“None at all? No emails either?”
“No. They’ve never emailed.”
“So how did they organize their meet-ups?”
“Mallally says they had a standing arrangement. They’d meet every week at the courthouse, Tuesdays, four in the afternoon.”
“That doesn’t sound right.” Woods rubbed his nose.
“Nigel has got his people on Mallally round the clock,” I said. “If there’s a second phone and he dumps it, we’ll get it. But getting into his house is a bit of a nightmare. After Whitt and I showed up unannounced, he’s dragged out every legal precedent he can find about authorities visiting and searching a property without a warrant. He’s threatening to sue everyone even remotely connected to the New South Wales Police for everything they have. He’s going to have our station cleaners living in their dumpsters. He does not want people wandering around his house.”
Woods gave a heavy sigh.
“Everybody’s doing their best here, Woods,” I said. “You need to step back and stop micromanaging.”
Woods grabbed a fistful of my shirt and dragged me toward him. He was a tall man, so his reach pulled me up on my toes. Only this close to him could I detect the alcohol on his breath.
“Listen here,” he said. “All this bullshit about lawsuits and goddamn phone records—your best isn’t cutting it right now. You’re not moving fast enough. You smell that?” He inhaled deeply through his nose. “That’s free air. I would advise you to suck it in. If you don’t get your arse into gear and stop messing around, you’re going to spend the next ten years in a fucking cell.”
“Let me go,” I breathed. It had taken so much resolve not to reach up and smack Woods in the face that I’d barely comprehended what he’d said. I staggered a bit as my weight fell away from his grip.
The city hummed, distant and glowing between the trees across the street. Suburban sounds punctured the silence. Dogs barking. Televisions playing.
“You ever touch me like that again and I’m going to make sure some unlucky morning jogger finds pieces of your body in a park, I swear to God.”
Woods stood with one hand covering his eyes. His cigarette was smoldering, lying on the pavement between us. I watched his silhouette, trying to decide if he was holding in tears or rage.
“Where are they?” he asked. He dropped his hand and looked at the stars, let out a chest full of air. “Where the hell are they?”
I watched him as he recovered slowly, rubbing his eyes.
“Do you think it’s possible Tonya has just run off?” I asked.
Woods looked at me sharply.
“You were sick of taking care of the baby,” I said. “You’re an older man. A young kid’s got to cramp your style. You wanted Tonya to step up and take control of her life. She was trying. Borrowing money to buy baby stuff. Maybe you thought if you gave her a little push she’d realize things needed to change. So with you pushing her, and bad people hanging around in her life, maybe she decided to get away.”
“I wasn’t sick of taking care of the baby,” Woods said. “Rebbie is the light of my life. That kid was born into the worst circumstances. Unwanted, unloved. And she’s just a delight. You wouldn’t believe it. Look.”
He took out his phone, scrolled to a video he had no trouble finding, something he must have played often. Tonya’s little girl was sitting on a yellow rug, turning a stuffed toy fish over and over in her hands. She was chubby, apple-cheeked. Little toes wiggling idly as she played. She was a beautiful child, sunny and carefree-looking, blessedly and tragically unaware of the chaos of her early life.
“What’s that?” Woods’s voice asked on the video. A big hand appeared, pointing at the toy fish.
“Doo Bee!” The toddler gave a gummy grin, fat dimpled cheeks.
“He’s a fish, Rebbie. Little fish. Fishy fishy fish.”
“Doo Bee! Doo Bee!”
“She calls the fish Doo Bee.” Woods sniffed. I looked at him. The white light of the phone flickered in the tears clinging to his lower eyelids. “I don’t know why. I can’t get her to say fish for the life of me. It’s always been Doo Bee.”
I tried to tell myself not to lose focus. That all kids that age were cute. But my throat was tight.
“I’m going to find them,” I said.
“I hope she has run off,” he said. He closed the video. “That would be the best outcome.”
“Get out of here,” I told him. “Go home. You need sleep. Wherever they are, they need you to keep it together for as long as you can.”
