Without Consent (19 page)

The following morning, Ben was up at
his usual six o’clock and Anya struggled to adjust to the early start. Seeing him every second weekend made her want to make up for lost time, but trying to cram two weeks into two days was at times almost too intense for both of them. She constantly tried to find the right balance and treat Ben like he was with her all the time.

The gentle knock on the front door made her flatten her hair with her hands and grab a windcheater from the lounge room to cover her pajamas.

Standing on the doorstep was a weary-looking Peter Latham.

“It’s early, but I was on a walk and saw your lights on.”

Never a fan of exercise, Peter maintained his ideal weight by skipping meals, usually unintentionally.

“We’re up,” she said, hugging him. “Come on in.”

For a moment, Peter looked uncomfortable until he saw Ben run from the kitchen and launch himself into his godfather’s arms.

“How’s my favorite little man?” he said, dropping to one knee. He was one of the few people who got down to Ben’s level to hug.

“The way you looked around when you came in—don’t tell me you thought I was entertaining a man?” Anya teased, unsure whether she should be flattered or insulted. “I’m doing microwaved scrambled eggs if you’d like to join us.”

“I’d love to, but only if I’m not interrupting. I know how precious your time is together.”

“Please stay, Peter,” Ben said. “I can show you how to do a noisy trick.” He released the hug and ran his hand under his shirt, cupping it under his armpit. With a few levers of the other arm, he demonstrated.

“Wow, I was seven before I could do that,” Peter said, laughing.

“With all he can do, he’s proudest of armpit noises,” Anya said, shuffling in her slippers to the kitchen to the strains of Ben’s latest performance trick. In a way, she was proud of his boyish crazes. The thing she feared was having a child who felt socially inept. That was what had crippled her so much in her teenage years. Behaving like a four-year-old was what he was supposed to do, without inhibition.

Whisking eggs, she thought for a moment of Geoff Willard and wondered if his mother had harbored the same fears when her son was a child. She found it difficult to understand the woman’s reaction to the possibility that Geoff might have been innocent, as though the thought had never occurred to her before.

She added a little milk to the glass bowl and put it in the microwave. Two minutes on medium and she’d check it again. Meanwhile, she made the toast. The smell of bread cooking on a Sunday morning made her want to gorge herself. Today was no exception.

In the lounge room, Peter and Ben were competing for the better body trick. Ben could roll his tongue, but the more senior of the two could wiggle his ears, a talent that Ben immediately tried to mimic.

The microwave beeped and Anya stirred the sloppy mixture.

“Couple more minutes and we’ll be ready,” she called to the now silent pair. Wiggling ears took intense concentration. She’d have to remember that if she ever wanted Ben to be quiet for a few minutes.

“Smells yummy.” Ben appeared and sat at the table.

Anya placed knives and forks and dished up the toast and eggs.

Peter had arrived just in time for a large pot of coffee. After the exhausting week, Anya would probably drink it all day. She poured two cups.

Handing Peter two plates, she took the cups and they sat together. “Are you all right?” she asked quietly before flicking to her son. “Careful, Ben, it’s hot.”

“I know,” he answered, blowing on the first mouthful.

Peter sighed. “I saw Alf Carney last night. He’s taken it pretty hard.”

That was hardly surprising, given he had just been deemed incompetent and could even face criminal charges if the police felt he had fabricated evidence.

They ate in silence until Ben had finished. “Thanks, Mum. Can I watch cartoons, please?”

“Of course you can,” she said, and kissed his forehead as he squeezed past.

“What’s Alf planning to do?”

“He’s talking about suing for defamation, but I think he’ll change his mind once he’s cooled off. He’s threatened it before when someone questioned his decisions, but has never followed through.”

Anya wondered if that was how he’d got away with incompetence for so long. Threatening anyone who questioned him with legal action was one way of stopping people challenging him or going public with their concerns. Without open discussion and peer review, incompetence could go unchecked indefinitely.

“How could he have continued working for so long? He must have known that his decisions were way off-base.”

Peter chased a piece of egg around the plate with his fork. “He suffered depression for a very long time. He’s getting help now, but that probably affected some of his decision-making.”

