Frantic (26 page)

‘A little more and we have him I reckon,’ Angus said.

She faced the drawer but knew Angus was still there. She tried to think. Why was Sawyer holding out? A thought crept into her mind –
What if he really didn’t do it?
– but she forced it away. Of course he did it. He had motive and opportunity. The police just hadn’t been able to prove it yet.

But maybe… maybe…

No. She grabbed needles at random and jumped out of the ambulance. The small dose wasn’t enough, that was all. It was time to get serious with the bluff.

Sawyer was saying to Angus, ‘I know why the bitch is doing this, but why are you here? Just getting your kicks out of watching someone suffer? I’m memorising your face, you know. She can fill me up with whatever drugs she likes. I’ll remember you and you’ll be in the deepest shit.’

Sophie steeled herself. ‘You’re assuming I’m still going to let you live.’ Shaking, she stuck the needle of a new syringe of adrenaline into the IV port and depressed the plunger slowly. One millilitre, two, three. Any more was too risky.

Sawyer gasped. ‘Oh God, oh God.’ He panted for air. He looked on the verge of cardiac arrest.

Sophie grabbed his arm, terrified he would die. ‘Tell me where Lachlan is,’ she begged.

He gagged, choking on a mouthful of vomit. She seized his chin and turned his head to the side. ‘Cough,’ she told him. ‘Cough it out.’

Crying, he managed to clear his mouth and throat. ‘I don’t know anything about your little boy,’ he wept.

Sophie started to cry too. She looked up at Angus, shaking her head. It was time to stop. They had to take Sawyer to hospital. Any more and he would die, and then they’d know nothing.

‘Liar,’ Angus said.

‘I don’t,’ Sawyer groaned.

‘LIAR!’ Angus launched himself across Sawyer and grabbed the syringe still attached to the IV line, slamming the plunger down and emptying the syringe. Sophie gasped and grabbed for the IV line to crimp it off and stop the flow of adrenaline into Sawyer’s bloodstream but it was too late. Sawyer turned white, took a short sharp breath then went limp.

‘Shit.’ Sophie leapt into the ambulance and grabbed the defibrillator. She tore open Sawyer’s shirt and slapped pads onto his chest. The screen showed the wriggling line of ventricular fibrillation, the state when the heart muscle was quivering uselessly. A shock was their best chance of restoring a natural rhythm. She charged the machine to two hundred joules. ‘Stand back.’

‘Sophie–’

Sophie hit the shock button. Sawyer’s body jumped as far as it was able with his feet and hands tied down. The screen still showed VF. ‘Shit!’

‘He was lying, Sophie.’

She charged the machine, shocked him again. Still VF. ‘Why the hell did you do it?’

‘I wanted to frighten him, make him realise we could see through all the crap, and he’d finally have to tell the truth.’ Angus clasped his head. ‘I didn’t know this would happen.’

‘Jesus, Angus.’ Sophie charged the machine to three hundred and sixty joules. Sawyer’s body jolted but his heart stayed in VF. ‘Jump in there and grab that resus bag.’

She started chest compressions while Angus climbed into the vehicle. ‘Where is it?’

‘There, on the wall.’ She felt a rib crack in Sawyer’s chest and lightened up. ‘Right there in front of you.’

‘I don’t–’

‘There!’ Sophie grabbed Sawyer’s face. She pinched his nose shut, raised his chin and blew into his mouth. His chest rose and fell. She breathed into his lungs again then began compressions.

‘This thing?’ Angus held out the bag.

‘Hold it on his face when I tell you. No, not now.’ She charged the machine and hit Sawyer with another three-sixty joules. No change from VF. ‘Okay, press the mask to his face. Tilt his chin up a bit. Hold it on with one hand and squeeze the bag with the other.’

She kept on with the compressions, trying to think what drugs she should give him. Basic treatment of an arrest included frequent doses of adrenaline, but what did you do if that was the cause?

She shocked him again. Angus squeezed the bag and she heard air leaking from the sides of the mask. ‘Press it on tighter.’

‘I am,’ he said.

‘Change places.’

She worked hard with the bag to get plenty of air into Sawyer’s lungs. She stopped for seconds to inject lignocaine, hoping to settle the heart down, then sodium bicarbonate to reverse the metabolic acidosis. But the monitor continued to show the irregular rhythm of VF and Sawyer’s skin turned from purple to mottled. Sophie wept as she worked, and her tears fell onto the resus bag and rolled down its curved sides then dropped to the dusty floor below.

Angus took his hands from Sawyer’s chest.

