Blood River

by Tony Cavanaugh

  But, as Billy always said to me, keep your mind open and let the evidence lead you. And so I did.

  But perhaps I should have remembered my own childhood and how those bullying girls circled me to the point where stabbing myself or them seemed like a terrific way out to solve the end of anxieties, or so it seemed then.

  Space Oddity

  HERE IS WHAT I HATE: I HATE SCIENCE AND I HATE MATHS. I hate bugs and I hate stairs and I also hate elevators because I freak-out that an elevator will freeze and I will be stuck inside it for days and slowly die. I hate Kieren because he presses his body up against me with a ‘Can you feel it?’ and yes, I can but get it away from me. I hate Ms Peters because her body odour is fierce. I hate rain and I hate water, especially river or sea water because there are things in there, fishy, squirmy things that will eat you. I hate boys who wear aftershave and girls who put on too much lip gloss, and I love, this is what I love:

  I love Proust, who wrote in bed, and Baudelaire and Colette and I love Emile Zola’s J’accuse! and I love Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Damon Runyon and I love Enid Blyton’s kids’ books, especially The Magic Faraway Tree and I love Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel García Márquez and Patrick White’s The Tree of Man and Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. I am going to study Literature at the University of Queensland and then go on to become a Professor of Literature and smoke a pipe and sit in an old green leather chair and be witty like Dorothy Parker at the Round Table in New York.

  Oh! Let me tell you about Google. It was sometime last year when Annice rang me and said: ‘Oh my God, you have to go onto the internet and find this thing called Google.’

  ‘What? Google? It sounds like how to cook an egg.’

  Now I love to go onto Google and watch the Spice Girls. (And did you know there’s all this pornography on Google? I typed in ‘Spice Girls’ and up came all these images of, stuff, you know.)

  I love playing Myst on the CD Rom my dad brought back from a trip to LA last year. I love skateboarding and I love getting tattoos even though I am under-age (there’s a guy in the Valley who does them for me) and I love my Docs and I love my black-dyed hair and I especially love it when mum goes nutzoid at me after I dye it blacker and blacker. (She hasn’t seen the tatts yet; I’m not stupid enough to get them where she can see them. Only someone who sees my naked body could know what and where they are and no-one is going to see my naked body until I am old and decrepit.) I love the breath and wind as I ride on my board in the middle of the night, after I have crept out of the house, dressed in black, hoodie and all, and skate through the Botanic Gardens and along the edgy peak at Kangaroo Point knowing that if I fall at the wrong moment, I will drop to my death twenty metres below. I imagine the release. I imagine what they would all think then. I love stabbing trees with my long-bladed knife. When mum saw the parcel (from the Asian supermarket in the Valley) all wrapped up in brown paper with string, she said, What’s that? I told her it was a hair straightener and she believed me – she believes most of what I tell her; she ignores the rest and pops another pill. I love walking up to the girls at school who used to bully me, calling me fat and a dumb bitch and stupid, walking up to them now, years later in Year 12, no longer fat, certainly not stupid, maybe a bitch, and pushing the edge of my knife in through their uniform, into their stomach and saying: Remember me? You bully another kid at this school and I will slice off your nose. I love the way they freak out and tremble because we both know I am in total control. They have no idea of the things I know. The things I have done. The things I will do. Jingles and jangles, the good things and the bad.

  That’s what I love.

  Oh! I love anchovies and olives, which is weird because nobody else seems to.

  I hate my sister, but I love her too. She is gloomy but smarter than me, and I’m smart. She needs to get out more. Anthea is sixteen, going on seventeen. I am seventeen, going on eighteen. I am a Celt-Goth. She is a mega-Goth but hides it. She hasn’t dyed her hair and she doesn’t have any tatts.

