Chapter Six
Judith took a seat and logged in to her machine.
She had a lot of work to do. The truth was that taking on Alexis Turner’s case was going to put her under pressure.
She had a number of active homicide cases, including the drive-by shooting of Samuel Haddad (a known drug dealer and occasional human trafficker) and his wife, Zara, outside their gym in Melbourne’s CBD.
The fact that Samuel and Zara Haddad were career criminals did not make the solving of their murders any less urgent, and Judith had a day of interviews ahead of her.
She spent the early part of her morning reading through preliminary statements and planning out her questions.
Then, with an hour to go until her first interview, she turned to the Robert Walker file.
She read through the transcript of her interview with Alexis, looking for facts that could be verified by third parties.
Pinning down as many verifiable facts as possible was an essential step in a case like this.
Catching the accused in a lie—even one that might seem minor—was the first step towards undermining their credibility.
Judith’s first aim therefore was to turn this case from a he-said, she-said, into a he-said, the-facts-say situation.
When she’d finished isolating the facts from the interview transcript, Judith compared Alexis’s statement with her notes from her interview with Walker. She found a discrepancy. Alexis had said that she’d had a referral from the college health centre. Walker had said Alexis was a private patient.
A call to Walker’s clinic and a quick chat with Walker’s secretary Delores did not resolve the problem. The woman was flustered.
‘Are you sure I’m allowed to speak to you? Don’t you need a warrant or something like that?’
Judith took care to sound relaxed and friendly.
‘You can talk to me if you like, Delores. Let’s just clear up a few details.
We won’t talk about anyone’s private notes or anything like that.
I just need to confirm that Alexis Turner had a referral from the college health centre when she came to see you. ’
There was a pause, and then the sound of keyboard keys clicking. Another pause, and then Delores came back on the line.
‘No referral. She was a private patient. A nice girl, I thought.’ She sounded doubtful.
Judith ended the call. The small discrepancy would have an explanation, no doubt, but she should resolve it quickly.
She just had time before her first interview on her homicide case.
Judith dialled Alexis’s number. There was no answer.
She dialled it again. Again it rang out.
Judith frowned. She sent a text message.
Hi Alexis, this is Judith Lee. Can you give me a call?
She waited ten minutes, finishing her coffee and re-reading her notes. Her phone didn’t ring.
* * *
The day didn’t go well. Judith interviewed the gym members who had witnessed the shooting of the drug dealer and his wife, but they’d observed very little that was helpful, and gave more than one conflicting account.
After that, she was pulled into a two-hour-long interview with an inspector and a senior sergeant from Professional Standards where she was asked to go over the detail of her encounter with Luke Fraser again and again.
At the end of the interview, the inspector—a stone-faced man she’d never met before—confirmed that Luke had been charged and released on station bail, that he was suspended pending a full disciplinary hearing, and that she was now expected to stay out of the case, and to keep her mouth shut about it.
At three o’clock, Judith took the lift down to the basement car park.
She had an at-home interview scheduled in the Haddad murder case, with the victims’ daughter, Nadia.
Nadia had been at school when the murders happened, but it was very likely that her parents had known that there was a threat to their lives, and therefore it was possible that they had discussed that threat in front of her.
If Nadia did know something useful, the chances of her being willing to discuss it with Judith—or any cop—were small, but every avenue had to be explored.
As Judith walked across the car park she was thinking about Nadia Haddad, about how best to approach an interview with a grieving fifteen-year-old.
So she didn’t see the damage to her bike until she was almost upon it.
When she did, she stopped dead. The leather seat and both tires had been slashed.
Judith swallowed, her stomach turning over.
She took a step closer and crouched to examine the damage.
Whoever had done the work had been thorough.
They’d made sure her bike was completely wrecked.
The brake lines and the main wiring harness had been cut in multiple places.
And oh Christ. Was that smell urine? Judith stood and took a step back.
Who the hell had done this?
She looked around, searching for nearby cameras.
