The Dry (6 page)

“Karen's body was found right here in the hallway,” Raco said. “The door was open, so the courier saw her straight away.”

“Was she running for the door?” Falk tried to imagine Luke chasing his own wife through their own house.

“No, that's just it. She was answering it. Shot by whoever was standing on the doorstep. You can tell from the position of the body. But tell me this, when you come home at night, does your wife answer the door to you?”

“I'm not married,” Falk said.

“Well, I am. And call me liberated, but I've got a key to my own house.”

Falk considered. “Catch her by surprise, maybe?” he said, playing out the scenario in his mind.

“Why bother? Dad comes home waving a loaded shotgun, I reckon they'd still be pretty bloody surprised. He's got them both inside the house. Knows the layout. Too easy.”

Falk positioned himself inside the hall and opened and closed the door a few times. Open, the doorway was a rectangle of blinding light compared with the dimness of the hall. He imagined Karen answering the knock, a little distracted maybe, perhaps annoyed by the interruption. Blinking away the brightness for the crucial second it took her killer to raise a gun.

“Just strikes me as odd,” Raco said. “Shooting her in the doorway. All it did was give that poor kid a chance to piss his pants and bolt, not necessarily in that order.”

Raco looked past Falk. “Which brings me to my next point,” he said. “When you're ready.”

Falk nodded and followed him down the bowels of the hall.

 

 

As Raco snapped on the light in the small blue bedroom, Falk's first dizzy impression was that someone was renovating. A child's bed had been shoved against the far wall at an angle, stripped back to the mattress. Toys were piled in boxes and stacked haphazardly beneath posters of football players and Disney characters. The carpet had been ripped out, exposing untreated floorboards.

Falk's boots left patterns in a layer of sawdust. The boards in one corner had been heavily sanded. A stain still remained. Raco lingered by the doorway.

“Still difficult for me to be in here,” he said with a shrug.

This had once been a nice bedroom, Falk knew. Twenty years ago it had been Luke's own. Falk had slept there himself many times. Whispering after lights out. Holding his breath and stifling giggles when Barb Hadler called through to them to shut up and go to sleep. Wrapped warm in a sleeping bag, not far from those floorboards with their awful stain. This room had been a good space. Now, like the hall, it stank of bleach.

“Can we open the window?”

“Better not,” Raco said. “Got to keep the blinds down. Caught a couple of kids trying to take photos soon after it happened.”

Raco pulled out his tablet computer and tapped it a few times. He handed it to Falk. On the screen was a photo gallery.

“The little boy's body's been removed,” Raco said. “But you can see how the room was found.”

In the photos, the blinds were wide open, spilling light onto a horrendous scene below. The wardrobe doors were flung wide open, and the clothes had been roughly pushed aside. A large wicker toy box was overturned. On the bed, a spaceship duvet was rucked up on one side as though tossed back to check what was under it. The carpet was mostly beige, except for the one corner where a rich red-black pool seeped out from behind a large upended laundry basket.

For a moment Falk tried to imagine Billy Hadler's last moments. Huddled behind the laundry basket, hot urine dribbling down his leg as he tried to silence ragged breaths.

“You got kids?” Raco asked.

Falk shook his head. “You?”

“One on the way. A little girl.”

“Congratulations.”

“We've got an army of nieces and nephews, though. Not here; back home in South Australia. A few around Billy's age. Couple a bit younger,” Raco said, taking back the tablet and scrolling through the photos. “And the thing is, my brothers know every one of their kids' hiding places. You send them blindfolded into their kids' bedrooms, and they could find them in two seconds.”

He tapped the screen.

“Every possible way I look at these photos, it looks like a search,” Raco said. “Someone who didn't know Billy's hiding spots methodically working his way through. Is he in the cupboard? No. Under the bed? No. It's like the kid was hunted down.”

Falk stared hard at the dark smudge that had once been Billy Hadler.

“Show me where you found Charlotte.”

