Chapter 58 #2
‘They’ve got another one,’ she said. I knew what she was talking about.
My father’s DNA, extracted from the floorboards, from Chloe Lutz’s body, and from his own rotting corpse in the car in the river where Evan had put him, was being run against a series of cold cases, one by one.
Photographs of the box of old jewellery that had been discovered freshly buried at his house were being circulated around the families of missing people nationwide, to see if anyone recognised anything.
The number of murder victims in New South Wales was up to seven.
Queensland had two cases. None of the other states had linked any cases yet.
But there was ‘hope’, the papers were saying.
I liked that word. Their use of it. In all the darkness, the victims’ families were holding out ‘hope’ for answers.
For an end to decades of thinking, praying, fighting, wondering.
An end to hoping. Bridie was smiling sadly at the sun on her toes.
I wondered what she felt every time a new match popped up.
Probably the same as I did. A mixture of shame and gratitude.
‘Have they called you in for an interview yet?’ she asked. ‘About what you remember? There must have been, like … things that make sense now. Times he was away.’
‘I did an initial interview,’ I said. ‘But since then, I’ve remembered more. It’s hard to go back, that’s all. I spent so long blocking all that stuff out.’
She nodded, looked at my eyes. ‘Do you think they’ll match all the jewellery and stuff?’
‘It’ll be a hard slog,’ I said. ‘Cold cases are always hard. People die. Memories fade.’ I watched her face, trying to sense what she was getting at. When I thought I knew, I said, ‘I’m sure they’d be grateful for any help that was offered, Birds. I could get you pictures of the items.’
‘Oh, I couldn’t.’ Bridie waved at me. ‘I mean, Mum has told me what she’d do to me if I ever joined the coppers. And I can only imagine what she’d do to you, if you inspired me to.’
‘I’m not afraid of that woman.’
‘You should be.’
‘They have dogs, you know,’ I said. ‘The cops. They have horses. You could skip the whole bit at the academy where they teach you how to rush up and crash tackle someone twice your size. You already know how to do that.’
Bridie’s lip twitched mischievously, and I started forming new dreams, about my daughter giving me access to that quick and daring and courageous mind of hers, the one that had gone right out on a limb and decided that Chloe Lutz had pissed off a serial killer.
The one that told me to look at the road at the back of the drug cookhouse.
The one that had been dead right on both counts.
Bridie would make an excellent cop. I knew that in my bones.
But, again, the shame of wanting something that my father had also wanted prickled in me.
I told myself to step back from influencing her, or pressuring her, which I knew I could do without even meaning to.
I shrugged and looked at the jasmine across the way. ‘Whatever you decide.’
Someone down on the street slammed a door, clopped toward the main road in heels. In the distance, a siren wailed and the city hummed.
‘What did you have planned for today?’ my daughter asked me, after we’d sat in silence for a bit.
I glanced at my phone on the little table next to me. ‘I’m in the market for a new Mustang. I’ve almost finished grieving the last one.’
‘Ooh, let me see,’ she took up my phone, turned it toward me so that my face unlocked the screen. ‘Where were you looking? Facebook Marketplace?’
‘Yep.’
She opened it up and started scrolling, and I watched her window shop for a while, counting down the seconds until she did what I knew she would do: sat bolt upright in her chair, having spotted something I’d seen an hour earlier.
‘I’ve found it!’ she said. She showed me the screen. A baby-shit-green 1965 Shelby that looked like it had been left in a field for half a century and periodically beaten with a cricket bat. ‘Look at this!’
‘I knew you’d pick that one,’ I nodded.
‘Did you? Why?’
‘Because there are so many nice ‘Stangs on there, loved and preserved by their owners, and that’s the one that isn’t.
That car you’re looking at would take extreme levels of passion and commitment to even extract from where it’s lain down to die and get to somewhere it has a chance of being rescued.
A madman would pay more than a dollar for it.
If I turn the key in the ignition and it actually starts, and a bunch of rats don’t go leaping out from under the hood, I’ll eat my hat. ’
‘I love it.’
‘Of course you do. It’s a rusty hunk of crap that no one else wants. You’ve looked down that list and found your own father in car form, Bridie.’
‘Oh my god,’ Bridie laughed. ‘You may be right.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘When can we go get it?’
I took in her puppy dog eyes, and let a huge sigh ease out of my nose, just so she wouldn’t get the idea that I was as keen on the car as she was.
So that she’d think that as we spent the next few months to a year fixing up the old car together, it was a bit of a hardship on me, and not the best thing that had happened in ages.
I flicked my head toward the door, and she leaped up, and we got going.