A Time to Run (14 page)

As the beers flowed and the children started laughing and playing, the ugly thoughts were pushed back a little and the mood lightened. Someone had brought a football and a couple of the blokes started kicking it with the kids. Someone else put some music on through a window of the barracks and the smell of sausages cooking wafted through the air. Everyone avoided talking about what had happened to Sammi, or at least had the decency to talk about it out of Gavin's earshot. Everyone was kind and supportive, and he was grateful to Tom for inviting him and providing the much-needed distraction.

As the evening drew on and the greasy food and cold beer started to take effect, Gavin felt unbearably tired. The stresses of the day and lack of sleep the night before, together with the alcohol, meant he could hardly keep his eyes open. Tom noticed and ushered him towards the barracks.

‘Just have a kip on my bed,' he said. ‘I'll wake you if we hear anything at all.'

Gavin nodded gratefully. Despite the party going on outside the window, he soon fell into a heavy sleep.

Saturday 5:57 pm

Shadows lengthened and grew darker as afternoon turned into evening. A new peril was emerging for Sammi. Without the heat of the sun, the temperature was dropping under the clear evening skies. Sammi's clothes were pitiful against the creeping cold. She'd relinquished her jeans for the elastic-waisted shorts. And not even underpants. She had a bra on, and a figure-hugging singlet top. Her shorts had dried out since her run in the creek, but that was the only thing going in her favour. Between her exhaustion and the decreasing temperature, it was going to be a new fight for survival when night came.

She made her way down to the creek bank and kneeled at the edge to take a few sips of water. Quickly. She was positive the barman was still somewhere in the bush, looking for her. She moved back into the scrub, close enough to still take her bearings from the water but far enough away that she wouldn't be obvious to anyone walking along its banks. She was having trouble concentrating. The task at hand was simple – keep moving forward, pay attention to sounds or any movement out of the ordinary – but even that was proving difficult. Her mind wandered constantly, dreaming of hot meals and even hotter showers.

A memory of her first trip to the snow sprang from the recesses of her mind. Someone – was it a ski instructor? – had told her that you lost most of your body heat from your head. There had been suggestive jokes about going skiing nude except for a balaclava, and the mental images had stuck. She pulled her shirt over the top of her head, lining up the neck hole so her face poked through. She tucked the singlet in on itself, trying to cover her ears and neck. Now her midriff was exposed but if the theory about loss of body heat was correct, this would have to be a better option. She hiked the shorts up as high as they could go. She was grateful for the socks. Sammi hoped if she kept her blood pumping, her own body heat would sustain her.

Don't think about the night ahead
, Sammi told herself.
Just keep going
.
One step at a time. One more step
.

Saturday 7:55 pm

It had been a long day since the start of her shift, but there were still so many things to do. Janine was eating a soggy burger at her desk as she continued to tap away at the computer. She'd had to tag and lodge the property seized at the raid. She'd completed the correspondence associated with the search warrant. Then there were great wads of information to read through – Intel reports and profiles, possible links to the Corbett case.

The Op Echo room was quiet now, just a murmur of phone conversations and clicking of keyboard keys. A couple of new staff had started for the evening shift. Bill had introduced them to Janine before he had left, but their names had disappeared in the mass of information roiling around her head.

Janine was also having a running email conversation with the head of the Media Liaison Unit. She had discussed it with Bill. It was time to put out a press release. It was now an absolute priority to find the barman, and if that meant putting some information out to the public, then that was how it had to be. It was a big decision, but if a member of the public provided a vital clue to Sammi's whereabouts, it was worth the hassle of dealing with the media.

No more treading carefully in case of a false alarm. There was no doubt now that Sammi was in trouble.

Sammi had been missing for about fifteen hours; there was no telling how far he had taken her. The BOLO, for officers to Be On the Look Out for Sammi, had already been emailed to all officers in Queensland and some interstate. It included details of the barman, the car and the circumstances.

The night-work crews would see it at the start of their shifts, but Janine held little hope for any developments through the night. The morning crews would get it about the same time as restricted details were broadcast on the morning news bulletins. They had already rostered on extra staff at the Crime Stoppers office to deal with the masses of new leads that would come in and need following up, if previous cases were anything to go by.

The maps they had found at the barman's house also interested Janine. One was a fold-out map of southeast Queensland. Large parcels of state forest had been circled, and aerial photos had been printed out from Google Maps. One particular state forest the barman seemed to have concentrated on was Captain's Creek, about 150 kilometres north of Tara – an enormous parcel of undeveloped bushland, the perfect place to go if you didn't want to be disturbed.

