Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) (6 page)

‘Leave it, Harry,’ he said.

‘You must be pretty set on this suspect if you’re certain he didn’t kill Claudia,’ I said. ‘Maybe because you were watching your suspect when Claudia was killed. Am I right? Have you got enough for an arrest?’

‘I didn’t even say we had a suspect.’

‘Well, if you don’t have a suspect, I have to assume you’re letting Nigel and his band of asshats push me away because they want it to be a men-only case.’

I punched Pops in the stomach. He fell against the ropes.

‘Harry—’

‘I’m a good cop, you know.’ I thumped my chest with my boxing glove. ‘Being a woman shouldn’t exclude me from anything.’

‘No one’s excluding you.’

‘The Camden strangler? Dennis Yama? David Paris, that cannibal guy? They were all me, Pops. Homicide got the credit, sure, but it was the sex crimes side of those investigations that put them on track.’

‘Harry, no one’s doubting your abilities.’

‘Then why the fuck am I being shut out?’

I pummelled Pops with a series of hits to the head. Without warning, he clutched at his chest and fell into the corner of the ring. I watched in horror as he collapsed.

‘OH SHIT!’ I
tore my gloves off. ‘Shit! Pops! I’m sorry!’

I dragged the old man to his feet. He unclipped the padded helmet and let it fall to the mat. His face was red and drenched in sweat. He thumped his chest as though he had heartburn and shook his head.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘I’m sorry. I got carried away.’

‘You’re too good for your old trainer, Harry.’ He batted me on the shoulder with his glove. ‘You’re a good cop, too. You’re not being shut out of the Georges River task force because of your abilities, or your gender. You gotta let it go. OK?’

‘Why?’ I followed the old man to the stool at the opposite corner of the ring. I handed him the bottle of water sitting there. ‘I just don’t understand. I feel like there’s something you’re keeping from me. And we’ve never been like this, Pops. We’ve never kept things from each other.’

The old man sucked at the water bottle and regained his breath. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. I ducked my head to try to see what was hidden there, whether it was guilt or shame or concern cutting him off from me. But he wiped his forehead on the back of his arm and turned away.

‘It’ll all come out in time,’ he said. ‘And when it does, you’ll … You’ll be grateful for all the time you
didn’t
know the truth.’

HOPE NEEDED TO
stay calm. It was rational planning and control that was going to get her through this. As soon as she had the Spellings’ money, she was out of here. Off towards the sunrise on the gentle waves. She’d never look back on Sydney, on the feast of horrors the city had provided over her life. This town deserved to burn. She walked along the pier between the yachts and looked at the glowing city towers reflected in the black harbour. Soon she’d be underway.

Her plan was to leave the memories of what she had done to Jenny and Ken Spelling behind, along with the memories of her father and his sweaty, grabby hands. She’d try to replace the night beast he’d become after her mother’s death with the man she remembered from her early childhood, his eyes set on the horizon, one warm hand on hers as he taught her to direct the helm, taking them out towards the edge of forever. She’d leave them behind with the memories of her almost skeletal mother curled up in the tub she’d died in, with the smoke-saturated bedrooms of the Black Garter hotel where she’d worked for almost all of her adult life. If she closed her eyes, she could still see the red lamplight out the front of the house of horrors, the men smoking there, looking at their phones, talking about the girls inside and which ones provided which services. Soon, when she closed her eyes, it would be the Caribbean sun burning red light there. Or maybe Key Largo. She hadn’t decided yet.

As she powered the
New Hope
east out over the South Pacific, she’d jettison the images that sometimes zapped through her. Claudia’s howling mouth as she’d sailed downward into the blackness of the ocean, the anchor yanking her soundlessly into the dark. Her confused eyes as Hope had come into the kitchen after they’d secured the Spellings in the bathroom, the hammer in her fist.

I thought we were in this together …

Her squeal of disbelief as Hope had raised the hammer above her head.

HOPE STILL CARRIED
the hammer with her in Jenny’s cream Louis Vuitton handbag. She supposed she’d have to get rid of that, too. She was dreaming as she wandered along mooring number 17 and almost ran into the overweight man with the clipboard standing there.

‘Oh! Sorry!’

‘It’s all right,’ he laughed. His name tag said ‘Steve’. ‘Is this your yacht here?’

