Chapter 43
RUSSELL
The road outside the Branch property was a zoo.
It was a stupid decision to come into town that way, but I was distracted, and so was Dodge, it seemed, because he didn’t stop me.
The mood in the car was sombre: the kind of embarrassed unease that comes from making promises to the victims of a half-century-old homicide that you’d be the one to finally hold the responsible party to account.
I hadn’t said as much to John Special, of course, and neither had my partner.
But the implication was there. What a claim it was.
We were going to do something that probably dozens of officers before us hadn’t been able to do.
In two days, I’d made that precious kind of promise to two broken-hearted men.
The promise of vengeance, and justice. The sheer arrogance of it felt weighty in the air.
I wondered if they’d ever asked my father to take a look at the Special and Richley cases.
That’s what they’d been doing, when they asked him to turn his hand to the missing woman Dominique Fine, and he’d shot and killed her husband.
Had they ever asked him to consult on Linda and Marian, and would that mean I would have to speak to him?
The thought filled me with horror. I wondered how bad the cancer was.
Maybe it would get to him before I had to.
I dared to dream, just for a few seconds, about solving a case that my father had been tasked with and had failed to resolve, and him hearing about that.
It being one of the last things he ever heard about before he promptly dropped dead of a terrible, painful disease.
How would I ever celebrate such a thing?
I wondered how much flights to Fiji set you back these days.
Press vans, forensic tech vans, and the private vehicles of journos crowded either side of the road.
I stopped the car beyond the crowd and started making a three-point turn.
A journalist I recognised jogged up to the car.
Tiny blonde with wolf-blue eyes and great fashion sense.
Amy Sail. She rapped on my window and I was worried about running over her feet, so I stopped.
‘Hey, Rusty!’ She grinned at me through the glass, jerked her thumb back towards the Branch property. ‘Was it him?’
If it had been anyone else, I’d have spun the wheels in the mud and racked off without saying anything at all.
But back in Sydney, Sail had done me a solid once or twice, keeping quiet about homicides until I was ready for them to go public, and she called me ‘Rusty’ like she didn’t know that I regularly put people’s heads through walls for lesser infractions, so I locked eyes with her and shrugged and said, ‘It sure looks good.’
A frown crossed Amy’s features. She knew what that line meant. I drove away.
Dodge had to go home to get his pain meds for his leg, so with promises to reconvene at the houseboat in an hour or so, I dropped him there and drove across the unmown field towards the houseboat, hoping I wasn’t running over anything slithery that didn’t deserve to have its life end under car tyres.
Bridie was sitting at the kitchen nook with a small red ball of fluff bundled into a knitted pouch resting against her belly.
She was slowly dribbling water onto the juvenile ringtail possum’s lips from a syringe, and the thing was lapping at the liquid with its googly orange-and-black eyes, looking up at my daughter in quiet wonderment.
This was a scene I had witnessed many times, something both my wife and my daughter had done over the years: rehydrating possums that had been flung aside by their mothers as they were attacked by cats, or found in the gutter, clinging to a deceased adult’s carcass.
I sat and folded my arms and watched, and without even greeting each other, my daughter and I enjoyed a quiet lack of awkwardness that had been five years or more in the making.
‘Where’s that going to go?’ I asked after a while, gazing at the little creature in her hands. The thing was holding on to Bridie’s pinky with a tiny, hairy paw. Witchy-looking, knobbly clawed fingers.
‘I’ll drop him to a carer later on today, when she gets home,’ she said. ‘Just want to get him settled for now.’
‘How’d you get it when I had the car?’
‘The job was only up the hill, actually, so I walked.’ She nodded towards the bow of the houseboat. ‘But I might take the ’Stang this time if you’re not using it. There’s a wallaby caught in a fence not far away.’
I clamped my mouth shut so I didn’t say anything about my beloved car and how I knew from long experience that the stink of a wallaby could hang around for days on end.
I was also keeping quiet about my precious daughter and how much I worried about her getting kicked or clawed or knocked to the ground by an enormous, frantic wallaby. ‘Mmm.’
‘You could come if you want.’
‘Not this time,’ I said. ‘I just want to drill down on a couple of things.’
Bridie put her little possum friend away in her rescue cage and left, and I pushed open my laptop and started looking at Linda’s and Marian’s cases again.
Marian was pictured in a crowded bar, pouring a beer, her mouth open as she spoke to a punter who was holding bills pinned against the countertop.
The guy screamed ‘cop’ the way I had been advised that I did, all tight shoulders and rigid back and wary eyes.
As I examined the photograph, I saw most of the gathering had the cop vibe.
Deep in the background, I spotted a shoulder and a slice of ear and neck and hair that only the son of the owner could recognise.
The shape of my father standing there, right at the edge of the frame, turned away from the camera.
I looked at the date of the article. 1975.
A deep discomfort unfolded in my chest as I looked around the officers, their smiling, laughing faces, the slice of my father back there among them.
When I tried to get my hands around it, this eerie feeling growing in me, I felt that it was a suspicion of these men, which as a cop myself always felt traitorous.
But whoever had killed Linda and Marian had been able to talk their way through their front doors while they were home alone at night.