Woods glanced at me with eyes shining in the dark, then he left, brushing past me, trailing the smell of desperation.
I unlocked Pops’s back door and went into the gym. I was tired, but I knew the adrenaline dump from Woods grabbing me would leave me twisting and turning in the sheets. I strapped up, flicked a light on over the middle of the boxing ring and dragged a heavy bag in with me, hung it from a hook in the ceiling.
I hadn’t boxed in prison, or in the months before I’d been incarcerated, running from the law and chasing a serial killer. My body seemed to awaken under the strain in my shoulders and arms as I smacked the bag, dodged and weaved from its motion, bobbed and smacked it again. My heart was hammering and my body was dripping with sweat when the knock came at the gym door. I sighed. Woods again, surely. He had probably walked up to the pub on the main road, sunk a few bourbons and was now back for round two.
When I opened the door, the fluorescent light from the gym flooded onto the sandy-haired kitchen fitter from The Workers. A wave of silent humor passed over me, half shallow desire, half embarrassment that I’d never asked his name and it was far too late to do so now. He looked at my sweaty body, strapped hands, the boxing bag beyond.
“I’ve been thinking about you.” He squinted at me skeptically. “I think I’ve figured it out.”
“Oh yeah?” I leaned in the doorframe.
“You’re fresh out of prison, aren’t you.”
“Good guess,” I said.
“That’s…kind of hot,” he said.
We smiled at each other.
“Get in here,” I said, and held the door open for him.
Chapter 56
DESPITE THE EXERCISE, I couldn’t sleep. The phone Pops had given me was again an escape to another place, an electronic world of distractions. I went into the living room of Pops’s house, tiptoeing through darkness and a silence punctuated only by his snores from the front room, and settled on the couch.
Anna Regent was on my mind. Seeing Woods’s chubby little grandchild had got me thinking about children and the evils done to them, and I felt I needed to try to understand what might drive a person to commit an act of violence against someone so small and vulnerable.
I had made many assumptions about Anna Regent, based on our meeting in solitary and her reputation around the prison as a quiet, lethal, lumbering giant who was to be avoided at all costs. But the Anna Regent who appeared in the Google Images shots was a wholly different creature. Anna was pictured leaning on the defense table at her trial, talking to a lawyer, her strong, muscular legs showing beneath a skirt suit and her hair in a soft and stylish low bun. She was wearing makeup, eyes big and worried, her hands captured mid-gesture as she spoke. She was apparently a Bachelor of Engineering student at the time of the murder. A hot-rod enthusiast. A quick scroll through the article previews online told me Anna had killed her nephew not in some blind, sadistic rage, but because he had seen her with a bag of cash in the garage of her home and she’d snapped, trying to protect herself from being implicated in a theft.
“Theft?” I scoffed. I was frowning hard. Clicking through to an article, I saw Anna in a casino-worker’s outfit. She had been a floor manager at The Star casino, a “pit boss” as they were called in the industry, watching the tables in a sharp red blazer. “What the…”
I read on through the articles covering the trial.
Over several weeks, Regent is said to have skimmed sums
of cash from the casino count room and stored them in a location on the casino grounds before shifting them to her home in Seven Hills. The prosecution alleges Regent was moving these same funds from one location inside her garage to another in preparation for a family visit when her nephew, having arrived to the gathering early with his mother, stumbled upon…
I clicked a video, watching Anna come to life on the witness stand at her sentencing.
“What I have taken from my family in my atrocious act against little Jeremy is immeasurable. I can’t hope to ever atone for it. All I can hope is that…”
“This isn’t right.” I shook my head. The Anna Regent I was seeing on the phone screen wasn’t the one I had seen in Johnsonborough—slow-talking, inarticulate, fixated, it seemed, on the senseless violence she had committed. Anna Regent, casino pit boss and cunning thief, had to be sharp enough to keep an eye on multiple gaming tables at once, on would-be thieves and scammers inside the casino. She would have had to be smart enough to work out how to skim floor counts without being noticed, move the cash safely off the premises, avoid falling under suspicion if the theft was ever discovered. The Anna Regent I was reading about hadn’t killed because she was a monster. She’d killed in a panic, trying to save her skin.
