Jill Jackson - 02 - Voodoo Doll (25 page)

Well not really alone. Jill thought briefly about the white-eyed girl – a dissociated part of herself that had separated from her consciousness when the pain and fear had become unbearable. 'They burned me,' she said in a small voice. 'Raped me. I didn't even know what sex was.' Her voice trailed off.

'They dropped me off at a school oval,' she continued, finally, in a tiny voice. 'I was naked. Still blindfolded. I often wonder who found me, and if they're okay now. I can't remember any of that last bit. There are lots of blanks.' She looked up at him. 'I suppose I should be grateful for that.' She laughed, harshly. 'Stuff still comes back in nightmares, though,' she said. 'I guess that's what I meant when I said the past keeps coming back.'

'That's fucked,' he said. 'Sorry.' Then, 'Did they catch them?'

'Nup. Not then,' she said. 'The younger one killed the older one when he got senile and started telling anyone who would listen about the sick shit they used to do to kids. They were part of an organised ring.'

And I killed the other one six months ago.
She thought it, but didn't speak the words. The knowledge registered feelings of relief, satisfaction, horror. She stared at her hands.

Jill's mobile sounded, and she fumbled reaching for it.

'Jackson,' she said; then, 'Okay. Be right over.' She put the phone back in her jacket pocket. Gabriel was already standing.

'They're ready?' he asked.

'Yep.' She found her legs wobbly when she stood. 'Forensics have faxed over a copy of their findings to Mobbs. His report's being printed now.'

Fifteen minutes later, Jill's passenger door wasn't yet shut when Gabriel hooked a U-turn in front of the traffic on Parramatta Road. Tyres shrieked. She held on. He hit the siren.

'It wasn't him.' Jill said it again, third time.

'He's going to go and get them, Jill. Try to get them on the phone.'

The coroner's report had revealed that the burned bodies in the home of Joss Preston-Jones and Isobel Rymill belonged to two men named Simon Esterhase and Guo Qi Xu, AKA Tatts. Each had a substantial criminal record. They were both known associates of Henry Nguyen. Cutter.

A comparison of the organic material found at the Rice and Capitol Hill crime scenes had specifically ruled out that Nguyen was one of the dead men.

The phone rang unanswered at the Mosman residence.

P
ERFECT TIMING AS
usual, Mother, thought Joss, driving through the night back to Mosman from Rozelle Hospital. He'd made the trip countless times throughout his adolescence – his grandfather doing the driving in the early days, then his grandmother. Finally, before leaving for the army, he would use the trip as practice for his driver's licence. His mother had made the trip many more times without them, in an ambulance, after hours of screaming obscenities, often naked, sometimes in front of their affronted North Shore neighbours.

Tonight, Joss's wife and child made the trip with him. He figured that his family's arrival and the disruption to his mother's routine had caused her fragile chemical stability to crumble yet again.

He stole a glance at Isobel's pale profile, and gripped the steering wheel tighter. It wasn't as though their presence in the Mosman house could have disturbed his mother too terribly. Isobel had said barely anything since they had climbed from the roof of their burning home on Monday night, two days ago. Even Charlie was quiet, listless.

Thinking back to that night, Joss could almost smell the smoke in his daughter's hair. When he'd handed Charlie to Isobel on the roof, the night air and the urgency of the situation had roused his sensibilities. Leaving Isobel clutching a wide-eyed and shuddering Charlie, he had worked quickly, the sound of the flames now audible over the noise of their smoke alarm. He had lowered the ladder to the ground and gone back for Charlie. He had prised his daughter from his wife's grip at the edge of the roof, and again clinging to her with one arm, had instructed Isobel to follow him. On the ground safely, they walked in single file towards the front of the house. A huddle of neighbours now stood in the street, mobile phones to their ears, panic painted on their faces in the streetlights.

Joss had pulled his blank-faced wife into the shadows near the Wilkinson's terrace next door, motioning her to squat with him behind the large council wheelie bins. Urgently, he'd asked Isobel what had happened when he'd left the room, and she had recounted, as dry and factual as a police officer testifying in court, what had happened in the bedroom. His relief when she had described the dead man's features had brought him to sobs. But the emotion behind the tears quickly gave way to grief for his wife. She had that night become a member of a terrible club, and it was his fault. He knew too well that killing another human being left a terrible legacy.

