Nigel came on the line, blasting questions at him like they were already mid-conversation.
“Are you idiots going to spend this whole investigation running ahead of my team and burning witnesses before we have a chance to get anything valuable out of them?”
Tox massaged his brow. “Depends,” he said. “Are you going to spend this whole investigation lagging behind my team, contributing nothing, only to swoop in two seconds before we reach a conclusion to claim all the credit? Wait. Don’t bother. I know the answer.”
“Blue and Whittacker got to the lawyer, Louis Mallally,” Nigel said. “We understand he has been conducting an affair with Tonya Woods. We tried to speak to Mallally, but he’s so embarrassed by having had it squeezed out of him and so worried his wife will find out that he’s clammed up.”
“What do you want to know?” Tox said. “The two were fucking. Martini-sipping douchebag has a midlife crisis, takes in a street strumpet hard on her luck, fools around with her until he gets bored and cuts her loose. Watch the Julia Roberts movie. You’ll get the picture.”
“How did it end? The relationship?”
“It’s still going by the end of the movie. Richard Gere climbs up a fire escape and gives her some flowers. But if you ask me, it’s a doomed union.”
“Tonya and Mallally, arsehole.”
“Right,” Tox said. “It ended as well as could be expected. She had a kid, and he didn’t want that, and he was married with two of his own. Harry tells me neither of them were under the illusion that he was going to bump the purebred family out of the palace on the hill to move her skinny track-marked butt in.”
“Maybe Tonya did think that. Maybe that’s exactly what she thought, and when it didn’t come to fruition, things went south.”
“I don’t think her self-esteem was that high. Girls like that have dreams, but they’re not stupid.”
“I guess you’d know. You’ve probably dated a few skels in your life, eh, Barnes?” Nigel sneered.
“Was that a thank-you?”
“No, it was a fuck you,” Nigel said. “You check Mallally’s alibi the night Tonya went missing?”
“He was sipping martinis with a bunch of other lawyers in a public bar until nine. But it’s useless, because we don’t know what time she disappeared.”
“What about his phone records? Did you see if he contacted her that night? I want to see those. If you’ve got them, send them to me.”
“I’m not your errand boy. Go get them yourself,” Tox said. “Anything I should know about on your end? Have you found anything in our leftovers we should have paid more attention to?”
“A hot shot,” Nigel said. “At the motel room. Little baggie of it under the kitchen sink. Looks like she decided not to get into it or didn’t get the chance.”
“Interesting. What makes the shot so hot?”
“We had it tested. It’s heroin, and some other chemical garbage you’d expect from cheap smack. But it was also loaded with arsenic trioxide.”
“Huh. Old school,” Tox mused.
“Why do you say that?”
Tox thought for a moment. “Well, arsenic’s not easy to get anymore,” he said. “Back in the day, you wanted to poison someone with arsenic you could just scrape some out of ant traps or mix some rat poison pellets into your batch. But they don’t use arsenic in those anymore. Too many toddlers kicking the bucket after sticking the little green candies in their mouths. They use brodifacoum in rat poison now. You’d have to eat a barrel of it to die.”
“So where did the person who made the hot shot get the arsenic?”
“You’re asking a lot more questions than you are giving answers, Spader,” Tox said, glancing around the bar. “I’d hate for you to pull ahead in this race and find the girl and her kid before Harry gets a chance to. Our mutual friend goes back to the can if she can’t prove her usefulness to Woods.”
“That’s half the reason I’m out here,” Nigel said. Tox could hear the smile in the detective’s voice. “I’m going to ask if I can drive her back there myself.”
Chapter 34
CHLOE BOZER WENT to the nearest bar stool and dumped her belongings onto the seat beside her, hiding her face, pretending to search for something deep in her cluttered handbag. It had been a mistake to come here. She knew it as soon as she spied him at the bar, tapping an unlit cigarette on the surface while he scrolled through his mobile phone. Every time she saw Tox Barnes, the memories of him flooded back. She saw him as he lay clinging to life in the hospital bed, tubes and wires coming out of him, a respirator raising and lowering his chest in unnaturally jerky movements as he slept.
She’d sat beside him in the dark and looked at his body. He was heavily scarred all over, some of them from injuries that looked like they’d been stitched at home, others obvious gunshot and stab wounds. There were old, faded tattoos—pin-up girls and a big tiger on his ribs that had been disfigured by a slash wound across its face. Tox Barnes was a fighter.
Then there were the wounds she’d closed herself, obtained in a fight with a serial killer. He was obviously a violent man. She had taken his hard hand in the dark room and looked at the fresh grazes on his knuckles. Just knowing that he was violent meant something to her, but she didn’t know what. Would it all have been less painful if he’d come into her surgery a buttoned-up, law-abiding accountant hit by a car while helping an old lady across the street? She’d held the hand, stared at it, was so lost in thought that one of the cleaners had come in and apologized, thought she was sitting by a relative, holding vigil. She’d dropped his hand and walked out.
But now she was here. She grabbed her things, stood, and turned to go, only to almost run into him as he headed for the door, the cigarette and lighter raised and ready.
