Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) (12 page)

The smoke was sudden, thick with burning chemicals. The wind picked it up from the deck and blew it inside the galley where they fought. The engine had ignited, pushed over its limit by the sheets and ropes tangled around the propellers. The burning fuel seared in their eyes. They both rolled, fighting through the pain, trying to climb to their feet.

Out of the glowing flames on the deck the woman cop emerged, the one who had gone after Jenny. Two other officers were close behind her on the ladder. The woman cop’s whole body was shaking with adrenalin and exhaustion. Hope backed towards the stairs as the two officers turned, blocking her exit. She grabbed at the counter, tried to find a weapon. A bottle. A glass. Anything.

‘It’s over, Hope. The whole thing’s going to burn,’ the woman cop yelled. ‘Put that down. You’ve got to come with us.’

Hope thought about it. And a weary smile crept to her face at what she imagined, how similar it was to the life she’d lived before. Hands on her. Dark rooms and endless days passing the windows. A team of girls in the prison dorms who’d welcome her, who’d stick by her, cheer her on, try to keep her away from the needle. Sweaty sheets and thin pillows, and those faceless men wandering in the halls, never meeting her eyes, giving her commands.

No. Never again.

Hope went up the stairs and slammed the bridge door behind her.

TOX AND I
got off the
New Hope
just in time, falling into the water as one of the fuel tanks exploded and the back half of the yacht listed badly to that side. The water was slick with oil. I was so tired. My arms grabbed weakly at the waves, making no progress, the current trying to push me back against the hull of the burning boat.

Tox pulled my arm around his neck. I held on to his hard, broad shoulders as we swam to the nearest police boat.

As we climbed aboard, we turned to see the fire creeping into the bridge. I could hardly watch. There was no sign of Hope in the blackened windows.

SOMEONE TOOK THE
small boat we’d commandeered back to the marina while Tox and I rode home on a police cruiser with Chris Murray. I stood up at the front of the boat with the squat, ruddy-faced man while another officer commanded the helm. Someone had wrapped a blanket around me. But Tox sat unattended at the rear of the boat on a barrel with his own shirt clutched to the gunshot wound in the side of his face. He was watching the boat’s wake disappear into the dark of the night.

‘You did a sensational job out there,’ Chris kept saying. Shaking his head ruefully at it all. ‘You weren’t coming up. I was willing to put money on it. You dived in, and you were down there too long, and I thought,
She’s got herself tangled up with that woman. She’s a goner
.’

‘Cut it out.’ I jabbed him in the side. ‘You know I don’t like it.’

We stared at our feet. I knew the answer to my question, but I asked it anyway.

‘The husband. Did he make it?’

‘No,’ Chris said.

We shuffled away from the officer driving the boat. Chris’s eyes wandered the coastline ahead of us, picking out the clustered lights of Bondi and Coogee and the dark patches where the cliffs met the sea.

‘I did look up Tox Barnes,’ he said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Yeah.’ Chris glanced at me. ‘After you called me. I felt bad. I knew some guys in records who could pull some strings for me.’

‘I
knew
you did.’

‘I thought I’d get the details, just to arm myself, in case you came at me again. I was ready to cut you down about it.’

‘I don’t think I even want to know.’ I held my hand up. ‘I think he’s all right. And if there was a time when he wasn’t all right, well, that seems to have been a long time ago.’

‘That’s the thing.’ Chris leaned in close. ‘He
is
all right.’

Chris told me the story. It wasn’t close to any of the ones I’d heard.

I WENT TO
the back of the boat and sat beside Tox as we passed through the heads of Sydney Harbour. Somehow he still smelled of cigarette smoke. One side of his hair was plastered to his head, while the other, where he’d been shot, stuck up in wild spikes. There was blood all through his chest hair.

‘How bad is it?’ I asked.

‘Meh,’ he shrugged.

He pulled the shirt away. The bullet had carved a vertical line up the side of his face from his jaw to his hairline, burning the flesh on either side, a straight gouge that looked half an inch deep. It was a grisly wound. Something he would wear well.

‘Wow, that’s disgusting.’ I reached out. ‘Can I touch it?’

