Chapter 33
RUSSELL
The front of the Branch property was a hive in two hours flat.
Locals who had heard about the shooting, cops from surrounding jurisdictions there to secure the scene, ambulance crews who had come to tend to the injured.
There was talk of bringing in a bomb squad, but I wasn’t a part of that.
Together, Fry and Evan took over the scene direction, because apparently I was too covered in blood to be worth listening to.
Dodge was hauled off on a stretcher, giving prattling protestations that he was fine, that he’d be back before sunrise, that all he needed was a few stitches in his calf.
I saw, from my vantage point on the back of a different ambulance, that the left leg of Dodge’s jeans was black with blood from the knee down.
I guessed there might have been more than simple stitches in his future.
I was annoyed at being taken out of the game for the simple crime of bleeding from every surface not covered in fabric.
Ambulance people kept approaching me and trying to wipe my face and shine lights in my eyes.
I gave a flat-toned and colourless statement to a couple of cops from Gosford, who recorded the whole thing on their body cams, then we all turned to watch as Branch’s body was loaded into a third ambulance under a dark blue sheet.
I saw Gail Caplan coming too late. I got up and tried to walk away anyway, but she skewered me in place with a look as she marched angrily from her personal car.
‘And here I was thinking my night couldn’t get any worse,’ I sighed.
‘Your night?’ She pulled up short. ‘Oh, that is rich. I’ve been at the bludgeoning on the waterfront all day. Then I get a message telling me you entered a suspect’s property, knowing it was hostile, without backup. Your partner got caught in a bear trap, and you shot the suspect dead.’
‘That’s about the sum of it.’
‘Fuck me, Russell!’
‘No thanks.’
‘In twenty-four hours you’ve punched a junkie and shot a rural lunatic.’ Gail’s nostrils were flaring. ‘What’s next? You gonna harpoon a paedophile?’
‘You got one handy?’
‘What? A paedophile or a har—Look! Enough! I am beyond tired of your shit. You know that? I was thinking on the way here that I understand completely now why your mother called you Gun. You’re a cold, loud, trigger-happy tool, and you present a constant danger to everyone around you.
Whenever you do anything, you ruin someone’s day! ’
I had to smile at the creativity.
‘The dead guy,’ Gail said. ‘Is he the killer, at least?’
‘It sure looks good,’ I replied, which is something I said when I meant that something had all the right appearances and not much else.
I described what I’d seen on my walk-through of the house with Evan.
I’d found Branch breathing his last gurgling breaths in an airless and bare room.
The wardrobe was open, and it and Branch and the floor were all full of bullet holes.
In the living room, there were cardboard moving boxes and plastic tubs scattered everywhere, maybe twenty of them, full to the brim with women’s underwear.
I’d stood in the glow of overhead lights that were slick with tobacco tar and cooking grease, and lifted a piece of underwear out of the nearest tub, examining it.
Blue polka dots on white, with a lace trim, the elastic a little worn from wear.
‘Twenty boxes of women’s underwear?’ Gail gazed at me, her head cocked.
‘By my estimation.’
‘Is it his underwear? Like, has he been wearing it, or …?’
‘I don’t know, Gail.’
‘Why was it …’ She shook her head, trying to fathom it. ‘Why was it lying around in tubs like that?’
‘If I had to guess, I would say he was trying to pack up the household and get out of town before my people came knocking about Chloe,’ I said.
‘But halfway through, he gave up. Figured it was too big a task. So he decided to go full Deliverance on us instead. Enact “Operation Crazyfuck”, which it looks like he’s been cooking up for some time.
That’s my theory, anyway. The underwear was being packed into boxes in the living room, but there were other things being packed up elsewhere.
The kitchen was half done. The bedroom was full of photographs that had already been loaded into tubs. ’
‘Photographs?’
‘Tens of thousands of them.’ I nodded. ‘Maybe hundreds of thousands.’
‘What were the pictures of?’
‘Women in their natural environment.’ I wiped at blood that was trickling down my neck.
‘I didn’t look at too many. But I got the gist. Women photographed through windows or between the slits of curtains.
Undressing. Cooking dinner. Sitting around.
Putting children to sleep. There were women that were older, and there were kids, too. Always females.’
Gail just stood staring at me, her mouth slightly open.
