Chapter 17
EVAN
My father called as I was steeped in dark considerations about Chris and the man who stood behind Chloe Lutz at the pub, the one who looked just like him.
The man who had stabbed a woman to death a mere twelve hours or so before my son, on impulse, shot a female friend in the head with a paintball gun.
I was so distracted I had to go around the big roundabout at Dural twice, trying to decide if I wanted to take New Line or Old Northern Road.
A truck driver blasted his massive horn at me.
‘Yeah.’
‘What am I hearing about some big swinging dick from Sydney taking over the case and pushing you lot around?’
I had to laugh. ‘You’ll never believe who it is.’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s Rus.’
I expected Dad to laugh, too. Or come out with some shockingly homophobic slur. Instead, he was silent. I waited, fighting traffic down the hill towards the city. ‘Dad?’
‘You need to get rid of him.’
‘Look, you’re not going to run into him,’ I said. ‘He’ll be head down on the case and won’t come up for air. If you’re worried, just stay out of Redbelly.’
‘I don’t care about running into him,’ Dad growled. ‘I care about him taking the case off you and leaving you—and by way of you, me—in the dirt. He would do that. You know what he’s like. He’s vengeful as all hell.’
‘This from the guy who checks the obituaries every week for a funeral notice about someone you had a fight with at work forty years ago,’ I said.
‘Yeah, so what? That prick Bernie Carrera is going to die one of these days, and I’ll be right there with my shovel to help them bury him.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘If Russell solves this, he’ll make sure you don’t get any credit. And if he cocks it up he’ll blame it on you.’
‘He’s not going to cock it up. Russell is an absolute weapon these days. The guy listens to a crime scene like a fucking maestro listens to the orchestra, trying to find out which tuba is out of tune.’
‘Do you hear yourself? What do you think you are, a poet?’
‘I’m not going to try to get him removed. Gail Caplan owes me zero favours, for one thing, and even if I did ask her to pull him off, he’d find out and hammer me into the ground like a tent peg. I’m just going to try to do my best here.’
‘Your best isn’t going to cut it.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do?’
‘Tell me what you’ve got,’ he said. ‘Maybe I can help you. Although you may be the very definition of “beyond help”.’
Russell’s voice was in my brain, doing that stupid high-pitched baby impression. I’m a good little boy, aren’t I, Daddy?
‘I’m not going to get an assist from my father on this,’ I said. ‘You’re not a cop anymore, and you’re not my mentor, and—’
‘Did you just say “I’m not gonna get an assist from my father”?’ Now he laughed. Hard.
I wrung the steering wheel. ‘I needed your help that one time, Dad. Which makes it all the more important that I don’t take it now.’
He left an uncomfortable silence, one designed to make me break and back down. When I didn’t, he said, ‘From what I know, it’s a girl stabbed in her room. No sexual assault. Full pub downstairs. That’s a snap decision.’
‘What did I just say about not wanting your help?’
‘A case this simple, you shouldn’t need it. The girl’s pissed off the local loony and he’s gone up there and taught her a lesson.’
‘That’s exactly what Russell is saying it isn’t. He thinks it was a carefully executed, targeted thing.’
‘Well, he’s wrong. Nobody with any sense of risk or forward planning would do this.’
I thought about Chris, lifting a paintball gun to a girl’s head, pulling the trigger. Die, bitch.
‘What do the traffic cams say?’
‘The cams.’ I wiped my hands on my trousers. They’d been sweating on the wheel. ‘I forgot about those.’
If Chris was at the pub, his car would be on the traffic cams coming and going from town, I thought. Again, a whump of guilt in my stomach, that I didn’t believe my own son’s word over a grainy image on a cheap pub camera.
‘Dodge’s people are working on the cams, I think,’ I said.
‘Why isn’t that your job?’
Because Russell sent me to Sydney, I almost said. To keep me out of the way like a troublesome toddler given an iPad to play with so his parents can get through dinner in peace. ‘It will be. In ten minutes. I’m just coming into town. I’ve got to go, Dad.’
I ended the call, used the hands-free in the car to text Dodge. Who have you got on traffic cams?
Dodge got back right away. I was just about to put my guy Knowles on that. He was door-knocking with my other two, but he’s completed his grid.
Leave the cams to me, I said. I’ll want something to do while I’m sitting around at Pemulwuy.
Righto, Knowlesy can do the phone calls to the past hotel patrons.
I pulled into the car park of Pemulwuy Forensic and Technical Services, a wide, almost empty lot behind a boom gate that was manned by a single security guard, who had to pause whatever he was watching on his phone to lean out the door to see to me.
I showed my badge and he waved me through.
White, hard sunshine hit my face as I exited my vehicle and walked to the sign-in desk of the lab; a cool, grey, featureless box of a room behind glass doors.
