Chapter 7
Sapphire
The chopper lifted off the burned ground, and Kayden banked hard south. Below us, the cottage shrank to a black scab on the scorched paddock, the windmill catching the sun off its blades and throwing it back at us like a signal.
I made myself wait until the cottage disappeared from view before I turned back to my notebook.
A page of bullet points stared back at me.
Cassidy and Xavier in cottage for 2 days. Hendersons lit the fire – unconfirmed, no report filed. Chalk dust on top of ash – walls stripped after fire, not before. Paint tin – check for fingerprints. What was hidden in the walls? Cash? Drugs?
Someone had gone to enormous trouble concealing something inside those walls. New plasterboard. Fibro glue. Fresh paint. That wasn’t a rushed job. That was careful, deliberate, and planned well in advance.
But whoever took out whatever had been hidden there had been in a hurry. Panels had been hacked off in chunks. There’d been no attempt to tidy up. In and out fast.
And they’d done it after the fire. The chalk dust didn’t lie.
But Kayden had.
I tapped my pen against my chin.
Cassidy and Xavier had been trapped in that cottage for two days. Long enough to find what was in those walls. Long enough to get it out, too. So where had it gone? And who were they hiding it from?
Then there was Bob. He hadn’t filed Bruce’s arson report. He’d gone out to that cottage himself, seen the stripped walls, and said nothing to me about any of it. Not a single word.
Something had been in those walls. Bob knew it. The Bransons knew it. And neither side wanted me anywhere near it.
I wrote cash or drugs? in the margin and circled it twice.
Kayden flew with one hand resting on the gear thingy and the other hooked into the door frame, jaw set, eyes fixed on the horizon. He hadn’t said a word since we’d lifted off. Whatever I’d said or seen at the cottage had rattled him. He was turning it over.
So was I.
The difference was, I was starting to think we were turning over the same questions. Just from opposite sides of a wall neither of us was ready to knock down yet.
The country below shifted from scorched black back to red.
The fire had eaten about a kilometer of ground around the cottage before stopping dead where a creek bed had cut a natural break.
Beyond the burn line, the country returned to its usual self—red dirt, spinifex, and the occasional bunch of gum trees standing in the middle of nothing.
Beautiful, in their own brutal way.
I’d grown up on a Merino sheep station outside Longreach, remote enough that the School of the Air had been my classroom and the UHF radio had been my social life.
Now every time I went back to see Mom and Dad, which wasn’t often enough, I couldn’t decide whether I loved it there or wanted to claw my way back to a decent coffee shop.
I probably would have stayed on that land forever if Aunt Carol hadn’t been murdered.
I shut that thought down before it went any further.
“How much further?” I asked over the beat of the rotors.
“Fifteen minutes.”
Those were the first words he’d offered since we lifted off. I let him keep his silence and went back to my notebook.
The creek came up out of the landscape slowly.
First, a ribbon of green threaded through the red, massive gums and grass spreading on either side, then the water itself appeared, glistening like polished silver in the sun.
From up here, it was genuinely beautiful.
Down there it was flies, heat, and red dust in every crease of your skin.
Kayden brought us down in a clearing on the western bank. The skids touched down, and we climbed out into heat that was more brutal here than at the cottage, closer to the water, and yet hotter, like the country was punishing us for showing up.
“This way.” He walked off without looking back to see if I was following.
I picked up my pace to catch him.
The creek was running, but only just. A gentle flow over flat stones, shallow enough that I could probably cross without getting my knees wet.
But the banks told a different story.
I stopped at the lip and looked up. Wedged in the fork of a red gum tree was a tangle of debris, branches woven together with fencing wire, and a fence post snapped clean in two.
The debris was jammed so high I couldn’t reach it.
The wall of water that had put it there had been moving with tremendous force.
I shook my head. Water was the lifeblood of outback stations like this. It could also be the enemy.
I lowered my gaze and kept walking along the bank.
Silt was smeared across rocks at waist height. A snapped fence line trailed into the creek on the far side, the wire kinked and twisted around the trunks of the gums like it was nothing more than a string of wool. Branches were strewn everywhere, some of them as thick as my torso.
This creek had been a wall of water—and recently. Weeks at the most, which fit neatly into the Doug Walker disappearance timeline. His boot and clothing had been found somewhere along here.
I climbed down the bank, and stones rolled under my boots as I picked my way along the creek bed.