The nursery across the hall was decorated in yellow. A musical mobile dangled from the ceiling above an empty space.

“Gerry and Barb took the cot,” Raco explained.

Falk looked around the room. It felt so different from the others. Furniture and carpet still intact. No acrid bleach stink in there. It had the feel of a sanctuary, untouched by the horror that had unfolded outside the door.

“Why didn't Luke kill Charlotte?” Falk said.

“The popular money's on conscience and guilt kicking in.”

Falk walked out, back across the hall to Billy's bedroom. He stood at the bloodstain in the corner, turned 180 degrees, and strode back across the hall into Charlotte's room.

“Eight steps,” Falk said. “But I'm pretty tall. So we'll call it nine for most people. Nine steps from Billy's body to where Charlotte was lying like a sitting duck. And Luke would've had the adrenaline going, blood pumping, red mist, the works. So nine steps. The question is, is that enough time for a total change of heart?”

“Doesn't sound like enough to me.”

Falk thought about the man he'd known. What had once been a clear picture was now distorted and fuzzy.

“Did you ever meet Luke?” he said.

“No.”

“He could change his mood like flipping a coin. Nine steps could be eight more than he needed.”

But for the first time since he'd returned to Kiewarra, Falk felt a pinprick of genuine doubt.

“It's supposed to be a statement, though, isn't it? Something like this. It's personal.
He murdered his entire family.
That's what you want people to say. Luke's wife of seven years is bleeding out on the hall floor and he's spent—what, two minutes? Three?—turning the bedroom upside down to murder his own son. He's planning to kill himself when he's finished. So if it was Luke”—he hesitated slightly on the word
if
—“why does his daughter get to live?”

They stood for a moment, both looking at the mobile hanging still and silent above the empty cot space. Why slaughter a whole family bar the baby? Falk turned it back and forth in his mind until he could think of a few reasons, but only one good one.

“Maybe whoever was here that day didn't kill the baby because they just didn't need to kill the baby,” Falk said finally. “Nothing personal about it. Doesn't matter who you are, thirteen-month-olds don't make good witnesses.”

6

“They're not crash hot about me coming in here generally,” Raco said with a note of regret as he put two beers on the table at the Fleece. The table lurched lopsidedly under the weight, slopping a centimeter of liquid over the scratched surface. He had been home to change out of his uniform and had returned with a thick file labeled
Hadler
under his arm. “I'm not great for business. Everyone always has to make a big show of putting their car keys away.”

They glanced over at the barman. It was the same large, bearded bloke from the night before. He was watching them over the top of a newspaper.

“Policeman's lot. Cheers.” Falk raised his glass and took a long swallow. He'd always been able to take or leave the booze, but at that moment he was glad of it. It was early evening quiet in the pub, and they were holed up alone in a corner. On the far side of the room three men stared with bovine blankness at greyhound racing on the TV. Falk didn't recognize them, and they ignored him in turn. In the back room, the slot machines blinked and whistled. The air-conditioning was blowing Arctic cold.

Raco took a sip. “So what now?”

“Now you tell Clyde you've got concerns,” Falk said.

If I'm guilty, so are you.

“I go to the Clyde cops now, it'll send them straight into arse-covering mode.” Raco frowned. “You know what'll be going through their heads if they think they've stuffed this up. They'll make a gymnastics team, bending over backward to prove their investigation was sound. I know I would.”

“I'm not sure you've got a choice. Something like this. It's not a one-man job.”

“We've got Barnes.”

“Who?”

“My constable at the station. So that's three of us.”

“That's only two of you, mate,” Falk said. “I can't stay.”

“I thought you told the Hadlers you would.”

Falk rubbed the bridge of his nose. The slot machines behind him clanged more loudly. He felt like the noise was inside his head.

“For a couple of days. That means one or two. Not for the duration of an investigation. An unofficial one at that. I've got a job to get back to.”