And when he’d sexually assaulted them, he’d had them wash his traces from their skin.
Dodge hadn’t said it outright, probably not wanting to offend me, because my father was a cop in the area.
But those two aspects of the crime hinted at someone in law enforcement.
When the discomfort wouldn’t go away, I reminded myself that knowledge of trace evidence at the time would have been common among most types of career criminal, as well as law enforcement personnel.
DNA hadn’t come into popular use by cops until the mid-eighties, but garden-variety dirtbags would have known about fingerprints and hair and fibre matching before then.
I told myself it was the image of my father there on the screen that was also unsettling me.
And the ground-shaking notion that one day soon he would be dead.
An email arrived in my inbox, telling me the ongoing collaborative file related to Chloe Lutz’s murder had just been updated.
I opened the email and scanned down the long, long list of updates, seeing notifications of entries into the file from Fry, Kalowski, Lee, Dodge and Caplan.
There were none from Evan, and none from me.
I was without entries because as the lead detective it wasn’t my job to make entries, but it was my job to oversee them at the end of each day of the investigation, and I’d neglected to do that, for the simple fact that I’d got mildly distracted by killing a man.
But it was weird that there was nothing there from Evan, who I knew to be a paperwork nerd.
I clicked on the latest entry, made by Gail Caplan, which stated that she’d sent out the request for the region-wide SMS blast of the image of the young guy at the pub, appealing for information from the public.
Weird. I’d asked Evan to do that, not Gail.
Another entry by Gail came through, which said that the forensic evidence lot delivered to the Pemulwuy lab the day before by Evan had been categorised and was undergoing testing.
I ran an eye down the itemised list and stopped halfway.
I took out my phone and dialled a number. The phone rang twice before someone picked it up. ‘NSW Police Forensic Services, Constable Jane Markwell speaking.’
‘This is Detective Inspector Russell Powder,’ I said. I squinted at the report in front of me, looked at the name of the tech who’d taken charge of the collection. ‘Put me onto technician Ryan Snelling.’
A click, and some silence, while I stared at my screen and ground my molars. When Snelling got on the line his voice was tight. ‘Yes, DI Powder?’
‘Why in the name of Friedrich Miescher’s fucking ghost am I seeing a “notebook” reported in the evidence inventory of my case?’
Snelling had to take a moment to think about that, during which he breathed so heavily into the phone I almost spontaneously combusted with rage where I sat, spraying chunks of myself all over the ceiling and windows. ‘Excuse me, sir?’
‘I’m looking at the collection that was handed into the lab yesterday for testing,’ I said. ‘Case number 33481B. Chloe Lutz. Fifth item from the top. Under “tampon packet” it says “notebook”. Why does it say that?’
‘Well, because … because a notebook was submitted with that collection, sir.’
‘No, it wasn’t.’
‘Yes, it was,’ Snelling said. ‘That particular discovery was actually made here in the lab. The notebook was in a hidden zippered section of the—’
‘Why the fuck wasn’t I told about it?’ I thumped the table with my fist, made my laptop do a little dance beside me. ‘You make a discovery of an extra item of evidence in a murder case during submission and you don’t immediately inform the case detective? Is this your first day on the job?’
‘Detective Inspector Powder, your submitting officer was—’
‘Photograph the contents of the notebook, right now, and send them to me!’ I yelled.
‘Sir, your officer—’
‘Stop talking! Do what I’ve asked you to! Before I climb down the phone and make it so that your mother has to view what’s left of you on a petri dish through a microscope!’
I hung up and called Evan. He didn’t answer. Typing in all caps, I sent a series of separate texts so his phone would ping a bunch of times in rapid succession.
NOTEBOOK DISCOVERED IN LUTZ HANDBAG BY LAB TECH.
WHY DIDN’T YOU SEE IT?
I’M
GOING
TO
KILL
YOU
EVAN.
I got up and went to the fridge, enjoyed the blast of cool air that hit my rage-boiling face as I opened it.
The cupcakes from Bridie’s helpful friend were there on the top shelf in a Tupperware container.
Although I have a phobia of women of a certain vintage, I hadn’t eaten in at least 24 hours, so I ate two of them in big, fast bites, chain-feeding them into my mouth and moaning quietly to myself at how good they were, because there was no one there to know about it.
Lemon curd with soft centres, so moist they stuck to the roof of my mouth.
My phone pinged on the counter, so I shut the fridge and went back and looked at the region-wide SMS blast instigated by Gail.
Do you know this man? New South Wales Police are seeking information on the pictured individual, who may be able to assist with enquiries related to a violent incident at Redbelly Crossing on Friday, 6 March 2026. The individual is described as …
I looked at the screenshot of the kid in the cap at the bar, closed the message with satisfaction.
At least someone was doing their job. The phone pinged again just as I was about to set it down.
The text was from Bridie. Her name on the preview screen, such a rare sight, sent a prickle of excitement through my chest. I opened the message and expected a picture of a wallaby, but instead saw that it was a pinned location.
As I was puzzling over the map she’d sent me, another message from her came through.
It was just one word.
Help.