“Well, well.” He gave a knowing smile that twisted something in her belly.
“Oh.” Chloe felt her face reddening. “I didn’t see you there.”
“I didn’t see you either,” he said.
“I was just leaving.”
“No you weren’t.” He sat down at the stool beside the one she’d just vacated, put his phone on the counter. Chloe went back and dumped her things again, slipped tentatively onto the stool.
“What are you drinking?” he asked. “I can’t believe you came here. I guess you don’t hate me that much after all.”
“I didn’t come here for you,” she scoffed. “This is my local. I come here all the time.”
The bartender approached them. Chloe ordered a shiraz without looking at the wine list.
“Actually we don’t serve a straight shiraz,” the bartender said. “We have a blend, but—”
“Just, fine, anything.” She flapped a hand at him, didn’t meet Tox’s eye. “Just give me something, would you?”
They sat in silence that was excruciating for her but didn’t seem to bother him at all. She’d heard cops were like that, immune to awkwardness, always in possession of the upper hand. Asking the questions, not answering them. The bartender brought him a whiskey without needing to be asked and Tox leaned on the bar with both arms. She focused on the cracks in the leather of his jacket, tried to breathe.
“While we’re here, by chance.” She put her elbows on the counter, mirrored his posture. “I suppose I did want to say I was sorry.”
“Oh, really?” He flashed a canine tooth in a delighted smirk.
“Don’t torture me,” she said. “I’m trying to be the bigger person. You might try it sometime.”
“Sounds boring.”
“I was rude,” Chloe sighed. “You were rude, of course, and you could apologize for that. But there was no need for me to sink to your level. You were trying to do your job.”
“Doctor Bozer, you couldn’t sink to my level if you tied yourself to a cinder block.”
“Chloe is fine.” She swallowed with difficulty. “And I’ve heard people calling you Tox, is that right? Where on Earth does that come from? It must be a cop nickname.”
/> “Sort of.” His face was unreadable.
Chloe fidgeted in her chair. Perhaps this was the perfect moment to tell him. Reveal everything. But a message appeared on his phone, distracting them both. He flicked it open, read it, dismissed it. She glanced back just in time to see what he’d been reading on the screen earlier, a news article with the same photographs he’d shown her in her office. He put the unlit cigarette between his lips, thoughtful, scrolled further down the page.
“Those are your missing persons?” Chloe said.
“Yeah.” He tapped the screen. “They’re about to live stream the press conference.”
They sat, their arms almost touching, and watched as Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Woods came onto the screen and briefed a room crowded with press about his missing daughter. Huge printed photographs of Tonya and little Rebel Woods stood on easels behind the big man in his stiff uniform.
“My daughter…has had a hard life,” Woods said. He put a fist to his mouth, cleared his throat. Tried to blink tears away without wiping at them. “She’s troubled and needs help. She’s a strong, beautiful, good person. Tonya loves her baby, and I do too, and I just want to know that the two of them are safe.”
“This is so sad,” Chloe said.
“Eh.” Tox shrugged. “Everybody’s strong and beautiful and good when they’re missing. He leaned on ‘good’ too hard. Like he was defending her. I bet if I went missing, people would say I was an absolute champ. Beloved by all.”
“You’re not beloved by all?” Chloe asked.
“No.” He didn’t look at her. “I’ve done terrible things. On the job. Off the job.”
She stiffened, trying to disguise the shudder that ran through her.
“Chances are, Tonya Woods has too,” he continued, tapping the cigarette on the bar again. “They found a hot shot in her apartment. Could have been for her, could have been hers; meant for someone else. It had arsenic in it, which tells me she didn’t make it herself. It was made by someone who’s been doing this for a while, hasn’t got with the program.”
“We had an arsenic poisoning case,” Chloe said.
Tox put the cigarette down. “Huh?”
“A month ago, maybe.” Chloe nodded, remembering. “We’d never seen one before. We had to bring a consultant in. The patient started with stomach cramps, moved into convulsions. I wondered if it was severe food poisoning, maybe a bit of dehydration. Then one of his kidneys failed. Definitely arsenic. The guy was a big biker type. Tattoos and silver rings.”
“You save him?” Tox asked.
“No,” Chloe said. “He died on the table.”
Chapter 35
THERE ARE PLENTY of ways to break in to an unoccupied house. Hack the security system. Pick the locks. Climb onto the roof and go in through an upstairs window.
The best and quickest way to break in to a house, however, is to wait until someone’s home and walk right in while all the doors are unlocked and the alarm is off. Riskier, but often worth it.
I had been sitting in the car watching Doctor Goldman’s pretty semi-detached home in Balmain long enough to see people arriving one by one, some of them leaving again, obviously distressed. The speed with which someone opened the door after a visitor rang the bell told me it was being left unlocked between arrivals. I went to the house, entered through the front door and slipped quietly into the hall.
Someone was sobbing in the living room while others comforted her. I stood in the dark and listened to the family mourning. Goldie’s death was shocking, but not entirely unexpected. Her job had been dangerous, and a man with an old, husky voice was lamenting the fact that she hadn’t just stayed as a general practitioner, wondering why she’d chosen the dark path.
