Home Sweet Murder

by James Patterson

  “What?” I said. Suddenly, I could hardly find words, which was unusual for me.

  “Woolfmyer agreed not to push forward with an assault conviction, but he applied for an AVO, and Steiner granted it.”

  Still no words came.

  Pops raised his bushy eyebrows. “Yeah. You’re banned from the trial. You’re banned from the entire courthouse, in fact. You’re not allowed to come within five hundred meters of Prosecutor Woolfmyer. Which means anywhere he regularly goes is off limits to you. The prison where your brother is, for example. Sam’s lawyer’s office.”

  “This is…” I was shivering with rage.

  “This is perfectly reasonable.” Pops shrugged, angry. “Judge Steiner could have recorded the conviction and granted Woolfmyer the apprehended violence order. But he didn’t. Because I convinced him you were going to get your arse out of town.”

  A young probationary constable was walking up the hall with my handbag, confiscated from me when I was arrested. I snatched the stupid pink bag off him and started rummaging through it for cigarettes.

  “I told Steiner I’d find you a case. Send you off into the desert again for a couple of weeks so you can cool down.”

  “I’m not going back out there,” I snapped. “I’m going to sit on the front steps of the courthouse. If I can’t go inside, I’ll still be there. I’m not leaving Sam.”

  “That’s exactly what Judge Steiner said you’d do.” Pops shook his head. “He wanted to lock you up instead. I said you’re not going to be on the courthouse steps. You’ll be out in the desert, out of trouble, just like you were after they picked Sam up.”

  “Nope,” I said. “Not happening.”

  I couldn’t find my cigarettes. My hands were shaking too badly.

  “Blue,” Pops called as I walked toward the door, following at my heels. “This is not up for discussion. You get out of here or he’ll reverse his decision. And then you’ll be no good to Sam at all. You want to try working on his defense from a jail cell? You’ll be lucky if they give you paper and a pencil in there.”

  I stopped by the big glass doors.

  There was a certain appeal to what he was saying. I could go back out into the Australian badlands, out among the tiny towns where people who didn’t want to be recognized fled. I could run away from the horror of my brother’s situation. Blessed denial.

  “When does the order expire?”

  “Nine days.”

  I bit my lip. I wanted so badly to cry. But I was not a crier. I was not weak. I squeezed the door handle, trying to hold on to some semblance of control.

  “You fucked up, Blue,” Pops said. It was rare that he swore. I looked at his eyes. “You’re a hothead. And I love that about you. It’s half of what makes you a good cop. Your fearlessness. Your fire. But you need to get away from here before you do some real damage. This?” He flipped the frilly collar of my blouse. “This is not working. When you’re not bashing prosecutors you’re standing around pissed as hell and doing a bad job hiding it. The princess getup makes you look about as harmless as a hired assassin.”

  I exhaled. I wanted a hug. But I was not a hugger, either.

  “It’s only nine days,” he said. “How bad could things go in that time?”

  Chapter 8

  I LEANED MY head against the car window in the dark.

  Beyond the glass, New South Wales desert rolled by, barren and hard. I was out here again. In exile for my own good, for the good of Sam’s case.

  I was six hours from Sydney, four of them by plane, two of them by car, on the straight edge of the western border of New South Wales. Red dirt country. We were headed to a tiny, dim star in a constellation of sparse towns, most notably White Cliffs to the south of us (population 103) and Tibooburra to the west of us (population 262). My driver, a plump and pretty blonde woman wearing a dusty police uniform and standard-issue baseball cap, shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel. She’d been jibber-jabbering since we left the airstrip, about the region, its history, seasonal precautions about snakes. I was so angry at myself, so distracted, I’d hardly been answering her. I sighed quietly. She was gearing up to take a run at me about why I was there. How could I possibly explain what I’d done? I could feel it—the curiosity.

  “So the papers said…” She licked her lips, hesitated, as most people do. “They said that the lawyer made some derogatory remark toward you?”

