Chapter Fourteen
When Judith woke on Monday morning, she reached for her phone and found that she’d already missed four calls from Mike Russo.
He hadn’t left a message, but she didn’t need to talk to him to know what he wanted.
The word was out that Robert Walker was dead, and Russo felt that he was owed the inside track. Judith turned off her phone.
She got out of bed and went looking for workout gear.
Eventually she fished her least grubby pair of leggings out of the laundry pile, and found a sports bra and an old knock-off AC/DC T-shirt at the back of her wardrobe.
They’d have to do. She’d put off doing her laundry for too long, and she’d all but run out of clean clothes.
Before she left the apartment she tried calling Hilary, the witness who’d come forward in the Walker case.
There was no answer. She left a message.
Her run took her out along the banks of the Maribyrnong River.
The weather was all right. It rained a bit, a light drizzle only, at about the half-hour point but Judith didn’t mind rain.
It cooled her down. She needed the time by herself, needed to push her body, despite the nagging pain in her ribs and her cheek.
She wasn’t sleeping well, and when she did sleep, she dreamed.
Every time she fell asleep, she found herself climbing through the window of Robert Walker’s study and pulling the trigger.
Again and again she brought the golf club down on her stepfather’s head.
Judith opened and closed her hands as she ran.
She shook them out. She could almost feel the reverberation of the golf club in her hands as it made contact.
Judith wasn’t sorry that Walker was dead—that was the truth of it.
She hadn’t been sorry in the aftermath of Gerry’s death either.
The fact that her mother had been so obviously distraught, that she’d made such a public display of her grief, all of it had made Judith want to run away, but it hadn’t made her sorry.
How could it, when the alternative would have been her mother’s dead body on that kitchen floor?
Judith increased her pace, ignoring the pain in her ribs. Her breathing came faster.
In the two decades she’d been a cop, there’d been a number of occasions when she could have taken a short cut, and no one would have known.
She’d once tracked a serial rapist to a dark alley and he’d pulled a knife.
She could have shot him then and there, and the entire force would have been behind her.
A year later, a drug dealer had jumped her, and she’d gone for her taser when she could have gone for her gun.
In real life, when she was under pressure, she was never tempted to break the rules.
But in her dreams, she was a vigilante. Robert Walker wasn’t the first suspect she’d dreamed about killing.
The dream recurred with distressing frequency and she didn’t understand why.
Did some deep down part of her want to kill?
Doing things by the book was difficult. It meant long months of investigation, the painstaking gathering of evidence, the risky transfer of a file to prosecutors who could easily fumble the pass, the wait for a judge’s ruling, and far too often all of that resulted in a shitty outcome.
But she understood that, and accepted it.
Didn’t she?
She did. Her conscious self never fantasised about having the power to make the judgement call—yes, this man is guilty—and then just take the bastard out.
She couldn’t, wouldn’t do that. But someone had shot Walker.
Someone who either had the thing Judith was missing, or was missing the thing Judith had. The burning question now, was who?
Judith slowed her pace. The pain from her ribs was intense, and the run wasn’t doing much to clear her mind.
Rocky and the team were now investigating Robert Walker’s murder, and she would be firmly shut out of it.
The complaint Walker made against her before his death had seen to that, and that complaint would hopefully die with him.
Her sexual assault case was certainly dead in the water.
With Walker dead, she had nothing left to investigate and no one to prosecute.
All she was left with was the sense, the absolute conviction, that she was missing something.
The note. That damning note.
Judith’s first thought, when she’d seen it, was that Walker had written it, to blame her for his suicide.
Her second had been that Eddie Fraser had left the note there for the same purpose.
But Walker hadn’t killed himself, and Eddie Fraser might be an arsehole and a strongman, and a dinosaur and a man with a massive blind spot when it came to his son, but he wasn’t a murderer.
He hadn’t killed Robert Walker just to put pressure on Judith. That would be insane.