“She always liked people like that,” a woman said. “Bad people. Burnouts and losers. She felt she could save them all, like stray cats. We didn’t raise her like that, did we, Howard? Where did all this crying for the less fortunate come from?”
I walked down the hall, trying to decide if I was a burnout, a loser, or simply bad. I’d known people like Bernadette Goldman during my time in foster care. People with sympathy for the devil, attracted to strays, the needy, the misunderstood. Lending a helping hand to bad people could be rewarding, I supposed, but it could also get you killed.
Goldie’s office was at the back of the house, a small room with a single window and an orderly desk. I went to the laptop sitting on the desk and pushed it open. No password on the home computer, all the tabs available. I opened Goldie’s email and scrolled through the sent items. She had emailed friends overseas, her sister, her accountant. I clicked on one sent to something called “Safe Home Enterprises” two weeks before she was killed.
Hi there, I’d like to get a quote about upgrading my home security system. Semi-detached, two-bedroom house in Balmain with single lock-up garage.
I stared at the email. Had Goldie felt insecure in her home, or had working with criminals all day just given her a more acute sense of the possibility of a break-in? I went to the security panel on the wall by the door and examined the tiny lit screen. Goldie already had all her windows and doors alarmed. I didn’t see any evidence of cameras feeding to her laptop. I went to her internet search history and found she had looked up a few different home-security suppliers. As well as the usual email and news sites, she’d also visited a website six times in the past few weeks—the guidelines and policies page of the Medical Board of Australia.
I clicked the link, which brought up a list of documents. The third in the list caught my eye.
Sexual Boundaries: Guidelines for doctors.
I heard footsteps in the hall and moved quickly away from the desk.
“I don’t know,” a man shouted from the hall. “Hang on.”
I slipped behind the door and stood rigid in the darkness, my knees bent awkwardly around a briefcase sitting there, as the man came into the room and stood just feet away from me. I watched his reflection in the window through the crack in the door beside me. He had Goldie’s auburn hair. A brother, maybe. He turned on the light, paused, looked at the laptop. He was listening intently; he must have heard me hiding. I held my breath, and after a few seconds he flipped the laptop closed, turned out the light and walked away.
Chapter 36
IF THERE’S ONE thing prisons don’t do well, it’s meat. Meat in all forms comes minced, glued together and pressed into geometric shapes, and often without any kind of crumbed coating to hold it together. I sat at the bar at The Workers hotel in Balmain and watched the rain falling outside. A group of dock workers in their high-vis vests and big boots sat outside on the rooftop, regaling each other with apparently hilarious stories. When my burger came I was two glasses of wine in and feeling warm and tired, burning with hunger. I forgot the chips and the wine completely and took big, slow chomps of the burger, licking the meat juices from my lips and watching the majestic slide of the melted cheese down the cliffs made by my bites in the patty.
The new phone in my pocket rang and I answered it with my mouth full.
“What’s it feel like, regressing to childhood?” Tox asked. “Pops makes you dinner. Buys you clothes. Lends you money to buy a phone, lends you his car. You might stay there forever, his live-in daughter. You and Daddy and the three shaggy pups.”
“I don’t know if I’d call this a regression,” I said. “My childhood was nothing like this. No, wait. I lie. One of the foster dads did buy me an item of clothing once. It was a string bikini. He wanted to watch me sunbathing in it.”
I finished the chips, pointed to my empty plate and caught the bartender’s eye, made a “same again” motion with my finger. The bartender obliged with his eyebrows raised.
“I’ve got phone records between Mallally and Tonya,” Tox said.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, I’ll email them to you. But don’t get excited. They’re brief.”
“How brief?”
“Three months’ worth,” he said. I could
hear him clicking a mouse, tapping keys. “They had a little flurry of romantic exchanges early on, and then bam, they stop. Dead silence. No calls, no texts.”
“It was an eight-month relationship,” I said.
“I know.”
“So they text for three months and then what?”
“Then the wife wants to know why he’s smiling at his phone all the time and they go offline,” Tox said. “That’s my guess.”
“Offline how? Letters? Hired intermediary? Carrier pigeon?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Well, get on it, Barnes.”
“Yes, boss,” he said.
I hung up. My second burger came. It was as physically and mentally pleasurable as the first one. I ate it more slowly. I realized a man was watching me as I put the last mouthful longingly between my lips.
“What are you, a reformed vegetarian?” He laughed. He was young, cute, some kind of manual laborer, judging from the big calloused hands and the paint or wood dust in his hair. A half-eaten burger lay on the plate before him.
“It’s just been a while.” I munched on a chip.
“You can’t deprive yourself of the good things for too long,” he said.
I wiped my hands on my napkin, nodded in agreement and raised my wineglass in his direction.
“Here’s to that,” I said.
Chapter 37
THE SEX WAS GOOD. Wholesome and intimate when it needed to be, impersonal and rough at just the right moments, the fold-out in the garage taking the challenge without squeaking madly as I worried it would.
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