‘But I wanted to put a stop to the badness,’ he said. ‘In my mind, it would have all been over by now. There would be an end, and everything I had sacrificed would have been worth it. But badness is everywhere. There’s a little bit of hell on Earth, and you never know when you’re going to see it next.’
Chapter 74
‘TALK TO TENACITY,’ I said. I reached over and grabbed his hand. ‘Call her.’
We watched as the woman on the screen battled her emotions, trying to decide whether to risk her hundred grand for what was hidden inside the last briefcase. She was pulling on her neck, tugging her ears down, the weight of the decision seeming to physically force her downwards. She picked the mystery briefcase. Animated sad clown faces flitted and flashed across the screen as a ten-dollar note was revealed, taped to a board on the inside of the case.
Kash took out his phone and left me watching the woman crying on the screen.
Hell on Earth. I’d seen slivers of that place myself, seen its flames flicker in the eyes of bad men I’d sat across from in the interrogation room, listening to them confess their crimes. I’d seen evil intentions in the eyes of foster fathers who’d welcomed my brother and me into their damp, cluttered homes, television light glaring on the walls, the blank faces of other abandoned children peering from shadowed corners. I understood the realisation Kash had experienced as he stood watching Zac Taby’s body burn in the driver’s seat of Snale’s car, a decade and a half after he’d watched his friends burn among the remains of dozens of others on a terrible night in Kuta. Sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up in this job, to think that you’re getting on top of evil. That in some wonderful distant future there will be no terrorists. No killers. No rapists and fiends. A dream like that is worth sacrificing everything for. Love. Friends. Marriage. Kids. It seems worth the fight.
And then you realise that no matter what you throw on the flames, they keep on burning, mighty and unquenchable. The fight would in fact be eternal. Like Kash, I’d given my life over to my job. I breathed it. I obsessed over it, nurtured it, the way I should perhaps have been nurturing friendships, relationships, maybe children. That sort of stuff hardly occurred to me. And yet it was all other people lived for. Was that what had so strangely drawn me to the baby in Jed Chatt’s arms? I’d defied logic, crept close to a man who’d only minutes before held a gun on me, so that I could see a child’s eyes. Was something inside me whispering of things I was losing because I refused to believe the world needed to be as bad as it was?
Kash had lost his wife because of his commitment to the eternal fight. He needed to get her back.
I lay in the hospital bed and held my broken arm against my chest and wondered if I’d be happier if I stopped fighting.
I pulled out my IV, pushed aside the blankets and started untying my hospital gown. Two nurses were standing just outside my cubicle, chatting at the counter. As I tied my shoelaces, they wandered on. I snuck past them and made for the car park.
Fighting was all I was good at. I couldn’t stop now.
Chapter 75
KASH WAS STANDING by a police cruiser loaned from White Cliffs to get us home. He was leaning on the driver’s side door, talking gently into the phone. He straightened as he saw me.
‘My partner’s here,’ he told the caller. ‘I gotta go. Love you, too.’
‘Love you too, huh?’ I said.
‘Force of habit.’ He watched me approach. ‘But it’s the first time in a long time there were no raised voices. I’m assuming the nurses have not signed your official release.’
‘They have not,’ I said. ‘So let’s quit the small talk and get out of here.’
On the road in the darkness, the cruiser sailed over the asphalt between oceans of featureless desert sand. The sun was just beginning to light the horizon. I looked at my phone. There was a text from my mother telling me she’d got the money I’d transferred. No mention of her disappointment that it was not in cash. A call came through as I was looking at the screen. It was an unfamiliar number. I answered with trembling fingers.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s Tox.’
‘Oh,’ I said. Tox was notoriously difficult to get on the phone, and even harder to converse with once the connection was made. His already-poor people skills seemed halved by the distance. My heart sank. ‘What’s happened?’
‘We found Caitlyn McBeal,’ he said.
I reeled, absurdly looking to Kash to see if he’d heard the news. My skin was tingling all over, and not just from the burns.
‘Is she –’
‘She’s alive.’
‘Jesus.’ I sat bolt upright in my seat. ‘Jesus! What’s she saying?’
