Chapter 39
RUSSELL
Dodge was standing in the steep driveway outside his house, at the open driver’s door of his Hilux.
He was simultaneously trying to manhandle his phone into his pocket, stop the door closing on him and keep himself upright with a shoulder bag on one arm and an aluminium crutch braced under the other.
I pulled up at the roadside and watched for a half a minute, thinking about the time I sat in my patrol car watching a nodding meth addict trying to cut through a bike chain with a pair of barbecue tongs once in broad daylight on King Street in Newtown.
Then I got out and walked up. Dodge froze like a boy caught with his hand in his dad’s porn stash.
I took the bag off his shoulder and shut the driver’s door, dealing with two of his problems for him before I’d said a single word. I nodded towards my car. ‘I’ll drive.’
‘I’m not sure I’m supposed to be working.’ Dodge turned to me. ‘But I’m pretty damn certain you’re not.’
‘Yeah, well, too bad. I want to tell you some things about what Chloe Lutz was working on.’
He started down towards my car, hobbling on that aluminium crutch.
A woman who I assumed from her age and nosiness must have been the mother-in-law came out of the front door of the house.
I was caught not wanting to walk off on her without saying anything, but not having Dodge there to introduce me.
She frowned at me, a little shrivelled person with one of those light bulb–shaped haircuts you can only get at country hair salons, the ones they refuse to give you until you can prove you’re over eighty.
I nodded a polite hello and she folded her arms and glared up at me.
‘Get him back in one piece this time, will you?’ she said.
‘I will,’ I promised, noting silently that I hadn’t even said who I was, nor claimed responsibility for the state of her son-in-law.
‘We need him here.’
‘I’m not surprised by that.’ I gave my warmest smile. ‘He’s a good man. Everyone could do with a Louis Dodge in their life.’
Her eyes narrowed even further at me. ‘Not you, though. He’s a happily married man, and he’s staying that way.’
The little woman went back inside the house. Once I’d picked my jaw up off the floor, I walked down to the car and wished with all my soul that Bridie had been with me for the past fifteen seconds of my life to witness my hypothesis about old women and their gaydars proven.
‘I would have thought you’d gone back to Sydney with the kid.’ Dodge groaned as he sunk awkwardly into the seat next to me in the Mustang, hauling the injured leg up and in with him.
‘I’m about as enthused about running out on this case as you obviously are,’ I said. I waved at his trouser leg. ‘Show us the damage.’
He pulled up the end of his trousers on the left-hand side.
The whole leg was an angry blue and swollen from the knee down, the calf cut through with tightly wrapped bandages where the bear trap had sunk its teeth into the limb.
‘The leg’s okay. I’m supposed to stay off it, but I don’t know if I believe in that.
I think it should have movement and blood flow, don’t you? ’
‘No idea.’
‘The real annoying thing was all the needles. The bear trap was rusty, so the doctor shot me for everything from tetanus to diphtheria. In the arm I sleep on, of course.’
‘Diphtheria?’
‘She just emptied her entire arsenal like she was trying to get rid of old stock.’ He took the coffee I’d made for him at the houseboat with caution, sipped it like he assumed it was filled with arsenic.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Chloe’s accounts have come in. There’s news.’
I pulled out onto the road and explained what I’d found on Chloe’s hard drive.
When I pointed, he took up my laptop from the back seat and started fishing around himself where I directed him to, looking at the emails I’d flagged and the calls I’d highlighted.
I drove impatiently, glancing over for a reaction.
His mouth hardened and he shook his head.
‘Awful cases. Special and Richley. The juvenile, too. I know her name from the files but it’s escaping me now. ’
‘Did you know about those cases?’
‘Oh, I mean, I looked,’ he said. ‘Just out of pure curiosity. I grew up past Womerah, so the story of the rape was a thing we all knew about. It seems Chloe thought that might have been connected to these two murders.’
‘I can see how cops at the time might not have connected the two,’ I said, slowing as I approached a kangaroo and her joey eating grass at the side of the road.
