up with a mi
ssing persons report that had been issued a day earlier. She had a tattoo of a rabbit in a waistcoat on her hip that matched the report exactly.
I didn’t like where this was all going, mainly because it was heading in the very opposite direction to the Georges River Killer. The killer we’d been hunting didn’t drown his victims – he didn’t put them in the water at all, but left them stripped to their panties, face down on the beach. His victims showed signs of physical and sexual abuse, while Claudia hadn’t looked in any way battered. I’d checked her wrists and ankles for ligature marks but there were none, except for a rough sort of rubbing on one foot. For all I knew, she might have fallen into Botany Bay drunk and drowned there, the waves stripping her clothes off as she floated towards the mouth of the river.
Though it didn’t look good for my entry onto the Georges River Killer task force, I wasn’t going to let go. It was possible the killer had changed his methods to confuse us. He was a wily creature, as far as I could tell, and he might have recognised that he was being tracked. I went right to the door of the task force’s case room and knocked, trying to shove my way in when no one answered. I came up against the thin and wiry Detective Nigel Spader just inside the door.
‘You’re not allowed in here.’ He pushed me back out the door before I could get a glimpse of their case board. ‘This is the last time I’m going to tell you, Blue.’
‘I’m allowed in,’ I said. ‘Chief Morris put me on a Georges River body last night. You’ll need to debrief me and get me up to speed so we can start making connections.’
‘Your case is not connected to ours.’ He tried to shut the door on me.
‘How the fuck would you know something like that? It’s a dark-haired girl almost naked on the banks of the Georges. I’m ticking all the boxes. If I knew what other boxes I could tick, maybe the link would be even stronger. You’re putting me on this task force, Nigel, before I kick you in the face.’