Violent Exposure (16 page)

Mick put his phone away and peered along the back of the house. This porch was higher and furnished with a broken cane chair. He worked his way carefully along, watching the windows, but all was still.

‘Ambulance,’ he called.

No response.

He walked
up the steps to the back door. Another security grille. It was all heavy-duty stuff. He knocked. Nothing. He tried the handle and, to his surprise, it turned.

He pulled it gingerly outwards, then propped it open with the Oxy-Viva. He knocked again on the inner door, then touched the handle. This one turned too.

The instant he opened the door, he caught the faint whiff.
Dead body
.

He let the
door swing wide onto the neat kitchen and tapped his boot on the doorframe. ‘Ambulance.’

Nothing.

He stepped tentatively inside. Clean grey Laminex benches, spices turned label out in a timber rack, a red checked tea towel hanging on the oven door. He moved slowly across the room and into a short, empty hallway. The smell worsened slightly. It wasn’t awful, not like some he’d been to, but he
still breathed as little as possible.

The first doorway led into a small bathroom. He gingerly pushed aside the blue curtain over the bath/shower but it was empty.

The next doorway opened onto a living room. Mick stepped in and saw the body slumped on its knees by a brown velour lounge, face down on the thick cushions. The body looked male, aged probably in his twenties, and was dressed in jeans
and a navy T-shirt, with white socks and new white sneakers on the feet. The arms lay limp on the cushions, one hand dangling over the edge. There were no visible signs of injury, no bloodstains on the floor or lounge.

The coffee table by the dead man’s feet was covered in small plastic bags and smears of white powder. Powder dotted the brown carpet too. Mick couldn’t see any needles or syringes,
but the number of bags and amount of spilled powder – heroin, cocaine, whatever it was – suggested the guy was a dealer rather than a user.

Mick moved closer to see the face, but it was turned down into the cushions. He could see a little stubble by the purplish ear, and as he looked a fly walked over the man’s hair to the orifice. Mick shifted his gaze and spotted something in the gap between
the cushions under the man’s head.

He went to the back of the lounge and looked closer. He leaned over and pushed apart the cushions with his gloved hands. Money. Great wads of it, wrapped in clear plastic bags.

Huge
wads of it.

Mick straightened.

He made a cursory check of the rest of the house but it was empty. In the kitchen, he found a box of medication. Epilim. The guy was epileptic.
He might’ve had a fit and collapsed on the lounge and suffocated. Mick had seen it happen before, when he’d been called to a woman who was found in bed with her face in the pillow.

He took out his phone and called Control. ‘It’s code four.’

‘I’ll get the coppers on their way. Suspicious?’

‘Not looking likely,’ Mick said. ‘No signs of injury or break-in, guy’s an epileptic, face down in the
lounge. Looks like he’s involved in drugs though.’

‘Okay, I’ll pass it on. Just a warning: I know they’re busy, they could take who-knows to get to you.’

‘No worries,’ Mick said.

He ended the call and looked out the back door at the neatly kept yard. A fly buzzed in past him and he lifted the Oxy-Viva from its place and let the screen door close.

Then he saw it.

Part of a shoe print on the
kitchen’s grey vinyl flooring. Part of a shoe print in white powder.

How had he not seen this before? He’d come in looking at the hallway, he remembered. Then he’d been looking at the medication box, at the backyard, at the fly.

It looked like a sneaker print. He checked his boots, then went into the living room and bent down to the dead man’s shoes. It matched neither.

Somebody else had been
here.

It made sense when he thought about it. The mess of spilled powder and bags on the table – as if the dead guy had been working away, weighing out or bagging up or whatever they did, maybe had his aura so he knew a seizure was coming and started to get up but ended face down on the lounge. Later, some user comes around, finds the back door miraculously unlocked, comes in and sees the opportunity
to serve himself. Takes the drugs and, Mick guessed, the scales too, but doesn’t see the money.

Doesn’t see the money.

Mick stared at the body.

The cops would come and see the evidence that the user or whoever had been here, and whatever was missing would be put down to him.

But this guy was a dealer. Who was going to tell the cops what should be here? His dealer mates?

So if the money was
gone, really, nobody would know.