When he'd heard emergency services approaching their street, Joss had made Isobel narrate, three times, an alternative story: that he had killed both men in the house. When the details of her account were consistent, he had taken her hand and Charlie's, and walked with them through the smoke and out into the street.

Now, in the driver's seat, Joss steered with one hand; the other rubbed at his forehead. Either Isobel would come to believe the tale he'd constructed that night or she wouldn't. Regardless, the weight of the repression, or the horror of the truth, would burden her. His poisoned past had infected his innocent girls. He could never forgive himself. They'd probably have a better life without him.

A gentle rain smeared the world outside the car. Joss wished they could stay in here forever, that he could just drive with his family to another place, another time, where none of this had happened, and his girls were shiny and smiling again. He glanced into the rear-view mirror. The shoosh of the tyres on the night-wet road had lulled Charlie into a fitful sleep. Isobel's forehead rested on the passenger window, her breath a frosty ghost on the glass. What did she see out there with that thousand-mile stare, he wondered.

Joss accelerated carefully. He hunched forward over the wheel, staring intently through the drizzle. Nearly there. He had to get back to the house in Mosman. The ghouls in his mind were impatient, and the bourbon was waiting.

It's taking forever to get there, thought Jill.

Night roadworks had snarled the traffic, and Gabe kept the siren on until they hit Mosman.

When they finally arrived, Jill climbed carefully out of the car. The dirt-tang of the rain on the road filled her nostrils, all senses acute. Joss's phone had rung out five times on the trip over, and her neck was taut with tension. If Cutter was coming after this family, she thought, it could well be tonight. She and Gabriel had been out here until late last night finalising the statements. The police presence would've kept him away yesterday. In the car, speeding over here, Jill had tried to reason that it was more likely that Nguyen had done a runner – figured his luck had run out and gone to ground. But the intensity of Gabriel next to her as he negotiated the vehicle through the city traffic had chased the thought from her mind.

Gabriel believed Cutter was coming here.

She took several deep breaths to flood her bloodstream with oxygen and moved around the car to his side.

The mansion squatted in the darkness. If there was any moon, tonight it was obscured by the mist that hung above them. The drizzle had stopped for now, but it draped, poised, waiting to fall.

Jill led Gabriel in through the heavy iron gates, her radio in hand. The overgrown vegetation around them shifted and breathed in the dark; the garden of a madwoman. There were hiding spots everywhere, and Jill kept her other hand near her gun. The house ahead lay completely silent, but she'd expected that. There were obviously no nursing staff on tonight. The nurse, or Joss or Isobel, would've answered the phone if they were in there. If they'd been able to. She swallowed the thought, and moved closer to the house.

On the threshold of the ornate entryway, Gabriel touched her elbow, pointed with two fingers to his eyes, and then to the right of the house. Jill nodded and walked left; Gabriel moved to the right. She debated whether to call for backup. She'd wait, she decided, until they'd determined whether the perimeter was secure. She hooked her radio back onto her gunbelt, took her gun from its holster and unclipped her torch.

Most of the gravel path that must've once surrounded the house had been reclaimed by the garden; the sound of her footfalls was absorbed by wet vegetation. Jill smelled rot with each step.

She'd not reached the back of the sprawling house when her tread crunched. Broken glass glinted at her feet in the torchlight. She directed the beam upwards. The small white-framed window probably opened onto a laundry or small study; the glass had been shattered, and the window hung ajar.

Jill signalled Gabriel's radio with her own, and stepped away from the window, into the grass. She made a quiet call for police assistance and waited for her partner. She watched him jog silently from around the back of the building.

'I've called for backup,' she whispered, playing the torch beam over the window and back down to the glass below to show him what she'd found.

He nodded.

It was not difficult to gain a toehold in the red brick wall for the one step-up needed to reach the window. The frame was clear of glass. Jill pulled herself in after Gabriel. As she'd guessed, the room was a laundry. A tiny one. These houses were all designed by men, Jill couldn't help but think, in the days when a male would never wash a shirt or cook a meal. She and Gabriel stood face to face in the darkness. Their breathing was the only sound she could hear.

'We should do this together,' he whispered.

'No time,' she said. The blood-spattered walls from the house in Capitol Hill filled her vision, and she felt compelled to move quickly. What if he's in here? What if they're still alive?

She couldn't decide whether the look Gabriel gave her was of relief or doubt, but he nodded, and they moved out of the room.