“I’m sorry, but he should have known better. To refuse treatment is irresponsible.”

“It’s not that simple. Insurance companies can deny you income protection and reputations can be ruined if anyone hears about it. A pharmacist recently rang a doctor, to let him know that a GP with depression was working in his practice. The thing was, the sufferer was better on antidepressants than off.”

“Okay, that was inappropriate, but Alf is a different story. His decisions affected so many lives. People could have been falsely imprisoned or acquitted when they were guilty.”

The theme to
Looney Tunes
sounded from the lounge room.

Anya took the plates to the sink. “What isn’t clear is why he started out being pro-police, conveniently narrowing down time of death to the only time suspects didn’t have alibis. All the cases I reviewed were the complete opposite. He went out of his way to exclude anything other than death by natural causes.”

Peter collected the salt-and-pepper shakers and cups. “He talked about that last night. Seems he was very trusting of the police and then became pretty disillusioned.”

Anya scraped the leftovers into the dustbin and one-third filled the sink. Tight water restrictions due to a statewide drought meant using the dishwasher as little as possible.

Peter picked up a tea-towel and stood next to the draining tray.

“Years ago, he gave an opinion on a series of infant deaths from the one family, attributed to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. This was about the time some pathologists, including Alf, started believing that there was no such thing and that every case was murder in disguise.

“A pretty aggressive prosecutor got a conviction for a young mother who’d lost two children, based on Alf’s evidence.” He held up the first plate and let it drip into the sink before wiping. “She’d been in jail about fifteen years when Alf did an autopsy on the woman’s baby niece. Turns out there was a metabolic abnormality that ran through the family. Alf went back and rechecked the specimens on the other babies. They all had the same disorder. An innocent woman had been convicted of murdering her children.”

Anya listened in silence, but knew that with the benefit of hindsight and better technology for testing, there were probably many similar cases from the past.

“Around the same time, Alf’s wife delivered a stillborn and he thought it was a sign from God, punishing him for that woman’s wasted years in jail. That’s when he started exploring alternative medicines and became obsessed with Vitamin C deficiency.”

Anya pulled out the plug. “What happened to the woman?”

“She was released and exonerated, but the husband had left her and she was unable to have any more kids. He’s kept track of her all these years.”

“That is tragic. Reality is that we probably would have all come to the same conclusions at that time. But Alf didn’t help anyone by overcompensating and crippling the police investigations into genuine homicide cases. In some cases more than one child in the family lost its life to abuse. Don’t you think that’s criminal?”

Peter nodded. “I just don’t think anything is that simple any more.”

Anya dried her hands and touched his arm. “Normally I’m the one trying to right all the wrongs and you’re the calming realist.”

“Maybe the student has outgrown the teacher.”

“Never!” She smiled. “I was going to ask your advice about the Willard case.”

Peter folded the tea-towel and hung it over the oven door-handle. “I remember that one from all the publicity.”

Anya put the plates away, banging the cupboard door in haste. “The file’s in my office, if you’d like to take a look.”

They passed Ben, who was lying on his stomach drawing what looked like a truck in his scrapbook, while watching Sylvester try to catch Tweety Bird.

As they entered her office, Brown-Eye stood guard, and stared through his glass eyes.

“What the—”

“It’s going back to its owner tomorrow. Don’t ask,” she said, handing Peter the autopsy reports for Eileen Randall and Liz Dorman. He studied them for a while before speaking.

“There are distinct similarities, but the time of death is most certainly wider than the window defined here. The girl could have died well before, especially if she were floating in the water, which she must have been.” He scanned down further. “A quick immersion wouldn’t have resulted in that many crayfish larvae finding their way into the chest cavity. And the post-mortem wounds are interesting. You don’t often see exploratory wounds like that after a frenzied killing.”

“What if,” Anya said, “someone other than Willard killed that girl on the beach and sexually assaulted her, and he merely pulled the body out of the water?”

“That could explain the smear of blood on his shirt.”

“Don’t we have an obligation to at least check, to right a potential wrong?”