‘Get off.’ He shoved at me. ‘Freak.’

I looked out at the waves, and the words came easily. Seemed to flow out, unlocked by my exhaustion. I told him I knew about Anna Peake and her son. His victims. I knew that Anna had been heading west on the A32 highway towards Katoomba on a bright Tuesday afternoon when she’d driven under an overpass where Tox Barnes had been standing with a group of other little boys. He was the smallest in the group. Six years old. The oldest had been nine. The boys had been tossing pebbles onto the tops of cars as they drove underneath, cheering and laughing as the rocks clinked and bounced on rooftops and bonnets, no idea that what they were doing was incredibly dangerous. They’d got over the thrill of raining pebbles on the cars when one of the boys dropped a pebble the size of a penny onto the windshield of Anna Peake’s car. The crack of the rock on the glass had been so sudden, so startling, that Anna had swerved and got the afternoon sun in her eyes. She had gone across the double lanes and right into the path of an oncoming truck. The boys had rushed to the other side of the overpass and watched her car burn, the mother and her little boy inside.

The five boys had been interrogated by police. The town had called for the oldest boy on the bridge to face criminal prosecution. In the end, none of the boys had been charged. They were so small, and so terrified by the awesome power of their actions, that the police had taken pity on them.

All of the boys had changed their names legally at some point between the deaths of Anna and her son and their adult lives. Terrence Brennan became Tate Barnes. The name change had not destroyed his past completely. Though his involvement in the killings had been suppressed, it had arisen when he’d tried to become a member of the New South Wales state police. The panel of admissions experts who’d approved Tox for service had been obliged to keep his childhood horror a secret. But it had leaked, like all secrets do. It had grown in size, warped, twisted. People had added things. Some had said the boys had stabbed the woman. Beat her. Raped her. Kidnapped her. The boys had grown older. Younger sometimes. New versions of the story had been passed down every year from older cops to the recruits in their charge. Like all rumours, it had its own life. No one knew the truth.

WHEN I’D FINISHED
talking I looked at him, expecting something. But he just watched the glowing Harbour Bridge in silence.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘I need to understand.’ I held my hands out. ‘You’re innocent. Why do you do this to yourself? Why do you let the rumours go on? Why don’t you fix your life?’

‘My life’s not broken,’ he said.

‘Everybody thinks you’re some kind of vicious psychopath.’

‘This isn’t high school.’ He gave me a pitying glance. ‘You don’t need to worry about what people think any more.’

‘You said earlier that you deserve some punishment. Is that how you really feel?’

‘A bit,’ he shrugged. ‘Mostly, I just let people tell their stories because it keeps them away from me. I’ve said it from the beginning: I don’t work with partners. I’m better on my own.’

I watched him, and slowly I began to understand. It was the same as my brother and me, the way we’d acted as kids, running away from the families that tried to take us in, behaving badly and shutting them out until they gave up on us. When we were on our own, we knew what to expect. We knew the rules of the game. Being ‘included’ was risky. Because we didn’t accept love and companionship, we couldn’t be rejected. Sam and I had known all our lives that we could only rely on each other. Tox Barnes knew it too.

I was sickened, suddenly, by how familiar I was with it all. Being the outsider. Pushing people away. I had to change his mind. I had to convince him to get his story out there.

‘You take pride in what you do. Don’t your victims deserve the best from you?’ I said. ‘Your colleagues hate you. They throw up barriers every time you try to make a move on cases. If people knew the truth about you, you’d be a more effective cop.’

He actually laughed.

‘No I wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘I’d end up being a cop like you.’

‘And what’s wrong with that?’

‘Oh man, you have no idea how ineffective you are,’ he said. ‘Waiting for autopsy reports. Calling the lab. Talking to colleagues. Hugging the victim’s parents. You’re a part of the system, mate. I’m outside the system. No one wants to take responsibility for me, so I do what I want. Skip the procedural bullshit. Makes me a better cop than you, I’ll tell you that much.’

I shook my head at him. It hurt, but I understood. He was pushing me away now, trying to annoy me so I’d leave him alone. I’d done the same thing all my life. Whenever someone uncovered the truth, made me vulnerable, I’d shut them down as hard and as fast as I could.

