Chapter 41
RUSSELL
John James Special was a slight man, silver-goateed and with rich brown eyes that hid behind those spectacle lenses that go dark when they’re hit by sun.
They were doing just that, hiding his expression, as Dodge and I pulled up on the gravel driveway of his neat little property fifteen minutes outside Redbelly.
John was putting a bowl of biscuits out for a scruffy white dog, which lost its damned mind at the sight of us and scrambled down the stairs to meet the car, a hairy tornado of fury.
Cockatoos in the nearby gums also started going bananas.
I was beginning to feel like it was personal.
John silenced the dog with a single word and it went back to his ankle-side, still unconvinced about us and issuing high-pitched whimpers.
‘It’s my daughter’s dog.’ John glanced at the creature. His voice was unusually raspy, like he’d been gargling sawdust all that morning before we got there. ‘She’s away, so I’m dog-sitting it for her. Mongrel thing hates everyone.’
‘Mr Special,’ I said, ‘we’re here about the murder of Chloe Lutz.’
The old man’s mouth dropped open, and he turned to Dodge for confirmation.
‘What?’
‘We understand you were due to meet with her yesterday,’ Dodge said. ‘About your wife’s murder.’
‘Yes.’ John took a tentative step forward. ‘It was my wife that was murdered, not—’
‘Chloe, too.’ I nodded, straining my vision hard to see his eyes behind the darkened lenses. ‘She was stabbed to death at the pub down in Redbelly on Friday night. The night before she had arranged to come out here and see you. Are you telling us you’ve heard nothing about it?’
John’s mouth turned downward, hard. He looked all around, finally settling on the dog, which he scooped up into his arms. He went inside, saying nothing, just opening the screen door and going in.
Dodge and I followed into the shady, cutely decorated little house.
There was art hanging on the walls. Seascapes with rocky cliffs, apartment buildings.
They reminded me of Maroubra, my usual jurisdiction.
For a moment I had to remind myself where I was.
‘Surely you must have heard what happened,’ I pressed.
‘Nope,’ he said with obvious bitterness, putting the dog on a couch and shuffling to the kitchen. ‘I saw there was commotion down at the pub, yes. When I got back into town this morning. But I didn’t go snooping. I just supposed it was a robbery or something.’
He picked up a tea towel from the edge of the sink, threw it down again. I could see his mouth working, chewing on emotions. ‘What bloody well happened to her, then?’
‘She was stabbed.’
‘What for?’
‘We don’t know, as yet.’
He shook his head, gazed out the windows at the fields.
‘But what did you think when Chloe didn’t turn up for her meeting?’ Dodge asked. ‘Her phone records show you didn’t call her to check where she was.’
‘Oh, I didn’t think too much. I never do.
’ The old man gave an angry, world weary laugh.
He started taking down coffee cups from a row of hooks against the kitchen wall, seeming to want something to do with his hands.
‘I’ve been stood up by journalists plenty of times.
They come out here about every five years or so.
Someone decides they’re going to run a story or make a film or something.
Then a more interesting or more recent case comes along and off they go after that.
I don’t bother chasing them. I’ve made that mistake.
Waste of time. And she sounded young, on the phone.
Chloe. I just assumed she got a better offer. ’
‘So you didn’t call,’ I confirmed.
‘I didn’t want to hassle her.’ He shrugged.
‘I was grateful enough that she’d decided to fiddle around with the case.
Nobody on the police side has touched it in a couple of decades.
I didn’t want to rouse on her the moment she stood me up.
I was hoping she’d pop up again in a few days and say—oh, sorry, I got called away. Or something.’
‘So, were you here that morning?’ I asked. ‘Sitting around, expecting her?’
‘I was. She was due at nine a.m. At about five o’clock that evening, I went to my daughter’s place.
’ John flicked the switch on a kettle, put his fists either side of the sink and stared out at the tree line.
The cockatoos were still screaming. ‘I’d been getting ready in my mind, since Chloe contacted me, to talk about Linda again.
And everything that happened. When she didn’t show up, it was sort of …
upsetting, I guess. I waited all day. So I went there, slept there that night.
She’s not far away, my daughter. Monica. She’s in Colo.’