Janine knew a few maps with circles on them was not enough to start a search. She had a strong feeling about it, though.

Although she had never met Sammi, Janine felt like she knew her. Sammi could easily have been one of the colleagues she had a drink with after work, or one of the uniform staff she chatted with in the office. Janine took it personally. She would fight for her.

So much had happened and there was still so much to do, so many potential witnesses to talk to. And she was certain the barman would turn up soon – at home, or somewhere else. She wanted to be there when he did. She wanted to see what he looked like, know what he said. Whether he blinked or swallowed or cleared his throat when he was asked about Sammi.

Even though the assignment now had little to do with her division, Janine was too pivotal to walk away from it. Both she and Jake were rostered for an 8 am shift the next day. She had already decided to base herself at the Op Echo room. Jake was going to start at 8am at Inala and head down to Op Echo after checking in there.

Jake had left an hour earlier, urging Janine to call it a day too, as he edged out the door. It was Saturday night after all, and judging by his frenzied texting, Janine was quite certain Jake had already stood up some poor girl. It was a sign of his commitment to his bachelor lifestyle that he would still make it out on the town after the day they'd had. Tomorrow would be an early start and doubtlessly another long day, however the investigation unfolded.

Her desk phone rang. It was Bill.

‘Go home,' he said without preamble. ‘You'll need a good night's sleep before tomorrow.'

‘I feel like I'm abandoning Sammi,' Janine said.

‘You're not. There's other coppers on this case. Just because you go and have a sleep doesn't mean we're not still looking for her. Promise me you'll go home now.'

Janine sighed. ‘OK,' she said. ‘Goodnight.'

She looked up to see one of the staff standing in front of her desk, a young-looking constable.

‘Sorry to bother you. There's a message for you,' he said.

‘Oh?' Janine said.

‘Someone from your home station called. They didn't want to talk to you, just asked me to pass on a message.'
He glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. ‘Michelle Lewis called. Don Black has failed to turn up for his shift at 7 o'clock.'

Janine looked blankly at her messenger. Then the name clicked. It seemed like days since they had sat in her dingy kitchen when it was only this morning.

‘Does that make sense?' he asked. ‘That's all she said. It sounded like she was just passing on a message too.'

‘Yes. Thank you,' she said.

That was important, thought Janine. The barman was missing now too.

Saturday 8:59 pm

Her watch had a luminous dial so even when the canopy of trees blocked the moonlight, Sammi had no trouble seeing what time it was. She latched onto the time as a way of anchoring herself. She set herself a goal. She would walk for four minutes, then rest for one minute. If she did that twelve times, she would be an hour closer to safety. The numbers jumbled in her head, but she walked on with a little more purpose, glancing as the minute hand slowly but surely moved around. It worked. It gave her something to focus on and a reason to take the next step. She tried not to rest for more than a minute. She began to shiver as soon as she stopped walking.

It was halfway through a rest minute when Sammi smelt it. Cigarette smoke. The acrid smell pierced her nostrils, then her sentience. She immediately dropped to the ground, crouching down low, fingertips touching the dirt like a sprinter in the starting blocks. She swivelled her head back and forth – scanning, looking and listening, trying to pinpoint which way the smell was coming from. It didn't even cross her mind that it could be anyone other than the barman. She had no illusions of rescue.

She had become used to the sounds of the bush at night, but now she paid close attention to the rustlings and scratchings. She was close to the river. Too close. Still in a crouch, she moved slowly and as noiselessly as possible to put a bush between herself and the water. Pointless if he had already seen her. Or had this movement drawn his attention now? She lowered herself onto the ground and pressed herself flat. The earthy smell of rotting leaves now overpowered the smell of cigarette smoke. Sammi lay still, every nerve tingling, every sense heightened. She could pick up nothing out of the ordinary. Had she even imagined it?

A cracking of branches made her hug the ground closer still. She pressed her cheek into the dirt, her head turned to face the other bank of the river.

There
. A dark animal shape moving through the trees on the other side of the river. Then her breath caught in her throat. A red pinpoint of light, suspended in mid-air. The unmistakeable glow from the tip of a cigarette. He was holding as still as she, both watching, listening. The game was still on. How could it not be? There was too much at stake. His life against hers.

Did he know how close he was? Was he equipped with night-vision goggles? Had he seen her movement? Heard her pounding heart? Smelt her fear?

The enormity of her situation struck her again. One wrong move could kill her. Her heart pounded against her ribcage, threatening to break out of her chest.