I walked back to the front of the boat and left him alone.

I’D SLEPT WELL
. The first night, it had been sheer physical exhaustion. Every limb had hurt. After I’d been checked over at the hospital, I’d gone home and crashed on my bed face first and slept until the next afternoon.

A couple of nights later I’d followed Matthew Demper and Alex Loris to a bar in Paddington and waited all night while the Kings Cross police officers got themselves nice and tipsy playing pool and betting on the horses. When they returned to their car, I’d given them a few seconds to remember me as the detective they’d made jump out of a police van with her hands cuffed behind her back. When their memory was jogged, I’d broken Demper’s nose and given Loris a sound kick to the nuts. I slept even better after that.

I was all ready to take my place on the Georges River task force. It was the perfect moment, and I’d make sure Pops knew that. Nigel had called a press conference with the national media, telling them he had some big announcement with regard to the case. I walked into the station, planning to tell him that he could announce that he was adding me to the task force while he was at it. How could they refuse me now? The newspapers were lauding me as a national hero. For once in my career I was in the position to make demands. And I was going to demand a spot on the hunt for that killer.

I strode across the bullpen on the way to Pops’s office, knowing Nigel would be in there being briefed about the press conference. I veered off my path slightly when I saw Tox standing by the coffee machine, half his face swathed in bandages, scratching at the bottom of a jar of coffee with a spoon. I marched up and slapped his arm.

‘I’m about to burst in and put myself on the Georges River task force,’ I said. ‘Did you hear there’s going to be some kind of announcement?’

Tox looked at me. His characteristic blankness had lifted slightly. There was a look in his eyes that was almost concern.

‘You haven’t met with the Chief yet? Does he know you’re here?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘What’s wrong? Is it the announcement? Do you know what it is?’

Tox looked over my shoulder. The Chief was heading towards me, fast. The way he put his hand gently on my shoulder sent my stomach plunging. This was a man who’d broken my tooth in the boxing ring. He didn’t touch me that way. No one did.

‘I need to see you,’ Pops said. ‘Could you give me a few minutes, and then come sit down? We need to talk.’

‘In your office?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘In the interrogation room.’

IT WAS THE
hardest thing he’d ever had to do. And that was a hell of a statement, because what was ‘hard’ in the job had changed incredibly over Chief Morris’s career. When he had been a young patrol cop back in the seventies he’d thought the hours were hard, sneaking into the house late at night so he didn’t wake the kids. When he’d first made detective he’d thought finding the bodies of stupid young gang members with their throats cut was hard. It got to be so that the old man had seen such wicked stuff in his time …

But sitting his best detective down and telling her this news, now that was a whole new level.

Detective Harriet Blue sat across from him in the interrogation room, the lights making her look even more tired than she was, her angular head of scruffy hair balanced in one palm. She looked this way in the boxing ring. On the verge. Wired. Ready for the next strike, whether it was his or hers.

The Chief had a tough time trying not to think like her father sometimes. If he’d been her father he’d have kicked her out of the force a long time ago. Got her into something that suited that brilliant mind but wouldn’t leave her a bitter, damaged old woman at the end of her career. He’d have dragged her out of the academy by her hair if he’d had to. But he wasn’t her father.

The words came out slowly. He danced around the issue for a bit. Then he laid it on her straight, the way she deserved.

‘We found the Georges River Killer,’ he said.

He looked at her eyes.

‘It’s your brother, Blue. It’s Sam.’

Harriet twitched, just once, the way she would do when he’d smack her good and hard in the boxing ring. She was trying to work out what had just happened.

Her sharp, cold eyes examined his.

Then she got up and left.

HE FOUND HER
in the Georges River Killer task force room, of course. She’d finally busted her way in. When Chief Morris came through the door, he saw exactly what he expected. The short, wiry Detective Blue was going at her nemesis Nigel Spader with all the blind ferocity of a Jack Russell terrier. Above her on the case board the evidence she’d been blind to in the months since the killings had started fluttering a little in the fray. All the officers in the room were silent. Some were half-heartedly trying to pull the woman off her victim.