Chapter 16 #2
I’d known it was Chloe’s father, just from the gravel in his throat.
The unmistakable raggedness and flatness of voice that comes from losing a child.
Many times across my career I’d spoken to these ghosts of people, parents trying to move and speak and breathe in a world irreparably shattered.
There’s a slowness to them. A shell-shocked lag, like they’re waiting for the ground to stop shaking and don’t know yet that it never will.
I put a hand in my pocket and looked at the river beyond the trees.
‘I am so sorry about what’s happened, Mr Lutz. ’
There was a long silence. Then he cleared his throat wetly and said, ‘Right.’
‘What do you want to know?’ I asked. ‘What could I tell you right now that would bring you the most comfort, do you think?’
‘Uhhh, well, I don’t know exactly.’ Larry cleared his throat again. His voice trembled. ‘Me and the wife, we’re sort of … trying to decide whether we want to … you know … leap in to help you guys or just … just … just try to get our heads around the idea that she’s really gone.’
‘Okay.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Yes, I have. And I’ve seen the crime scene.’
‘They’re saying her laptop and her phone are missing.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘And can you just tell me … They’re saying she wasn’t raped or beaten up or anything like that. Just that she was killed and her stuff was taken.’
‘I believe at this stage that she wasn’t sexually assaulted.’ I started walking again. ‘But an autopsy will tell us more about exactly what happened. She certainly wasn’t beaten.’
A sound, strangled and hoarse.
‘Larry, your daughter was attacked by someone who wanted her dead very fast. I believe she was specifically targeted—’
‘And that’s how she died, is it?’ Larry cut over me. ‘Fast?’
I thought about the blood trail on the carpet in the hotel room. Chloe trying to drag herself towards the window while her attacker searched the room. ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘It was fast.’
Another silence while Larry took this in. The breeze off the river swept around me. Made the native grass shiver and scratch at my boots, insistent, the land trying to tell me stories, to claw me down and make me answer those agonised fathers who were in line for justice long before Larry.
‘Have you got experience with this sort of thing?’ Larry asked. ‘I mean, you’re going to find him, aren’t you? You know what you’re doing?’
‘I’m going to find him, Larry,’ I promised. ‘I always find them.’
‘Okay.’ A long breath that rattled the phone line. ‘What can I tell you that’ll help?’
‘Talk me through the last six months with Chloe,’ I said. ‘Specifically her love-life and her work life.’
‘Uh, there hasn’t been much of a love-life.
’ Larry’s voice loosened a little. ‘Her mother likes to live vicariously through her with the dating. Finds it interesting, the twists and turns. Young people and the stupid stuff they do. They’re like sisters, giggling about it, or crying about it, you know, Jill and Chloe.
But there hasn’t been anything in the past … I don’t know … year?’
‘Why was that?’
‘Chloe had a major break-up with a boy, and he was cheating on her, maybe. She could never prove it, mind you. But his uptake with another girl afterwards was too quick. I’m talking a week.
Chloe was getting texts from her girlfriends saying they were seen out together getting hot and heavy.
Like I said: twists and turns and stupid shit. ’
‘Can you text me the boy’s name, and anything you know about him? Car. Employer. Address. Was he ever aggressive with her? Did they fight in your presence?’
‘Oh, no, no, nothing like that. And I believe the boy’s in Italy right now anyway. The detectives here are onto that and they’re telling me he’s abroad. But I can text you all that stuff.’
‘Tell me his new girl’s name, if you have it. Same stuff for her. Address, vehicle, employer. Only if you have it.’
‘Okay.’
‘Why was Chloe in Redbelly Crossing?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know.’ Larry heaved a heavy sigh.
‘See, this is the thing I don’t understand.
She used to keep us updated about all that kind of stuff.
While she’s been doing her degree, she’s been making her way writing all sorts of things.
Restaurant reviews, and long pieces about people for the paper and for a handful of websites.