It was possible Doctor Goldman had been right. That Anna was savable. She hadn’t killed out of a hideous evil desire for violence against a child, as I’d assumed. She was complex, multilayered, a chimera. Had her performance in solitary been an act, then? Had she wanted me to underestimate her, or had she been drugged? Had prison life driven Anna, as it had many other inmates, into the arms of addiction?
I saw an article about Doctor Goldman’s murder, in which Anna Regent was listed as one of the notorious inmates housed where the doctor had been killed. In the dark, I looked away from Doctor Goldman’s smiling face, the shining eyes of a woman who never gave up, even on the worst people. I wanted to find who had killed her, but I was beginning to feel like I hardly had a grasp on the kind of predators who had surrounded her at the prison.
Chapter 57
“WHAT THE HELL happened?”
Pops’s wail snapped me out of my sleep. I slid out of the channel I’d been sleeping in, the kitchen fitter’s naked body making a wall on one side of the bed and the fluffy dogs piled on the other. I threw on some clothes and found Whitt, Tox, and Pops standing around the ruined Datsun in the street behind the house.
I hadn’t had a chance to look properly at the damage until now. The rear quarter of the car was substantially crunched, and long gouges traveled along the side and back of the car. The only surviving glass was the windscreen and the driver’s window. Even the wing mirrors were cracked.
The three men looked at me.
“I’ll fix it,” I said. “It still drives fine. It’s aesthetic damage.”
“Yeah,” Tox said. “That’ll buff right out.”
“It’s half my fault.” Whitt put a hand up. “I’ll throw in for repairs.”
“Oh, good,” Pops huffed. “And when can I expect this generous offer to come to fruition? I happen to know for a fact that neither of you is gainfully employed.”
“I’ll sell my prison memoir and Whitt will hire himself out as a lap dancer at bachelorette parties,” I said.
Pops groaned at me. I patted his shoulder in consolation. The street around us was filled with the smell of bottlebrush trees, wet in the morning dew, droplets falling as lorikeets crawled in the branches across the road.
“We need to talk about your friend from the carjacking yesterday,” Tox said to me. He sat on the undamaged bonnet of Pops’s car. “He was hired to kill Tonya and Rebel.”
“Jesus,” Whitt said. “So you’ve brought him in?”
“No,” Tox said. “He didn’t do it.” Tox explained the blind-drop system at the Nicholl Hotel, the request for Blenk to dispose of Tonya and Rebel Woods.
“So there’s no way we can tell who wrote the letter?” Whitt asked. “What could he tell you about it? Was it handwritten? What was the tone?”
“The whole point of the blind drop is to leave the employer anonymous.” Tox shrugged. “Blenk said the notes usually come in typed up and basic. He didn’t remember much about the letter targeting Tonya and Rebel, and neither did the bartender who passed the envelope on.”
“What about the phone call asking Blenk to pull Harry aside?”
“Blenk says it was from a payphone,” Tox said. “Guy told him so, in case they got disconnected.”
“Is that bullshit?” I asked.
“I don’t know. He’s not a terribly acute guy, Blenk,” Tox said. “And all this happened a couple of days ago. He said he read the letter and discarded it, and there was only the one phone call. But he did mention it was big money both times. Too big.”
“The Silver Aces have big money to spend on hits,” Whitt said. “We saw their drug operation out in Panuara.”
“But they didn’t know I was on the case until we went out to chat to them,” I said.
“That’s what we assumed,” Whitt said. “But maybe they did and they were playing it cool. Maybe they knew exactly who we were and what it was all about before they even saw us out there.”
“Whitt and I will go talk to Gotten again. I’m sure he’ll be delighted to see us,” I said. I took my phone out of my back pocket and opened my email. “I want you to see what you can do with this.”