‘Just keep
walking
,' she silently pleaded in her mind. The dog kept moving. But she watched as the cigarette tip glowed red again, still in the same spot. Was he looking at her? What would she do if he found her? She still held her pointy stick. It was as good as nothing. But the solidness of it, the act of squeezing her hand around it, gave her courage. It was a small act of bravery sitting in her hand. She had lasted this long. This would not be the end.

She heard a stamping and crackle of leaves. He had thrown the cigarette onto the dirt and was grinding it underfoot. A moment of stillness. Silence. Then he moved forward. His footfalls slowly moved upstream, away from Sammi.

Sammi noticed she had been holding her breath. She took such a deep breath, she sucked a small piece of leaf debris into her mouth. She gagged, resisting the urge to cough. She waited five more minutes, lying in the dirt. She shaded the tiny glow from the dial of her watch with her right hand. With her eyes concentrating on the tick of the seconds, she strained her ears for any unusual sound. The smell of smoke had dissipated, but then she had heard him crush his cigarette underfoot, so that was no longer a reliable indicator. So she waited five more shivering minutes before quietly climbing to her feet. She moved slowly downstream, getting faster as she moved further away, until she was sprinting headlong through the bush. It was a brief release of nervous energy. She could not sustain the frenzied pace. She slowed to a walk and then stopped completely.

Exhaustion flooded over her, now that the adrenaline had subsided. She rested against a tree trunk, panting. She slid down the rough bark, hardly registering it scratching the exposed skin on her back until she was sitting on the ground. She tipped her head back so it rested on the trunk. Her entire body was leaden, her limbs heavy like bags of wet sand. She couldn't find the energy to stand up again. If she just rested for three minutes, she might regain some strength. She checked her watch again. It was so peaceful now. There was no sound except cicadas calling and the occasional flapping of a bat's wings against the night air.

She would just close her eyes for a minute.

Saturday 11:02 pm

Janine was greeted by darkness and silence when she opened the front door to her home. Even her cat had bailed out on her, spending more time with her neighbours than it did at home. Janine switched on the light in the hallway, then the lounge room and the kitchen, plus the television, trying to bring a little life into the empty house. She opened the pantry and grabbed a tin of cat food. She opened the back door and banged a spoon on the side of the tin. Within a few seconds, Tabby appeared on top of the side fence, leapt down, and did one smoochy lap of Janine's legs before running inside to where her food dish lived.

There had been a time when Janine was welcomed with a warm kiss and the smell of dinner in the oven when she came home. But Janine couldn't separate herself from her work. The frequent late nights and preoccupation with whichever current case she was working on had been the catalyst for her most recent break-up.

She and Damon had been together for four years. Damon was a teacher, with predictable hours and school holidays to look forward to. Even when he did work late, it was because he was marking exams at home. He didn't understand that Janine couldn't just switch off at the end of her shift. He had never experienced the feeling of holding someone's safety and wellbeing in his hands. He resented the early starts and late nights that went along with being a detective. Though it was quite common, Janine didn't think dating another copper was a good idea, but at least they understood the job.

Even now, as she spooned cat slop into Tabby's dish, Janine's mind was still at work. Had she missed something? What was the next step? She tried to imagine where Sammi might be, what she might have endured today. She imagined her alive, scared and confused, then imagined her as a lifeless corpse, waiting to be found. Either was possible, but Janine was a realist. Kidnappers didn't generally keep their victims alive too long, not unless they were weak and pliant. With a strong, smart woman like Sammi, there was always a risk they would figure out a way to escape or fight back.

Janine checked the fridge, and found an almost-empty bottle of white wine. There was just enough left to half-fill a glass. She grabbed a couple of choc-chip biscuits and settled herself in front of the TV. Tabby quickly jumped on her lap, a warm ball of laziness. She switched onto the 24-hour news channel. She found it oddly relaxing to watch international misfortune and tragedy, knowing it was beyond her control and she was not responsible for trying to fix it.

Janine knew she had to sleep tonight. There were officers who swore by a good night's sleep to make a breakthrough in an investigation, who believed in letting their subconscious work on the problem as they slept. She would look at things differently in the morning with a fresh pair of eyes. But her mind was still racing and there would be no sleeping while she was still sorting facts and people and ideas in her head.

She was certain no one would call her through the night. Even though she had kicked off this investigation, they wouldn't call her in if they found the barman. They didn't know her, she wasn't ranked high enough. They would call Bill. He would hopefully call her, but would probably leave it till the morning. Otherwise, if anything minor happened during the night, she would find out about it when she went in to work.

