Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
The team gathered. Rocky started the briefing, then passed it over to Judith.
Work was assigned and carried out. Ruth and Miriam Hall’s child services files were made available.
Miriam Hall’s file was short. She’d fostered with the Giffords, and after that with only one other family.
By all accounts she’d been happy with them.
Or happy-ish, at any rate. The last social worker to visit had commented that Miriam had not formed deep bonds with the family, but she had won a scholarship that covered her university tuition and most of her living costs.
She’d moved out of her foster home and into a rented flat close to the college.
Two years later a note was placed on the file about her death. That was it.
Ruth’s file, on the other hand, was a complicated mess.
Apart from the Giffords, she had had three other attempted placements in foster homes, all of which ended badly.
When she was fourteen, Ruth had assaulted a six-year-old foster sister with a brick.
When she was fifteen, she was placed with a family with no other children.
They sent her back when all three of their pets—two dogs and a kitten—went missing, one after the other.
The last attempted placement—this time to a family with neither other children nor pets—ended when she tried to burn the house to the ground.
There was a pattern of similar incidents at her group home. She was placed in a high-need, highly-supervised facility, where the other kids too had a history of violence or of acting out. But here too, Ruth quickly earned a reputation.
‘The other children avoid her,’ said a note on the file. ‘Her friendships are superficial and temporary. Ruth requires close supervision, particularly in the aftermath of a friendship, when she is prone to volatility.’
The file ended when Ruth aged out of the system.
There was a note that she had been offered a place at Deakin University, and that was that.
Ruth Hall had no criminal record, which seemed impossible.
Judith didn’t believe that a woman with her history had left the foster system at eighteen, lived a completely blameless life for seven years, and then at twenty-five set about taking brutal revenge for her sister’s suicide.
‘Where have you been, all this time?’ Judith murmured. ‘Where did you go?’
There was a buzz of excitement from the other side of the room. Judith turned in her chair. Lucy Phillips was standing by her desk, her phone pressed to her ear, gesturing for Rocky’s attention. Judith stood too, and took a few steps in Lucy’s direction. Lucy put her phone down.
‘That was Nathan Anderson,’ she said. ‘He’s just been into his garage, and his wife’s car is gone.’
Rocky swore. ‘No one thought to check the family vehicles before now?’
Lucy looked stricken, like the oversight was her fault. ‘I’ve got the numberplate,’ she said.
‘Run a check on the ANPR cameras. Let’s see where she went.’
Lucy ran the search.
‘We’ve got hits on the M1 system,’ she said. ‘Monash Freeway eastbound, CityLink heading west through the tunnels, Princes Freeway heading southwest towards Geelong, and then one hit on the Anglesea Road.’
‘She’s heading for the coast,’ Judith said. ‘She’s going to Lorne.’
‘What?’ Rocky turned to her.
‘I think she’s going home. Back to the house she grew up in with her father and mother. What happened to the house? Is it vacant?’
Maybe no one had wanted to buy a house that had been owned by a murderer, where he had ultimately killed himself. It could have been left empty all of these years. Was that where Ruth had been living, before she’d put this plan into action?
Rocky turned to Lucy. ‘Call Lorne Station. I want someone out to the house in the next ten minutes.’
‘She might be armed,’ Judith said.
Rocky turned to Lucy again. ‘Make sure it’s a team, and make sure they know what they might be walking into.’
It took only minutes to get a response from the sergeant at Lorne Station. Lucy handed the phone to Rocky. After a moment Rocky put it down.
‘The Palmer house is long gone,’ Rocky said.
‘It was bulldozed in 2009. There’s another house there now, owned by some tech millionaire.
’ The news rippled through the room. More than one cop swore quietly, or let out a sigh of frustration.
‘I want every cop in the state looking for that car,’ Rocky said.
‘We’ll find her, sooner or later. If we don’t, she’ll call us.
She took that boy because she wants something, take my word for it. She’ll be in touch.’
* * *
Time passed. The work continued, but they made little progress.
The forensics team reported on their search of Ruth’s apartment.
They’d found packaging for a hidden camera that had been made up to look like a smoke alarm.
The team then searched Robert Walker’s office again, and they’d found the camera, attached to the ceiling in plain sight with high-strength adhesive.
It looked like a standard industrial smoke alarm.
The plastic had even been aged a little so that it didn’t look brand new.
A search of Jack Miller’s place led to the discovery of a small goose-neck camera placed inside a pot plant that was sitting on his porch.
A quick search confirmed that both cameras could be easily bought from an online shop, and neither required any particular expertise to use.
Ruth must have broken into Walker’s office at some stage to place the camera.
When questioned, Walker’s former colleagues seemed to have no idea of when she might have done it, but the office had no security cameras or alarm and the windows were old sash windows, one of which had a broken mechanism.
Ruth could have come and gone at night without anyone being the wiser.
Dropping a camera into a pot plant outside Jack Miller’s place would have been easier still.
Data from both cameras uploaded automatically to the cloud.
The technical team was trying to trace the data but so far they’d had no luck, and even if they managed to trace the data to its download point, Judith was pretty sure that they’d trace it to the computer sitting on the desk in Ruth’s abandoned apartment.
Ruth had been ten steps ahead, every step of the way.
Jude was at her desk when Deborah Sawhill appeared at the door to the squad room.
Her eyes went straight to Judith, and she jerked her head for Judith to follow her out of the room.
Judith glanced at Rocky, who was standing a few desks away, looking at Sawhill and frowning.
Clearly, he hadn’t expected this interruption.
Judith followed the other woman into the corridor. Sawhill was looking even more severe than usual. Her blonde hair was slicked back into a tight bun, and her eyes, when they looked at Judith, were dark with dislike. She offered no explanation for her sudden appearance.
‘Come with me,’ she said. She walked quickly down the corridor, and Judith, with no other option, followed.
Sawhill led the way to a meeting room one floor up.
She opened the door and gestured for Judith to enter.
Judith took three steps into the room, then stopped.
The room was large and furnished with a conference table and eight seats.
There was a TV screen on the wall to her left, and a large window with a view over the Melbourne skyline to her right, but Judith paid no attention to the view.
All of her attention was on Eddie Fraser, who was seated at the head of the table.
He smiled at her. As Judith stood, unmoving, Sawhill took the seat immediately to his left.
‘Sit please, Detective Lee,’ Sawhill said. She nodded to the only other occupant of the room, a young officer in uniform. He was red-haired and thin, and he looked thoroughly intimidated. ‘This is Senior Constable Griffin, from TPAV. He’s here to represent your interests.’
TPAV meant the Police Association Victoria. The union.
‘Represent my interests?’
‘This is a disciplinary hearing,’ Eddie Fraser said. The smile was gone. He now looked dignified, reserved and self-possessed, every inch the senior officer.
‘An emergency disciplinary hearing,’ Sawhill said. ‘Sit.’
Judith sat. Sawhill picked up a remote control from the table in front of her. She hit a button and the TV screen on the wall came to life. It displayed an email. Judith read it rapidly.
Dear Assistant Commissioner Fraser,
Judith Lee is a liar and a cheat and a bad cop. Here’s the proof. Don’t think you can bury this (I know you cops like to bury things). This is going to the press too. I suggest you get ahead of it.
From
A well-wisher.