Violent Exposure (4 page)

Dennis nodded.

On the far side of the paved courtyard stood a single garage. The door was up, the car space empty. The driveway was loose sand-coloured pebbles and led past the pavers down the left side of the house to the street. The fence between the driveway and the neighbour’s place was mostly hidden behind a thick box hedge.

‘No knife?’ Ella said.

‘Not yet.’

Ella turned to the
door and inspected both the inside and outside handles. They were smooth metal, good for prints. She could feel the case building in her chest and hid a shiver of excitement from the others.

She went back inside, past the body and along the hall. The lounge room looked as undisturbed as the driveway. An empty beer bottle stood on a coaster on the coffee table. DNA from saliva. Fingerprints from
the glass. The shiver increased.

‘Bin under the sink is full of those,’ the officer said.

She wasn’t surprised. Alcohol was a notorious trigger in domestic homicides.

A flatscreen TV was off but a floor lamp in the corner was on. Opposite the TV stood a three-seater, brown leather lounge. Four framed photos on a weathered wood buffet showed a woman recognisable as Suzanne with a tall brown-haired
man who looked a little older than her. Others showed either the pair of them or Suzanne alone with other people: an older couple who Ella thought could be her parents, a group of twenty-something friends on a beach. None showed the man without Suzanne. Ella picked a good head-and-shoulders shot of them both.

Dennis nodded. ‘Double-check that’s him with the friend.’

They were taking off their
gloves and booties on the porch when a station wagon with
Paramedic Superintendent
emblazoned on the side pulled up. The barrel-bodied man who stormed out had grey hair scraped firmly back and no jacket. Mick Schultz straightened, almost apprehensively, Ella thought.

‘What the fuck’s going on?’ the superintendent barked at Mick.

Ella joined them. ‘Detectives Marconi and Orchard.’

‘Superintendent
Ben Holland.’ He stuck out his hand and Ella shook it. His forearms were furred with thick grey hair.

‘I’m so sorry about all this,’ Mick said.

Ella shook her head. ‘It’s not your doing.’

He gave her a small smile, then glanced over his shoulder into the ambulance cabin. In the passenger seat a young man watched them warily.

Ben Holland yanked the door open. ‘Out. Speak.’

‘Actually,’ Ella
said, ‘we’ll need to interview him formally at the station.’

The young man blanched, and Holland slammed the door on him. ‘You need Micko as well?’

Ella nodded. ‘And the paramedic who was here last night.’

‘Carly.’ Holland pulled out a mobile. ‘I’ll call her.’

‘We’ll do that, thanks,’ Dennis said.

Holland scribbled down a number and handed it over.

Ella turned to Mick and nodded at the cabin.
‘Don’t discuss any of this with him in the meantime.’

‘No fear of that.’ The anger in his voice was clear.

Ella and Dennis went to the marked car. The Crawfords’ friend sat with his head in his hands. Ella opened the door. ‘Step out, please.’

He moaned.

‘Step out.’

The man dropped his head to his knees and started to cry.

‘Let’s just take him to the station,’ Dennis said.

‘Kings Cross is
expecting you,’ the duty officer said.

Ella nodded. They would eventually run the investigation out of the Homicide office in Parramatta, but at the beginning they always worked out of somewhere close by. ‘Mick can drive the ambulance across and I’ll take the randy paramedic,’ she said. ‘You bring this one.’

‘Gee, thanks.’ Dennis reached in and hauled on the weeping man’s arm.

Ella put the
young paramedic in the front of her car. ‘What’s your name?’ she said.

‘Aidan Simpson.’

He was lean and smooth-skinned, with black hair cropped short around the back and longer at the front. She could smell his cologne. She knew his type, had seen it a million times in the young guys who joined the cops at least partly to impress girls with their uniform and their guns. Paramedics could be even
more appealing with the whole caring thing they had going on.

She started the car and turned it around. He sat with his hands between his knees like a little boy.
Just a trainee.
She wondered if there were rules about relationships between paramedics and patients like there were between cops and victims. Not that a one-day stand really counted as a relationship. But still.

The streets were quiet
and the station wasn’t far and she followed Dennis’s tail-lights and let Aidan stew in the silence.

They were almost there when he said, ‘She came onto me, you know.’