  “My brother,” I answered. “He made a joke about my brother being raped in prison. I work in Sex Crimes. Rape jokes aren’t funny.”

  “Struth! You’re right, they’re not. Plus, it’s your brother,” the cop sympathized. “I mean, it doesn’t matter what he did. He’s still—”

  “He didn’t do anything. He’s innocent,” I said.

  I realized miserably that I didn’t even know this officer’s name. My mind was so tangled up in my personal life that I’d completely forgotten it as soon as she’d introduced herself. I reached down for the case file at my feet and pretended I was shifting it to the backseat so it wouldn’t get damaged. I glanced at the name on the cover. Senior Sergeant Victoria Snale.

  “I’ve got to say”—Snale’s voice was irrepressibly cheerful—“it made an amazing picture for the front pages. You standing over the lawyer. Him all splayed out on the concrete. It must have really been some punch.”

  I felt microscopically uplifted. “It doesn’t have to be hard if it’s on target.”

  “And now you’re here,” she said brightly. “I can’t say I’m sad about that. It’s pretty lonely out here, to be honest. It’ll be good to have some more cops around. Someone who can relate. You know?”

  “How many cops are there in town?” I asked.

  “Active officers? I mean, we have one retiree…”

  “Active officers.”

  “Just me.” She looked over, smiled. “Just us.”

  I didn’t want to burst Snale’s bubble, but I didn’t plan on being out in the desert long. Nine days of “us.” Then it’d be back to Victoria Snale: Lone Ranger.

  The moment Prosecutor Woolfmyer’s AVO expired, I’d be back—back in that jerk’s face, fighting him and the state’s crack team of lawyers about my brother’s innocence.

  The empty desert around me was familiar. I’d been shoved aside when Sam had first been arrested, shipped out into the middle of nowhere, away from the public eye, away from my distinctly uncomfortable colleagues and their guilty looks after months of lying to me. Back then, I’d succumbed to the journey. I’d felt such shameful pleasure at having something to think about that was not Sam and what he was facing. Now was no different.

  I squeezed my folder of notes on Sam’s case against my chest. A thick binder of papers detailing all the leads I’d tried to chase down. Most of the work I’d done was hopeless, dead ends I’d pursued over the months searching for something, anything, that might set my brother free. The binder was battered and bruised, but it was my lifeline. I wasn’t leaving it behind. I wasn’t putting it in my bag. I was hanging on to it. As long as I had the binder, I wasn’t abandoning Sam.

  Chapter 9

  “LET’S CHECK OUT the view before we go down,” Victoria Snale said, beaming. “You’ll love it.”

  The officer pulled the four-wheel drive off the side of the highway and let it rumble to a stop. I climbed out and breathed the desert air, felt the warm wind ruffle my hair. The great domed sky was heavy with stars. I felt so far from where I belonged. Wonderfully small.

  “Come this way,” Snale beckoned me, kicking up dust in the car’s headlights. “This is it.”

  I stood with her on the edge of a rocky cliff in the dark. “This is Last Chance Valley,” she said.

  She swept her hand dramatically across the landscape, indicating a less-than-impressive collection of gold lights clustered at the bottom of a moonlit rise. I nodded, made an interested noise. I felt bad for being so distant for the whole trip toward the town.

  “You can’t see it very well right now, but
the town is actually at the bottom of a massive crater.” She pointed to the curve of the rise we stood on. “Biggest crater in the Southern Hemisphere. This ridge is just the edge, it runs all the way around. It’s sort of egg-shaped, with the town right in the center and properties spreading out around. The first family settled down there two hundred years ago. There are seventy-five residents now.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “They’re not sure what formed the crater, but it may have been a volcano. A meteorite. Every now and then somebody comes out and runs a study on the place. Very exciting stuff. I usually get to brief the town on their visits, tell everybody to behave themselves.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “I guess the settlers thought the crater might shelter us from the desert dust storms,” she mused, rolling a rock under her boot. “It doesn’t. In fact it makes things worse. We get about ten centimeters of dust when the summer winds roll in. It also floods real bad, and the floodwaters hold beneath the earth. When it floods, we get green grass. We can grow wheat here. There’s plenty of cattle. But, being the only grass around for thousands and thousands of kilometers, it brings locust plagues.”