‘Yes, it is, actually.’ Hope smiled. ‘It’s just come out of dry dock. I signed in at the office.’

‘Yes, yes, that’s all good.’ Steve glanced at his clipboard. ‘I’m actually just doing a safety inspection. The coastguard makes us do spot checks now and then on all the moorings.’

‘Uh-huh.’ Hope chewed her lip. She listened to the boat beside them. Was that thumping she could hear? Could Steve hear it too?

‘Everything’s fine. It’s just … It’s so weird.’ Steve pointed with his pen to a red cone-shaped device strapped to the side of the deck. ‘I’m running checks on all the EPIRBs to make sure they’re all registered and up to date, and this one isn’t right.’

Hope shifted her handbag on her shoulder. ‘An EPIRB?’

‘It’s an emergency position-indicating radio beacon.’ Steve looked at the sky, recited the words carefully. ‘Ha, that’s what I think it stands for, anyway. That beacon gets wet and it’ll send a signal to the coastguard telling them you’re in trouble. You’ll want to chuck it in the water long before you start to sink, though!’

‘Right,’ Hope laughed.

‘They also kind of act like a microchip would in your family dog,’ Steve said. ‘They’re registered to particular people, and particular boats, in case the boat gets lost. Or the people get lost! Ha! Now, I’m seeing that your boat here is the
New Hope
. But when I look up your EPIRB number on the computer, it says this boat should be
Dream Catcher
.’

Steve tipped his clipboard, which he used to balance a thin computer tablet. Hope hardly glanced at the numbers on the screen.

‘Did you change your vessel’s name, Ms …’ Steve looked at the screen, ‘Ms Spelling?’

‘Uh, no.’ Hope wiped sweat from her neck. ‘No, this is … This is a different vessel. That we … we only recently purchased, my husband and I.’

‘Oh.’

‘I mean, I’m not even Ms Spelling.’ Hope drew a long breath. ‘Whoever that is. I’m … Uh.’

Steve waited.

‘Look, would you like to come aboard?’ Hope gestured to the yacht. ‘Come on board and I’ll show you the paperwork and we can sort all this out.’

‘Sure thing.’ Steve smiled. He turned and stepped across the small gangway to the deck.

Hope followed, sliding her hand into the darkness of her handbag and around the polished handle of the hammer.

DESPITE THE EVENING
gym session, I couldn’t sleep. I desperately needed to. I called my brother and blasted him with complaints about Tox as soon as he picked up.

‘What actually
is
the story with this guy?’ he said. ‘How can he possibly be a cop if you’re saying he’s killed two people?’

‘No idea,’ I grunted. ‘People are saying he was seven years old. If I had to guess, I’d say that because of his age at the time of the crime, he’d have been charged with involuntary manslaughter, if he was charged with anything at all. Apparently it was a group of boys, not just him. So his lawyers would have said he was influenced by the group, and far too young to know what he was doing.’

‘But you don’t actually know any details about it?’

‘No, the records are sealed. I tried to have a look before I left work this afternoon.’

Sam scoffed. ‘So it’s all just rumour, really?’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘Maybe he didn’t do it.’

‘If he didn’t do it, he’d have set everyone straight, right?’ I said. ‘The bosses would have set everyone straight. He must have done it.’

We fell silent.

‘I’d like to think he didn’t do it,’ I admitted. ‘But when I look in his eyes, I’m not so sure.’

I SAT IN
bed all night on the computer after speaking to Sam, clicking around, looking for Claudia Burrows. She’d recently scrubbed her social media presence clean. There were suggestions that she’d once had a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but these were empty now, the links broken. I saw a couple of pictures of her on sites that must have belonged to her friends. She was a very different girl to the one whom I’d seen washed up on the shores of the Georges River. Her hair, which had been short and dark when she died, was long and bleach-blonde, the roots dark and the ends scraggly. I learned that she sometimes went under the name Claudia Dee. Did multiple names mean multiple identities? Was it Claudia Dee who’d worn the skimpy clothes that filled most of her wardrobe, and Claudia Burrows who’d bought the more formal attire?

