Chapter 51
RUSSELL
She was on the top deck, leaning against the railing outside the bridge where I’d held my meeting with Dodge’s crew, her hands clasped and her head turned into the breeze.
My daughter watched us approach the property on foot; straightened and gave a little inhibited wave.
She reminded me of Georgia in the early days, when she’d still smile at the sight of me.
Same smile. Same wave. She was down through the vessel and waiting for us at the door to the kitchenette as Dodge and I arrived at the stern.
Dodge paused to take a phone call on the deck, and I went in.
‘We’ve got to go, Birds.’ I couldn’t look at her. Georgia’s anger was still thumping through my body, awakening those old memories. Of that night. Her horror, her humiliation. ‘Your mum wants you back home.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’ Bridie clapped a hand to her brow. ‘She found out.’
‘Yep.’
‘I didn’t tell her, Dad.’
‘I know. She saw it on the news.’ I slipped past her, went down the stairs and into the kitchenette, started collecting up her belongings and placing them on the nook table for her. ‘And you shouldn’t have had to keep that secret. It’s my fault.’
‘Let me talk to her. I’ll tell her I want to stay here.’
‘I wouldn’t, if I were you.’
‘Is she pissed?’
‘Oh yeah.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Bridie flashed teeth, a rare slipping of her youthful gentility. ‘It’s not like I’m running around beside you, chasing suspects and shooting at people. I’ve been here at the boat. I’ve been on rescues. I got into a fix one time, but we handled it.’
‘Georgia’s got good reason to have a zero-tolerance attitude to my lies,’ I said.
‘You didn’t lie to her.’
‘I lied by omission.’
‘Come home with me.’ She watched Dodge come into the kitchenette, didn’t even acknowledge him, her arms folded and her jaw set. ‘You can both come and tell her I’ve been taking care of myself and she should leave me alone.’
‘I’m out.’ Dodge put his hands up. ‘I’ve spent two days with this guy, now. I don’t have the emotional energy to meet the nutjob who was crazy enough to marry him.’
I didn’t respond. Neither did Bridie. I didn’t realise she was following me until I was in the bedroom pulling the sheets back up on her unmade bed. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
‘I’m fine. Help me pack, Bridie.’
‘You’re quiet.’
‘Busy brain, that’s all.’
I picked up her backpack and handed it to her. ‘And … you know. I don’t like to annoy your mother.’
She took her backpack from me and started packing.
In the silence, we removed all her things from the room.
Her headphones, clothes, water bottle, a smattering of books.
I lifted the cage from the end of her bed and set it on the coverlet and pushed back the towel draped over the top to check on the possum.
The lined, knitted pouch was lying in one corner, with a thin, furry tail protruding from it.
At the tip of the tail, the fur changed from brown to white.
I put the towel back in place and turned and Bridie pushed her way into my arms. The feel of her shuddering against me threatened to set off a sympathetic wave of tears. I held strong, hugged her and stroked her hair. ‘Hey, hey, hey. Come on.’
‘I was having fun,’ Bridie sniffed. I had to laugh at that.
‘What was the most fun? Almost being killed by drug dealers, or being ignored while I ran around after a murderer?’
‘I wasn’t being ignored.’ She stepped back from me. Looked me in the eyes. ‘You’ve … you’ve come closer to me in the past two days than you have in the past five years.’
Oof. That hurt. The way she described it, the time we’d spent together, as me ‘coming closer’ to her.
It made me sound like a wild fox being beckoned from the edge of the woods by a human, getting spooked and darting away between the trees by any sudden movement.
It ached so badly to think of her that way, to know she was thinking of herself that way: as someone who had to be still, and silent, and constantly offering lures, just so I’d come within a reasonable distance.
I was so sorry for it all, suddenly. Exhaustingly and agonisingly sorry.
‘Next weekend,’ I said. ‘My place. We’ll do it. I promise, Bridie. Okay? I promise.’
‘You might still be out here.’
‘I’ll hand this whole thing over and come back. I’ll have to, anyway. I killed a guy. Gail won’t let me stay on it for too long.’
‘Mum won’t be happy.’
‘I’ll make it work, Birds,’ I told her. ‘You can trust me.’