‘So you didn’t have to pass the pub,’ Dodge said, almost to himself. ‘Wouldn’t have seen the crime-scene tape.’
‘My daughter, she keeps a spare room for me,’ John said. ‘It was nice to be there, even if she’s not.’
Dodge and I were quiet. Thinking.
‘It’s hard to explain.’ John shrugged again. ‘But it’s full of life, Monny’s house. And I felt like being around some life.’
The old man made coffee, placing a safe bet that as cops we wanted some.
Dodge and I threw meaningful glances at each other behind John Special’s back about the way he moved.
Stiff and considered. Wondering to ourselves whether this could have been the man that pinned Chloe Lutz against a wall and stabbed her to death.
I knew from experience that adrenaline did wonders for a person’s body, and psychopathic murderers made excellent actors.
‘You fellas got a suspect, then?’
‘We’re looking at several people.’
‘Do you think it’s him?’
John turned towards us. Dodge and I looked at each other, and I felt a coldness come into me as I remembered my beautiful daughter crouched in the morning light.
Do you think he’s still here?
‘That’s one of the theories we’re working with,’ I answered.
‘You coppers.’ John gave a gravelly laugh.
‘You all sound the same. Anybody ever tell you that? You’ve been giving me those lines for fifty years.
We’re looking at several people. We’re working with several theories.
I sure hope you come up with some new ones, so some bastard related to Chloe isn’t sitting around in half a century being fed those same lines. ’
I thought about Larry Lutz. ‘They won’t be,’ I said. ‘We’re getting to the pointy end of things now.’
John’s eyebrows jolted a little but his eyes, which I could see through those glasses now, were empty.
He put a bowl of sugar and a jug of milk onto a tray and carried the coffees into the living room, set them on a very retro coffee table inlaid with burnt-orange tiles.
The dog went mental again as we entered and John gave an exasperated sigh.
‘It’s the same two blokes, for chrissake! ’
We sat down. John Special seemed to know the drill.
He began taking us through the hellish time of his wife’s murder, more than fifty years earlier, a collection of memories as sickeningly vivid in parts as they were vague in others, blurred by time and trauma.
Dodge and I listened to him speak of the first moment, while overseeing a crew of men doing safety checks on the railing system of an oil rig off the coast of Newcastle, when an announcement over the PA system told him to report to administration.
‘That’s the first time I got any inkling that anything was wrong,’ John said.
‘People say, you know, that sometimes you can feel it in your guts. Something’s happened.
But I didn’t. Not until they called me in.
Then it just came over me like a … A fever, almost. This sense that I had to get home.
Nobody wanted to be the one to tell me why I needed to get back right away.
And I wasn’t asking, either. It was like I was being pulled home on a string. ’
‘Who actually found Linda?’
‘The postman,’ John said. ‘She was friendly, Linda. Talked to everyone. Liked to take people on as a pet project sometimes. I think she felt sorry for them. This postman had just been widowed, so she was encouraging him to get back on his feet. He’d got into the habit of coming up to the house to deliver the mail so they could have a chit-chat.
He heard Monny screaming inside, and was knocking and getting no response from Linda, so he went in. ’
‘And he found her deceased?’ Dodge asked carefully. ‘No signs of life?’
‘He told police he didn’t try CPR.’ John nodded. ‘She was that cold. And her eyes … he could tell there was no bringing her back.’
Dodge and I fell silent. John sipped his coffee, took a few long breaths. The scruffy white dog glared at me from the end of the couch as though it was imagining what my jugular tasted like.
‘By the time I got home, it was chaos here.’ John glanced towards the front windows of the house.
‘The cars went right down the driveway and around as far as the neighbour’s property.
Her parents were here. The coppers were here.
The journos. There were people who went to high school with her just standing around on the lawn, crying. ’
‘I assume the postman was looked at pretty hard,’ I said.
‘Every man and his dog got a proper look, except for me, because my alibi was the best you could come by,’ John said.
‘That was the only good part of it: that the cops didn’t put me on the rack.
Because times were different then, and sometimes they did that.
Roughed people up. They held the postman—Thompson, was his name, Hugh Thompson—for about two days, I think.