And she always shows us that stuff. If she ever has to travel to do it, she says so.
She’ll say, “Oh, guess what, I’m going to Noosa to review a hotel and they’re paying for it. ”’
‘Okay.’
‘I have been, um, sceptical from the start that you can make a living anymore as a journalist, you know?’ Larry said.
‘With all the technology that can do it for you. AI and all that. I wanted her to go into something more secure. Like banking, maybe. We’re a family of bankers.
But she was never excited about that. So I think since she took up the journalism degree, she’s been trying to prove to me that you can actually make a go at it if you work hard.
She’d say, “I just got paid three hundred bucks for a fifty-word review of this movie” or whatever.
So, if she was out there at Redbelly Crossing writing a story, she would have made sure I knew.
Just so I’d know she was making money. Had a job. She definitely would have told me.’
‘Unless it was dangerous,’ I said.
Larry was silent. My words hung in the air.
‘Did you ever discuss how dangerous it could be, to be a journalist?’ I asked. ‘Had she ever talked about going overseas to be a war correspondent or to cover violence?’
‘She knows I would never have allowed that,’ Larry said. ‘There are other people to do that.’
‘Did she cover any dangerous stories that you know of? Did she tell you about them beforehand?’
‘I can’t … Urgh. Christ. I can’t think.’
‘It’s all right.’
‘I know what you’re saying,’ Larry went on.
‘She’s gone out there, and someone’s killed her and taken the laptop.
Maybe it’s because she went out there that she was killed.
But she never said she wanted to do any dangerous writing or …
or researching. She was happy writing movie reviews and cooking blogs and stuff. ’
I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that if I’d learnt anything at all across my career covering the murders of young people, it was that it was almost impossible for a parent to tell whether their child was truly happy or just faking it.
Children know their parents. They know what they want to see.
‘What kind of story could be out there that someone would murder her over?’
‘People murder each other over all kinds of things, Mr Lutz,’ I said. ‘She might have just had some information that someone never wanted the world to learn. The nature of that information could be absolutely anything. The possibilities are endless.’
‘The pub that she was staying at,’ Larry said. ‘Maybe she knew something about that pub. It’s the pub owner who found her, wasn’t it? Or says he was. Should you be looking at him?’
‘I’ll be looking at everybody, Mr Lutz.’
Silence fell between us. The wind moaned in the pines lining the river.
‘I’m gonna let you go,’ Larry said. ‘My wife is calling me from the other room.’
‘Call me, day or night,’ I said.
I walked over to Dodge, who was standing with his arms folded, staring at the pub.
At those back windows to the hotel rooms, trying to assess the angle a person would have to stand at to see both them and the stairwell, it seemed.
He was side-stepping towards me. I had to clear my throat so he wouldn’t run right into me.
‘Beds,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘We need to talk about them. The day is getting on. You and your daughter: you’ll need somewhere to stay while you’re on this case. And I suppose you’ll want the other three rooms here at the pub shut down for the foreseeable future?’
‘Until I can establish what, if any, involvement the other guests had in what’s happened here, I want it all closed off,’ I said. ‘The hallway, the rooms, the stairs. Everything.’
‘So would you be staying with your brother, then? In Mangrove Mo—’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Right.’ Dodge heaved another whole-body sigh; paused to think. ‘You guys don’t seem to be on the best of terms.’
‘You’re very observant, aren’t you, Dodge? You’re like one of those extreme empaths.’
‘The thing is, this is the only hotel for fifty k’s.’ Dodge gestured to the building before us. ‘The next one would be Wisemans Ferry. Forty-five minutes if the ferry’s running. So that’s an hour and a half of driving per day, you coming and going from Redbelly.’
‘We’ll get an Airbnb.’
‘They’re all full. I called and checked.’
It was my turn to sigh.
‘There is an option,’ Dodge said, chancing a sidelong look at me. ‘But it’s a little … eccentric.’