‘It’s best you don’t say anything now.’

‘What am I, a suspect?’

‘Why would you ask that?’

‘Suspects get that Miranda warning thing.’

‘And have I recited that to you?’

‘You said it’s best not to talk. Same difference.’

She
gave him a cool smile and parked in the police-only zone outside the station. Dennis was already walking inside with the slump-shouldered friend. Aidan got out and pushed his hands deep into his trouser pockets. The ambulance drove up and Ella indicated to Mick that he should park behind her, then she pointed out the path to the waiting room at the front of the station.

Inside the station, she
put Aidan in an interview room. ‘Wait here.’

Dennis had taken the friend to another interview room.

‘He say anything?’ Ella asked.

Dennis shook his head. ‘Just cried. I cautioned him anyway.’ He dug in his pocket for the slip of paper with the other paramedic’s information on it. ‘You want to phone her while I get us set up?’

‘Will do.’

But first she went to the waiting room. Mick sat on
the low chair with his elbows on his knees, the posture of a man whose worries hung on a too-thin strap around his neck.

Ella said, ‘I’m about to call Carly. I won’t say much about why we want her to come in, so if you’re here when she arrives, please don’t tell her anything.’

He nodded.

‘We’ll have somebody take your statement as soon as we can. Meantime, can I get you a coffee?’

He shook
his head. ‘Thanks anyway.’

She went out, letting the door close gently between them.

In the main office, she sat at a vacant desk and pulled the phone close. It was just after one in the morning.

‘Hello?’ Sleepy.

‘Carly Martens?’

‘Yes.’ Alert now.

‘This is Detective Ella Marconi calling from Kings Cross police station. We need you to come in and make a statement regarding a homicide.’

‘Did Mick put you up to this?’

‘I can give you the station number and you can call me back if you want,’ Ella said. ‘Mick is here, actually.’

‘What? Is he okay?’

‘He’s fine. He’ll be giving a statement too.’

‘Christ, it must be Aidan then,’ Carly said. ‘Is
he
okay?’

‘Fine,’ Ella said. ‘Can you come in? Now?’

‘Sure, yes. The Cross?’

‘Yes.’

‘Twenty minutes.’

Ella was hanging up when she
saw a familiar figure hurry past the door. ‘Detective Peter Hepburn, how are you this lovely morning?’

He came back. ‘Hey, Ella. Where’s this briefing at?’

‘You live too close. Nobody else is here yet,’ she said. ‘Take a couple of statements for me in the meantime?’

‘Sure.’

She explained about Mick and Carly, and left him to it.

She found Dennis waiting outside the interview room, and glanced
through the window in the door to see the friend lifting a polystyrene cup in a shaking hand.

She opened the door and they went in.

Dennis began by cautioning the man again.

He stared gloomily into his cup. ‘I knew you’d think it was me.’

Ella said, ‘State your name, address, date of birth and occupation.’

‘Stewart James Bridges, 14 Loganlea Crescent, Stanmore, third of July, sixty-eight.
I’m a freelance photographer.’

‘Who is in this photo?’ Ella held out the picture they’d taken from the Crawfords’ house.

‘That’s Suzanne and Connor.’

‘Does Connor have any identifying marks? Tattoos? Things like that?’

‘No tatts that I’m aware of, but he has this funny-shaped birthmark on his neck here.’ Bridges touched the left side of his neck, just under his collar. ‘You can see it if he’s
wearing a low-necked T-shirt.’

‘What sort of funny shape?’

‘Kind of two round things put together. Like a filled-in number eight.’

‘Is he taller than you?’

‘An inch or so.’

That made him about a metre eighty-five. ‘Has he put on or lost weight since this photo? Grown a beard or cut his hair?’

Bridges looked at the picture again. ‘No, he’s just the same. Not skinny but not fat. Just average.’

‘Wear glasses? Coloured contacts?’

‘No.’

Ella said, ‘How did you come to be driving past their house tonight?’

‘I’d been out drinking in the city and went past on the way home.’

‘Where in the city?’

‘All over. The Cross, right in town. Everywhere.’

‘How does the drive from the city to Stanmore take in Potts Point?’

‘I never said it was a direct route,’ Bridges said.

‘So you just cruised
past,’ Ella said. ‘Did you plan to knock on their door and visit for a while?’

