Chapter 55
RUSSELL
As a cop, you spend a lot of time in emergency rooms. Basically your first two years are spent there, getting statements off assault victims, chasing up the fate of car crash victims, delivering wild, thrashing, often naked junkies there to be strapped down and sedated.
It was odd to be sitting beside Bridie’s bed in plain, wet clothes, listening to the stories of the patients around me with no investment in their circumstances, no need to catalogue the facts.
The bed to our right contained a woman whose partner had broken her nose during a game of pickleball, whatever that was.
The partner was deeply, loudly, apologetic.
To the left of us, an older woman was sleeping, having been brought in with chest pains, and her husband was reading a newspaper and eating Twisties.
Something mysterious had happened to a guy across the room from us, who was unconscious and swaddled in bandages and whose feet were smeared with blue paint.
Bridie was furiously sending texts, her head mended and bandaged. We were waiting to hear the results of her CT scan. Dodge was trying to get the lay of the land, appearing at the end of the room now and then and watching me from the hall while he talked on the phone and paced and chewed his nails.
When Georgia came in, I felt a wave of pre-embarrassment in anticipation of being slapped in front of room full of people.
I rose from my plastic chair and prepared to accept my fate.
Because I probably would have slapped me, if I was her, for all of this.
She was leaner and harder and more sculpted than the last time I’d seen her, still wearing the Inner West detective’s usual garb of immaculately tailored grey slacks and black collared shirt, sleeves rolled back over her forearms. She ran in and brushed right past me, swept Bridie’s face into her hands, started kissing her.
‘Oh my god, my honey. My little honey!’
‘I’m okay.’ Bridie let her phone drop into her lap and she closed her eyes for the assault of kisses. ‘I really am, Mum.’
I wandered away and left them to talk. Didn’t go too far.
Because I knew the longer I delayed the slap or the kick in the nuts or whatever I was about to get, the worse it would seem.
Anticipation is half the pain. I found a spot and leant against the wall beside a big poster about domestic violence towards men, and waited.
Georgia came over before long, and I was surprised that she didn’t go right in for the blow.
In fact, she said, ‘Are you okay?’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you, Russell.’ She looked at my eyes. ‘I’ve been speaking to your partner Dodge for the past ten minutes. He called me on the ride here. Gave me an overview.’
I looked down the room towards Dodge, who was still on the phone.
It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d been debriefing my ex-wife before her arrival, maybe hoping to soften her perspective towards me, while he paced back there and talked.
It was such an unspeakably nice thing to do that for a moment I just stood there, dumbstruck, wondering how the hell he’d even got her number.
Georgia was still watching me with her keen brown eyes, and I shrugged. ‘Ah, I’m … I’m sort of numb.’
‘Do you think it’s real?’ Georgia asked. ‘I mean … yeah, your dad’s a psycho. But this, Rus?’
I fell into thinking. I kept doing that, unable to pull myself out, knowing people wanted answers from me but being powerless to give them.
The memories were thick, dragging, like sludge.
I saw Evan and me in an old car we’d done up on the sly.
A Chevrolet, maybe. Two girls. Dad busting us, telling the girls he wanted to watch.
There were other memories. Him arriving home in the wee hours, washing his hands in the tap outside by the water tank.
Selling the main family car suddenly, for dirt cheap, having spent far too long cleaning it.
Disappearing for weeks or months at a time, or having unexplainable scratches on his face.
‘Rus?’
‘We could know for sure, in a few hours,’ I said. ‘The samples got to the lab. Gail got some of her ground crew to take them the rest of the way.’
‘But what do you think?’
‘I don’t know what I think,’ I said. ‘I’m … I’m not as desperate to know if Dad would rape and murder young women as I am to know if Evan would cover it up. Because if that’s the case, I’ve got two monsters on my hands, not just one.’
‘There’s a Keep A Look Out For order on Evan,’ Georgia said.
‘Is there?’
‘Yeah.’
The world was upside down. I took out my phone and called him.
‘He won’t answer,’ Georgia said, looking at my screen.
‘Maybe not to them, but he’ll answer to me.’
‘No, I mean, he doesn’t have his phone.’ Georgia put a hand on my arm. ‘They found it in the car that hit Bridie.’
I felt my jaw tighten. I looked at my ex-wife and she must have seen the blackness in my eyes, because she took a step back.
‘Bridie said it was Evan who hit her,’ I said. ‘But I thought she was crazy. Shaken up from the crash. She dove back down to the sunken car for that fucking possum.’
Georgia didn’t say anything. I remembered the last time I’d spoken to Evan.
You, um. You’re going to take the ’Stang?
‘He’d tried to get me to leave her there,’ I said, almost to myself.