  I was glad Snale was the local cop and not the tourism director. I tried to maintain a serious face.

  “Locusts?” I said.

  “Yeah, we’re just getting over the last plague. Here’s one right now, in fact.”

  She reached out toward me, and I realized a creature was walking up my biceps, an enormous brown grasshopper covered in the patterns of the desert, spots and stripes in red and brown. I didn’t scream. But it wasn’t easy.

  Snale plucked the creature from my shirt and tossed it into the wind. It fluttered into the dark.

  “Oh great,” I said, brushing off the place where the thing had been. “This is great.”

  “They bite, but it’s not that painful.”

  “And what exactly will I be working on out here?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said cheerfully. “Turns out somebody’s planning to kill us all.”

  Chapter 10

  WE SAT IN the car together and Snale took a package from the glove compartment. It was a notebook secured in a police evidence bag, a sheaf of photocopies, which she handed to me. She started the car but kept the overhead light on so I could read as she drove.

  “A trucker found this diary in a backpack on the side of this highway, at a rest stop.” She pointed over her shoulder. “Back the way we came, about five kilometers. He spotted it sitting there when he stopped to pull a dead roo from his front grille. Brought the diary into town and handed it in to me. It contains detailed analyses of spree killers, weapons, massacre plans. We think someone is, or was, constructing a plan to kill as many people in Last Chance Valley as possible.”

  “When was this?”

  “Two days ago.”

  “And you vetted the truck driver?”

  “Yeah, I let him go.”

  I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I looked at the photocopied pages before me. My eyes breezed over the tight, small writing and fell upon the hand-drawn images, sketches of a person in a hood running toward fleeing groups of people, mowing them down with a huge rifle. There were diagrams of the layout of the town below, lists of names and addresses. I examined the notebook in the evidence bag, turned it over. Of course, there was no name on it. That’d be too much to hope for.

  The thing that struck me immediately about the pages I was looking through was the sheer weight of preparation that the diarist had gone to. Every page was filled on both sides with either illustrations or notes, or with excerpts from books that had been copied and pasted onto some pages. It was all very calm and methodical. Where there were illustrations, they were very well done. More like scenes of war than the macabre scribblings of a maniac. There were photographs of buildings, I assumed areas of the tiny town below us from different angles. This was more than a speculative work. This was serious.

  Snale drove us over the edge of the crater and down toward its depths. I looked up at the other edge of the valley, rocky and pointed against the burnt-orange light.

  And as I looked across the crater I saw the explosion.

  The sound it made took seconds to reach us across the distance. A bass thump I felt in the center of my chest.

  The sky lit up with a fireball directly across from us, on the steep rise.

  “Oh my God!” Snale swerved, gripping the wheel.

  I shoved the papers aside and sat bolt upright. “Get there. Get there now!”

  Chapter 11

  THE EXPLOSION ON the other side of the town seemed to have ignited the brush there in flames. I kept my eyes on the dim glow as we raced up the main street and between the fields beyond. Small houses. Fences. Snale’s jaw was set. She squinted at the dark rise before us.

  “Might have been kids with fireworks,” she murmured. “The kids around here, they’re pretty feral.”

  “Those are some pretty big fireworks,” I said.

  We took the winding road up the slope at a roaring pace. I gripped the door of the vehicle as Snale took the corners. Country driver. She’d been taking these roads at breakneck speed since girlhood.

  We could smell the blast zone from the side of the road as we parked. Snale was no athlete but she bounded into the bush ahead of me, agile as a rabbit, her gun drawn. I had no flashlight, but followed the bouncing white light of hers, razor-sharp desert plants slicing at my jeans. The fire was burning itself out in the tough grass and the oily leaves of the eucalypts above us.