‘Not necessarily.’

‘What then?’

‘I was looking to see if their lights were on,’ he said. ‘If I thought they were still up then maybe I would’ve knocked, yes.’

‘For what?’ Ella said. ‘Toilet stop? Cup of coffee?’

‘We’re friends. I was in the area.’

Ella looked at Dennis. ‘You ever drop in to see your friends that
late at night?’

‘Nope.’

‘Me neither.’ She looked back at Bridges. ‘So?’

‘It doesn’t matter why I was there,’ Bridges said. ‘I went past, I saw their door was open, I parked. I knocked on the open door and called out. I got no reply and I walked in and I saw poor Suzanne there in the kitchen.’

Ella watched him blink back tears.
Weasel
. ‘Why did you say you knew we would think that it was you?’

‘On TV, cops always think the killer’s the person who found the body.’

‘Did you kill Suzanne?’

‘No!’

‘How did you see that their door was open?’

‘How do you mean? It was open, and I saw it. How else can you see something?’

‘You told the duty officer that the lights were off in the house.’

‘They were.’

‘So how could you see that the door was open if there were no lights on inside, no light
streaming out?’

He scratched the back of his head. ‘There was enough light on the street.’

‘The door’s set deep in that porch.’

‘There was enough.’

‘So why were you there?’ Ella said.

‘I told you, I just happened by.’

‘A moment ago you said the reason didn’t matter.’

‘It doesn’t! I just happened by, and it’s completely irrelevant in the scheme of things, and yet you’re spending all this
time trying to get me to explain it when somebody out there killed Suzanne.’ He wiped his eyes on his jacket sleeve. ‘It feels like you’re wasting time.’

‘So the door was open,’ Dennis said.

‘Yes. I just said that.’

‘And then what did you do?’

‘I told you. I called out and heard nothing. I was worried maybe something had happened. I turned on the lights. So if you find my fingerprints there,
that’s why. But I was just worried about Connor and Suze.’

Suze.
‘Go on,’ Ella said.

‘I walked down the hallway.’

‘Even though you thought something was wrong.’

‘Yes.’

‘You didn’t think to stay out on the street and call us?’

Another scratch of the back of his head. ‘I was worried about them.’

‘What did you do when you saw Suzanne?’

‘I froze,’ Bridges said. ‘It didn’t seem real. Then I
thought maybe I could help her and I bent down, but when I touched her her skin was cool and I knew it was too late. I think that’s when I got the blood on my shoes.’

Forensic examination would help determine if that was true. ‘And then what did you do?’

‘I got out my phone and rang triple 0,’ he said. ‘Then some cops turned up and they made me go outside.’

‘You stayed in the kitchen all that
time?’

‘It was only a couple of minutes, I think.’

‘You stood there looking at her for even that long?’ Ella said. Most people ran away as fast as they could.

‘I felt like . . .’ He cleared his throat. ‘Like I didn’t want to leave her alone.’

Ella caught the faint flush spreading across his face. ‘How close were you and Suze?’

‘Just, you know, friends. I was friends with both of them.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘How long have you been friends?’

‘It’s hard to say. Couple of years, maybe.’

‘But you don’t remember how you met?’

‘I meet a lot of people in my job.’

‘So you met them through work,’ Ella said.

‘No, I mean . . . I’m always meeting lots of people and I don’t store my friends catalogued in my head by the ways we met.’

‘You said you’re a freelance photographer,’
Dennis said. ‘What kind of things do you photograph?’

‘Whatever I’m paid to do,’ Bridges said. ‘I shoot for magazines, I do a lot of corporate stuff, real estate sometimes. Portraits. Weddings. Whatever.’

Ella made a note to Google his work. Maybe he had a thing about death.

‘You seem much calmer now than when we first met you,’ she said. ‘Why is that?’

‘I guess the shock wore off,’ he said.
‘You probably see that a lot.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Usually people who find their friends murdered stay pretty upset.’

Bridges looked at the table. ‘It’ll hit me again later, no doubt.’

‘No doubt.’ Ella nudged Dennis’s foot under the table. It was time to leave Bridges alone for a while to think. They got up. ‘We need to check a few things then we’ll come back.’

Bridges frowned. ‘Do I need a lawyer?’

‘What for?’