The parking garage was secure. There was no way in without a security pass, no way in without driving or walking under a camera, but there was no camera pointing directly at the motorbike parking, she realised.
The cameras were at the entrances and the exits, and at the lifts, but there were none monitoring the vehicles themselves.
Which meant that anyone who had accessed the garage in the eight hours she’d been inside the station could have been the one to mess with her bike, and she had no way to rule any of them out.
Which of course they’d known. A cop had done this.
Someone under Eddie Fraser’s thumb, or some friend of Luke’s?
Luke had made a lot of enemies in his short time as a police officer, but he’d made a few friends too, because even in the force there were weak people who were easily impressed by a blowhard arsehole with more muscle than character.
Judith was shocked to discover that she had tears in her eyes. She blinked them away rapidly. God. She’d better pull herself together. It was just a motorbike. It was fixable. She couldn’t let them get to her so easily.
Judith left the bike where it was and took the lift back up to the ground floor and the fleet management desk. She knew the guy on duty.
‘No bike today?’ he asked.
She cut him a look, but the expression on his face was open and friendly.
‘Not today,’ she said.
He handed her a set of keys. ‘This is the best I’ve got today. Two years old. Just been cleaned.’
‘Thanks.’
He lowered his voice. ‘I heard about Fraser. That was good work. I hope you’re not getting any shit for it.’
That was too close to the bone. She glared at him, suspecting that he was making a thinly veiled swipe about the damage done to her bike, but the look he gave her in return was one of confusion. Damn it, she was being paranoid. They were making her paranoid.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘Yeah. Welcome,’ he said, but he looked unsettled.
Judith gave herself a lecture as she walked away. If she jumped at every shadow, she was handing Eddie Fraser the win. And she sure as hell wasn’t going to do that.
* * *
Nadia Haddad was staying with her aunt Layla in Bayside.
Layla and Nadia met with Judith in the kitchen of Layla’s prettily decorated and extremely tidy three-bedroom home.
Nadia was a beautiful girl with very dark eyes and a septum piercing.
She looked Judith straight in the eye and told her that she had no idea who’d killed her mum and dad, and if she did, the last person she’d tell would be a fucking copper.
After that she shut her mouth and refused to say a word.
Judith did her best to break through, but got nowhere.
She wasn’t helped by the fact that Layla hovered over her niece, breaking into tears at regular intervals, and interrupting the one and only time Judith thought she might have been getting close to provoking a response.
The tears were not a tactic. It was obvious that Layla was completely freaked out by her sister’s murder.
Judith had no sympathy for the woman. The weeping and the shock struck her as hypocritical, in the circumstances.
Not to mention weak. Shit, Nadia was fifteen years old and she’d just lost both parents, but she was holding it together better than her aunt.
Judith’s mood darkened further when she left the house, turned off her Do Not Disturb and her phone buzzed three times in rapid succession.
She’d missed another call from her mother, who had left a new voicemail and sent a text message—both of them asking her to drop by the house.
She groped in her pocket for a cigarette and found only the gum.
Christ. She really needed a smoke. Judith put the gum in her mouth and chewed, slowly and begrudgingly.
Her jaw still ached. She told herself it was getting better.
She sat in the car but didn’t start the engine.
There was no way out. If she didn’t take the time to see her mother, Linda would keep calling, she’d call Rocky again, and after that, she’d start calling the station.
Judith checked her watch. It was after five.
She’d go there now, get it done before Linda escalated, and before she had a chance to change her own mind.
Judith pulled up outside her mother’s house in Brighton East at five-thirty p.m. Linda had lived in the same home for twenty-eight years, during which time the suburb had gentrified around her.
Most of the neighbours who’d lived there when Judith was a child had long since sold up and moved, and their houses had been knocked down to make room for gleaming contemporary two-storeys with electric gates and manicured landscaping, but Linda lived on quietly in her little red-brick bungalow with its ragged edged lawn and brightly coloured bedding plants.