Frantic (11 page)

‘Why the hell should I?’

‘Listen,’ Allan said. ‘This woman’s husband was shot and her baby kidnapped tonight. I can understand she frightened you but I’m sure you in turn can understand her behaviour.’

The man looked at Sophie. After a moment he lowered his arms so the baby’s face became visible. It wasn’t Lachlan. Sophie felt a wave of nausea and turned away.

She’d left her driver’s door open and it was cold again in her car. She turned the heater down one notch to ring Ella.

The call went to voicemail. ‘Please tell me you have some news,’ Sophie said after the beep.

Allan crouched by her window. ‘I’m sorry it wasn’t him.’

‘Me too.’ Sophie wiped her eyes.

‘The guy’s okay,’ Allan said. ‘Told me the baby was crying so he came out for a walk. Said he’s sorry, but he thought you were a nut in a stolen uniform wanting to take his bub.’

Sophie held onto the steering wheel. ‘I told the detectives about Sawyer.’

‘I know, they rang me,’ he said. ‘We charged him with low range PCA yesterday and he’s due in court in six weeks.’

‘Did he say anything else about us? About me?’

Allan looked down the dark street then back at her. ‘He kept saying you killed them. At least he did until his solicitor arrived and made him shut up.’

‘I have to go,’ Sophie said.

‘What are you doing – just driving the streets, looking?’

‘Yes.’

‘Us too,’ he said. ‘But you shouldn’t tell people you’re a cop.’

‘I didn’t. He just assumed I was.’ The lie came so easily. ‘I don’t have another jacket with me but I’ll give it back as soon as I get one.’

‘Okay.’ He reached in the open window and put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Be careful.’

On the eastern side of the Bridge approaches she drove back and forth, covering the grids of the streets, slowly moving south. She shone a torch from her window along the buildings for any places her high beams missed, and prayed aloud, ‘Please, God, please, God, please, oh please, God.’

12.47 am

The wind off the Parramatta River was cold. Ella hunched her shoulders as she and Dennis crossed the Meadowbank Wharf carpark. On the black water two police boats motored about in the current, spotlights reflecting off the surface. She guessed there were divers out there, searching in the dark by feel, the object of their hunt worth the danger of diving at night. She wondered how they coped with the tide hauling at them, and for that matter how they thought they’d find a baby’s body close to the area where he might have been thrown in. Turning upstream she saw more lights. Well, okay. So maybe they were looking all over.

‘Sharks in there,’ Dennis said.

‘Thanks.’

The carpark was divided in two by a concrete railway bridge. The larger area contained only three cars. Dennis wrote down their plate numbers. A passageway just wide enough for two cars led underneath to a second, smaller parking area. It was poorly lit and hidden from view from the wharf.

Sawyer’s BMW sat in the far corner. It had been found by a woman walking her dog. She’d dragged the animal to the public phone on the wharf, screaming that a man was dead behind the wheel of his car.

The car’s dark surface gleamed under the lights that Crime Scene had set up. They ran off ear-busting generators. Dennis said something Ella lost in the noise. ‘What?’

He leaned closer. ‘Nice Beemer.’

Crime Scene officer James Mooney came over. ‘Got a few things to show you. Here’s one.’ He held up an evidence bag containing a baby’s dummy. ‘Found it down here.’

They followed Mooney around the BMW to the kerb and Mooney pointed to the gutter with a chubby finger. There was a collection of dead leaves with a pool of dirty water banked up behind it. ‘Lying in that.’

Ella looked around. It was conceivable that some parent or child could have dropped the dummy while stepping off the kerb. It was simple to see how Sawyer might have dropped it too. Manhandling the baby, the dummy gets dropped at some stage, kicked accidentally into the gutter, Sawyer never sees it and gets back into his car. In Ella’s peripheral vision the black water loomed.

‘Looks pretty new,’ Dennis said.

Mooney nodded. ‘If it’s not from our kid, I doubt it’s lain here more than a day or so.’

‘Name on it?’

