Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) (3 page)

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 pocket knife. He flicked open the blade with a snap, and slashed at the girl.

‘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.

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.’

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 missing 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.’

‘It’s not the GRK,’ Nigel sighed. ‘Now piss off.’

He slammed the door on my boot. I shoved forward, slid an arm into the gap and tried to grab him. Pops’s voice sent a bolt of electricity through me.

‘Detective Blue!’

‘I’m just helping, Chief.’ I pulled the door shut, gave the knob a jiggle. ‘Making sure the case room is secure.’

‘You’ve got the dead girl’s parents in interrogation room six.’ He carried his coffee towards me. ‘I’ve put the paperwork in. You’ll share the case with Detective Barnes.’

‘Are you kidding me?’

‘He was the first responder,’ the old man said. ‘He’s got some good theories. The media has got hold of the case already, so it’ll be all over the news. And she’s a bright, pretty university student. I want to have something meaningful to say at the press conference.’

‘University student?’ My mouth fell open.

‘She’d just applied and been accepted. Her parents told the patrol cops who picked them up,’ the Chief said. ‘Applied, studied – in the media’s eyes, it’s the same thing. She was full of prospects. We need to get something quickly.’

‘Well, you can tell them this is a Georges River Killer case, then.’ I counted off on my fingers: ‘Dark hair, Georges River, semi-naked, university student …’

‘It’s not,’ Pops said, and walked away.

I stood in the middle of the bullpen and looked at the officers all around me, some of them answering phones, some of them clicking away at computers. Had the whole world gone crazy? I felt as if I were speaking a foreign language, and everyone I talked to was pretending to understand and then brushing me off. I was concerned I was getting so frustrated I might be tempted to cry. I generally cry about once a year, so I wasn’t going to waste it on this bureaucratic bullshit.

‘This
is
a Georges River Killer case!’ I roared. The men and women on their phones turned to look at me. ‘I need to be on the task force!’

‘It’s not,’ Pops said calmly as he closed the door to his office.

THE
DREAM CATCHER
had been in a dry dock at Garden Island for two days. In that time, Hope had cleared it of almost all the Spellings’ possessions. She did keep some things – a nice new laptop that had belonged to Ken, and some of Jenny’s more modern jewellery. She was exhausted from constant trips to the shower cubicle to see if Ken was awake, and, if he was, to hold the chloroform-soaked rag over his face until he slept again. Jenny didn’t stir at all. It was as though she knew her husband was lost in the land of dreams, and she’d chosen to join him there.

Between trips to check on her prisoners, Hope spent most of that morning lying on the bow in one of the deck chairs in her bikini, reading the yacht’s operating manual and writing down questions for Ken. She needed a tan if she was going to fit in with the other yachties – she couldn’t look like a newbie or they wouldn’t accept her into their world. Sometimes she closed her eyes and pretended she was at sea, sailing across the Indian Ocean, the sun baking her pale skin a deep golden brown like Jenny’s. She didn’t keep her eyes closed too long, or she’d see flashes, electric zings of light that sometimes contained frightened faces, splashes of blood, clawing fingers. The images played about the corners of her eyes, made her chew her nails. They’d go, in time, these memories. She just had to focus on the plan.