The kid at the desk was in his twenties and dressed in a patrol uniform, hammering away at the computer like he was writing the next great Australian novel.
He had almost certainly been relegated to fronting the forensics lab’s sign-in desk on a weekend for screwing up somehow on the job.
We were just two toddlers in timeout, he and I.
‘Powder,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to hand in some samples.’
Something shot through the young man at the sound of the name. He stood up from his desk chair so fast it kicked out from behind him and rolled away. ‘Oh, Detective Powder. We spoke just a moment ago.’
‘That would have been my brother.’ I put the bags on the counter. ‘I’m Senior Sergeant Powder, not Detective Inspector.’
‘Right, okay.’ The guy, whose name badge said Yang, softened a bit. ‘No worries. Well, I’ve been … advised … about the urgency of getting these samples tested.’
Threatened, I thought.
‘So, come in, sir, and we’ll get everything started.’
I was buzzed through a security door, led around to the counter and directed to sign in on an electronic panel set into the desktop.
A lab tech arrived and walked me through to a receiving area, where we set the bags on a large steel bench.
The heavy-set tech took a pair of gloves from his back pocket and upturned the three paper bags onto the counter, one at a time, spilling a stack of plastic vials and packets from one and the ziplocked clothes from the other.
He turned the bagged clothes, looking at them from either side, like a pawn-shop owner inspecting old leather wares for hock.
He lifted the handbag out and set it on the steel tabletop so that it sat upright, then unzipped it.
‘I’ll get all this unpacked,’ he said gruffly, lumping Chloe’s tampons and make-up pieces onto the tabletop with all the ceremony of someone clearing junk out of the bottom of their car. ‘Then we’ll take a photo of all the items. You can sign off on that, and then you’ll be free to go.’
‘I’ve been instructed to wait for the results.’
The tech was lining up the vials and packets, recording the numbers of each on a sheet of paper beside him. ‘Oh, Jesus. Don’t tell me. Russell Powder sent you.’
I smiled and nodded. He gave an aggrieved sigh. ‘There goes my break.’
‘That’s all it’s going to take?’ I asked. ‘Your usual work break?’
‘I can get you something in maybe a couple of hours,’ the tech said. ‘Get Detective Powder off your back. But it wouldn’t be anything complex. You’ve got two sets of data here.’ He gestured to the items before him. ‘Stuff that needs extraction, and stuff that’s already extracted.’
‘You’re losing me.’
‘These.’ He pointed to the little baggies and vials the forensic techs in Wisemans had created.
Cotton buds and slides of what they had wiped, peeled and scraped from Chloe Lutz’s body.
‘These are skin scrapings and fluids. I can put them in solution and run them right away. I don’t need to analyse them or do any chemical extractions.
The bag and the clothes, though, I’ll have to conduct procedures to pull the DNA and skin cells out of those items, so I can isolate them for testing. That could take days.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll also start with a simple Y-STR DNA test. It’s what we use for female rape kits. Designed to get the male DNA out from where it’s surrounded by female DNA. It won’t give you a complete genetic picture of this guy but it’ll give you something to start with.’
‘Having something in just a couple of hours would be really great. I appreciate it.’
‘I said maybe a couple of hours,’ the tech grunted. ‘And I’m putting aside every other case in the state of New South Wales to do it, I hope you know.’
‘It’s a murder,’ I said, in case it helped.
‘Uh-huh. I could tell that from the amount of blood on the clothes.’
The tech lifted the handbag. Seemed to weigh it. Put it back down. Opened it up again and fiddled with the fabric divider that ran between the two halves of the handbag. ‘Oh, here we go. Left something behind.’
I watched in astonishment as he caught the tiny end of a zipper in his big, gloved fingers, one I hadn’t noticed when I looked in the handbag at Wisemans. He drew the zipper open, dividing the divider itself in half, reached in and slid out a slim black notebook.
‘Holy shit.’
‘Looking for this, were you?’ He gave a smug laugh, flipping the notebook and looking at the cover.
‘Handbags. Full of secret little pockets and flaps and zips. You wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve been pulling apart some good girl’s bag and found a neat little side sleeve stuffed with drugs that you coppers have overlooked. ’
‘Can I see that?’
‘They’re dark inside, handbags. That’s what gets you. Small zips so your keys don’t get caught. They actually sell lights on that you can clip on the—’
‘The notebook.’ I put my hand out.
‘Oh, I can’t let you take this one,’ the tech said. ‘It’s part of the evidence submission.’
‘Just let me photograph the pages, then.’ I gestured for him to spread it on the table. ‘It’s relevant.’
The tech stood there filling out his evidence submission form while I pulled on gloves, then photographed the pages in Chloe’s notebook one by one, flipping and shooting, flipping and shooting.
When I was done, the tech pulled down an overhead camera that was mounted on a coil and photographed the whole collection. ‘Just sign here, please, sir.’