Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  “Ted Collins,” I lied.

  I got the impression that this man’s handshake would usually have been firm, masculinity-driven. It was limp and cold now. He had hard hands and a trucker’s build, hours lifting and sitting, the shoulders strong and the belly round. His eyes were puffed from crying.

  “What happened to you?” he asked dimly, offering no name of his own.

  “Car accident,” Amanda covered for me. “Ted, Michael Bell here has brought us in—his son is inside.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I told Michael. I looked around the empty parking lot. “Isn’t there anyone who can come and be with you right now?”

  “My whole family is at the house.” He glanced away, distracted. “I can’t … I can’t be there. Not while Andy’s inside. I just walked off. There’s too much crying. Too much…” He trailed off, rubbing his beard, the thoughts swirling. “They called me this morning, to confirm I was home. Six o’clock. You get a phone call from the police and you don’t know what they want and then they come to the door…”

  He drew a shuddering breath. I wanted to hug the big man but I didn’t know how he or the cops nearby would react. Now and then, flashes of rage crossed his features, lightning cracks there and then instantly gone. I knew from delivering the news of deaths to loved ones as a cop that the rage could leap out at any moment, bursting through the grief like a fireball.

  “I saw the stories about you both, the Jake Scully case,” Michael offered. My stomach twisted. He must have known then who I was, what I had been accused of. That I wasn’t “Collins” but “Conkaffey”: the notorious. “I need … I want everyone on this. I need to know what happened. The cops, they fuck this kind of shit up all the time. You see it on the news. Missing evidence and corrupt officers and … and…” He gestured uselessly, hand flopping by his side. “Whoever has done this, I need to know. I just…”

  “We’ll do everything we can,” I said. I didn’t know what exactly had happened inside the bar, but what this man needed now were assurances. “But I’ve got to warn you, Michael, that hiring private investigators this early—you run the risk of putting too many cooks in the kitchen. We’re not going to trample all over the police investigation.” I looked at Amanda, making sure she knew I was telling her also, not just Mr. Bell. “Mate, I really suggest you go home, or you call someone to be here with you.”

  “I’m fine,” the father said, shifting from foot to foot, already beginning to retrace his pacing path at the edge of the cordon. “I’m not leaving Andy.”

  I followed Amanda under the police tape to the door of the bar. The large room was packed with people, most of them looking in on the empty bar and kitchen area, a forensic staff–only zone. As I appeared, most eyes turned toward me, examined my bruises, the dried blood that I couldn’t seem to fully expel from the rims of my ears. Everyone had donned a Tyvek suit from a pile on a table by the door. I stopped and grabbed one, pulled it on, my face burning with the quiet scrutiny of dozens of people.

  There were officers around who looked like they wanted to come and stop us entering the scene. A woman in a suit approached and pulled back her hood. I braced myself for the speech from the lead crime-scene officer about how Amanda and I weren’t wanted there, about how insulting it was for a victim’s family to bring in private detectives without giving the police half a chance to fuck it up. But I was surprised by a familiar face. Officer Philippa Sweeney had been Holloways Beach police when I first met her, a beat cop tasked with watching over my house six months earlier when a mob had assembled outside it, shouting and carrying on over my arrival in their town. She turned a heart-shaped face up toward me, and I was glad to see it wasn’t creased with jurisdictional fury.

  “What happened to you, Conkaffey?”

  “Slipped on a banana peel.”

  “Right.” She smirked. “I’m the lead on this case. Detective Inspector Pip Sweeney. I was on protection detail at your house a while back.”

  “I remember.” I shook her gloved hand. “That’s a swift upward turn in the career trajectory.”

  “Yeah, well. Seems there were a couple of openings in Crimson Lake for sergeant suddenly.” The corner of her mouth tightened, just slightly, with a smile. She didn’t want to thank me. Couldn’t. “I took the exam and they rushed me through.”

  “Nice work,” I said.

  “Mmm.”

  “Look, it’s very unusual, us being hired this early,” I said. “I’ve already said as much to Mr. Bell. But I’m happy to go and talk to him again, tell him that you guys need to lead and we’ll come in afterwards if there is anything we think we can assist on.”