‘Couldn’t be so easy,’ Mooney said.

‘No chance I can show the mother, I assume?’ Ella said.

Mooney shook his head. ‘I want to get testing for DNA and prints.’ He went to his car and dug through a box in the back. Coming up with a battered old Polaroid camera he took a quick snap. ‘Show her this.’

‘Anything in the car?’ Dennis said.

The navy BMW’s doors were open, the interior light on. Fingerprint dust coated most surfaces. Ella imagined how it was when the paramedics pulled up, with Sawyer slumped in his leather seat behind the wheel. She wondered what the dog walker might have seen if she’d come along a little earlier.

‘Found this on the driver’s floor.’ Mooney held up another bag.

It was a slim one millilitre plastic syringe, the kind that came with an orange cap over the short needle, the kind Ella saw on streets and in houses all over the city. Hospitals, doctors’ surgeries, diabetics and drug addicts all used them. Sawyer could have taken it from his own practice or got it when he bought the drugs.

‘We’ll print it and see what we get,’ Mooney said. ‘Also found some hairs in the carpet and on the seats; none that look juvenile though. Then there’s this.’ Mooney pointed to the rear bumper, where a dent held traces of white paint.

‘Hel-lo,’ said Dennis.

‘There’s no report of it having been in a bingle, but I’m leaning towards the white being automotive paint rather than any other kind. We’ll have to wait for the lab results to be sure,’ Mooney said.

Dennis squatted for a better look. ‘Nice and fresh.’

‘Anyway.’ Mooney didn’t go on. It was his way of ending a conversation.

‘Okay,’ Ella said. ‘See ya.’

‘Thanks,’ Dennis added, standing up.

Ella slipped the photo of the dummy into her pocket as they headed back under the railway bridge. The boats churned the water. ‘Think Sawyer’ll stick with his story?’

Dennis started the car. ‘It’ll be interesting to see.’

1.10 am

Sophie crawled so slowly along the empty back streets of Surry Hills, the car threatened to stall. She slipped the clutch and shone the torch out the window, scanning dingy apartment block entryways and tiny junk-stacked terrace-house patios. A grey cat sprang away from the gutter, startling her. A wavery quarter-moon gave her little help.

She turned left through a stop sign at an empty intersection. Down the street an ambulance was parked next to a small playground. The ambulance’s sidelights showed the paramedics crouched beside a man who lay propped up on his elbows on the grass, and Sophie recognised the male officer as Mick.

She stopped behind the ambulance and ran across the park. Mick and his fill-in partner, a paramedic named Keeley, were washing dirt from a wound in the patient’s leg. The patient inhaled methoxyflurane deeply. When Sophie reached them he smiled at her. ‘Hey babe.’

Mick looked up. ‘Sophie?’

She burst into tears. ‘They can’t find Lachlan. I’ve been out driving the streets, I scared some poor man half to death, I can’t think what else to do.’

Mick handed the saline bag to Keeley and walked a few metres with Sophie. ‘Listen. I was just about to call the cops. That patient told me he came down here from his flat to sit on the swings and drink. He couldn’t sleep because someone turned up tonight at his neighbour’s flat with a baby who won’t stop crying.’

Sophie grabbed his arm. ‘Where’s he live?’

‘It might not be Lachlan.’

Sophie hurried to the patient. ‘Where do you live?’

He grinned at her, happy as a clam on the methoxyflurane. ‘Up there. Fourth floor.’

She followed his nod and saw a tall apartment block. ‘Where’s the crying baby?’

‘Flat four-twelve.’

Sophie started across the street.

‘Wait up,’ Mick said. ‘Let me call the cops.’

‘Do what you like but I’m not waiting.’

Sophie heard him tell Keeley to radio for police, then he came running after her. He caught the door to the building. ‘It’d be safer if we waited.’

Sophie didn’t answer, saving her breath as she took the stairs two at a time. She heard Mick press the timed light switch and hurry after her.