I texted Tox the picture of Gotten in the desert with the shovel. He looked at it on his screen.
“You want me to see what I can do with it?”
“Yes.”
“You got any ideas?”
“I don’t,” I said. “Be creative. And fast. If that’s a picture of Gotten standing proudly over someone’s grave, then I want to know where it is before he thinks about checking his sent emails folder and realizes I’ve got the picture. His crew will move the bodies. We could be talking about Tonya and Rebel here. The picture was taken the day after Tonya was last seen.”
“We could be talking about a guy who’s buried a dead dog,” Tox said. Whitt was leaning over him, looking at the picture.
“Or a guy who’s just really proud of his new shovel,” Whitt said.
“Tox, would you just—”
“Meh.” He waved a dismissive arm, walked off toward his car.
Whitt and I walked toward Whitt’s car, parked two down from the partially destroyed Datsun.
He slid into the driver’s seat, put his hands on his thighs.
“We need to talk,” I said.
Chapter 58
WHITT WAS MOTIONLESS in his seat. We watched Pops standing in the street ahead of us, examining his ruined vehicle.
“It was a stupid move,” Whitt said.
“Probably,” I said. “Kissing a woman while you’re trapped in a bikie drug den with a dozen of them waiting behind a steel door to murder you is not the smartest way to spend your time. We probably could have used those extra three seconds for something more productive. Anything.”
“It was a moment of madness,” he said. “I was sure I was going to die.”
“I thought so.”
We sat silently.
“It wasn’t…inspired by that moment though,” Whitt ventured. “I mean…”
“What?”
“I’ve thought of doing it before.” He stole a glance at me. “I’ve thought about it for a long time. It was just…being in the situation we were in. I thought it might be my last chance to actually do it.”
I said nothing. His hands were in his lap, his eyes on Pops.
“So what does that mean?” I asked. There was a strange tightness in my throat.
“I don’t know,” he said.
The back door of Pops’s garage swung open in front of us. The sandy-haired kitchen fitter was there with his boots in hand. He looked at Pops, waved awkwardly, bent, and pulled the boots on and started walking up the street toward us. He didn’t see Whitt or me sitting in the car. Pops watched the man go wi
th a cocked eyebrow and then went back to his work.
The expression on Whitt’s face was unreadable. He put the keys in the car’s ignition and started it up.
Chapter 59
JAX GOTTEN WAS not pleased to see us. We reached the interview room where he was housed after passing through halls, offices and walkways full of officers and detectives similarly annoyed by our presence. The bikie boss sat with his big arms folded, arms that were, like his face, patched here and there with bright white bandages. His left eye peered out from beneath a white awning made from a bandage over his brow.
“You’re going to die, Harriet Blue,” Jax said.
“Wow, straight out of the gate with the death threats.” I laughed as I sat down before him.
“It’s not a threat, it’s a fact. You don’t touch a man’s bike. You don’t so much as scratch it. I’d watch your back if I were you, because some of the bikes you trashed yesterday have been with those men’s families for generations,” he said. “They’re like family members.”
“You sound more pissed about the bikes than you do about your face,” I noted.
“I am,” Gotten said.
“Priorities.” I glanced at Whitt. “What can I say, Jax? I wish I’d had time to reverse up and give it another crack. I loved those smashy, crunchy sounds. Metal twisting. Glass shattering. And then there was the girly screaming you were all doing in the house when I flung the oil at you. The whole afternoon was music to my ears.”
“What kind of police force arranges for a victim to be confronted in a locked room by their attacker?” Jax asked. “Should I add emotional trauma to my assault charge?”
“I don’t know. Should I add triple murder to your drug trafficking rap?”
“There will be no drug trafficking rap.” Jax smirked. “The cops went out to the property and had a good look around, waving a half-arsed, judge-bought warrant. There’s no evidence of any illegal activity on the premises. The evidence of your attack? That’s all over the place. All over my face. I can see why a pair of balls-out psychopaths like the two of you had your badges taken away.”
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