Chapter 13
RUSSELL
Wisemans Ferry Medical Centre was on a hill across the wide street from a Bottlemart.
The liquor store was already parked out with the vehicles of local tradesmen enjoying their Saturdays.
They’d be preloading for a big night on the farms and wooded lots around town.
I could already smell woodsmoke on the wind as I stepped out beside a long wheelchair ramp.
I got a text from Bridie and opened it to find a selfie, her smile wide and an enormous lizard clutched against her side.
The thing was as thick around the middle as a pool noodle, its chest and midsection lying along Bridie’s forearm, its eyes indignant and looking right at the camera.
I could see the back leg was twisted and swollen.
Being a middle-aged male and a father, I texted the thumbs up emoji.
Evan ended a phone call and tapped out a text to someone with another of those stressed sighs that everybody around me seemed to be giving every fifteen minutes or so, like the man was a walking pressure cooker with a faulty release valve.
‘So, Dodge is telling me Chloe’s body was brought here rather than to Gosford,’ he said, coming around the bonnet and standing near me.
‘After the paras arrived and took her out of the hotel and tried CPR. Once they’d realised she was definitely dead, their thinking was that they needed to get her somewhere sterile, and this is on the route back to the city, at least. She’s been kept at room temperature, he says, so that forensics can look into a proper time of death once she’s transported to the lab. ’
This was good. I didn’t say so, but I’d been hoping Chloe hadn’t been put on ice before I saw her. That would fuck up time of death calculations even worse than they already had been.
‘Do you know these lot?’
‘Vaguely.’ Evan said. ‘I’ve never brought a body here.’
There was an ambulance parked in a bay marked out for the head GP of the clinic, and a handwritten sign on the door of the centre stated that the surgery was closed until further notice.
A red-haired woman in navy-blue scrubs opened the door as Evan arrived ahead of me, smiling at him sadly and giving me a wary look.
There was some chatter back and forth between the local cop and the people of his region, so I stood at the window with my best expression of impatience, because the last thing I wanted was to make friends.
After I’d cleared my throat at least twice I was offered a set of gloves from a box and directed to a door at the back of the empty centre.
Chloe was still zipped into the body bag, lying on a gurney in a room that looked like it was prepped for minor surgeries. Steel benches, a huge overhead light, privacy curtains. I went over and unzipped the bag all the way, pushed the flap back, and looked at her.
The first thing you get hit with is the smell.
An overwhelming wave of copper, then the sour, fetid smell that comes with a body having lost bladder and bowel control in death.
The little elastic hair tie that had pulled Chloe’s platinum-blonde hair into a high ponytail was hanging on for dear life down towards the last inch of her shoulder-length hair.
The hair was resting on her shoulder, sticking to her cheek, matted with blood.
Her whole body was coated with dried blood in a dozen different colours—reds, browns, yellow, black.
There was no telling what colour her T-shirt had originally been.
She was braless. Her eyes were half open and focused on the wall behind me, her face turned my way, like she’d been waiting for us to meet.
Evan came and looked at Chloe from head to foot.
I guessed this wasn’t his usual fare. He’d probably seen plenty of car accidents and drownings out here, teens wrapping four-wheel drives around trees and speedboats hitting submerged logs at 80 kilometres per hour.
The occasional drunken idiot who tried to jump over a bonfire.
I carefully pushed up the folds of fabric around Chloe’s already bloating midsection and found exactly what I knew would be there: two gaping, eye-shaped stab wounds, almost exactly vertical and at least two inches long.
Evan went around the other side of the table so he could lean in closer to inspect the wounds.
‘Big kitchen knife,’ he guessed.
‘Wrong. Hunting knife.’ I pointed to the uppermost wound.
‘Bottom of the wound is frayed. Top is neat and trim. The knife had a pointed tip, sharp upper edge and an at least partially serrated lower edge. We’ve got bruising from a hilt here and here.
We’re looking for a big-arse bowie knife, like you’d use to kill a pig. ’
Evan leant in closer still.
‘He’s right-handed,’ I went on. ‘The wounds are slanted that way. Soft diagonal tilt. See?’
‘You talked about divers in the car.’ Evan stood upright. ‘You going to send them in looking for the knife?’
‘We won’t find it.’ I shifted Chloe’s T-shirt back into place. ‘He’s not so smart that he’s pulled all this off just to dump the knife off a bridge a hundred metres from the crime scene. But a dive will be good for appearances.’
‘So he thinks we’re working hard.’ Evan nodded. ‘We’re coming after him.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘So he thinks we’re underestimating him. So he thinks that we think he’s that dumb.’
The two of us stood over Chloe Lutz’s body, gazing at her face, at the awful wastefulness of seized and destroyed youth.
I didn’t know what Evan was thinking, but I was in familiar and sadly comfortable territory.
Because I’ve been angry all my life. The anger simmered sometimes, lowered to a dull, warm flame, but it was never really gone, and all it took was a gentle manipulation of some over-sensitive dials in me to bring it flaming on again.
Combusting. Burning everyone around me. Mine was a brain that knew the viciousness on display here like an old friend.
It was a viciousness I saw in the eyes of my own father as I lay squabbling in a crib, a newborn already knowing of the badness in the world, already having heard it through the walls of my mother’s womb.
It was just inevitable to me. I shrugged on the anger at whoever had done this to Chloe Lutz now like I was pulling on a coat I’d owned forever.
Felt its comforting weight on my shoulders.
I’m gonna get this prick, I told myself.
Evan was looking at the steel bench at the side of the room.
Two items were laid on sterile blue-and-white pads there, awaiting handling by forensic techs, who would also come and take Chloe’s clothes into evidence.
A large black handbag waited there beside a thin silver watch.
‘Bingo,’ Evan said, taking a pair of gloves from a box beside the items. He opened the handbag and looked inside. ‘Damn. No notebook.’
‘What’s there?’
‘Tampons. More pens. A protein bar.’ He drew a handful of fabric from the bag, kept pulling, stretching the thing out. ‘A … cardigan.’
I straightened and zipped Chloe back into her body bag, then pulled my gloves off, dumped them in a bin by the door. ‘I’m going to go out and call Dodge for a ride.’
‘Why wouldn’t you just ride back with me?’
‘Because you’ll be getting your arse to Sydney.’
‘Sydney?’
‘Yeah.’ I washed the glove powder off my hands in a nearby sink.
‘The forensics team at the pub should be wrapped up there within an hour. They’ll swing by here to process this stuff.
I want you to supervise the extraction of the fingernail scrapings, vaginal swab, skin exam, hair combings, everything.
Make sure they swab her neck. We know he grabbed her there. ’
‘But what do I have to go to Sydney for?’
‘To sit there at the forensics lab in Pemulwuy and make sure they get me the DNA results as fast as possible,’ I said. ‘Plant yourself in the waiting room and stare at them. Set a timer on your phone for seven minutes, and every time it goes off, go to the counter and ask them how it’s going.’
Evan’s face pinched. ‘You do that? You sit there all day asking them every seven fucking minutes whether they have your test results yet?’
‘It works.’
‘There’s stuff I could be doing on the ground here. You’ll be a whole man down if I leave.’
‘That’s debatable.’
‘You’re just trying to get me to go away, Russell.’
‘Now you’re catching on.’ I tapped my temple and smiled as I headed out the door.