‘Don’t you dare stop,’ she snapped. She heard another rib crack as he pressed down again.
Oh God, what have I done?

She charged up and delivered a shock. The smell of singed chest hair filled the air. She forced the mask tighter on his face and squeezed the guts out of the bag.

‘Sophie, he’s gone.’

‘Not until we stop he isn’t.’ She charged the monitor again. It reached two hundred joules then stopped, the words ‘
low battery
’ flashing on the screen. She hit him with the two hundred and charged up again. This time the machine made it to a hundred then the screen turned black. The batteries were dead. There were spares in all the cars except the spare one itself, this one.

‘I’m calling for back-up,’ she said.

‘You can’t.’

‘I have to.’

‘He’s dead, Sophie. Look at him.’

The surfaces of Sawyer’s half-open eyes were dry. His forehead and nose were turning bony white as the blood drained towards his back, the lowest point of his body. The skin of his neck and chest was cooling, the mottling turning pale. She’d seen more people in this state than she could recall. It was the point at which you got out the body bag.

The enormity of the situation fell on her like a monstrous cresting wave. She dropped the resus bag on the warehouse floor and slumped onto the ambulance’s back step, her head in her hands. Shock and grief engulfed her and she felt she might collapse.
What have I done? What have I done?

After a moment she croaked,‘How will we find Lachlan now?’

‘We can’t.’ Angus jabbed a finger into Sawyer’s motionless chest. ‘He killed him.’

Sophie shook her head.

‘You’ve seen all the cars out there with the blue ribbons.’ His voice was hoarse with emotion. ‘All those people looking out for Lachlan, yet nobody’s found him. Soph, what do you think that means?’

Sophie stared at him, unable to speak.

He lowered his voice. ‘Can’t you see there was only one reason he was parked at the river?’

Sophie couldn’t get her breath. She collapsed on her hands and knees on the cracked concrete floor, her vision blurry, her stomach roiling. She hung her head and her tears dripped onto the floor. Everything in her chest dried up and blew away in a grim and icy wind.

Gone. Lachlan was gone.

Saturday 10 May, 10.53 am

S
ophie sat on the cold concrete floor, her hands over her face. She felt like going home and killing herself.

‘Get up,’ Angus said.

She couldn’t move. He crouched before her and grasped her upper arms, pulling her to her feet.

‘Ow,’ she said. ‘Stop it.’

‘You should go home and rest.’

‘For what? My time in jail?’

He shook his head. ‘That won’t happen. I’ll take care of it all.’

She looked at Sawyer’s cooling body, the mess of vomit and drug boxes on the floor, the IV line that still slowly dripped fluid into the dead veins. ‘How?’

‘Just go home,’ he said. ‘Don’t think about it. Think about you and Chris. Look after yourself.’

Her head hurt. Wind whistled through a crack in the building’s wall somewhere. ‘The ambulance,’ she said.

‘Tell me how to put it in the station, what to say if I meet anyone.’

She sat on the ambulance’s back step, weak and sick. It didn’t seem possible that they could get away with this, she wasn’t even sure she wanted to, but her mind was so muddled that she couldn’t think it all through. ‘The remote for the station roller doors is attached to the dashboard,’ she said. ‘Reverse in, close to the wall.’

‘And if I meet anyone?’

She tried to think. ‘Say you’re new to the city. Say that Control told you to bring the truck back from the workshop and your mate’s getting code twenty at the Quay. Then get away as quickly as you can.’

‘Okay,’ Angus said. ‘Now, to get you home.’ He looked around, then went to a pile of rags and rubbish that lay against the wall and fished out a tattered and dirty blue shirt. ‘Put this on, then go outside. Back down the road was a public phone. Call a taxi.’

She held the shirt at arm’s length. There was already grease on her fingers from it.

‘It’s better than your uniform shirt,’ he said. ‘I’ll take that and get rid of it along with mine.’

‘The taxi driver will remember me anyway, won’t he?’

‘He’s guaranteed to if you’re in full uniform.’

Sophie pulled her ambulance shirt off and yanked on the grimy blue one. Angus turned away while she did so. ‘Need phone money?’

She patted her pockets, thought of her wallet in her car at The Rocks. ‘I do.’ He gave her some coins. ‘My car keys are in the front of the ambulance,’ she said. ‘Maybe you can use my car to get home yourself.’

‘Thanks, I will if nobody’s around.’ He came close and put his hand on the side of her neck. ‘It’s going to be okay.’

She looked past him at Sawyer’s body, feeling certain that nothing would ever be okay again.

12.15 pm

In the carpark Ella watched Dennis light a cigarette. ‘Have you noticed that any opportunity you get now, you have a smoke?’

