Chapter 9
RUSSELL
I needed air. There was a time when I could walk into a crime scene and put everything together into a nice complex story, vacuuming up all the details, stirring them around in my brain and spitting out an initial theory, and then I could move straight onto the next step of the investigation without taking a breath.
But the mental effort required to look with hard eyes at the room where Chloe Lutz had been murdered and put together some undercooked ideas about what had happened, all while confronting my brother for the first time in five years, left me numb and jittery.
I walked back out to the landing at the top of the stairs and came upon the crime scene photographer, who was hovering at the railing, fiddling with the knobs on her tripod and trying to look anywhere but at me.
Word was obviously getting around that I was a world-class arsehole, which gave me some comfort.
But I’d blown out all Prick Energy at Dodge and Evan, so I told her gently and politely what I wanted from the scene shoot and then went down the stairs and out to the front of the pub.
Bridie was sitting on a low sandstone wall across the street, messing with her phone. I came and sat beside her.
‘Your uncle Evan is here,’ I said.
She put her phone down. ‘Oh … wow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘I thought he was further out.’
‘He is.’
Bridie chewed her lips and looked at me. I was trying not to remember the last time I had seen Evan. We’d been sparring with each other in a doorway then, too. The doorway of my house in Eastwood. The crime scene of my murdered marriage. ‘You guys aren’t going to work together on this, are you?’
‘No,’ I said firmly.
‘You’d better not. You’ll strangle him, and then there’ll be another murder to investigate.’
I wanted to smile at the joke but didn’t have the strength. ‘He’ll be hanging around, though.’
‘So should I, uh …’ Bridie picked up her phone again. Just held it to her chest, the teenager’s comfort teddy. ‘If I see him, should I not talk to him?’
‘You’re an adult, Bridie. You can decide who you talk to.’
She looked surprised. ‘Oh. Okay.’
‘I’m not trying to come back into your life and start making rules in the first five minutes,’ I said. ‘Have you been speaking to him? You know … since.’
‘No.’
I nodded. The girl was struggling to reconnect with me, her own father, after what I’d done.
I was sad but unsurprised to know that contact with my side of the family had fallen away as well.
I sat and tortured myself for a minute or two with memories of Bridie and her aunty Delle, the girl sitting on Delle’s lap when she was little, eating fairy bread, drawing, laughing.
Chrissy and Bridie squealing and splashing in the pool.
‘I see Chris on TikTok and I see Aunty Delle on Instagram, but we don’t really talk.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Mum, uh …’ Bridie struggled. ‘She told me. About what Uncle Evan did at work. Sort of. She heard about it through her colleagues.’
‘That’s not why I don’t talk to him.’
‘Oh, I know. I’m just saying that I know about that, also.’
‘It was incredibly stupid,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but, like, cops do stupid things sometimes.’ Bridie glanced at my grazed knuckles.
‘We sure do.’
‘Mum said Pop swooped in and saved him from getting fired.’
‘Arthur has got a lot of pull around here,’ I said.
‘But that was stupid move number two. If Evan had taken some time and thought hard enough about it, he might have been able to get himself out of the mess he was in. But he panicked and called his daddy. And now he’s up shit creek.
That’s what Evan does. It’s what he’s always done.
He gets backed into a corner and acts before he thinks.
He doesn’t wait. Doesn’t strategise. He gets in a spot and snaps and does something dumb. ’
Bridie was gazing at the river now. She smiled sadly. ‘Funny.’
‘What?’
‘That’s how you catch an injured bird.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yeah. You back it into a corner,’ she said.
‘Don’t give it time to think. Then you just lash out and grab it.
I’ve done it a thousand times. You move too slowly, the bird looks around and finds an escape route.
Runs between your legs or flies up and over your head.
You’ve got to move as fast as you can, so they don’t have time to strategise. Ambush predator tactics.’
I nodded, trying not to think about Chloe Lutz pinned up against a wall by her killer.
‘I’d better go back in,’ I told her, and stood. I didn’t know whether to put my hand on her shoulder, or hug her, or tell her that I loved her, so I did none of those things and just walked away.
I found Dodge at the entrance to the pub, standing under a wrought-iron sign bolted into the sandstone that said Please Tie Horses at Rail.
He slipped his phone into his pocket when he saw me and came over.