I didn’t like the idea that Claudia had been pretending to be someone else, and that she’d recently told her creditors that she was coming into money. Had she been conducting a scam? If so, who was the victim? Had she been planning a robbery? I put the laptop away, discouraged by all the dead ends, and tried to sleep. Ten minutes later I had it open again, doing different searches.

At midnight I called Chris Murray, the detective from the Surry Hills station.

‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’

‘Murray,’ I said, ‘you’ve got connections in the records department, don’t you? I want you to help me out. I’m wandering aimlessly around the Internet looking for anything I can get on Tox Barnes. Maybe they changed his name after the crime? Is that why I can’t find any newspaper articles about him?’

‘The fact that you’re carrying on working with that monster without looking for an out is exactly the reason I won’t help you,’ he said. ‘You should be trying to get away from him, not trying to understand him. I’m hanging up, Harry.’

‘Murray, don’t go! I need help here, man.’

‘He
murdered
a woman and her kid,’ Murray said. ‘He and a bunch of other kids stabbed them to death.’

‘I thought they beat them to death.’

‘Is how they did it very important?’

‘I guess not. What exactly am I supposed to do, Murray? I’ve got a homicide on my hands. You know how often I get homicides in sex crimes? I can’t just walk out on this.’

‘Feign sickness and leave the case to him,’ he said. ‘He’s good at what he does. He’ll solve it himself in no time. Probably uses his killer instincts.’

‘This is what people do?’ I shook my head. ‘They just drop him?’

‘He’s like a curse. You either find some way to drop him or shuffle him onto someone else. Otherwise you’ll look like you’re on his side, and you don’t want people thinking that, Harry.’

‘This is insane.’

‘He’s a disgrace to the force,’ Murray said. ‘He’s a disgrace to what we stand for as police.’

‘But wasn’t he only seven years old when the crime occurred?’

‘I got a six-year-old,’ Murray snapped. ‘She knows it’s wrong to kill people. Hell, my three-year-old knows that. I’m too busy for this shit, Harry. I got a couple of missing yachties from Queensland on my desk. I’m looking at hundreds of pictures of identical boats all day long. I’m seein’ boats in my fucking sleep.’

‘What are you doing with a Queensland case?’

‘Oh,’ he sighed. The wind seemed to go out of him suddenly. ‘Long story. It’s bad. It’s just one of those ones that gives you the creeps.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I said. I hoped by listening kindly to his problems for a few minutes, he’d take his fury down a few notches. It seemed to work. When he spoke again, his voice was softer.

‘A retired couple in their fifties was last seen on their yacht heading south out of Brisbane. They travel a lot, so the woman does her own kidney dialysis on the boat. She’s got some kidney problem, I don’t know what. But she hasn’t filled her prescription for the dialysate – the stuff she rinses her kidney with. By the family’s calculation, the couple should have dropped into Sydney a couple of days ago at the latest to fill the prescription. If they did drop in, they didn’t sign into the marina, and they haven’t filled the prescription. Nobody on the east coast has seen them. They were selling the boat. It’s possible they swung in and picked up potential buyers. But we don’t know.’

‘Jesus,’ I said, as sympathetically as I could. ‘Sounds complex. Why haven’t I seen it getting much press?’

‘It’s early days yet. And these yachties go missing all the time. Decide to change direction on a whim and don’t know their comms aren’t working. Everybody’s hoping they’ll just pop up again in Indonesia or something. I don’t know. I got a bad feeling about it. The coastguard is on the lookout.’

‘Anything I can do?’

‘No, Harry, there’s nothing you can do.’ His tone sharpened again, as though he’d realised I was only listening because I wanted his help.

‘Look, Murray, I want to understand what I’m dealing with here,’ I pleaded. ‘What exactly is Tox supposed to have done? How many people were involved? I want to know exactly what he was charged with. I’ve got to find out what kind of man he is.’

‘I don’t know, Harry, but I’m disgusted that you’re even interested,’ Murray said. ‘We’re supposed to be the good guys. He’s an insult to us, and so are you right now.’

The phone clicked dead in my ear.

THE BLARING OF
a horn woke me. When I looked out my bedroom window, Tox Barnes was sitting in the driver’s seat of his black ’69 Mustang, revving the engine. When I got in the car he tossed his phone into my lap.

‘Check it out, zombie face,’ he said.