So she did something she had started resorting to more and more often. She took a sleeping tablet with a large glass of water. Some nights she hardly slept. Images from past jobs would spring unbidden into her mind. A black tongue poking out of the puffy face of a hanging victim who wasn't found for three days. The first incision down the chest during the autopsy of a ten-year-old boy who drowned. The cooked carcass of a bikie found in the boot of a burnt-out car. Most of the time, these things didn't bother her much.

But inevitably, she would think of Charli. She had never met the girl, had only ever seen the one photo that had been shown repeatedly on the TV news – the white-blonde baby curls, the innocent smile stretching wide across the chubby cheeks, the pudgy hand holding out a red gerbera. She was a stranger to Janine. As was Charli's heartbroken mother. As was Charli's emotionless father who drowned her during an access visit after Charli's mother left him. She'd never met them. But Janine had failed them. She'd had nothing to do with this case, but she had been the one to answer that first phone call. She had fobbed off Charli's mother when she had rung with her concerns. There had been no way to know just how badly it would end.

‘Police said there was nothing they could do,' the mother had sobbed in front of the TV cameras.

Most nights, when her mind was still at work and full of speculation, all these unhappy endings sprang to mind every time she closed her eyes. Was there something else she could do to find Sammi? What state would Sammi be in when they found her? Would she be a new image in Janine's personal horror show?

Her insomnia wasn't something she really discussed with her colleagues. When she had started at the force eighteen years ago, it had taken a lot of work to win the respect and trust of her workmates, especially the men. There was still the old-school way of thinking in sections of the police, that women – if they insisted on being police officers – should stay at the station, taking phone calls and statements.

The first time she had shown emotion was after attending her first SIDS case. Her shift supervisor, a cranky old sergeant who really didn't want to be there anymore but had no other options, had told her to ‘take a tablespoon of concrete and harden the fuck up, girlie'. The ‘girlie' was as demeaning as the suggestion. She took that throwaway comment to heart. Janine never again wanted to give a male colleague the opportunity to say she couldn't hack it. She couldn't show any weakness, give anyone the opportunity to think she was not tough enough and not as good as the next bloke.

So she pushed her natural empathy and compassion to the side and acted professionally and by-the-book in every situation. Her ‘weakness' manifested itself in another way – in her refusal to give up on a victim, following through above and beyond where other officers would stop. And in her inability to sleep after a day like this.

Janine placed her mobile phone on her bedside table. She set her alarm for 6 am and checked the volume. Then she closed her eyes and tried to think of nothing.

Saturday 11:16 pm

Sammi dreamt. Really, it was a nightmare. But her whole day had been a nightmare and it was getting harder to separate the real from the imagined. Darkness and paranoia crowded her mind. But she saw Gavin in the bush with her, so it couldn't have been real. Her brain knew it, even if her mind didn't.

She was lying in the dirt and leaves that littered the ground. Gavin was standing a few short metres from her. He held out his hand to her.

‘C'mon,' he said. He sounded frustrated with her, as if he had been waiting and getting annoyed.

‘Over here.'

A sense of urgency this time.

‘We can work it out.' Pleading now.

Sammi tried to get to her feet. She wanted to take Gavin's hand. She longed to hug him and apologise for the fight they had, an argument that seemed so long ago that she struggled to remember what it had been about. He was so close, but receded from view as she reached for him.

She tried to get up but couldn't. The harder she tried, the more Gavin faded. Her legs wouldn't move. She couldn't even feel them and she wasn't sure why. Puzzled, she looked down at her feet. A monstrous black dog, the size of a lion, loomed over her. It was so big, only its face was in focus, the rest of its body was a dark shadowy threat. It had both of her feet clamped in its enormous maw, holding her down. It growled, rolling back black lips to reveal razor-sharp teeth, gleaming silver like the blades of hunting knives. Blood dripped from its fangs and she saw now the creature had bitten off her feet. Even if she survived this, it had changed her forever. She would never be whole again.

She screamed and the sound carried over into real life.

Sammi sat bolt upright from where she had passed out under the tree. The shrill sound of her own cry echoed in her ears. Her head snapped left to right and back again, watching for any movement. Darkness pushed against her from every side. She held still and listened for any sound. A gruff far-off sound – was it a dog barking? The only things she heard clearly were the sounds of her thumping heart and ragged breathing.

How far away was he? Had he heard her?

She rolled onto all fours and then pushed herself slowly to her feet. She felt stiff and sore, the cold seeping into her aching muscles and joints. She must keep moving.

She glanced at her watch: 12:06 am. She had survived the day. It was Sunday now, a new day. She took her bearings against the creek and faced herself downstream.