  “He’s in shock,” Sweeney said. “It’s been three hours since he learned his son is dead. He’s grabbing at straws. I’ve seen it before. You tell someone the news and before they can do anything else they go hang the washing on the line. I’m not insulted. I think he’s had a kneejerk reaction.”

  “Right,” I said.

  “But I’m not going to tell you guys to shove off right away,” she said. “Get a look at the scene. Make some calls if you want. If it makes Michael Bell feel better to have you here I’m not going to argue.”

  She turned and pulled her hood on. I did the same, gave Amanda a quizzical frown. Sweeney’s attitude was far beyond what I had expected. I’d expected to be turned on my heel and shoved right back out the door, but instead I found myself following Sweeney to the edge of the bar area where the crowd was thicker and a photographer’s flash was bouncing off the walls. Sweeney was letting us in, but she clearly didn’t trust me. She had the restless eyes of someone trying to decide whether they can turn their back on a dangerous animal, constantly searching my face when she didn’t think I noticed.

  There were two bodies visible from the door to the kitchen. A brown-skinned woman had been lying on her stomach when she was shot in the back of the head, her jaw still resting against the dirty tiles. Her hands were flat, palm down, sitting either side of her head, which was turned away from me. A man I assumed to be Michael’s son Andrew had been shot multiple times just before the entrance to the back door and had dragged himself a little way, painting the floor in jagged streaks as he went for the exit and was shot again. There were footprints in the blood, one set, it looked like, but this could have been from whoever discovered the bloodbath. A photographer was getting a close-up of the woman’s face.

  “That’s Keema Daule, twenty. Over there is Andrew Bell, twenty-one,” Amanda said, looking at her notes.

  “Christ.” I winced. “They’re just kids.”

  Hearing me say the word “kids” sent a ripple of uncomfortable looks around the people in earshot. There are certain things I can’t mention as an accused pedophile. Children, toys, schools. I’ve talked about cartoons in public and made people shift uncomfortably in their seats. It never wears off.

  “Are they a couple?” I asked.

  “No,” Sweeney said. “He’s got a girlfriend. Local girl, Stephanie. Keema here is over from the UK recently, been backpacking her way around the country. Mum’s of Indian heritage but Keema’s lived her whole life in Surrey. We’re making calls liaising with the Surrey cops. They’re going to go around there and give them the news.”

  “Who found them?”

  “Delivery guy coming in with frozen chips.” Amanda looked at the ceiling. “Terry Hill. Local guy. Andrew is usually here to let him in in the morning. He knocked at the front, no answer. Came round the back, looked in the back window and saw a foot. Called the ambulance. Thought someone might have fainted.”

  At the back of the kitchen beside a shelf full of blackened pots and pans there was a tiny barred window, greasy from the kitchen air. The angle looked right. Around the side of a bench, the delivery man would have been able to see only Andrew’s splayed foot and nothing of Keema.

  “Someone interview him?”

  “Yep.”

  “So what are the current theories?” I wondered.

  “Most popular
vote is it’s a stickup,” Amanda said. “Someone comes in, trying to hold up the bar. Tells the pair to lie flat on their stomachs like she’s doing.” She pointed to the dead girl. “Keema and Andrew think they’re going to be tied up while he raids the safe, probably. Instead he executes her. Bang. Andrew freaks out and tries to make a run for it. He gets it next. Bang, bang. He doesn’t go down right away. Keeps trying for the door. He cops the rest of the clip for his troubles. Bang-bang-bang-bang-bang!”

  Amanda had her fingers out in a pistol shape, pointing at the body by the door, one eye closed for aim. People were staring at us. I pushed her hand down.

  “What do you think?” I asked Sweeney.

  “The setup works,” Sweeney said. “Cash register and safe are empty. Safe was full from the week’s takings, about to be emptied today. So it was a hell of a convenient time for someone to come in and knock it off. We’re rounding up all current and ex-employees.”

  “Bit of an odd thing to do, kill them both, if it’s just a robbery.” I looked at the girl’s limp, inward-turned feet. I ducked to get a better view of her face. There was a flashy necklace in the blood at her throat. “Why shoot them? Did they recognize the robber?”

  Neither woman answered.

  “Anyone weird hanging around the bar before closing time?”