Peter frowned. “I think I taught you far too well.” He ran his eyes over the reports again, scratching his beard. “All right, what would you like me to do?”

On Monday afternoon, Hayden Richards
arrived at the SA unit. Anya had just finished examining an eight-year-old girl allegedly abused by her mother’s de facto husband. The local doctor had referred the girl after noticing some inappropriate sexual behavior, but the mother refused to separate from her boyfriend. Family services would have the girl in a foster home by this afternoon.

Anya had taken twice as long as usual to examine the young girl, accompanied by a gynecologist from the hospital. The pair concurred and the magnitude of their decision was not lost on either of them. If the girl stayed in her current situation, she would be subject to more abuse, but the child didn’t want to be taken from her mother.

The sounds of the girl crying when told she would be placed in a temporary home still rang in Anya’s ears. She double-and triple-checked the evidence. The photographs weren’t clear and didn’t help.

“You look like you’ve lost your last penny,” Hayden said as he tapped on her open door.

“Guess we’re all suddenly questioning ourselves, hoping we’ve made the right decisions.” Her head throbbed and she tried to ease it by rubbing the pressure points at the base of her skull. It made the pain worse.

“Is that such a bad thing?” He leaned against the door with a videotape in one hand. “Want to talk about it? I’m a pretty good listener.”

She rested her head in her hands after gesturing for him to come in. “I just took a child away from her mother. What if it isn’t the right thing?”

“None of us is infallible. Come to think of it, maybe you should be having this conversation with Sorrenti.”

“Speaking of whom, how did you get off the leash?” The moment she said the words, she wished she hadn’t.

Luckily, Hayden just raised his eyebrows and sat down. “It is a bit like that, especially after Willard’s arrest. Unless his former conviction for the Randall killing is overturned, he’s going to stay on remand for the Dorman murder. The similarities are far too close for any judge to let him go. Sorrenti’s got him pegged for your knife-rapes as well. She doesn’t want to consider any other suspects.”

He looked like Anya felt. Tired, disillusioned and fed-up. Like someone who had lost his spark, whatever that was. Anya studied him. Each time they met, it seemed as though more weight had melted off his frame. For a moment she wondered whether he was in perfect health, or whether there was a more sinister reason behind the massive weight loss. Whether the cancer scare was merely that.

Then she thought of Meira Sorrenti. It couldn’t have been easy working with someone who knew a lot less about investigating sexual assaults.

“Guess we’re all under pressure.” She lifted her head. “So what brings you to this salubrious part of town? Have you come to tell me Melanie wrote that letter?”

“Nope, handwriting doesn’t match. We’ve also turned up a number of rape cases that could fit the pattern, but victims are proving hard to find.” Hayden threw the tape into the air and caught it. “To cheer you up, I brought Geoff Willard’s initial confession.”

There had to be something unusual about it, or he wouldn’t have bothered. Anya moved to another room and returned with a portable TV/video. She plugged it in on the desk and inserted the tape.

A young-looking Willard appeared in black and white. The quality of the picture was poor, but she could make out that he was sitting at a desk in an office. The uniformed officer, a younger, thinner Charlie Boyd, sat with his back to the camera.

She turned up the sound.

“Here comes the good bit,” Hayden pre-empted.

“All right.” Willard wiped his nose with the back of a blood-stained hand. “I’m hungry and I wanna go home.” He had the look of a rabbit startled by a shooter.

“You tell us what we want to know, and we’ll let you go,” the policeman said. “And your mama will stay out of prison, too.”

“All right, I killed Eileen Randall. I saw her and stabbed her to death on the beach.”

“And what else did you do?” A beardless Charlie Boyd tapped the table with his pen.

“I stuck my penis into her insides.”

“You mean you raped her vaginally?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Charlie Boyd noted the time and date Willard had confessed.

Before he could shut off the tape, Willard asked, “Can I go home now? I said what you wanted.”

Anya stopped the tape. That wasn’t a confession. It was a frightened adolescent saying what he was told. He was scared and probably didn’t understand what had happened.

“That last bit didn’t get heard at the trial,” Hayden said. “The local cop thought he was doing the right thing. Screwed up big-time with that effort.”