She chewed her lips, tears falling freely. We stood in the tiny room together, between the beds, her little sniffles and breaths actively scoring the surface of my heart with cuts I knew I’d never heal. ‘Did you speak to the carer for the possum?’
‘Yeah, it’s in Leets Vale.’
‘Okay, change of plans, then,’ I said. ‘You take the ’Stang. I’ve got to get some stuff to the lab, so I’ll go with Dodge. When you’ve got the animal where it needs to go, you head straight to your mum’s. I’ll meet you there to get the car back.’
‘Will you speak to her?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Dad.’
‘How about this,’ I said. ‘I’ll text you on approach, and you can tell me if she’s waiting behind the front door with a baseball bat. If she’s unarmed, I’ll come in and talk.’
Bridie braved a tiny smile, and I held her again. ‘Go easy on the windy roads, Birds.’
‘I will,’ she said.
I watched Bridie pull out of the property gates with emotion so heavy and suffocating, I couldn’t have discerned it as foreboding, fatherly instinct, a subliminal knowledge of what was about to happen.
Dodge was in the passenger seat, his head resting against the headrest, rubbing his eyes hard.
I slipped into the driver’s seat beside him and tossed a muesli bar I’d taken from the kitchen into his lap.
Before unwrapping one for myself, I took my gun from the back of my belt and handed it to him.
‘What’s this for?’ he asked.
‘I just don’t want to have a gun on me right now,’ I said.
I unwrapped the snack and bit a hunk off as I pulled out of the property.
‘I want to stop and talk to Evan at the end of the road leading to my father’s house.
The temptation to go there and put a bullet in his head will be overpowering.
You may have to handcuff me to something. ’
‘Noted.’
‘I’m going to call the lab,’ I said. ‘And tell them to get ready for us. I want to be top of the queue.’
Bridie was ahead of us on the road past the pub. I glanced at the activity there as someone picked up at the lab.
‘It’s Detective Inspector Russell Powder,’ I said. ‘I want—’
‘Urgh!’ the lab tech, Snelling, made a disgusted noise. I could tell it was him immediately from the huskiness and breathiness down the line. ‘You again!’
I was so stunned by his sudden brazenness that for a moment I was silent. ‘Uh, yes. I want—’
‘You know, Detective Inspector Powder, I’m getting a little tired of hearing about what you need, and about what you want,’ Snelling barked.
‘This phone line is for officers to use to make polite and reasonable enquiries about the samples they’ve submitted and their place in the queue.
It’s not your personal hotline for harassing and bullying the staff of this facility into skipping that queue entirely, like you’re King Shit of Turd Island! ’
‘Well—’
‘I was trying to say something important to you this morning, Detective Inspector Powder, and you cut me off,’ Snelling blasted. ‘It’s incredibly rude to cut people off. Did you know that, sir? Is that something anyone has ever enlightened you on?’
‘I—’
‘When you cut me off’—Snelling paused to delight in his manoeuvre, which I’d fallen for, hook, line and sinker—‘you denied me the chance to tell you that your completely inappropriate verbal spray was directed in entirely the wrong direction. Because your submitting officer, one Senior Sergeant Evan Powder, was here when the discovery of the notebook was made. So he should have told you about the notebook, and it was quite reasonable for me to assume that he would tell you about the notebook, so abusing me because I didn’t tell—’
‘Wait a minute.’
‘Did you just cut me off?’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. The words felt like rocks in my mouth. ‘I’m sorry, Snelling. I’m an arsehole. Just go back for a minute for me, would you? You said Evan was there when you made the discovery of the notebook?’
‘Yes.’
‘In the room with you?’
‘Yes!’ Snelling yelled. ‘Are you deaf?’
‘He was standing in the room with you. And you pulled out a notebook from the handbag. And he saw that.’
‘That’s what I said, Detective Inspector Powder.’
I hung up on Snelling. Which probably sent him into a murderous rage somewhere south-east of where I was driving, but it wasn’t yet another intentional insult to the man.
My mind was whirring. That same eerie discomfort, the one that had begun at John Special’s house and continued to build, brick by brick, was becoming so weighty I couldn’t focus on the phone or the road.
I pulled over, and Dodge seemed to know to just sit there quietly and let me think, based on the content of the phone call and the look on my face.