He shook himself.
How can I be thinking this?

But still he went to the back of the lounge and looked down between the cushions.

He was sweating.

A car went past outside and he looked up as if he could see through walls, half-dreading, half-hoping to hear the slam of doors and the step of police boots on the porch, taking this question away from him.

But the
car kept on its way.

He allowed himself one thing: ease the bag out and have a look. Just that much. It wouldn’t matter to the cops. They probably knew the dead guy anyway, knew him as a scumbag – hell, maybe they knew the thief too, maybe they’d already found his corpse if he’d shot up everything he stole.

Mick slid his gloved fingers into the space. The plastic crackled. The bundled notes
were firm. He pulled carefully and the cushions lifted, raising the dead man’s head a little, as if he was going to look up accusingly at Mick from his flat dead eyes. Mick leaned back and turned his head away and kept pulling. The package slid free. He held it with one hand and pushed the cushions down with the other and the man sagged back into place.

Mick stared at the cash in his hand. Hundreds
and fifties in great, thick rubber-banded blocks.

Drug money.

Money made by wrecking people’s lives, which would only have been spent to wreck more.

But now . . .

There was a tap on the back door and Mick almost died on the spot.

‘Hello?’ somebody called.

He dropped the money on the floor and shoved it under the lounge with the toe of his boot, then hurried into the hallway, sweat drowning
his hands inside his gloves and pouring down his back.

An elderly man stood outside the closed screen door, hands cupped so he could see in. ‘Is everything okay?’

Mick stepped carefully over the shoe print and went out to the porch, shutting the screen firmly and keeping one hand against it in a silent message to the old guy that he wasn’t going in. ‘Are you a relative?’ he asked.

‘I live next
door.’ The man gestured at the place with the big greenhouse. ‘I saw your ambulance and thought I’d better come over.’

‘I’m sorry to say that your neighbour’s passed away,’ Mick said.

‘Oh no. Poor man.’

Mick nodded. ‘Did you know him well?’

‘No, he wasn’t very friendly.’ The man’s rheumy eyes were big behind his thick glasses. ‘I’m not saying he was rude, he just kept to himself. He had lots
of visitors, though, so I guess he was sociable enough. Maybe just not with us old ones.’

Mick nodded again. ‘The police are coming and will probably want to talk to you.’

‘Oh no, really?’ The man put a hand on his narrow chest.

‘It’s just procedure,’ Mick said. ‘How about you go home and have a cup of tea in the meantime? They might be a while.’

‘Okay, okay,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’ll do that.’
He went down the steps then looked back up. ‘Would you like to join me?’

‘I can’t leave here, I’m afraid.’

‘I’ll bring one over for you.’

‘Thanks anyway, but I don’t drink it,’ Mick lied. ‘Just make yours and have a sit-down in your kitchen for a while. I’ll send the police over when they get here.’

He watched the old man walk slowly around the corner and stood there until he heard his front
door close. The sun was bright off the garage roof, and his heart was beating hard and he felt sick in the stomach, but at the same time something strong and important thumped in his blood.

This drug money could be put towards something good.

*

The investigation had been moved overnight to run out of the Homicide office in Parramatta, and the longer the morning meeting went on, the faster Ella’s
hopes fell. The detectives who’d worked last night had come up empty on just about everything. They’d found no house fres killing two adults and leaving a teenage son in that ten-year period in WA. They’d had no joy on new CCTV of the man Stewart Bridges claimed to have bumped into, nor any taxi drivers who recalled picking him up. The DNA reports were still some time away. They did have pages
of maybe-useful information called in to the public information lines, but Ella couldn’t help but feel sceptical, even when one caller said he’d sat next to a man who looked like Connor Crawford on a fight from Sydney to Auckland early on the morning after the murder. He’d given the fight and seat numbers and described the man as seeming edgy.

Ella listened to the hope in the reporting detective’s
voice and sighed. Even once they got the passenger manifest and matched it with immigration records, even if they could work out that it was Connor, they still had to find him. Also, at the time of the fight Connor’s photo hadn’t been in the papers, so the caller was going on memory: a notoriously unreliable source. People never really
looked
at people, in her experience. You got an impression
of features – beard, bald, fat – and attitude, usually based more on your perception of their behaviour towards you than any reality, and that was it. She couldn’t count the number of witnesses she’d interviewed who recalled nothing more than ‘He was a tall, rude man with red hair’, or ‘She was a short and friendly woman’.