  I have dyed black hair and wear shredded black jeans and ripped T-shirts and I have tatts and I carry a flick-knife to get back at those little bitches who bullied me all the way through school because I was overweight and wasn’t blonde or in their Group and because of my eyes, one green, one blue. It’s called heterochromia, you stupid dumb-fucks and it’s got nothing to do with having a split personality; get over it. I want to go to Paris. Davina is a bitch; she stole my tuna sandwich last week. Mister Tyson is hot and sometimes I dream about him having sex with me but I actually don’t understand what sex is, really, aside from the porn I watch, which is not much because it makes me kind of squirmy but sometimes I go online at two in the morning and watch stuff; there’s this guy called Peter North. I would never let him get anywhere near me but I told, I did, I told Emma, my best friend, the next day, to go look at the Peter North videos online – on Google – and she did, that night and the next day Emma came back to me in the corridor of the school and said: You are so naughty!

  I didn’t tell her I had found a couple of violent porn sites where men stabbed women, and women strung up men. Torture stuff. Shhh. I feel dirty after I watch a bondage scene where a woman dressed in black leather hurts a guy who’s hanging from the ceiling and then …

  Then I found the snuff videos.

  P-Plater

  HE KEPT STARING AT ME.

  On the floor above Homicide were thick woollen carpets and young women in short skirts and immaculate white blouses and high heels who whispered to one another with a sense of urgency from behind their desks in the wide-open space where, behind them, were large offices that housed the Deputy Commissioners and the Commissioner. It was the land of policy and media bites, statistics and ratings.

  I had never been up there and never wanted to. It was not the land of crime or blood or sawn-off heads, of tears and anguish. It was the land of reassurance to the public and the government that all was well within the Police Service and, as long as they didn’t cut our budget, all would continue to be just dandy because, minister, crime is going down (it wasn’t) and violent crime is … well, I’ll tell you what it is: it is re-defined. Yes, minister, we have approximately ninety murders a year and when one takes into account the nature of most of these killings – passion or a lover’s violent tiff – then we have stabilised the level of crime, so we are, indeed, doing an excellent job. So, minister, as crime is really going down – as you will see in the stats – what we would like to suggest is an increase in the budget to ensure this trend continues so that the government can put it out to the voters that we are, indeed, fighting crime on the streets.

  Billy says I am too young to be cynical – just learn how to be a good copper and shut up, he says – but I get it from him; he never shuts up about all this stuff.

  Three dead men, middle-aged, white and upper-middle class, heads sawn off and folded sideways onto their shoulders, mouths cut open into a horrid, frozen grimace – those dead men did not fit into that world view.

  ‘What are you doing? Give me an update,’ asked the Commissioner, a tall, angular man whose body, when he stood, alarmingly took on the shape of a question mark. He was in his forties and nobody in uniform liked or respected him because he came into this job from a PhD at Sydney (strike one) University (strike two) and had spent not a day, not a day, on the beat or in the presence of a crook (strikes three to eighteen). He had never felt the rattle of violence and threat beyond a B-minus for an essay. He had long eyelashes and, for a second, after he shook my hand without looking at me, I wondered if the rumours were true and that he used eyeliner (strikes nineteen to six hundred and counting).

  His name was Johannes van de-something-unpronounceable. (Strikes six hundred and counting to seven hundred.) He was Dutch. No-one could remember his name. Or wanted to. He was known simply as The Dutchman. He kept staring at me, his eyes constantly falling back to me. I smiled, in that reassuring dumb-arse way tha
t we do, but it made no difference. His office looked out to the Roma Street railway station. Outside, the sky was deep purple with shards of black, and rain bashed loudly against the windows.

  Next to me stood Billy and Kristo Galantamos, our Officer-In-Charge, our immediate boss, who was jiggling like he was at a Suzi Quatro concert.

  ‘We’ve all seen this movie before, right?’ he said.

  Huh?

  ‘Boss screams at his underlings and says: Why haven’t you done what you are meant to have done. Right?’ He had an accent. Clipped. Afrikaans. Not my favourite but don’t be racist, Lara.

  Billy was meditating, eyes half-closed and smiling in an inoffensive way, and Kristo was nodding and I was trying to figure out if he actually did use eyeliner. Maybe it was natural.