Not under official arrest, just being questioned.
I saw him later and he had that look like someone had ground him into the dirt like a cigarette butt. ’
‘So there were no witnesses that night?’ I asked. ‘Nobody drove past, saw a car? Heard a scream?’
‘Nobody heard anything.’ John shrugged. ‘The neighbours at the back, they’re not far away.
But they told police that the cockies were going off that night, like they are now.
’ He pointed towards the back of the house where the birds were still going nuts.
‘You wouldn’t have heard anything anyway, over that racket. ’
‘Do they do that a lot?’
‘No. Not really,’ he mused. ‘Especially not at night. They’ll make a racket if there’s an owl around. We get big ole owls here.’
‘Aside from the postman, there were no other major suspects?’ Dodge asked.
‘Oh, well, after telling me they were “working with several theories” and “looking at several people” for a few months, the cops were quoted in the local newspaper saying they had no leads,’ John said.
‘And then they were dead silent, at least until Marian Richley, up the road here, almost a year later. They told me flat-out it was the same guy. Because of the way he operated. No forced entry. Made them shower afterwards.’
‘He made them shower afterwards?’ I looked at Dodge.
‘Yuh. So there was never any DNA. They stook stuff. Ran tests at the time for fibres and hairs. This was before DNA. And then when DNA came in, in the eighties, they tested it for that. But they didn’t find anything.
’ John licked his teeth, thumbed the corner of his eye.
A phone trilled gently somewhere. ‘Let me just get that.’
The old man got up with difficulty and shuffled out. I scratched at the arm of the sofa where I sat, thoughtfully picking at the corduroy. ‘Mid-seventies. A bit early for civilians to be thinking about getting rid of trace evidence.’
‘If it’s the same guy who got the teenager while she was sleeping, we’re looking at someone who was smart enough to think not only about trace evidence.’ Dodge nodded. ‘But also about mixing up his MO to hide his crimes.’
‘Mmm. Because why were there only two murders?’ I said. ‘Why did he stop?’
‘Maybe there are others, but they don’t look like this. The MO is different.’
‘With Chloe he’s right back to his original style,’ I said. ‘Knock at the front door. The knife.’
John came back. Tried to sip his coffee.
Found it was empty and set it back down.
‘Marian’s people moved away, afterwards.
Went to Queensland. It was only her parents anyway, and I heard they died promptly after.
It puts a good dent in your life expectancy, burying a child. Especially if it’s your only one.’
‘Why did you stay here?’ I asked. I suddenly felt the shape of the house around me. Imagined it dark. The cockatoos had finally quietened, and I could hear cicadas out there in the trees now, and the ticking of the aluminium roof above us.
‘Ah, well, it was a financial decision, in the beginning.’ John rapped his knuckles against the empty coffee cup.
‘I would have had to sell the house at a cut price, because of what had happened in it. And I had to be home to take care of Monny, so the oil rigging work was over with. Then, after a while, I thought: Fuck you.’
I felt a small smile come to my face. Couldn’t help it.
‘Whoever did this?’ John shrugged. ‘Fuck you. You’re not going to take our house from us too.
Linda loved this house. The breeze that comes through it, and the big gum trees out the back.
She used to sit out there and look at the sunset on the mountain range.
I still do that, and when I do, I feel close to her.
If I’d sold the house, all I’d have is a grave somewhere. ’
Dodge and I listened.
‘He took her,’ John said. ‘I wasn’t going to give him a single other thing.’
I took my phone out of my pocket and stood. ‘I just want to make a short phone call.’
Dodge and John continued talking. Their voices lowered to a soft rumble as I made my way back into the hall, up and through the kitchen, passing the spot where I assumed Linda Special’s body had been found, judging by descriptions in the newspaper articles I’d read.
The floorboards creaked as I stepped through the spot, the very centre of the house, it seemed.
The heart. I told myself not to step over the place where she had lain.
But I did, anyway, taking a long stride, not sure exactly why the impulse presented itself.
Respect, maybe. Superstition. Fear. I went out the back, where there was a little sitting area, the one John had said his wife used to sit in to watch the sunset. I dialled my brother.