‘He’s been creeping around taking pictures of women through their windows at night,’ I went on.
‘Probably in the cammo. Treating it like a secret operation. From the settings, the furniture in the pictures and the clothes on the women, I’d say he’s been doing it for decades.
And the underwear, it’s all used. It seems to range from big granny knickers to undies for little girls.
He’s probably spent decades doing that, too: pulling them off clotheslines, or maybe raiding them out of laundromats. ’
‘Jeeesus fuuu …’ Gail let her hands slap by her sides, stared off towards the crowd gathering at the police tape. ‘So what … what … why?’
‘I have no idea, Gail.’
‘This is going to totally eclipse the bludgeoning.’ She pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘A guy who stalks women in their houses with half his spare time, and runs around rigging his property with booby traps with the other half. This is going to go international. The press will be feverish.’
I nodded, studied the blood on my hands, black beneath my fingernails.
Cops nearby were describing the scene to newly arrived colleagues, who were gawping just like Gail had been.
The officers had marked on a rough drawing that was being handed around where the known bear traps were, and where the house was, and which parts of the property were unexplored.
I listened to that for a while, playing with my nails.
‘You’re quiet,’ Gail said. I realised she was looking hard at me.
‘I just killed a guy. It makes you contemplative.’
‘Go get some sleep.’
‘No.’ I jumped down from the deck of the ambulance. ‘I want my team to get out there and do some DNA swabs. And I’m looking for a young guy who was seen in the pub that I haven’t identified yet. And I’m waiting on—’
‘But it’s over.’ Gail gestured to the Branch property gates. ‘Are you kidding me? This is your guy right here, Rus. The briefing I got said he was the only person on the ground last night to speak to the victim. And then you come out here and find this? Come on!’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ I shrugged. ‘Like I said, it looks good. But I don’t like things that look this good. If you look harder—I mean, really stare at it—you start seeing imperfections.’
‘Like what?’
‘There’s no violence,’ I said. ‘There are no home invasions, no stabbings and no rapes on Stephen Branch’s rap sheet.
From what I’m seeing of the inside of that house—the undies and the photographs—he seems to be a looker.
Not a doer. The worst he’s ever done in town is sleaze onto a couple of women at the pub.
Aside from that, he’s never actually done anything of note. ’
‘He just lured you and your guys into an Apocalypse Now-themed death maze!’ Gail scoffed.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘The one time he’s ever done anything violent, he appears to have spent several years planning it, and he’s perpetuated it against a couple of men.
And he wasn’t very good at it. He took five or six shots at me overall.
Nothing hit. He lost sight of me completely at one point.
That slip-up cost him the game. What happened to Chloe Lutz was a crime of opportunity.
Something squeezed into a very tight window that would only have opened up on the night it happened.
It was conducted by someone who was waiting for their moment, and knew what they were doing, and had probably done it before. ’
‘You’re out of your mind.’ Gail shook her head.
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You’re going to go somewhere and get some sleep.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘You’re sleeping, and your people are sleeping, too,’ Gail snapped. ‘I bet you came out here and pulled that “Nobody sleeps!” bullshit like you always do. I’m not having it.’
‘Yes, you are.’
Her tone shot up, harder and louder, a ferocity coming into her eyes that I was deeply familiar with.
‘Detective Inspector Powder, you just killed a fucking civilian! You’re stood down from duty, effective immediately, for a period of at least ninety days!
That’s protocol! I’m not negotiating this with you! ’
‘I’m not negotiating this with you!’ I shot back. Natural instinct. Gail and I having fired shots at each other for years. ‘Fuck your “protocol”! I don’t need to be signed on to keep chasing this thing! I’ll do it on my own time!’
‘I’ll have my officers watch over you, Rus, if I have to.’
‘They’d better be fast on their feet.’
‘This is so you,’ Gail sneered. ‘I have to shove you as hard as I can just to get you to come out here in the first place, and now you’re going to give me hell getting you to leave. You’re like a fucking toddler who won’t take a shower and then throws a tantrum when the water’s turned off.’
‘Good thing I’m cute then, huh?’ I winked. The cops nearby who had been listening to our little exchange of fire snickered. Gail went over to roast them about standing around. I went to my car with a smile.