Chapter 15
EVAN
I stood in the corner of the room, texting Delle, feeling the waves of annoyance roll over me slowly at the past hour and a half spent in my brother’s company.
The two forensic techs looked tired. They gloved up, gowned up, took to Chloe’s body slowly; unzipping the bag and standing, discussing a plan of action for a while in voices full of quiet reverence.
I watched as discretely as I could, having witnessed this almost ceremonial procedure only a handful of times in my life.
As one of the techs was turning Chloe’s head to release part of her ponytail where it was wedged, she murmured, ‘Here we go, lovely,’ like she was talking to a living being.
The two women started filling ziplock baggies of slides and scrapings and cuttings and combings taken from Chloe, beginning at the top of her body and working down.
All good? I texted my wife.
Just dropped off the second lot, she answered. They’re getting their safety briefing. First lot have gone through and are waiting.
It hadn’t even occurred to me that, because of the number of kids, Delle would have to make two car trips out to the paintball field with the teens, returning two sweaty, reeking, overstimulated carloads of them back again at the end of the day. I sent, You’re a saint.
Both sets of kids spent the whole trip out there deconstructing Monty Python films, she replied. BOTH sets of kids, Evan.
I felt a little sparkle of annoyance at Chris.
It was an angry sort of envy at his freedom to be such a weird young man, at his ability to find delight at the idea that he might be genetically seven per cent Norwegian or to see the comic value in Monty Python without (much) judgement or ridicule from his parents.
Sure, I rolled my eyes. Delle and I had issued plenty of bewildered and long-suffering sighs over the years, never more so than during Chrissy’s amateur taxidermy phase, which was immediately followed by his Rocky Horror Picture Show phase.
I was envious of all the versions of himself Chris had got to be in his sixteen years.
Anime Chris. Medieval-reenactment Chris.
Animal-scat-collector Chris. Delle and I had never shamed him, even when things got really odd; we sent him to a therapist when he started collecting his fingernail and toenail clippings when he was nine, but never let on to the anyone outside the household about it.
The only version of ourselves that had ever been available to Russell and me was carbon copies of our father, and he would loudly expose us to his cop friends when we stepped outside those bounds: lambasting me in front of an office full of cops once for knowing the words to a Britney Spears song, slapping a novel out of Russell’s hands in a supermarket in front of a group of women.
The need to be like him had made us both cops and family men.
But I wondered who I might have been had I not spent my whole life trying so hard to be Dad, or hating Russell because he was better at it than me.
By the time the forensics team finished up, they had two labelled paper bags full of specimens in tiny containers, and had bagged and tagged Chloe’s clothes, watch and handbag and added them to the collection.
In all, they told me, there were a hundred and fifty or more evidence items to hand over at the Pemulwuy Forensic Evidence and Technical Services Command.
‘I’ll drive in convoy with you.’ I took my keys from my pocket, tossed and caught them. ‘I’ve got to see the samples in and wait for results.’
‘Oh, well, we’ve actually got to stop at Chatswood on the way back.’ The officer was in her forties, with a neck tattoo peeking up above her collar. She gave an apologetic sigh. ‘There’s a tripod camera in the van we’ve got to lend to a team there who’re covering a gang rape.’
‘Why don’t they have their own camera?’
‘Government-funded police force, sir.’
‘Can’t you send it with someone else?’
‘It’s a big piece of kit. Needs the van.’
‘Well, I need these samples at the lab now,’ I insisted. ‘A detour to Chatswood is going to add an hour to the timeline that I don’t have. If there’s a delay I’ll get hammered by the lead detective, and so will you.’
‘Yeah, he seems like one scary dude.’ She nodded.
‘I won’t be answering that phone call. If you want to get something to the lab as fast as lightning, give the lab geeks something to get started on, you could maybe take these sets of bio samples and the vic’s clothing.
But you’ve got to take official custody, sir.
I’m not having that guy blasting me about the protocol. ’
‘I can do that.’
‘You sure?’ She raised an eyebrow.
‘Let’s do it.’ I waved her off. ‘I’ll start loading this stuff into my car.’
We did the transfer in the bright light of the car park, drawing curious glances from patrons who were arriving to the medical centre for their appointments only to hit the sign on the door like cars arriving at a road block.
I was handing the chain of custody paperwork back to the officer when Delle called me.
The tightness in her voice vibrated down the line.
I’d had many a phone call with her like this: a mother trying to keep calm in the face of crisis. ‘We’re leaving.’
‘What?’
‘Your son and I,’ Delle hissed. She always called Chrissy my son when he fucked up. ‘He’s been kicked out of the paintball centre and banned for two years.’
‘What?’
‘Get in the car, Chris,’ Delle shouted, her mouth away from the phone. When she came back, the line crackled with a huffy, angry snort. ‘Your son shot one of the girls in the head.’
‘What do you mean, Delle?’
‘Exactly what I just said. They’d just finished the safety briefing, where they tell you eighteen-fucking-thousand times not to shoot someone from a distance of less than fifteen metres, and your son immediately goes and shoots one of the girls point blank in the side of the head before they’d even started the first bloody game. ’
My neck was suddenly hot with fury. I slid into my car and turned the ignition, pulling out so fast a few of the sealed paper bags of evidence fell off the back seat and into the footwell. ‘Put him on.’
There was a long pause. I wound up the hill through the bush, the engine struggling as I pushed it too hard. ‘Chris? Chris?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What the fuck?’
‘I don’t know, Dad.’
‘You shot one of the girls in the head?’
‘I didn’t shoot her. Not on purpose. I, like, put the gun to her head and it … it went off. I didn’t know it was that sensitive. I hardly touched the trigger at all.’
There was a rumpling sound on the line. Delle came on.
‘I stood there and watched you do it, Chris. Evan, he walked up to the girl in the corset, put the gun to her head and said “Die, bitch!”, then pulled the trigger. I was standing right there. It was a deliberate act, Chris, and you’re not going to try to convince your father that it wasn’t. ’
Muttered dissent in the background.
‘I don’t know what in the world you were—’
‘Is she okay?’ I asked.
‘The paintball people are saying he could have killed her if he’d lined it up right. Jesus. Fuck. Evan, I’m so embarrassed!’
‘Delle, try to calm down.’
‘You fucking calm down! My next call has to be to the girl’s father!’
‘What condition is the girl in?’
‘She turned her head at the last second and the shot glanced off her forehead, but she came up with a huge fucking grapefruit-sized bruise that’s as dark as ink, Evan. She didn’t have her helmet or her safety glasses on. He could have got her in the eye. Can you please come and help me with this?’
‘I can’t.’ I winced. ‘Delle, I just can’t walk out of the case.’
‘Fuck you. Fuck the both of you. Chris, I don’t know what got into you. That was in-sane.’
I heard more muttering in the background; the opening and slamming of car doors. ‘I’ve had to send the girl to the local hospital with one of the paintball techs, for god’s sake. I’m taking Chris home and leaving the rest of the kids there.’
‘Is that a good idea?’
‘They’ve all paid for their tickets, Evan.’
‘But if another one of them gets hurt and you’re not there—’
Delle started roasting me, worse than she had thus far, using the last of her furious energy to get out some language I usually only heard around the police station locker rooms, and some I’d never heard before at all.
As was her usual mode of operation, she was soon quiet and I felt safe putting the phone back to my ear.
‘Why did it have to be us?’ She sighed. ‘As if people don’t talk about us enough already.’