Dennis tilted his head up and exhaled smoke. ‘Your point being?’

She ignored that. ‘Angus Arendson rang. Said he was at golf earlier. I gave him the spiel about how the calls to the TV stations about the robbery gang were made from a phone box across the street from where he was booked in Waterloo, right around that time. I asked if he was the caller or if he’d perhaps noticed somebody in the box. He said no.’

‘Why was he there?’

‘Apparently there’s a vintage record shop on that stretch and he was looking through their collection. Thought he was in an hour zone but when he found the ticket he realised he’d looked at the wrong sign.’

‘Buy anything? Got receipts?’

‘Yep,’ Ella said. ‘Well, so he says.’

Dennis finished his smoke and stepped on the butt. ‘We might go and have a look after the meeting.’

When they entered the station the desk officer waved them over. ‘Call for you, Detective.’

Dennis took the handset she held out. ‘Orchard.’ He listened for a moment then motioned for Ella to pick up another handset.

‘–searched the hospital grounds and found no trace,’ she heard a man saying. ‘He was last seen in his office about eight-thirty this morning. His car’s still there and none of us saw him go.’

Dennis rubbed his forehead. ‘Are there other exits?’

‘Well, if he’d gone out with the laundry he might’ve managed it,’ the man said.

Dennis looked at Ella, then said into the phone, ‘Keep us posted, will you?’ He put the handset down. ‘Sawyer’s done the bolt.’

‘I knew it.’ She clenched her fists in glee. ‘He was hiding something from the start.’

‘Put his description out,’ Dennis said to the desk officer. ‘We need to find this guy.’

12.33 pm

Chris opened the door when Sophie knocked. ‘Where have you been?’

She pushed past him, got some money and paid the taxi driver, then went inside the house again. Chris followed, an icepack held to his forehead, bloodied tissues in his nostrils. ‘I need to talk to you.’

‘Just don’t,’ she said.

‘Are you crying?’

‘Does it matter?’ She tore off her clothes and threw them in the washing machine.

‘Whose shirt is that?’

She left him in the laundry and went upstairs to shower.

Chris came into the steam-filled room. ‘Sophie.’

She didn’t answer. Her skin burned under the hot water and the scrubbing brush. It didn’t make sense, she hadn’t been in close prolonged contact with Sawyer’s dead-man sweat, but if she inhaled deeply enough she still caught a whiff of it.

‘Sophie.’

‘Not now.’ She turned the shower off but stayed in the cubicle. The last of the water trickled down the drain between her feet. She stared into the little holes and wished she could slip away with it.

He opened the cubicle door. ‘I’ve got to talk to you. Something’s happened.’

She shivered and he handed her a towel. She couldn’t look him in the eye.

‘Soph?’

She felt sick and faint, and crouched down, hands hard against the tiled walls. Despair over what she’d done overwhelmed her. Great racking sobs rose up from deep inside her chest.

‘Jesus, Sophie.’ Chris crouched beside her, his arm over her back, pulling the towel up to cover her goosepimpled shoulders, hugging her to him.

She sank even lower on the shower floor.
Oh God, I didn’t deserve him before. What will he say when he finds out what I’ve done?

12.40 pm

In the meeting Ella sat with her elbows on the table, barely listening to people reel off their lack of success. Her mind was on Sawyer. Where was he? What was he doing? Did he have Lachlan hidden somewhere and was in the process of moving him? If so, was the baby dead or alive?

Dennis’s mobile rang. ‘Orchard,’ he muttered. He blinked then started to scribble on a notepad. Ella peered over his arm to see an address in the inner western suburbs. He said, ‘Thanks,’ ended the call and stood up. ‘Meeting adjourned, folks, we’ve found a body.’

Ella felt a sharp pain in her chest and the detectives sighed and slumped down in their chairs.

‘It’s not Lachlan,’ Dennis said. People brightened.

‘Who then?’ Ella said.

‘Not sure yet.’

In the car she said, ‘But obviously you have some idea?’

‘A real estate guy arrived at this warehouse and found a dead man in it.’ He accelerated out of the carpark. ‘He was in a state when he rang triple 0, saying something about an ambulance being there but nobody else around, but his description made it sound like Sawyer.’

‘An ambulance.’

‘Yes.’

She put a hand on her head. ‘That’s bad.’

‘First we make sure it’s him,’ Dennis said. ‘Then we know.’

12.45 pm

Chris walked Sophie to the bed, sat her on the side and pulled the quilt up around her. She couldn’t stop shaking.
I killed a man.
The thought went round and round in her head.
I killed him.