The confession should never have been shown at trial. It failed the most basic standards of policing.

“After I saw that, I decided to do some checking. Nick Hudson’s no cleanskin. He served some time in Queensland for assault in the early 1990s. He’s got a charge-sheet for minor offenses, but no other convictions.”

“Nice family.” The timing suggested Nick hadn’t been in prison with Gloria Havelock’s rapists, so would not have had access to Melanie’s photo. Three questions remained: why Geoff had small amounts of blood on two shirts, who’d written him the letter and how he’d got Melanie’s picture.

“Have you checked out where Nick was the night of the Dorman murder?”

The phone rang and Anya answered it, gesturing her visitor to give her a minute. He wandered into the corridor while she spoke to a victim’s local doctor. When the conversation ended, Hayden returned to the doorway.

“Hudson works at a local pub. No tax records, just cash in hand. He says that on the night in question, the owners went out and asked him to cover the bar. The owners confirmed it and every dropout from Fisherman’s Bay frequents the place, so the guy’s got a firm alibi.” He leaned his head on the door again. “They all know someone who recruits at the local chicken factory. It’s like some kind of magnet for them all.”

Anya wondered if Hayden had a back problem and was more comfortable standing.

“For all we know,” he said, “there could be more fatal cases, ones we’re missing because Willard was in jail at the time. I’m thinking our killer’s struck before.”

“Funny you should say that.” Anya swivelled back in her chair to the empty fax. “I was wondering the same thing.”

“Damn!” he said, sat and pulled the chair between his legs. “You know something.”

So much for the bad-back theory, she thought.

His foot met Brown-Eye, who was temporarily deposited under the desk. “Jeez, you’ve gotta take that back. It’s disgusting.” He screwed up his nose. “And it smells worse than ever in here.”

“Thanks for that.” She wondered what other smell he was referring to, one when Brown-Eye wasn’t there. “It’s going back tonight. I just want to grab some aspirin and check the other fax. I’ll be right back.”

In a few moments, Anya returned with a blister-pack of tablets and a glass of water. Under her arm, she clutched some papers. “This just came through—your timing’s impressive.” She squeezed past the detective to get to her seat and deposited the papers on her end of the desk. “A friend did a search of the National Coroners Information System. I can’t access it from here.”

The NCIS had been established in 1998 to collate autopsy findings around the country. Its purpose was to identify clusters of disease, trends and similar cases to reduce preventable death and injury. Its role had become important in occupational health and safety, pinpointing the types of work-related deaths, occupations most at risk, and equipment linked with deaths.

Pathologists also found it useful for looking up similar pattern injuries. She’d ring and thank Peter Latham later.

Hayden wanted to get in first. “Well, I came up with a case from three years ago. A woman up north was stabbed to death in Port Macquarie. Local police thought it was a break-and-enter gone wrong, and never even had a suspect. No fingerprints or DNA at the scene. Hard to say if anything was taken. The investigation was pretty sloppy.”

Anya looked through the faxed sheets. “Leonie Turnbull?”

“Bingo!” Hayden suddenly looked brighter. “What have you got?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute.” Anya gulped the tablets and read the report. She recognized the name of a locum pathologist who’d done the autopsy. Thankfully, Alf Carney hadn’t been involved. The deceased, Leonie Turnbull, was in her mid-twenties, five foot two and weighed fifty-five kilograms. Cause of death was massive blood loss due to thirty-eight stab wounds. Some were superficial. One penetrated the thoracic aorta, which was probably the fatal wound.

“Looks like she was stabbed multiple times; wounds look confined to the chest and neck, some deep, others superficial. Some look like they’d been done after death.”

“Anything to suggest she’d been sexually assaulted?”

“Not according to this, but that doesn’t exclude it.”

Hayden flicked through his notebook. “Apparently she was a medical student from Sydney sent there for a country rotation. She’d just returned from a few days off. No one even knew when exactly she got back, but she was having problems with her supervisor. Seems she didn’t really like the place and wanted to get back home.”

