Chapter Two
When Judith left the interview room with Alexis Turner in tow, she found her boss waiting outside.
Detective Senior Sergeant Rocky Jansen was sitting on one of the benches that lined the hall, his arms resting on his thighs, his head down.
He was wearing what she’d come to think of as the Jansen uniform—a blue shirt, navy jeans and a brown jacket.
He was already frowning as she came out of the room, and the frown deepened when he saw her face.
‘Give me a minute,’ Judith said to him. She walked Alexis to the door that led to the waiting room, passed her security card over the lock and held the door open to allow Alexis to pass through. ‘I’ll call you. As soon as I have anything I can share.’
Alexis might have nodded. It was hard to tell, as her hood was still up. Judith let the door swing shut. She turned back into the corridor, took a seat beside Rocky, stretched out her legs and rolled her shoulders. The movement sent a jolt of pain through her ribs.
‘Look at your fucking face,’ Rocky said.
‘You should see the other guy.’
Rocky Jansen was a thirty-five-year veteran of Victoria Police.
He’d been Judith’s direct boss for five years, but had known her since she was fifteen.
Other than Katy, who was Judith’s closest friend, he was probably the person who knew her best in the world.
He also had the kind of connections that meant he heard rumours almost before they started.
It didn’t surprise Judith that he’d already heard what she’d done the night before.
If anything, she was surprised that it had taken him this long to find her.
‘Jude, what were you thinking?’
‘I’m not sure what else you expected me to do. Luke broke that kid’s arm.’
‘Damien Collins is running scared. He’s telling everyone who’ll listen that you overrode him. That he tried to talk you down but you insisted on dragging Luke to the custody suite, that you insisted on the drug test. Damien says he tried to talk you out of it.’
Luke Fraser and Damien Collins were constables.
Beat cops. But to some, Luke Fraser was much more than that.
To some Luke was a hero. A twenty-nine-year-old former AFL player.
A mercurial talent whose career had been tragically cut short when his knee blew out in the 2019 Grand Final, in front of a crowd of a hundred thousand at the MCG.
Luke had a failed surgery and a failed comeback under his belt before he finally walked away from the sport he loved and dedicated himself to Victoria Police, just like his dad, Assistant Commissioner Eddie Fraser, had before him.
That’s if you believed the hype.
If you were a little better informed, you knew Luke Fraser as a spoiled, macho, arsehole misogynist with a cocaine habit and a history of domestic violence, the son of an adoring father and a mother who had learned over the years that her only safe path through life was to keep her head down and her mouth shut.
Luke’s knee had healed well enough, but his team had been glad to see the back of him.
He’d been pushed out the door and offered a quiet exit after an incident where he’d taken two rookies to a strip joint and introduced them to his supplier.
His AFL career over, his dad had stepped in with a smooth path into the police force.
Luke had brought with him his own ideas about what it took to police the streets of Melbourne, which mostly seemed to involve screwing with his colleagues, building cosy relationships with drug dealers and using excessive force on anyone small enough not to present a threat.
Judith fished in her pocket and found a packet of gum. She offered one to Rocky, who shook his head. She put one in her mouth and started to chew, regretting it almost immediately. Chewing gum helped with the nicotine cravings. It didn’t help with the pain in her cheek.
‘So, tell me Damo has it wrong.’
She shook her head. ‘That’s more or less what happened.’
‘Judith . . .’
‘Rocky.’ She gave him a sideways glance, half-mocking, half-affectionate. ‘What are they going to do? That prick was on meth. On the job, and off his head. He was halfway to killing that boy. Luke is six foot four and a hundred kilos of mostly muscle. The kid was maybe sixty soaking wet.’
‘What did he do? The suspect?’
‘The kid was out with his friends. He got drunk and he stopped to take a leak against the side of a building. That’s it.
Damo and Luke were on foot patrol. They give him a warning, kid gives Luke some shit.
A minute later he’s on the ground with a broken arm and Luke’s thick arm wrapped around his neck. ’
‘And you just happened across the scene?’
Judith smiled, said nothing.
‘Eddie’s going to come after you. You know that, Jude. He’s got friends in low places and high places and he’s a bastard at the best of times but he idolises that boy.’
‘Luke Fraser is not a boy.’ She paused. ‘Look, it was an opportunity and I wasn’t going to let it pass me by. With a positive meth test on the record, he’s out. And there’s nothing his dad can do to stop it.’
‘You don’t need Eddie Fraser as an enemy. Jesus, Jude. And they’re already trying to pull the test results apart. Claiming a false positive.’
Judith snorted. ‘Good luck with that.’ As Assistant Commissioner charged with leading Crime Command, it was true that Eddie Fraser had enormous power, but even he couldn’t cover up the results of a drug test that had already passed through the hands of multiple officers.
Judith had been more careful than Rocky knew.
She’d picked her moment and gone after Luke entirely alone.
More than one officer had been waiting for a chance to get rid of him.
When Damien Collins had told his best friend on the force that he was sure Luke was high again, that message had reached Judith in less than an hour.
A door opened at the end of the corridor. Two officers came out of an interview room, leading a suspect in handcuffs. They threw glances in the direction of Judith and Rocky, and kept walking.
‘It’ll be okay,’ Judith said. ‘Eddie might try something, but a lot of people are going to be happy to see Luke gone. And Eddie’ll have to be careful. He can’t come after me directly.’
Rocky shook his head, and said nothing. They sat in silence for a moment. Judith found a piece of paper in her pocket and took the gum from her mouth. She looked around for a bin. There wasn’t one. She stood up.
‘Come on, Rocks. No point sitting here.’
They walked together down the corridor.
‘Who was the girl?’ Rocky asked.
‘Complainant,’ Judith said. ‘Sexual assault.’
Rocky gave her a sideways look. ‘And you interviewed her why?’ She and Rocky worked together in homicide.
Judith hadn’t worked sex crimes in nearly eight years, and Rocky knew that she’d hated every minute of the short time she’d spent on the team.
She wasn’t suited to the work, had never been great at building rapport with victims.
‘She asked for me by name.’
‘Make sure you hand it off.’
Judith shook her head. ‘I’m keeping this one.’
‘Jude . . .’
‘Let me have this one, Rocky. I’ve got my reasons.’
They stopped when they reached the end of the corridor.
His eyes went again to her bruised cheek, and his right hand lifted like he wanted to reach out and touch her.
Rocky was twenty years older than her, and on the cusp of retirement.
He was old school with all that that entailed.
His relationship with Judith blew hot and cold depending on how much he approved or disapproved of her choices.
He was still the closest thing to a father that she’d ever had.
Judith felt herself soften.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘You should know by now that I can look after myself.’
He didn’t look convinced, but he’d clearly said what he had to say, and he knew her well enough to know that trying to push her or scare her would only serve to get her back up.
‘You need to call your mother,’ he said.
That provoked a little spike of irritation deep in Judith’s gut, but she kept her expression mild, and merely raised an eyebrow in enquiry.
‘She called me,’ Rocky said simply. ‘Asked me to ask you to call her back.’
‘I’m sorry about that.’ It was something Linda did, if Judith ignored her calls for too long.
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘I’ll call her.’
He nodded.
Judith hesitated, but there was nothing more she could say that he didn’t already know. And she had work to do.