‘Don’t get excited. She’s not saying much at all, and what she is saying doesn’t sound good for you. She says a guy has been keeping her in a cellar for the last few months. Practically starving her to death. She thinks he’s connected to Sam. A partner, maybe.’
‘What do you mean, she thinks that?’
‘I mean that’s what she thinks.’
‘Christ, Tox! Explain what you mean!’ I tried not to yell. Every fibre of my being was telling me to scream. ‘What exactly did she say?’
‘She says he didn’t touch her the whole time,’ he grumbled. ‘Didn’t rape her. Didn’t torture her. Hardly looked at her. Just seemed to go on standby mode, almost like he didn’t know what to do with her. Caitlyn thinks it’s because Sam was arrested. She thinks they were a double act, and once Sam was gone, the guy who kept her lost interest.’
I shivered in my seat. The drugs were still in my system, making my mind fragmented, twitchy. Again I felt that magnetic pull towards my home. I needed to get back there. Speak to Caitlyn. Convince her that she was wrong. Three days. I’d go to her hospital room. Look her in the eyes.
‘How … I mean, what did he …’
‘I haven’t got time to relate it all to you play by play,’ Tox said. ‘We’re standing outside Caitlyn’s hospital room, waiting to go in. Detective Nigel Fuckface is giving us fifteen minutes with her.’
‘Who’s the guy?’ I gripped the phone tight. ‘The guy who abducted Caitlyn. Did you catch him?’
‘No, he slipped away,’ Tox said. ‘You’ll see the sketch on the news in a couple of hours, I reckon.’
‘But –’
The line went dead.
‘Fuck!’ I screamed long and loud, looking at the phone screen, Tox’s number and the ‘Call ended’ message. He’d hung up on me. ‘Fuck! FUCK!’
Chapter 76
WHITT AND TOX stood side by side, leaning against the wall outside Caitlyn McBeal’s hospital room. A few metres down the hall from them, a group of detectives lingered, people from Sex Crimes and Major Crimes, some trauma-trained officers Whitt recognised from the Parramatta headquarters. Beyond them, at the nurses’ station, a group of journalists had already assembled, arguing with three beat cops who held them back from the hall.
A photograph of Caitlyn McBeal in her current state would have been worth a lot of money, Whitt thought. It was guaranteed front-page news. Over the four and a bit months she had been held captive, Caitlyn had lost a good ten kilos, and her hair had thinned by half. The girl Tox had carried to the ambulance outside the abandoned Pinkerton Hotel had looked like a cancer patient. Sunken eyes and yellowed teeth, her neck and arms covered in bedsores. Her lips had been dry and cracked and bleeding. Tox had described finding her in the alley outside the hotel, desperately trying to crawl towards the street, the exertion of escaping her captor having reduced her almost to unconsciousness. The doctors were saying that, had the unfortunate homeless man Ronnie Hipwell not stumbled upon her makeshift prison cell and initiated her escape, she would have been mere days from death. It was both a miracle and a tragedy that Hipwell had ventured down to the lower basement level after rain flooding the ground floor had pushed aside the trash that had been obscuring the door leading downstairs. Caitlyn was free. Hipwell was dead.
Detectiv
e Nigel Spader emerged from the room and closed the door behind him, eyeing Tox suspiciously as he tucked his notebook into his back pocket.
‘Five more minutes,’ he said.
‘You said that an hour ago,’ Tox said.
‘Yeah. Maybe I did. What are you going to do about it?’
‘I’m going to go in there.’ Tox stepped forwards, pointed at the door behind his fellow officer. ‘And if you try to stop me, you’ll find yourself downstairs in triage.’
‘You’re lucky you’re getting access to the witness at all, Barnes,’ Nigel spat. ‘You are not on this task force. Neither of you are. And I can deny an interview any time I want.’