“Any patients bother her?” Anya knew that a young medical student could easily attract unwanted attention in a small place. Doctors were at a much greater risk of being stalked than anyone else, given the relationship they had to forge with patients. Even the most innocent exchange could be misinterpreted and deemed intimate by someone with dysfunctional thinking.

“Not that we know. According to the supervisor, she looked young, but her work was fine. He thought she was bright, shy and a bit strange, but he wouldn’t explain what he meant. He thought she was irresponsible when she just took off for a few days. Sounds like he’s pretty guilty about what happened to her. Thinks he should have spoken to her more.”

Hindsight was 20/20, Anya thought. Everyone would do things differently if they had the benefit of what medical people termed the retrospectoscope.

She wondered about the young woman’s sudden disappearance. Hayden’s mobile phone rang and he excused himself to get better reception.

Anya flicked through the list on her notice-board and dialled Port Macquarie hospital. The medical-records department proved surprisingly helpful when she explained the need for information. No one named Leonie Turnbull had been admitted. The sexual-assault service had been run by the local clinic for many years. Anya doubted a medical student would want to be examined by people she worked with if she’d been assaulted.

She dialled a friend at the Newcastle SA unit, the closest major center. After explaining how important it was to know whether Leonie had presented three years ago, her colleague agreed to check and promised to call back. Anya thanked her and flicked through the remaining pages from Peter Latham.

A case from six years ago involved a more elderly woman who had been stabbed in her home multiple times. This woman had ligature marks on her wrists and ankles from being restrained on the bed. Judging by the trauma, the poor woman had been raped with a sharp instrument prior to death. The details were horrific. After the rape, the perpetrator slit her throat, shearing the carotid arteries on both sides. The stab wounds weren’t confined to the chest and involved the face and limbs as well. As far as murders went, this was one of the most sadistic. The killer had even urinated on his victim.

When Hayden returned, Anya passed him the pages. He read in silence, shaking his head at various stages. “Hard to imagine what sort of animal can do this,” he said.

“I doubt it’s the same killer. The pattern of injuries is very different.”

Hayden studied the page. “I agree. What did Quentin Lagardia say about our guy? The gentleman rapist?”

“Exactly. In relative terms, he’s not that sadistic. Whoever did this wasn’t role-playing with the old lady. Everything he did was angry, brutal and degrading. Look at the urination. That’s something either an anger-retaliatory or anger-excitation rapist would do.”

“Our guy doesn’t kill them
when
he rapes them. And the ones who were stabbed to death weren’t raped at the same time, as far as we know, except for maybe Eileen Randall, and that could have been consensual going by her reputation.” He took a deep breath and rubbed his forehead. “This old lady was a goner as soon as she opened the door.”

Either way, Anya knew she would be happier if Hayden followed up on whether or not anyone had been convicted of the old lady’s murder.

As if in response to her thoughts, he said, “I’ll still check it out just to be sure we’re not jumping to the wrong conclusion.”

Anya’s mobile phone rang in her handbag. She fumbled to grab it on the fifth ring.

“Thanks for getting back…She was?…She did? On the twelfth of June?…Brilliant. I’ll need to talk to her about the details later on. Thanks.”

A counsellor knocked on the door.

“Sorry to interrupt, but we’ve just got word. A woman is coming in who’s been tied up and held captive for two days. Casualty is checking her out. If she’s well enough she’ll come here, otherwise they’ll ask you to examine her over there,” she said. “I brought you these,” she added, presenting a plate loaded with buttered scones.

“Fine, thanks.” Anya’s headache suddenly felt worse. This would take hours to complete.

Hayden smiled and took the plate, thanking the counsellor.

“I think we could both do with some of these,” he said, tucking in to the first scone. “If we think the same person killed Liz Dorman and Leonie Turnbull, Willard can’t be guilty. He was in prison at the time. Unless we find a concrete link between Turnbull and Liz Dorman, Geoff Willard’s looking at life and I’m likely to be pulled off the case.”

Anya had almost forgotten. “That call was from Newcastle. It seems Leonie Turnbull had good reason to take off suddenly. She’d been raped four nights before she was murdered.”