  ‘I’ve done the stats,’ he said. ‘And the stats tell me we have eighty-seven point five murders in Queensland every year. And have done for the past ten years. Sometimes there’s a spike down and sometimes there’s a spike up. Probably the weather. Like now, with this goddamned rain and threat of a flood. But …’

  But.

  ‘… these figures are consistent and …’

  And.

  ‘… almost every murder, and I am talking murder here, chaps …’

  Chaps!

  ‘… gets resolved. Three-point-three percent do not – not a bad rate actually, but I didn’t say that because we must strive for a one hundred-percent rate. Three-point-three percent – the unexplained, or the ones missing that vital piece of evidence to nail the perpetrator. And now we seem to have a goddamned serial killer. Super. Puts the state on the map in a beautiful way; sensational for tourism as we move into the next millennium: ‘Sunshine one day, serial killer the next.’ And all of the gentlemen, these poor chaps who got killed, upstanding members of the community. An accountant, a lawyer and an architect. These are not people who should be killed in the city of Brisbane. No?’

  No.

  Be obedient, Lara. Be quiet. Watch, listen, learn.

  He leaned forward, flicking his gaze at all three of us, and I swear I heard Billy snore, ever so lightly.

  ‘Please find the killer. I don’t care who it is and I don’t care how circumstantial it is; the DPP can figure that out and the onus will then be on them. I do not, the government does not, want a goddamned serial killer, a goddamned Hannibal Lecter walking the streets of Brisbane.’

  Goddammit, I thought, me neither.

  (Keep it cool, Lara. He is your boss and you are twenty-six, the only Asian and we can count the number of Queensland female detectives with the fingers of one hand. Don’t be a smartarse. You are, actually, privileged to be in the office of the Commissioner.)

  Leaning in once more, and he too was wafting aftershave but not Brut, he stared at Kristo and said:

  ‘Kristo.’

  ‘Yes Commissioner?’

  ‘Get me an arrest and get me an arrest within the next six days. I don’t care if it’s a blind fucking monkey, just get an arrest. Six. Days. I would say seven because that’s a nice round figure, but in seven days I am going up to Noosa with the family because my littlest is turning five and we are having a birthday party on the river, on one of those houseboats they have, and by the time I am on the Noosa River with little Chloe and the missus, I want to have put behind me the biggest stress of being Commissioner. Yes?’

  ‘Yes Commissioner.’

  ‘Good.’

  As it seemed like the meeting was over, we started to leave. He was staring at me again.

  ‘How old are you?’ he asked.

  ‘Twenty-six,’ I replied thinking: Here we go, this will be the end of my time on the case. ‘Going on twenty-seven,’ I added, like a five-year-old who wants to be six.

  ‘And you’ve been in Homicide for how long?’

  ‘Seven months.’ (Going on eight!)

  I felt Billy move forward. I wanted to speak up before he, as I knew he would, defended me. I needed my own voice heard.

  ‘I feel I am qualified, sir.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked and I inched forward as I felt Billy step back. I don’t believe in ESP but I swear he got my message: I’ve got this.

  ‘I am dedicated and focussed on this case, sir. I bring my study in criminology to our Squad, not to mention first-hand experience I would rather forget with evil bastards, and while I might look young, I am as ruthless and determined as any of the men on the floor below. I may not be an expert in Homicide, yet, but I am working with one. The most experienced detective in the building, in the state of Queensland, and it’s the combination of his amazing experience and my fresh, young eyes that, I suggest, provides you and the department and the minister with the best team available. Our crew is growing, with many additional experienced detectives, and we, all of us, fully understand the urgency in finding this killer and we will not rest until we have taken him off the street and charged him.’

  He held my gaze and the guys behind me said not a word. I could hear the roar of my heart. I was not used to speaking up for myself, not like this, not as a cop.

  ‘Six days,’ he said and then, to me: ‘If this comes to trial, you dye your hair back to its original colour. You can get away with looking like a goddamn pop star at the moment, because you’re Asian and a woman and we’re lean on both, but not in the gaze of the Supreme Court. Yes?’

  Yes, sir. Got it.