It was the first time Whitt had seen Tox almost lose his cool. ‘Let me tell you a few things,’ Tox said, jerking a thumb at Whitt. ‘This two-man investigation right here, we’ve got enough to get a mistrial and bail in the very least.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘We’ve traced the camera from Sam Blue’s apartment to a hock shop in Bondi,’ Tox started listing on his fingers, ‘and we’ve got video of a man purchasing the camera who digital imaging analysists say is far too tall to be Blue. You yourself admitted that your people muscled Blue to extract the confession. We found Caitlyn McBeal’s mobile phone at the crime scene you guys released. Your ten-man crack team of task force cockheads is going to look really stupid when the press gets wind of this. You need to fuck off and do some damage control, and leave Caitlyn McBeal to us.’
The bigger man had all but backed Nigel into the wall. Nigel shoved Tox’s chest.
‘Back the fuck up, murderer!’
‘There’s no need to be so hostile.’ Whitt came between the two men. ‘We’re cooperating with you, Detective Spader. We let you know as soon as we had a lead on Caitlyn’s possible whereabouts so that your officers could be on the scene if she was found. That was a goodwill gesture. Now return the favour and let us have our time with Caitlyn.’
‘I don’t know how good multiple interviews are for her right now,’ Nigel mused, his eyes never leaving Tox. ‘She’s very fragile.’
‘You know what else is fragile?’ Tox said. ‘Your neck.’
Tox and the much shorter detective stared at each other. The door to Caitlyn’s room opened and another officer walked out. Whitt took the opportunity to slip through the gap as the door closed.
Chapter 77
THE ROOM WAS full of people. Caitlyn lay against the pillows, talking softly to a police EFIT specialist who sat beside her, scrolling through selections of eyebrows for the composite image of Caitlyn’s captor. In the chair on the other side of the bed, Caitlyn’s mother sat quietly crying, talking on her phone. Whitt understood Mrs McBeal had arrived a week earlier to put extra pressure on the investigative team.
‘I can’t believe it either,’ she was saying. ‘No. No. I just can’t believe it. I tried to tell them. I tried to tell them all along.’
‘Caitlyn, I’m Detective Inspector Edward Whittacker,’ he said, shifting awkwardly between two men standing in the doorway, detectives or counsellors, family members, Whitt didn’t know. ‘I’m, uh, I’m part of the team who found you.’
‘You’re Detective Barnes’s partner?’ Caitlyn looked at him with tired eyes.
‘Yes.’
‘Come here.’ She patted the bed beside her. Whitt moved around the bed, squeezing between people, and settled on the edge beside the girl. Her strength was incredible. As Whitt looked about the room, he noticed more than half the people here were crying. Though Caitlyn looked exhausted, a tiny fire seemed to be burning in her, brightening her eyes. She was being strong for the people here, her family and friends and those who had been searching for her. They needed to know she was alright.
‘I know you’ve answered a lot of questions already,’ Whitt said. ‘But I just need to know anything you can tell me about your captor’s connection to Sam Blue. Did the man who kept you ever say anything about Sam? Did he ever say his name?’
‘He was very shocked and angry at his arrest,’ Caitlyn said. ‘We watched it on the television in the room together that first night. He said they weren’t finished yet.’
‘They weren’t finished yet?’ Whitt swallowed. His mouth was bone dry. ‘Are you sure those were his exact words?’
Caitlyn reached over and held Whitt’s hand. Her fingers were cool and hard, rough from long months in the concrete cell, slowly dying in the darkness.
‘He said he needed him. See, he didn’t touch me,’ Caitlyn said. ‘Not once. He didn’t even speak to me. He was just holding me. He didn’t know what to do. His partner, Sam, was gone and he didn’t know what to do without him.’
Whitt tried to breathe. His throat was tight.
‘I saw Sam Blue a lot while I was locked up,’ Caitlyn said. ‘The TV was my only company. I’d see him walking to court. See footage of him giving evidence. I looked at his eyes. There was a deadness there. It was the same deadness that I saw in the eyes of the man who held me. It was like something inside him had shrivelled up and there was only emptiness left.’
Whitt felt a chill come over him.
‘They killed those girls, Detective,’ Caitlyn said. ‘That man and Sam Blue. They’re the same kind of monster.’