‘I’ve got one on traffic.’ He pointed to an officer across the street, standing with a clipboard and watching the empty road. ‘Three door-knocking.’
‘Tell me what you know about the entry,’ I said. ‘How did this guy get to Chloe? What was she doing here? Everything.’
Dodge adjusted his stance, cocked a leg out, probably relishing being able to tell me something I didn’t already know.
‘So, Chloe checked into her room at about four p.m. Rob Winter, the pub owner and manager, processed the check-in at the counter in the bar area. She parked in the spot he directed her to, last on the row, and then went straight up to her room with her bags. She wasn’t seen again until seven p.m., when she came down for dinner. ’
‘Where did she go in between those times?’ I asked. ‘Was she in the room or did she drive somewhere?’
‘We don’t know yet.’
‘What does the CCTV say?’
‘Not much,’ Dodge said. ‘There’s a camera over the bar and a camera over the parking area, and that’s it for the whole establishment.’
‘No cameras on the stairwell? None in the hallway outside the guest rooms?’
‘Nope.’
‘An impenetrable fortress, this.’
‘But busy,’ Dodge said. ‘On a Friday night, it’s pretty loose around here.
You’ve got the beer garden, where a lot of people drink and have dinner, but there are only a few tables out there to sit at.
So people who aren’t eating wander around, spread out.
They go right to the edges of the road. Out there, into the trees.
Sometimes people cross the road at the front and go stand drinking and looking at the river.
A lot of eyes out here. I have a couple of people saying they saw Chloe come down for dinner.
And we’ve got her on camera ordering at the bar. ’
‘She speak to anyone? Sit with anyone?’
‘We’re working on that. So far the word is she was on her laptop while she ate, which was a bit of an unusual sight, it being mostly tradies and locals and people on holiday out here. We don’t know yet if she had interactions with anyone.’
‘When did she leave the bar?’
‘Around 8 p.m.’ Dodge heaved a sigh that lifted and dropped his shoulders by about four inches.
The sigh of a man who hadn’t been this stressed, this busy, in many years.
‘She was seen going back upstairs by one of the other guests who was coming down at the same time. Now, when Chloe went back to her room, she was the only person on the floor. All the other guests were out.’
‘How do we know that?’
‘We’re going off their accounts,’ Dodge said.
‘There are only four rooms total up there. It was a full house last night. We’ve got a guy travelling alone for work, a young couple on a dirty weekend, a pair of grey nomads making their way around Australia, and then there was Chloe in the furthest room along the hall.
The lone guy and the young couple were at the pub downstairs until about one a.m., and the grey nomads were at a local friend’s place for dinner.
They don’t know when they got back but it was at least midnight.
They’re going to give me their car’s sat nav to confirm an exact time. ’
‘Why was everybody out so late?’
‘It was a Friday night.’ Dodge shrugged.
‘And, look, there’s really no point in going to bed at this place until the crowd downstairs has cleared out.
The exterior of the pub is sandstone, but it was gutted by a fire in the fifties and renovated cheaply on the inside.
The floors are pine.’ He looked at the floor through the doorway beside us.
‘They’re like paper. You can hear people sneeze.
My wife, Patsy, and I stayed here once for our anniversary and we could follow individual conversations as we lay there in bed.
We weren’t trying too hard to sleep, though. ’
Dodge braved a grin. I looked at him the way I look at the stuff I scrape out of my ear canals every couple of months. He dropped the smile and continued. ‘That’s why I’m thinking that by the time all the other guests arrived home, midnight and beyond, Chloe was already dead.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the grey nomads were in the room next door to hers, and the wife apparently can’t sleep unless it’s pristine silence.
She’d have heard the knock on Chloe’s door.
She’d have heard Chloe’s head hitting the wall.
And her falling to the floor, and the guy rumbling around her room.
The wife is telling us she heard diddly squat from the room next door from the moment she got home until Rob the publican started knocking on Chloe’s door the next morning. ’
‘I don’t believe her.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I shouldn’t.’ I narrowed my eyes at Dodge.
‘And neither should you. We’ve got nothing to back up her assertions.
Maybe she thinks she’s got Superman’s hearing abilities.
She thinks she can hear a cockroach jerking off two suburbs over.
Whoop-de-fucking-do, lady. Until I can back up her claims with evidence, they’re useless. ’