We passed without them leaping out. ‘Linda and Marian were in their twenties. They were at home alone at night. The coppers were thinking he’s come and knocked on the door and talked his way into the houses. ’
‘Why did they think that?’ Dodge clicked around the screen, squinting.
‘There was a smashed cup on the floor at Linda’s place.
Phone off the hook in Marian’s kitchen. The thinking was he’s knocked and asked for a glass of water.
Or to use the phone. They’ve let him in and he’s attacked them.
There was no forced entry, and police found every door and window in both houses was shut and locked except for the front one. ’
‘This article is saying the girl, the minor, was attacked in her bed after she went to sleep.’ Dodge’s head was down, his nose inches from the screen. ‘That’s a different MO entirely.’
‘Probably why nobody bothered to connect it.’
‘Why did Chloe connect it?’
I shook my head. ‘I haven’t been through all the emails. And there’s no notebook. But maybe she was just … I don’t know. She was winging it. Thinking creatively. Wanting to have some red herrings for her podcast.’
‘She was going to do a podcast?’
‘There’s an email there to a guy named Herman Grey.’ I pointed vaguely, my eyes on the road. ‘Early on. One of the first emails in her account that mentions the case.’
‘Oh, yep. I see it.’
‘Grey was an old copper from Wisemans. In the email she says she’s thinking about doing a podcast.’
Dodge read. I drove. The valley hugged us as we crossed the bridge and wound up through Redbelly.
There were press vans parked by the river.
I caught a glimpse of Gail Caplan at the marquee in the pub beer garden.
Fry and Knowles in plain clothes, listening to Caplan talk.
She had her hands on her hips, and they had the relaxed shoulders and unfurrowed brows of guys who had been stood down from duty.
‘Uhhhhh …’ Dodge scratched his temple.
‘What?’
‘There’s an “Arthur Powder” here.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I saw. That’s my father.’
‘What’d she want to talk to him for?’
‘She’s emailed all the old coppers from the whole region,’ I said. ‘A copy-and-paste email explaining briefly what she was interested in and asking if they wanted to talk. When one didn’t answer, she moved on to the next.’
‘He didn’t answer.’
‘I’m surprised he even has an email address. Or that she found it. She was going to be a good journalist, Chloe Lutz.’
‘Should we go speak to him? Your dad? Is he still out here?’
‘I want to go to my father’s place about as much as I want a battery acid poured on my testicles, Dodge,’ I said. ‘I’m taking us out to speak to John Special.’
‘So you’re not on friendly terms with your father?’
‘No.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Because I’m gay and he’s not okay with that,’ I said. Silence in response. I looked over. Dodge had his eyes locked on my face, quickly snapped his gaze forward to the road. ‘That’s not the only reason,’ I went on. ‘It’s just the most recent one.’
‘I’m sorry … You said you’re gay? Or he’s gay?’
‘I’m gay.’
Dodge started to blow out a disbelieving laugh, but swallowed it halfway through. What came out was a kind of breathy croak. ‘I would not have picked that!’
‘Good.’ I nodded. Dodge was blinking hard. He rubbed his face with both hands like he was trying to wake himself up.
‘That’s what it was, the whole time,’ he said. ‘That’s what you’ve been so fucking … guarded and angry about.’
‘I suppose.’
‘From the way you’ve been carrying on, I was sure you’d killed someone.’
‘I did,’ I said. And he probably thought I meant someone on the job.
Or Stephen Branch, the night before. But what I meant was the thousands upon thousands of killings I had to perform whenever I let someone find out who I really was.
I’d murdered the man Georgia thought of as her husband.
The one Bridie thought was her dad. As we drove, Dodge and I were getting further and further away from the Detective Inspector Russell Powder he’d thought he had a handle on mere moments before, leaving him expiring by the roadside like a hit bird.
Now he had to come to terms with this new guy he had sitting beside him and decide whether he accepted him or not.
‘Okay, well, fair enough.’ Dodge shook the whole episode off, literally shifting in his seat and throwing back his shoulders. ‘We can work with that.’