Chapter 8
EVAN
There was a blood smear on the outside doorknob.
I stepped over the threshold, glanced at the chain on the lock as I went through, which was intact.
I looked at the walls in the short hallway into the room.
Both walls told me something. On the left, a new dent in the plasterboard at about the five-foot-five mark, just inside the door itself and beside a framed print of a chicken.
Plaster dust on the floor. On the right, on both the wall and the open door itself, medium-impact cast-off patterns in blood.
I stood there and tried to visualise what had happened.
Saw the victim, Chloe Lutz, being grabbed by the throat or the face as she opened the door, being shoved hard into the wall, making a dent in the gyprock with the back of her head.
Being held there while she was stabbed, probably two or three times, in the abdomen, judging from the height and amount of cast-off on the wall.
I looked down at the mess of handprints and smears on the bloodstained carpet, stepped over it all, followed the smears as they went up the hall past the wardrobe and the bathroom and arrived at the foot of the bed.
The bed wasn’t made but wasn’t messed up, either.
No struggle. The coverlet and top sheet were flipped back on the left-hand side, closest to the bathroom and the front door.
I walked over and saw there was no blood on the sheets, or on the walls.
Just a couple of big pools in the carpet where Chloe had crawled, rested, dragged herself on, and then finally arrived at the place where she bled out and died under the window to the beer garden.
The curtain was still drawn, blocking out the view.
I looked up, saw that there were circular oyster-style lights in the ceiling, which were switched off.
Saw another blood smear on the light switch.
I went to the spot where Chloe had died, crouched down, looked hard at the shape of the blood in the carpet.
She’d been lying on her side, facing the bed.
I could see the imprint of her upper arm.
Her thigh. I took some deep breaths, rubbed my throat, got the sudden urge to vomit.
This wasn’t me. I didn’t gag at crime scenes like a fucking rookie.
What was this whole-body dread, this sense that a storm was about to hit and I was going to be caught in it, swept away?
I rose, looked at the bed again, preparing to do another lap of the room. Voices in the hallway outside made me jolt.
‘Who’s the arsehole who’s in my scene? One of your cronies, Dodge?’
‘Well, I actually wondered if—’
My brother, Russell, was there. The sight of him made me freeze.
The moment seemed to collapse in on itself.
It was like realising I was inside a dream but not being able to wake from it.
Nothing made sense. Russell seemed somehow larger and more menacing than the last time I had seen him, five years ago.
He’d been puffed up then, the way that he was now, standing in the doorway, mean-eyed and raising an enormous finger to point it at my chest like a gun.
‘You!’ Russell’s grey eyes narrowed. ‘What the hell are you doing here? Don’t tell me you’re on this.’
‘I am,’ I said. Dodge was hovering in the hallway behind Russell, a bare sliver of him visible past Russell’s broad shoulder: a single eye. ‘My chief super put me on it.’
‘Forget that,’ Russell spat. ‘I’m the assigned detective, and I’m not working with you.’
‘You’re the assigned detective?’ I fumbled, trying to get a grip on reality. ‘How?’
‘Doesn’t matter how. I’m on this. Which means you’re out. Hit the road.’
‘Russell, wait—’
‘I’m not working with you.’
‘You have to,’ I said. ‘My chief—’
‘Tell her I sacked you.’ Russell jerked a thumb towards the hall. ‘You’re redundant. Your services aren’t required. Scram, Evan, before I create another crime scene right here on top of this one.’
‘Are you guys …’ Dodge’s words were again ventured carefully, a mouse trying to talk his way out of a lion’s den while two beasts snarled at each other. ‘You two are related, are you?’
I nodded. ‘Russell is my brother.’
‘Huh! Small world.’
‘Get out, Evan!’
‘I thought there must be a family connection.’ Dodge folded his arms, curious now. ‘Odd name, “Powder”. So you’re both from—’
‘Just give us a minute, Dodge, will you?’ I widened my eyes at him, and the sergeant turned and left. Russell remained in the doorway to Chloe’s room. I walked over, my hands up in surrender. ‘Russell, lis—’
Russell seized a handful of my T-shirt, got chest hairs as well, making me yowl with pain. Water welled in the corners of my eyes. ‘No, you listen,’ Russell snarled.
‘Rus!’
‘I’ve had a real prick of a morning, okay?