One more step. Just one more step.

Sunday 3:00 am

Gavin woke with a start for no good reason, and immediately reached for Sammi. He nearly toppled to the floor, catching himself with one arm. It was only then that he remembered that he had gone to sleep on the couch in the lounge room.

He checked the time on his phone, never far from his reach at the moment. Three am exactly. He had heard it called the devil's hour. The story went that Jesus had died at 3 pm, so the devil claimed the opposite time, 3 am, for his own devices. Folklore held that this was the time when evil was at its most powerful. Gavin wondered what had woken him, and whether it was a bad omen. An involuntary shiver ran through him and he put the sound on the TV to take the edge off the eerie silence.

The dog was asleep on the lounge-room floor. This was a special treat for her, being allowed to sleep somewhere other than her mat under the house. Gavin reached out and nudged her. Jess stirred and looked up, wagged her tail twice so it thumped on the floor, then shut her eyes again. Even the dog knew it was time for sleeping.

Gavin flicked through the TV channels to distract himself. But every channel he flicked through seemed to have a crime show on it – victims and offenders and police in different variations and locations, all of which spoke of fear and violence. He settled on an infomercial for exercise equipment that held absolutely no appeal to him, in the hope that it might bore him to sleep. But his mind was with Sammi, wherever she was, living or dead.

Was she alone? What had she endured? Was she thinking of him right now? Did she want to come home? Although he didn't truly believe that she had left him and run off with some guy, at 3 am, anything seemed possible. He pulled the blanket tighter around him, but nothing could shut out the cold dread that seized him.

Sunday 3:01 am

It was more of a stagger than a walk as Sammi moved on. There was quite a lot of noise and movement in the bush at night. The creatures had a similar goal to Sammi – survival. The natural rustlings and scratchings calmed her a little, her footfalls blending in.

At first she thought she saw a light through the trees. She moved towards it hesitantly, quietly, trying to avoid cracking twigs, though her feet felt like concrete blocks. And there in a small clearing stood a patio heater, a glowing ball on top of a pole. She thought she could feel the heat radiating from it and raised her hands walking towards it. Closing her eyes intensified the feeling of warmth and she walked forward one slow step at a time, till she crashed into a small tree and the heater was gone. It added another couple of scratches to her collection. Scrapes, grass cuts and bruises crisscrossed every centimetre of bare skin, but Sammi no longer felt them. Her body was starting to shut down the non-essential parts in favour of her brain and internal organs.

Again she staggered and fell forward. She caught herself on her hands and knees and pain jolted through her wrists and elbows. She rested on all fours and tried to will herself back up onto her feet. She must keep moving. But her arms started to shake beneath her and it was all too hard. She let herself collapse to the ground. Slowly she drew her knees to her chest, curling into the foetal position.

For the very first time since she'd been abducted, Sammi started to cry. Big deep sobs that shook her whole body. Even though the noise of her own sobs terrified her, she couldn't stop. If the barman was anywhere nearby, he would hear her cries carried on the still night air.

‘Hey!'

It was little more than a whisper, but it cut through the still night air. Although paranoia and fear had been gnawing at her since she had come to in the back of the ute, she knew this was not someone to be scared of. She stretched out a little and raised her head.

A young woman was standing there a couple of metres in front of Sammi, a shimmer of silver around her, as if she was lit from behind by the moon.

‘Come on. You have to get up. We're counting on you.'

The apparition walked over to her, her feet grazing the tops of the twigs and leaves. She bent down, her outstretched arm reaching towards Sammi. It was Tahlia Corbett, dressed in the clothes she went missing in.

Sammi reached out, and although she grasped at air, it was enough to set her in motion again and she hauled herself back onto her feet. She was swaying slightly and Tahlia moved to her side and linked arms with her. Sammi looked down and saw glowing fingers entwined with her own numb digits.

‘You need to keep going,' Tahlia said, her soft voice inside Sammi's head. No reply was needed.

Then she noticed the other girls. Three others, each glowing with different degrees of intensity, one was barely visible, Sammi only catching a glimpse of her on the edge of her peripheral vision.

One of the other girls, the next brightest after Tahlia, moved silently towards her and took her other hand. Her lips moved, but her voice was so faint Sammi couldn't make out what she said. With everything happening in slow motion, supported on both sides by the ghosts of the dead women, Sammi took a step forward. And another. Clutching spirit hands tightly, drawing on the shared memories of what the other women had endured, Sammi moved forward, each step bringing her closer to dawn and another day.