Chapter 78
THE SMOKING HUSK of Snale’s four-wheel drive had been screened off from the public eye by a white tent. I saw the flashes of the Forensics officers’ cameras as we pulled in to the driveway, their ghoulish silhouettes augmented by protective suits. All the front windows of Snale’s house had blown out. Glass crunched under my feet as I made my way up the drive. Again the townspeople drove by slowly, pressing their faces against their car windows. Others gathered in huddles at a safe distance some metres down the road, to gawk and mutter, some still in their bedclothes.
There was a moustachioed officer talking to Snale as I walked into the house. The guy gave me an odd look as I entered. Snale turned away from him and threw her arms around me.
‘Oh, Harry.’ She squeezed me painfully, smoothed down the sides of my hair. I could see she had been crying. She examined me all over, the cast, my face, the torn remnants of the clothes I’d worn during the blast, still reeking of smoke. ‘I can’t believe you’re here. They released you already?’
‘The bomb,’ I said, ignoring her mothering and turning to the Forensics officer. ‘Any traces? Anything we can use?’
‘Nothing biological,’ he said. ‘Everything burned to a crisp. Hot and fast, those gas-bottle jobs. Our main concern now is recovering everything we can of the boy for the parents.’
My stomach twisted. I must have made a face, because Snale reached up and continued patting my hair.
‘Did you speak to them? Zac’s parents?’ I asked her. ‘What did they say? Are they OK? We should get them into counselling. On suicide watch, maybe. They’ll be fragile. They might –’
‘Just give it a break for a while, Harriet,’ she said. ‘You look like the walking dead. You smell even worse. Have fifteen minutes off, and then we can get back to it.’
Chapter 79
I WALKED NUMBLY to the bathroom and stripped, pulling off a bunch of soft layers of skin from my forearms and neck. Looking in the mirror, half my face appeared badly sunburned, already peeling at my temple. I must have turned away at the last second, put my hands up to try to shield myself from the blast. The tender flesh on the underside of my forearms had taken the worst hit. The edges of my cast rubbed at the irritated skin, causing it to burn anew.
I held my arm up out of the stream of cool water and closed my eyes, raked back my singed hair. Against the back of my eyelids I could see the outline of Zac’s mangled corpse in the front seat, the flames twisting around him, flaring out over the roof.
I screamed as something brushed against my leg. The pig had muscled his way into the bathroom and nosed open the shower door.
‘Vicky! Vicky, help! Oh God!’ I hollered, trying to shove the beast away. It weighed half a tonne. Snale rushed into the
room, horrified, trying to shield her eyes from my naked form.
‘Oh God, I’m sorry!’ Despite everything, we were both almost laughing. ‘He likes to drink the water. I think it’s the soap. It tastes different. Oh Jesus, I’m so sorry. Jerry! Jerry! Come here, you idiot!’
The pig was snorting and snuffling at the few centimetres of water at the bottom of the shower. Eventually Snale gave up trying to haul the animal out of the shower with me. I got out and she handed me a towel.
‘I’m seeing stuff on the news about Sam,’ she said. ‘The girl they found. Caitlyn? Someone got some footage of her being carried to an ambulance. She looked terrible.’
‘Nothing about us out here?’ I asked. ‘The bombing? Zac?’
‘No. No way. We’re small fry.’ She sat on the toilet seat near me.
I wrapped the towel around my body, felt exhausted.
‘The girl,’ Snale cleared her throat, ‘she’s saying –’
‘I know what she’s saying,’ I said. ‘It isn’t true.’
Snale shifted uncomfortably.
‘Would anything make you believe that it was?’ she asked.
I took a comb from the edge of the sink and pulled it through my hair, looked at my own eyes in the mirror. Sam’s eyes.
‘No,’ I answered.
Chapter 80
KASH WAS IN the living room, looking at the diary, the book pressed flat on the tabletop in front of him. On the left-hand page was a sketch of a body fitted out for a massacre, a faceless dummy strapped with guns and knives. It was a lot like the sketches Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had made in their own diaries as they planned their assault. They’d envisioned body harnesses in which they could house handheld pipe bombs, holsters with easy access to knives for hand-to-hand combat should they run out of ammo. The diarist had copied excerpts from Eric’s diary into their own.