  The smoke seared my eyes. We split up. I almost tripped over a plastic chair, or what remained of it. Three of its metal legs were buried in the dirt, and the back had melted to a black husk, sharp, sticking upwards like a dagger. Snale came back to me, huffing, winding her flashlight beam across my face, then to where I was crouched, examining the chair.

  “May I?” I grabbed the light and swept it over the chair, found the crater where the bomb had gone off. There were bodily remains here, tangled in the dirt and grass. The blackened and burned slivers of flesh of something or someone blown to bits.

  “Oh no,” Snale was saying gently, following close behind me. “Oh no. Oh no.”

  I zeroed in on a shiny object—a hand wheel valve. There were splinters of metal shining in the dust. Entrails, blood everywhere. Hair. An animal? I nudged the valve with my boot, didn’t have evidence bags with me.

  “Propane gas bottle,” I said.

  “Oh man.” Snale gave a frightened shudder, taking the light from me with her cold fingers. “Oh maaaaan!”

  I followed her. She’d noticed something hanging from a nearby branch, swinging gently in the breeze. It was a man’s hand and forearm, blackened and charred, held there by the remains of a shred of melted duct tape. The tape wrapped around the wrist seemed burned to the flesh.

  I was just beginning to wonder how on earth it was still hanging on when it fell, slapping to the ground at our feet. Snale yelped in terror. She grabbed at me as a new fear rushed through her: the sound of a large vehicle leaving the roadside back near where we’d parked.

  We could hear it crashing through the undergrowth toward us.

  Chapter 12

  DEER-HUNTING LIGHTS. Eight of them. They pierced the night around us, blasting through my vision, making me cower behind my arm. It was like an alien ship landing. Snale cocked her weapon, but in seconds she seemed to relax.

  “Oh. It’s only Kash,” she said. There was a slight upward lilt to her voice, like she’d just been given good news. I was still blinded. I stumbled forward, grabbing the back of her shirt to guide me through the painfully illuminated blast zone.

  “Jesus, those lights!”

  “Hands up!” someone bellowed. “Identify yourselves!”

  “It’s me!” Snale put her hands up. I didn’t bother. “It’s us. Vicky, and my new friend Harriet.”

  I thought “friend” was going a bit far.

  An enormous man eme
rged out of the light like an overexcited dog, a flurry of hard breath and wild gesturing. Incredibly, he had a flashlight in his hand.

  “Vicky. Right. Have you seen the suspect? Where’s the suspect? Any signs of where he went?”

  “The what?” I tried to see his face, glimpsing a chiseled jaw, black curls. “What suspect?”

  “You”—Kash pointed at me—“head down the hill and sweep south-east in a standard second-leg search pattern. Snale and I will take southwest. Give it a K, maybe a K and a half. We’ll meet back here in twenty.”

  “A search?” I yelled. “Using what? I’m not sure I’ll ever see again.”

  “Double time! Let’s go!”

  The muscled goliath took off into the bush, crashing over plants and shrubs like a tank. I jogged, confused, in the general direction he’d indicated.

  There was nothing to indicate that a suspect was on the loose. But the big man in the dark had overcome my decision-making abilities with his barking voice, like a slap to the side of the head. I was annoyed and bristled, but I did what he said. There was no one south or east of the blast zone.

  Snale and the big man, Kash, were there when I returned. She was searching the remains again with her flashlight beam. Kash was standing uselessly with his hands on his hips, looking generally “in charge” of whatever might have been about to happen. In the light of the enormous truck I saw an action-figure body and Clark Kent glasses on a head as square and thick as a sandstone block. When I came back into the light, he walked toward me, hand extended.

  “Elliot Kash, Counter-Terrorism Task Force, Islamic Fundamentalism Division, ASIO.”

  “Of course.” I nodded. I understood all the dramatics now. This guy was in national security. I’d come across his type before. “Of course you are.”

  “You’ve heard of me then? Good. That’ll save time. Let’s secure the entry to the blast zone, erect a checkpoint on the road. We’ll do hourly sweeps of the search grid to see if the suspect comes back. They often return to film their work for their online campaigns.”