’ Russell said, squeezing hard as my hands closed around his fingers.
He was almost lifting me off my feet. ‘Bridie is downstairs. She’s supposed to be staying with me this week in the city.
Instead, I’ve been shafted out here to Fucksville against my will.
When Georgia finds out I’ve dragged our child along on whatever the hell this is, she’s going to feed my balls into a paper shredder.
The last thing I need to add to this delicious turd sandwich of a day is your sorry mug.
I’m here to clear this thing up and get back home. Okay? So get a move on. Now, Evan. Go.’
Russell yanked me into the hallway, shoved me hard. I found myself suddenly released. Stood with my face burning and smoothed down my crumpled shirt.
‘I can’t, Russell.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I just finished begging my way onto this job.’ I swiped at a tear that had fallen free of my eye.
‘I need it. For the detective’s exam. If I don’t get my stripes and get the fuck out of Mangrove Mountain in the next couple of years, Delle is going to leave me.
’ I drew a ragged breath. ‘You must have heard about my … my …’
‘I heard.’
‘Right.’ I nodded hard. ‘So, you know, then, that I was supposed to be out of here by now. But I fucked up. And this might be my last shot at getting out for a long, long while.’
Russell shook his head, walked away, into the room, stood looking at the scene. ‘The mess you’ve made of your life is not my problem, Evan.’
‘Mate, please—’
‘No.’
‘Ple—’
‘It’s your son’s birthday, for Christ’s sake. If you cared that much about him, you’d be doing something with the kid.’
‘You remembered.’
‘He’s still my nephew, even if his dad’s a traitorous piece of garbage.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Yep.’
‘Russell, I would love to be out right now with my kid,’ I continued.
‘And I’m … I’ve been fighting with Delle for a good long while about being stuck out here.
It’s not so bad for me, because I’m always working.
But she’s … you know … She’s got to see people in the town.
And Chris has got to go to school. So, regardless of what you think of me, and what happened between us—their futures are riding on this. ’
Russell said nothing. All the fire had gone out of him. He was like that, I remembered. Like a volcano. Explosive, then worryingly calm.
‘I’d appreciate it if you at least left me on the books for this. I don’t have to be in your face the whole time. I can be off doing sideline stuff.’
I stood behind him, watching Russell’s profile as my brother surveyed the room.
I saw him walk further in, turn in a slow circle, taking it all in.
The blood on the floor. The hole in the wall.
The window to the beer garden. On the bench beside the little television set, Chloe Lutz’s duffel bag was upturned, clothes scattered along its length.
I took a step back into the room. We were both here now.
Two brothers, steeped in the raw, electric awfulness of a fresh and violent death.
‘Walk me through the scene,’ Russell said. ‘And then you can get the fuck out of my sight.’
He didn’t need to be walked through the scene.
It had been pretty clear to me before he’d even joined the police at age eighteen that Russell was going to be a better cop than I was.
Because Russell was just made that way. Better.
He was older, taller, faster, stronger and smarter.
He had our father’s face, had been named by him: the ridiculously puerile Gunther ‘Gun’ Powder, a nod to Arthur’s alleged German heritage and a ham-fisted attempt to position Russell as he grew up as a dangerous, masculine weapon of a person, his father’s dream child.
Me, on the other hand: I looked like our mother.
I was leaner, reedy when I was stressed and forgot to eat, with eyesight that had almost disqualified me from joining the jacks at all.
From pictures I had of her, I knew I had my mother’s dark, deep, emotive eyes.
Russell would have seen everything critical in the room already, even before I walked in and gestured to it, and it wasn’t because he’d been a cop for four years longer than I had, or that he’d sat and passed his detective’s exam with flying colours.
Russell was good enough. And I had never been good enough, as a son, or a husband, or a father, or a cop.
I shifted past my brother, walked around the side of the bed closest to the window.
Russell moved naturally back to the doorway, so he was as far away from me as he could physically get.
He stood there for a good minute or so after I’d finished my debrief: silent, thinking, staring at the hole in the wall beside him.
‘Dodge is thinking it’s a punter from downstairs,’ I said.
‘Wrong,’ Russell said.
I waited.
‘It wasn’t someone from the pub.’ My brother took out his phone and fired off a text, typing with two thumbs. ‘At least, not a random admirer who came up here wanting to beg his way into her room, failed and got violent.’
‘No?’