Kayden came down after me slowly, like a man who didn’t want to be anywhere near this spot.
“Where did you find his items?”
He pointed to a flat rock at the edge of the water about further downstream. “There. Boot and clothes.”
I made my way over and crouched.
A well-worn left hiking boot sat next to tattered clothing on a smooth-topped rock just above the current waterline.
The boot leather was dried and cracked, curling at the edges.
Red mud was caked into the leather, and the eyelets and the laces were stiff with muck.
A crust of dried silt had formed inside the boot around the footbed.
Ants had moved in, tracking steady lines along the tongue of the boot and disappearing inside.
I leaned closer. A dark stain was along the inside heel of the boot. Could be mud. Could be blood. I took out my phone and photographed it without comment.
The clothing was a shirt. Tattered and torn, bloody and covered in mud, folded next to the upright boot.
I stood and looked at Kayden. “They’re together. Nice and neat.”
He shifted his weight. “After we found them, Charlie was upset. She put them together.”
“Okay. That makes sense.” I kept my voice neutral. “But here’s what doesn’t. If Doug was swept away in a flood powerful enough to strip the boot off his foot, how did it end up here, above the waterline, with the laces still tied?”
He opened his mouth, then closed it.
“A flood that size would’ve tumbled that boot for kilometers.
” I pointed downstream. “The laces would be shredded. The boot would be packed solid with silt and debris, or more likely, sitting at the bottom of the creek.” I looked back at the rock.
“This boot looks like someone walked out wearing it. Not like someone drowned in it.”
He folded his arms. “Or his body washed up on the bank, and the animals got to him. A dingo would’ve gnawed that boot off the body.”
“With the laces still tied?”
“Sure. Dingoes are scavengers. Things don’t always make logical sense out here.”
“No,” I said. “They don’t.”
I kept photographing the boot, catching the tiny scratch marks in the leather. Then I photographed the tattered shirt, zooming in on the blood on the sleeve.
I turned to Kayden. “Who found these? Specifically.”
“All of us rode out looking for him. Me, Mitch, Charlie, and Cassidy. We split up.”
“But who spotted these items first?”
A pause, and he frowned. “Charlie found the boot first and called out.”
“And was anyone else with her when she found it?”
“Mitch was with her.”
“Your brother.” I straightened. “They’re together now, aren’t they? Charlie and Mitch.”
“What the hell has that got to do with anything?”
“Just getting my facts straight.”
“Sounds more like you’re building a case against my family.”
“I’m trying to make sense of the evidence. That’s all.” I crouched again and photographed the sole of the boot. “Were the laces tied or undone when Charlie found them?”
He scowled. “Tied, I think.”
“You think.”
“I wasn’t the one who spotted them. I rode up after. Ask Charlie and Mitch, they were right there.”
“I will,” I murmured as I wrote tied laces in my notebook. “So, here’s one possibility. Doug survived the flood. Crawled out somewhere downstream. Made it this far. And then something else happened to him.”
“Or he drowned.” Kayden’s voice had a hard edge. “His body washed up, and the animals got to him before anyone found him. Dingoes, crows, ants. Not much left after they’ve had a feast. Nothing suspicious about that.”
“But the tied laces?”
“Why the hell does it matter?” He dragged a hand across the back of his neck. “The guy went into a flash flood and died. Why are you acting like it was something different?”
I straightened and faced him square on. “Because something is going on, Kayden.”
“Nothing is going on.”
“Don’t bullshit me.”
“I’m not bullshitting you.”
“Then look me in the eye and tell me your family has nothing to hide.”
He said nothing.
“That’s what I thought.” I shoved my notebook into my pocket.
“I see it when you talk about Doug. I saw it at the cottage when I asked you about those walls. I saw it at that dining table this morning. Your whole family is sitting on something, and you’ve been cagey with me since the second you walked into that kitchen and saw me.
” I held his gaze. “I know bullshit when I hear it, Kayden.”
His eyes hardened. “We’ve done nothing wrong, Sapphire.”
“Then help me understand what’s going on.”
“I’m not telling you a damn thing, Officer Delaney.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re wearing the badge that says Bob Ackerman owns you. So if you want to know what the hell is going on out here, go ask that bastard yourself.”
I stared at him, rage simmering inside me.
He didn’t take it back.
I put my hands on my hips. “You think Bob owns me?”
“Bob has owned every cop for hundreds of miles for years. Tell me you’re different.”