“Fine.” Raco spoke like it was obvious. “Stay for the couple of days, then. It doesn't have to be anything on the books. Do what you said you'd do on the money side. As soon as we get something solid, I'll go to Clyde.”

Falk said nothing. He thought about the two boxes of bank statements and documents he'd taken from the Hadlers' place that were now sitting upstairs on his bed.

Luke lied. You lied.

He picked up their empty glasses and took them back to the bar.

“Same again?” The barman hauled his bulk off a stool and put his newspaper down. He was the only person Falk had seen working in the place since yesterday.

“Listen,” Falk said as he watched a clean glass put under the tap. “That room I'm in. Likely to be available a bit longer?”

“Depends.” The barman set one beer on the counter. “I've been hearing one or two whispers about you, my friend.”

“Have you.”

“I have. And while I welcome the business, I don't welcome trouble, see? Tricky enough running this place as is.”

“The trouble won't come from me.”

“Just comes with you?”

“Not much I can do about that. You know I'm police, though?”

“I did hear that, indeed. But out here in the sticks at midnight with a few boozed-up fellas looking for trouble, those badges mean less than they should, you get me?”

“Fine. Well. Up to you.” He wasn't going to beg.

The barman put the second glass on the counter with a half smile.

“It's all right, mate. You can untwist your knickers. Your money's as good as the next man's, and that's good enough for me.”

He gave Falk his change and picked up the newspaper. He appeared to be doing the cryptic crossword. “Take it as a friendly warning, though. They can be a funny lot around here. You find yourself in hot water, there's not always a lot of help at hand.” He eyeballed Falk. “Although from what I hear, you don't need telling about that.”

Falk took both glasses back to the table. Raco was staring moodily at a soggy beer mat.

“You can lose the look,” Falk said. “You'd better fill me in on the rest.”

Raco sat up straighter and slid the folder across the table.

“I've pulled this together from all the stuff I've got access to,” he said.

Falk glanced around the pub. It was still half-empty. No one nearby. He flipped it open. The first page had a photo of Luke's truck taken from a distance. A pool of blood had collected by the back wheels. He closed the file.

“Just give me the highlights for now. What do we know about the courier who found them?”

“He's looking as clean as you'd want to be. Works for an established delivery firm. Has been for two years. He was delivering recipe books Karen had ordered online—that checks out. He was running late, last delivery of the day. First time he'd made a delivery to Kiewarra. Says he rocked up, saw Karen lying in the doorway, chucked up his lunch into the flower bed, and jumped back in his van. Made the emergency call from the main road.”

“He left Charlotte in the house?”

“Reckons he didn't hear her.” Raco shrugged. “Maybe he didn't. She'd been alone for a while. Might have cried herself out by then.”

Falk turned to the first page of the file. Kept it open this time. He'd always assumed Luke had been found in the truck's driver's seat, but the images showed his body flat on its back in the cargo tray. The tailgate was open, and Luke's legs dangled over as though he'd been sitting on the edge. A shotgun by his side pointed toward the mess where his head would have been. His face was completely missing.

“You right?” Raco was watching him closely.

“Yeah.” Falk took a long drink from his beer. The blood had spread across the bottom of the cargo tray, settling in the metal ridges.

“Forensics find anything useful in the tray?” Falk asked.

Raco checked his notes.

“Other than lots of blood—all Luke's—nothing particular noted,” he said. “I'm not sure how well they looked, though. They had the weapon. It was a working vehicle. He had all sorts of stuff in the back.”

Falk looked again at the photo, concentrating on the area around the body. Barely visible along the left interior side of the tray were four faint horizontal streaks. They looked fresh. Light brown against the dusty white paintwork, the longest was maybe thirty centimeters, the shortest about half that. They were in pairs of two, each pair about a meter apart horizontally. The placement wasn't particularly uniform. The right-hand streaks were dead straight; those on the left had a slight angle.

“What are these?” Falk pointed, and Raco leaned in.

“I'm not sure. Like I said, truck would've carried all sorts.”