She put her forehead in her hand.

A uniformed constable knocked at the
door. ‘Detective Marconi, there’s a William Sheppard wanting to speak to you.’

William Sheppard stood by the doors in the waiting room, staring out at the street. He turned when Ella walked in and wiped his eyes on the back of his hand. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘You have no need to be,’ she said. ‘Would you like a coffee?’

‘Not just now, thank you.’ He looked pale and thin. ‘Lydia’s had a stroke.’

‘Oh no. I’m so sorry. Is she okay?’

‘I don’t know.’ His face crumpled and he started to cry.

Ella squeezed his shoulder.

‘She’s semi-conscious, she doesn’t know anything, she keeps asking for Suzanne.’

Ella put her arms around him. He clung to her and she felt the thinness of his arms and shoulders and the bony protuberances of his spine. It was like hugging her own father.

‘They don’t know
if she’ll recover. She might be completely fine again in time, or she might go downhill and . . .’ He gulped. ‘I’ve had to put the funeral off, I just can’t . . . I can’t.’

‘It’s okay,’ Ella said.

‘I don’t know what to say to her. She cries because Suzanne’s not there. She says she must be a bad mother if her only daughter won’t come to her.’ He let her go and wept into his hands. His scalp
was thinly haired like Franco’s. ‘Have you caught him yet? Please tell me you’ve caught him.’

‘Not yet, but I promise you we’re doing everything we can.’ She gripped his arm. ‘We’ve got a big team on this and we’re all doing our absolute best for Suzanne.’

‘I know what you did for that boy who’d been dead twenty years. I know you can help our Suzie too.’

The Tim Pieters case
. A lump rose in
Ella’s throat, and she hugged him again. ‘Go back to your wife. I’ll call you the second we have any news.’

‘Sometimes she doesn’t know me,’ he said. ‘Thirty-three years we’ve been together. It was just her and me and Suzie, our perfect little world, and now . . .’ He shook his head.

She pressed her card into his hand. ‘My mobile number’s on there. Please phone me anytime.’

She watched him
leave, then went to the bathroom, ran cold water on a folded paper towel and pressed it to her eyes. She turned the air dryer onto her face, then, when it finished, took out her mobile.

Her parents’ home phone rang out and their mobile went to voicemail.

‘Hi, it’s me,’ she said. ‘Just checking in. Sorry I couldn’t stay for dinner last night. I’ll try to come around this evening. Hope everything’s
good.’ The lump rose again. ‘I love you. Bye.’

*

If the money wouldn’t fit in the Oxy-Viva, Mick’s dilemma was solved.

He laid the bag on top.

It would fit fine.

He put his hands on his hips.

He’d been waiting for the cops for twenty minutes. In that time he’d paced the room, inspected the cornices for pinhole cameras, having seen that sort of thing in drug busts on T V, and stared at the
back of the dead man’s head.

‘If you don’t want me to take it, give me a sign,’ he said to him. Silence.

It made perfect logical sense. Money made from pain and suffering could be turned into love and joy. Nobody would know it was gone, and if they did they’d blame the user who stole the drugs.

Pain and suffering into love and joy.

‘It’s almost wrong
not
to do it,’ he said.

He projected himself
into the future: having the money, spending it. Would he feel bad? It was difficult to know, because mostly what he saw was Jo holding up a positive test strip, this baby actually holding on till viability, and then the two of them cradling a newborn in a pink dreamyland cloud.

‘Do or do not do,’ he said in his best Yoda voice.

He dropped to his knees and unzipped the Viva in a rush. He grabbed
the parcel of money and felt it again, checking for any oddness, a dye pack or a bomb, inspected the notes – some older than others, non-sequential as far as he could see – and then pushed it inside. It didn’t quite go. He’d forgotten about the equipment already in there. He shoved aside the oxygen masks, crammed the Laerdal resuscitation bags against the bottom, and forced the package in.