The rain was heavier now. Judith walked, her breathing easing, barely noticing as her T-shirt soaked through.
She supposed it was possible that Eddie could have heard about Lachlan’s report as soon as it had come in, and sent someone over to the house to plant the note, or even planted it himself, before she had arrived.
But if it had happened like that, how could he have entered and left the house without Lachlan seeing him?
She thought again about the beautifully written calligraphy, and dismissed Eddie Fraser as a possible suspect.
That note had been written by someone with all the time in the world.
Not by Eddie Fraser. But if not him, then who? It had to have been the murderer.
Judith had regretted taking the note in the immediate aftermath of her action, but now she was glad she’d done it.
She couldn’t think of a single way that her life would be made better by someone else seeing it.
But burning the note hadn’t erased the problem it presented.
She had an enemy, and while she had no earthly clue who they might be, they clearly knew far too much about her.
Back at her apartment, Judith showered and changed into the previous day’s black jeans and black shirt.
They were presentable, barely. She dropped the rest of her clothes to the laundromat down the street, to promises of a two-day turnaround, and took a tram to the station.
The squad room on the tenth floor was quiet, with only a handful of cops at their desks.
Judith hesitated, then turned around and took the lift back down two floors.
She found Claire Holdsworth drinking coffee and eating a croissant at her desk, headphones on over her red curls.
Judith tapped her on the shoulder, and Claire jumped guiltily.
‘Sorry. I didn’t see you.’
‘Did you call me on Saturday?’ Judith asked quietly.
Claire looked confused. ‘On Saturday?’
‘You didn’t call to tip me off about Robert Walker’s murder?’ Judith had been thinking all weekend about that call. The voice had been young and female, and she was certain that there’d been a hint of an English accent.
‘Robert Walker’s murder?’ Claire echoed. The confused look deepened.
‘It’s fine if you did, Claire. It was helpful, actually. But the call got cut off, you see, so I—’
‘I didn’t call you,’ Claire said. ‘Sorry. I didn’t even know Walker had been killed until you said it just now. Did someone call you? What made you think it was me?’
‘It’s nothing. I thought maybe I heard your accent. Never mind.’
Claire was still holding her croissant in her right hand.
Her fingernails were bitten to the quick.
There were traces of black nail polish, a remnant only at the base of her thumbnail, a dark shadow on the side of her index finger, like she’d tried and failed to remove it all.
Judith’s attention sharpened. Her eyes went to Claire’s face.
‘I haven’t gotten to that video yet,’ Claire said. ‘It’ll be a day or so. I’ve got two laptops and a phone to go through on a fraud case. Actually, I suppose if Walker is dead, your case is closed now?’
Claire Holdsworth looked a lot like Alexis Turner—if you tucked all that red hair under a black wig, added black eyebrow gel, heavy eyeliner, and hid her face under a hoodie.
‘I suppose it is,’ Judith said. Her eyes searched Claire’s again, looking for a tell, and found nothing.
Claire’s eyes met hers easily and if there was any tension in her face, it seemed to Judith that it was only the tension any young officer would feel if a senior detective stood over them and questioned them about anonymous phone calls.
Judith thanked Claire and left her to her work.
But she walked away wondering. Luke Fraser had had his fans.
Most of them were very young male officers, idiots like Alex Thompson or Derek Lambert, low on confidence and common sense, but there’d been a few women too.
To Judith, Luke’s contempt for women was blindingly obvious, but would it be so obvious to someone fifteen years her junior?
She’d seen Luke turn on the charm for women who fit his idea of the feminine ideal—pretty, and young and unsure of themselves.
Claire was both very pretty and very young, but surely far too confident to be an attractive target for Luke, and far too smart to fall for his bullshit.
No, she was turning in circles, looking for connections in the wrong places.
She was tired, that was the problem, and therefore jumping at shadows.
If she suspected every woman who wore black nail polish of being the real Alexis Turner, she would have to interrogate half the young women in the building.
She needed sleep, and in lieu of that, caffeine.