I hung on to the steering wheel and stared at the road.
Then I plucked up my phone again and called Snelling back.
He must have seen my phone number in the phone’s incoming call screen, because he was already spewing abuse when the line connected. I had to cut him off to get a word in.
‘Evan took the preliminary DNA results from you, and he said there wasn’t a match in NCIDD,’ I said. ‘Is that true?’
‘I provide the profiles; I don’t do the matching, you gigantic ignoramus!’
‘Can you send me that profile again?’ I said.
Snelling grumbled something fast and incomprehensible, and then he hung up.
I got out of the car and stood by the field, looking at a distant row of trees that were frosted all over with cockatoos.
Dodge got out of the car and stood by me.
His hard, downturned mouth told me he was probably thinking exactly what I was thinking.
Knew, before I spoke, what I might be about to say.
‘Listen,’ I said. The words started tumbling out, freefalling, my mind barely planning them or following their implications.
‘My father was a cop in Maroota in the 1970s. That’s, what—half an hour from here?
Chloe emailed him, saying she wanted to come out and talk about the murders.
Now I’ve got Evan hiding the fact that his son was at the pub.
And hiding the fact that Chloe had a notebook. ’
‘He couldn’t have hidden the fact that the notebook was there,’ Dodge said. ‘Not forever. All he could do was delay you finding out about it. And maybe that was by accident, sir. Maybe he was tired and distracted and—’
‘No. No. It’s not that. I feel like there’s something here.’ I could hear the horror in my voice. The knowing. ‘Jesus Christ, Dodge, I can feel it.’
‘We could check the police reports for that time, I guess,’ Dodge said. ‘But … I mean, mate. Are you really accusing your own father of … of something like that?’
‘I don’t know.’ I thought of Evan. Of the weirdness.
The fact that he was the one to tell me that Linda and Marian’s evidence boxes were empty.
Were they really empty? Had he found them empty?
Had anyone seen it? I tried to push the thoughts away.
But they kept coming back. ‘Dodge—my nephew, Chris, was at the Redbelly pub with someone. He came back for two drinks. Two very different drinks.’
‘Sir.’
‘My father drinks Tooheys New.’
‘Mate, I know Evan’s work on this case has been a bit, sort of … inefficient,’ Dodge said. ‘And him admitting to covering for Chris … Hearing that your brother did that in a police investigation would shake anybody up. But you’re making some mighty leaps here.’
‘Someone knocks on your door in the middle of the night,’ I said. ‘You’re a woman. You’re home alone. They say they’re a cop. Or—better yet—you know them to be a cop. You’d let them in, right?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘A cop attended Linda Special’s house a week before she died. A week!’
‘But that would have been a cop from Wisemans. Not from Maroota.’
‘I just don’t feel good about this.’ I put my hands on my knees, bent forward, blew out air. My head was spinning. Thoughts crashing. ‘I’ve got a real fucking bad feeling, Dodge. About all of this. The birds.’
‘What birds?’
‘The cockatoos. They were screaming at me at John Special’s house. You were there. You heard them. They were doing it that night, too. The night she was killed. It’s like they knew who I was, or … or who I’m related to. Maybe they think I’m him.’
‘Oh, Jesus.’ Dodge took my arm and pulled me upright. ‘You can’t go letting the local wildlife tell you who’s a serial killer and who’s not.’
‘They can live to be eighty. Cockatoos. Bridie told me that once. I look just like my father. Maybe they saw me walking up to the house and—’
‘Let’s go and just speak to Evan.’ Dodge helped me walk back to the car.
‘If you want to run down this crazy idea about your father, the quickest way to do it would be to get our stuff to the lab. Get it tested. Run it against your DNA. The guy said he’s sending you the results of the Chloe stuff.
We can see what that’s about, too. I’m sure Evan wasn’t lying about there being no match. I’m sure of it, Russell.’
‘Yeah.’ I walked on. ‘We’ll do that. We’ll get moving. Get some answers. Let’s go. Get in. We’ve got to catch up to Bridie.’
‘It won’t be him,’ Dodge said, hobbling along beside me. ‘You can’t have been raised by a serial killer. You’d know. A person would have to know, deep down in their guts.’
I slid into the driver’s seat, not answering. Wondering what I did and didn’t know.