'I'll take downstairs,' he whispered.

Jill kept her back to the wall as she made her way to the grand staircase in the centre of the loungeroom. Cutter had no firearm offences on his sheet, but that meant nothing – he had access to the nine guns from the Capitol Hill robbery. She ran lightly up the stairs with her heart in her mouth, bolted to the cover of a wall and squatted in a crouch.

That window could've been broken ages ago, she told herself, as she slid along the cold plaster wall. No one really looked after this place. She used the reasoning to temper the panic that always built when she couldn't see anything.

The hallway that led away from the stairs was windowless, and the darkness was built of shadows and blacker voids behind them that could conceal anything.

They'd kept her blindfolded in the basement when she was twelve, and she knew that terror grew so quickly in the absence of light that it could push all vestiges of sanity from the mind. She waited for the numbness to kick in. The sensor that tripped when she experienced any emotion too strongly should have engaged by now. But her anxiety continued to climb.

Jill decided to take control of her feelings by tuning in carefully to all of her other senses. The house creaked and moaned in the quiet way that old houses complained as they aged.

She steeled herself to enter the doorway on her left. The master bedroom, she remembered, pushing the door backwards with her left hand and then following her gun into the room. She swept through quickly, back flat against the walls when possible, listening for breathing or movement in the dark. Nothing.

Back in the hallway, Jill froze.
There
. A sound, behind her. Footsteps. She squatted, and then crawled back towards the noise. Peering over the balustrade of the balcony, she spotted Gabriel patrolling. She let go of her breath. He'd heard her too, and signalled. She moved back into the hallway, and made her way into the second room. A bathroom. Tiny. She checked the possible hiding places and made her way to the third room along the hallway. Joss's room, she remembered, as she pushed the door back.

Jill heard the woof of the knife as it sliced through the darkness, but didn't feel it when it bit into her gun hand. Pain or not, her gun clattered to the ground, and she screamed into the mask in front of her. Panic detonated behind her eyes as she struggled to get her left hand up to strike, but he had the momentum and he used it to pull her to him, towards the knife. When she stopped screaming to breathe, she thought she heard him giggle. She pulled backwards with everything she had, but he had hold of her jacket.

Every millisecond of the next few moments seemed to register. She saw his eyes widen and at the same instant, she detected movement behind her. He heaved her towards him with the force that still reverberated from his original strike, and smacked his forearm across her throat.

Gabriel stood in the doorway. His gun pointed at them.

Cutter chortled in her ear and she felt his arms and chest tense to pull the machete sideways, to slice her throat. She absorbed his madness, and the physical power that accompanied it, through the skin of his arm on her neck.

Gabriel's eyes met hers.

Yes, she told him, without a word.

Then there was just white. No sound.

The blast blew them backwards and Jill flew through the air with Cutter, landing merged with him on the floor at the base of the bed. Her cheek rested against his neck. Above his nose was purple-red, wet. His right eye and the top of his skull were pulverised.

Her mouth filled with the smell of singed wool, cordite, and vaporised blood.

Jill's hearing returned in stutters. She listened to Cutter living and dying with each breath. The death rattle.

She couldn't move. She lay there breathing in this man's soul as it left his body. She felt close to him, part of him, dying there with him. Her mouth on his neck, she whispered into the blood. Not long now, she told him.

But Cutter first had something to say.

Because they made no sense, and she'd never been certain that she had actually heard them, Jill had never repeated the words to anyone.

'Coming, Grandfather.'

'Thanks,' Jill managed in the back of the ambulance.

'Sorry,' said Gabriel.

She couldn't hear him, couldn't hear anything at the moment actually, as the deafness had returned, but she'd seen him mouth the word. She nodded and tried to touch her face. The medical attendant pushed her hand away. The bullet had been so close that her cheek was seared. The ambo sprayed something cold on her skin that felt wonderful.

'Tell me you're a great shot,' she said to Gabriel. She couldn't hear herself. She was probably shouting.

He smiled at her, reached forward and gently smoothed her fringe from her forehead.

'I'm a great shot,' she saw him say.

Gabriel's hand continued down the length of her hair and onto her shoulder, then stopped. Emotions scudded across his dark eyes like a storm across a night sky. She saw grief, guilt, hope. A question.

She reached up and found his hand, held it tight and closed her eyes. She rested her injured hand on her chest.

Underneath, the butterfly pendant seemed to tremble against her heart.