Chris wrapped his arms around her and pulled her close. She felt simultaneously comforted and guilty in his embrace. She laid her head on his shoulder, looking at the side of his face, as every bad thing she’d done rose up in her memory from the cheating to the events of today. At Mrs Macquarie’s Point they’d kissed while fireworks shot from the Harbour Bridge, and she’d felt his heart beating against her chest, and now they were so separate. When all this was over she had to live differently, holding nothing back. She should start now.

‘I need to tell you something,’ he said. He looked down at her with tears in his eyes. ‘Lachlan being taken was my fault. I’m so sorry.’

‘No, it was mine.’ Sophie started to cry. ‘Sawyer took him because I couldn’t save his wife and baby.’ She drew a long faltering breath. ‘And today I killed Sawyer.’

Chris looked horrified. ‘What?’

‘Angus and I kidnapped him. I wanted to make him tell me where Lachlan is. He wouldn’t say, then he got an overdose and died and I couldn’t get him back.’

Chris started to cry too. ‘You killed an innocent man.’

‘No, we didn’t. The detectives think it was him too.’

‘You did,’ he said. ‘Lachlan being taken was my fault. I rang the TV stations about the robbery gang being all police. I wasn’t completely certain that they were, really, but I found out that officers like Rigby were doing some bad stuff and I thought this way the government would be pressured into a general investigation into corruption. But people in the gang somehow found out I did it, and they shot me and took him as payback.’

‘That’s wrong,’ Sophie said. ‘I know it was Sawyer. Angus said so too. He kept me up to date with the things Ella wouldn’t tell me, like how she felt Sawyer might have got rid of Lachlan on the baby black market.’

‘He said that? Are you sure?’

‘Positive.’

‘But there’s almost certainly no such thing,’ Chris said. ‘Ella would never seriously suspect that’s what happened.’

‘Then why would he say it?’

Chris was silent for a moment. ‘Where’s Sawyer’s body?’

‘Angus is taking care of it.’ She explained what he was going to do.

‘So your getting away with killing Sawyer depends on Angus’s carrying out his part of the plan.’ Chris suddenly stared at her with such a fire in his eyes she felt afraid.

‘What is it?’

‘Mum told me today that she arranged an abortion for Angus’s sister, Bee, when we were sixteen,’ he said. ‘But the baby wasn’t mine. We never had sex.’ He grabbed her arms so tightly it hurt. ‘Do you see what I’m saying?’

1.05 pm

Four uniformed police waited for Ella and Dennis outside the warehouse. Two local area detectives stood inside, some distance from the ambulance. Ella and Dennis approached slowly, careful not to step on any drug boxes or syringes. It was all evidence and would be photographed in situ before being logged in, packaged up and taken away for analysis.

The body was tied to the stretcher by both wrists and both ankles. The once-white shirt was torn open and what Ella guessed were defibrillation pads were stuck on his chest. She walked parallel to the stretcher, studying the body’s face. ‘It’s him.’

Dennis nodded. ‘I agree.’

Sawyer looked even skinnier than before, perhaps an effect of being dead and flat on his back, though Ella remembered he’d looked more gaunt each time she’d seen him even while alive. There was dried vomit around his mouth and on the floor. His eyes were half-open and an IV bag hung from a metal pole on the stretcher, its tubing connected to his arm. A needle and syringe stuck out of it. Ella twisted her head to read the printed label: ‘
Adrenaline
’.

‘Look at that.’

Ella turned to where Dennis was pointing and saw a crumpled ambulance uniform shirt thrown partly under the ambulance.

‘Detective Orchard?’

Ella looked towards the door, where a uniformed officer and a detective stood with a man in blue workman’s clothing. ‘This man has information.’

The man worked as a welder in a factory down the road. ‘I was on my break,’ he said, ‘about eleven, when I saw a woman come out of the building and walk to the public phone down there. She was almost staggering, so I watched her, thinking she was maybe sick. She stayed in the phone box for a while, I could see she’d sat down in there, then about five or ten minutes later a taxi pulled up and she got in. I didn’t think anything else of it until I saw all you guys here.’

‘What did she look like?’ Dennis said. ‘What was she wearing?’

‘She was tall and slim, and she had long hair tied back in a sort of bun thing. She was wearing a really raggedy-looking shirt, a blue one. And dark trousers. Blue or black, I’m not sure.’

‘Which taxi company was it?’

‘The red and blue one, I can’t remember their name.’

‘Thank you.’ Dennis turned to the detective. ‘Get his statement, track down that taxi and then call me.’ He headed outside, Ella right behind him.