‘Who?’
‘Evan.’ I was trembling with rage now. ‘Evan told me to leave Bridie in Redbelly. He asked if I was taking the Mustang. He was trying to figure out what car I’d be driving. I told him when I’d be leaving, and that I was going to be ferrying evidence back.’
Georgia watched my face, a mixture of hardness and understanding behind her eyes in equal measures. The eyes of a sex crimes cop. Of a betrayed wife. I turned to leave and she grabbed my arm. ‘Russell.’
I yanked my arm away and walked off.
The stale white-and-blue fluorescent light of the hospital car park.
Then, the vibrant green and red and yellow of the streets around the Hawkesbury District Hospital, traffic lights on the roads wet with misty rain.
Black of the bush-lined streets, gold windows of houses and farms. Dodge called me maybe ten minutes after I hit the dark road heading back north.
I turned the phone on silent and tossed it into the back seat.
I wanted to let my mind drift. Let the anger build, until it was no longer hot but cold and calm and rigid, a vibration in my very bones and a mission in my heart.
The moon was hard and white above the tree line.
I approached the turn-off to the farm at Maroota doing the speed limit, glided in, and let the two women manning the checkpoint there look at my ID with my face passive and my eyes on the windscreen.
They reported who I was to the ground team, and I was let through.
Squad cars were parked on either side of the road, four of them, right outside the gates.
A command vehicle further on. A grey cat was sitting by the wheel of one of the cars, its eyes flashing red as I passed and drove up the driveway.
My approach had been announced. A stocky guy with a round face was leading the scene, came over, made sure he had a constable with a body cam in tow.
I showed my ID silently, afraid that if I tried to speak I’d fire-breathe someone’s head off their shoulders the second I opened my mouth.
I wasn’t there to give answers, or be arrested, or make a fuss. I just had to see with my own eyes.
The scene leader, who introduced himself as Tailor, looked me over as I watched the activity up at the house.
‘I’m new to the case,’ Tailor said, putting his hands up.
‘I’m still catching up. But I’ve been told your brother, Evan Powder, is wanted for leaving the scene of a serious accident earlier today.
An officer came here looking for him, as they have been unable to make contact with him at his home address. ’
I said nothing.
‘When that officer arrived here, they found that your father, Arthur Powder, was not at the residence. But the place was unlocked, and his phone and wallet were inside. There’s a vehicle registered to Evan Powder in the carport.’
‘Have you actually got a question for me?’ I asked.
‘Do you know the whereabouts of Evan Powder, or Arthur Powder, Detective Inspector Powder?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘We have grave concerns for the both of them,’ Tailor said. ‘Evan especially.’
‘Can I go up to the house and look?’ I asked. ‘Maybe I can see something that’ll help.’
‘Go ahead.’ Tailor nodded, after thinking about it.
I went up. Heard another detective address Tailor behind me. ‘You don’t want to lock him down?’
‘He’s not the one I’m after,’ Tailor replied.
I walked up to the house and turned off the cracked, weed-riddled path.
Noticed a fresh bullet hole in the carport awning, which some officers were examining with torches.
I went to Evan’s car and looked in the window.
The officers hadn’t unlocked it yet, were pointing their torches at a phone and laptop that were sitting on the front passenger seat.
I went to the house. The living room and kitchen were as I remembered them.
Filthy, old, damp and sad. I saw the bucket of car keys sitting by the back door.
I crouched down, shifted some of the keys around.
There must have been fifty sets in the bucket.
I walked out the laundry door, into the darkened field, and made my way between the cars, looking for fresh tyre tracks in the grass. I found them, and realised Evan’s plan.
Making sure I wasn’t followed, I drove towards the river, joining Singleton Road, following the curves and straights between the lonely fields.
I knew where Evan was. Psychics and moon-and-stars weirdos would call it symbiosis or brotherly mind-meld or whatever, but to me it just made plain sense.
Evan would have taken a car from Dad’s lot, an unregistered, heavy and untraceable thing, with the hopes of using it to smash into my Mustang and relieve me of the evidence I’d been ferrying to forensic holding at Pemulwuy.
With the borrowed car totalled, Evan would have planned to bush-bash back to his own car at the farm.
He would have known he’d be exhausted, and possibly injured from the impact of his car into mine, so he’d be looking for the flattest, most hidden and safe route back.
Evan would have to bet going back for his car at the farm wasn’t safe now.
But there was another possibility on the same route home—the neighbour at the back, Rodger, who had yard cars the same as Dad.
I knew where Evan would be now. He’d be down along the old route we took as kids, where we rode our bikes, creek-hopped, stayed out as long as we could away from home. I had to get to Evan before the cops did. I sped up and followed the river through the night.