  Satellite of Love

  WHEN WE HAD A SERIOUS SUSPECT IN A CRIME, THE LAST thing we would do was go knocking on their door and say: Hello, you are a major suspect in a string of murders.

  A little like how we had placed the outward circles around the crime scene itself, we gathered information until we had a 3D picture of the person, and of the what, why and how they might be the crook. Which was what we did with Jen White. Which was what we had done with Miles and Nils. Neither of whom had been forgotten. Billy and Kristo had assigned one of the crews to verify, double-verify and then triple-verify their movements up to, during and after the three killings.

  Miles’s boat had yielded no incriminating DNA. Same with Nils’s apartment in Miami.

  We had to move fast. Not that we really cared about the Dutchman’s six-day countdown to his daughter’s birthday party. We were, all of us on the floor, all of the crews, working on the serial-killer case, which we were now also calling The Slayer. Billy and I (all twenty-six years of girlie-me) were leading the investigation only because we were the first responders and Billy, whom everyone was scared of, said we were calling the shots and if any geezer had a problem with that, he’d chuck ’em out the window.

  We had to move fast because it was only a matter of a short time before our killer struck again. And we weren’t the only ones who knew it. The press and the public knew it too. Jack the Ripper’s first six victims were killed within eight weeks. Our killer had exceeded that in the most terrifying of ways.

  As I researched Jen, still sceptical that our killer could be a seventeen-year-old skater, I skimmed some Kafka, remembering soon after we left Donna that he was a gloomy Czech author and that some kids at my school in Cairns had a prize for anyone who could actually finish one of his books. There was a passage about wanting to die being the purpose of life. Eek.

  Ring a bell, Lara?

  I suppose all teenagers – well, most – are drawn to the lure of the dark. I certainly was with Nils, tatts and blades. But had the darkness led Jen White to butcher three men?

  —

  WOMEN DON’T OFTEN kill. About fifteen percent of homicides are committed by women, and almost all of them are a result of domestic violence or, as they called it when I studied criminology, Wife Torture, when a ‘battered partner’ can’t take it anymore. Or infanticide, which is rare and usually relates to a place (like Queensland) where abortion is illegal and a mother giving birth imagines that she has no other solution to a birth she cannot cope with, for whatever reason. Or when the grip of postnatal depression proves too strong.

  Unlike men – those
who kill, anyway – who seem to think that murder is a sensational way to solve a problem despite the fact some rational thought or conversation might have actually done the trick.

  It just didn’t seem possible that a seventeen-year-old girl could be capable of repeat murders of such a ritualistic and grotesque nature. But Billy kept telling me that young women can kill, more than once, even though it’s rare, and all the time I was thinking, I don’t think so, not in this case, not with this level of brutality. But Tracey Wigginton was in her mid-twenties. And then Billy reminds me of Mary Bell.

  She was pretty, an innocent face with a sweet little smile, black hair and a fringe. From the West End district of Newcastle upon Tyne, way up in England’s north, on the east coast, where Billy reckons the locals have undecipherable accents. She was eleven when she strangled two little boys.

  It was the day before Mary’s birthday in 1968 when she strangled four-year-old Martin Brown in an empty dump of a house in her working-class suburb in northern England. A couple of days later she turned up at the Brown residence and asked to see Martin. When his mum, who was in deep grief, explained that he was dead, Mary said:

  Oh yeah, I know that, I just want to see him in his coffin.

  And his mum let her in. God only knows what this eleven-year-old girl was thinking as she looked at the corpse she created.

  About five weeks later, Mary and another girl, Norma Bell (no relation) strangled three-year-old Brian Howe. Out came a razor-blade, and no-one really knows who did what because Norma, weeping in court non-stop and showing remorse and with a good lawyer, got off and has not been heard from since. The blade was used to mutilate Brian Howe, slashing his penis, cutting his hair and carving an N – later modified to an M – in his stomach.

  ‘Brian Howe had no mother, so he won’t be missed,’ is what Mary later said, this cherubic eleven-year-old girl.

  But it was revealed this little monster had a mother who was an S&M prostitute working from home who would force Mary to fuck her clients. From the age of four.