The stairwell stank of urine, cooking oil and stale cigarette smoke. Empty beer cans stood in the corners of one landing. Canned laughter came from a flat on the second floor. The timer switch clicked off, plunging them into darkness, but Sophie kept going, her feet finding each step automatically.

‘How are we going to do this?’ Mick panted behind her.

‘Tell them someone rang about a sick kid.’

‘Me tell them?’

‘I’m being a cop.’

‘What?’

She felt primed and steely hard. Turning onto the landing on the third floor she checked the zip of the police jacket. She could hear the baby crying now and her scalp prickled. The child was going hoarse. Was it him? Was it Lachlan?

On the fourth floor landing Mick pressed the light switch and she saw that flat four-twelve was three doors along. She knocked on the door.

A man’s voice answered. ‘What?’

She gestured at Mick. ‘Ambulance,’ he said.

A muttered conversation was just audible over the baby’s cries. ‘We didn’t call an ambulance.’

‘We got a call about a sick child at this address,’ Mick said.

‘We didn’t call.’

‘Well, someone did, and once we’re here we have an obligation to make sure everything’s okay.’

‘Everything’s fine.’

‘We can hear the child crying,’ Mick said. ‘How about if we come in for just one minute to check him over? Then we’ll be out of your way.’

Another muttered conversation. Mick made a face and pointed back down the stairs. Sophie ignored him.

The man said, ‘We don’t need any help and we want you to leave.’

Sophie stepped close. ‘This is the police. Open the door.’

‘Police?’ the man said.

‘Open the door now.’

There was a long moment and Sophie thought he was calling her bluff, then a security chain was slid back and the door opened. Light flooded the landing. Sophie saw a man dressed in black jeans and a T-shirt, his arms folded, and behind him a woman lying on a worn brown velour lounge with her arms around a screaming blanketed bundle.

‘Let the paramedic check the child and we’ll be on our way,’ she said.

‘Since when do cops and ambos get about together?’ the man asked.

‘We do sometimes.’ She walked in first. Mick followed her. The woman on the lounge stared at them with resentment. She was in her mid-thirties, with tanned skin and straggly brown hair. The pale pink blanket she held was worn and pilled. The baby faced her so all Sophie could see was a tuft of dark hair. Sophie’s heart was racing. ‘It’s your baby?’

‘Whose else would it be?’

The child cried. Mick said, ‘Just let me check him quickly then we’ll go.’

Sophie stood over the woman, her hands clenched inside the jacket pockets, as Mick crouched and reached for the baby.

‘It’s a her,’ the woman said. She turned the baby around and Sophie saw that it wasn’t Lachlan. This baby had a squinched-up face, and was younger than Lachlan, probably by a couple of months, and there was a portwine birthmark on her chin.

Sophie glared around the flat while Mick ran through the motions of checking the baby’s pulse and feeling her forehead for fever. Her anger at these people swelled in her throat. Their delay in opening the door had built her hopes up and now she’d crashed and burned. Who but people with something to hide would behave in such a way? There was a sleeping bag piled on one end of the lounge and clothes thrown on the back of it. The grimy bench between the tiny kitchen and this living area held an open packet of homebrand biscuits, the end of a loaf of bread, a full ashtray, a baby’s bottle still one-third full of milk, and a pile of newspapers. No sign of any weapon or stolen goods, but Sophie was certain there’d be some somewhere. She glanced at the way the man shifted from foot to foot, and decided what she’d do.

‘Happy now?’ the woman said.

Mick smiled at her. ‘You know how it is, we have to follow procedure or we get in trouble.’

‘Thank you,’ Sophie said, wanting instead to scream and punch someone.

They met three police officers on the stairs. Sophie said, ‘It’s not Lachlan, but there’s definitely something odd going on.’

The police thanked them and moved faster up the steps.

On the street Mick said, ‘You said that on purpose, so they’d go up and roust them.’

‘Didn’t you notice how reluctant they were to let us in?’

‘It’s after one in the morning,’ Mick said. ‘Someone comes knocking at my door when I haven’t called for help, I’d be suspicious too.’