  “We’re bringing in the last customer, Darren Molk, a Holloways Beach postman. His was the last transaction on the readout of the EFTPOS machine, and he says he was the last to leave. We’re going to see if he saw anything strange. He’s a regular. Apparently it was just Darren for the last half an hour or so before closing. Usually went like that.”

  “What time did Darren say he left?”

  “About two a.m.”

  “Two?” I said. “That’s odd.”

  “Why?”

  “I worked in bars while I was at uni,” I said. “Tough work. Takes a long time to close a bar down for the night. You’ve got to wash and polish all the glasses. Do the mats. The kegs. The fridges. Put all the chairs up. Do the floors. It sucks. You think the night is over when the last customer leaves and then you’re there for ages trying to get the place cleaned up.”

  “What’s your point?” Sweeney asked.

  “Well, if they’d only had the one customer since one thirty a.m., why didn’t they start the closing process then so that when the guy left they could just about walk out?” I shrugged. “Why hang around for forty-seven more minutes than you have to?”

  “Maybe they had staff drinks,” Sweeney said.

  “What? Just the two of them? Together?”

  “Men and women can be colleagues without being romantically involved,” Sweeney offered.

  “We better hope so.” Amanda nudged me in the arm.

  “I’ll talk to the owner,” Sweeney said. “They might have been partway through cleanup. We’ll see what the routine was, how long it usually took. Whoever was waiting to hit the place might have been thinking the girl would leave and Andrew would stay behind to lock the door. Got a surprise when it looked like they were going to walk out together.”

  It could have been a robbery, easily. Guns were right for robberies. If both had been stabbed, I might have thought differently. Just because they were both dead, that didn’t mean it was something personal. One of them might have seen the robber’s face, or recognized his voice.

  I’d had a few murder-robberies in my time on the drug squad, rival gangs going into each other’s houses and blowing each other away, stealing their stashes. A few times it had been over women, or territory, or insults. The good thing for me had been that as soon as my team walked in on a murder, we walked right back out again. Handed it over to homicide. Sometimes I didn’t even see the bodies, didn’t bother entering the scene in case I messed up evidence. So bodies and death were still foreign to me. I hadn’t worked up the desensitization I was obviously going to need as a private investigator, and I wasn’t blessed with Amanda’s empty toolbox of emotions. I was feeling a little upset at the sight of the dead young people, so I moved off to check out the rest of the place.

  I walked along the bar and into the small staff office where another forensics officer was taking prints from the safe. The roster for the night showed Keema and Andrew were the only people on for the evening. It was a Tuesday night. That seemed about right to me. A chef named Ben had left at nine. I noted where he had signed out for the evening. Amanda was correct—Keema had clocked off at 2:45 a.m. Andrew hadn’t signed off at all. The register would give the police a picture of how many customers they’d served. There was a CCTV system, but it was old. I pushed open the flap with a gloved fingertip and found the video tape slot empty. The fact that they were still using VHS to tape the bar’s goings on wasn’t a surprise to me. The bar was ancient, with running repairs visible everywhere. A piece of wood kicked off the bottom of the bar, replaced with a strip of ply. The cracked corner of a mirror held in place with sticky tape. If it wasn’t broken, these people didn’t replace it, and if it was broken they fixed it cheaply.

  There was a photograph pinned to a corkboard of a bunch of young people hanging out on the porch of the pub, back when the wisteria was in its infancy. There didn’t seem to be anyone over the age of twenty-five who worked here, spare for an old woman with heavy jeweled earrings who I guessed was the owner.

  Two young people dead on the floor of a shitty dive bar, their faces in the grease and grime of a tiny kitchen. Their deathbed was run by underqualified short-order cooks who’d left after dinner service without so much as a sweep up of the dead cockroaches under the sticky counters. It was such a waste.

  Bartending had been a tougher job than I’d thought it would be when I started out in the industry as an eighteen-year-old. I’d been sucked in by the apparent glamour of the pubs and clubs in Sydney’s CBD, the thumping music and the drunk girls flirting with the fit young guys behind the crowded counters. The illusion wore off pretty quickly. I finished work in the early hours exhausted and reeking of cigarette smoke, my feet sore and my ears ringing with the same soulless tunes thrumming out from the DJ’s stand over and over. The girls flirted with me, sure, but they were half as charming when I was tired and sober as they seemed when I was on the serving side of the bar. For every long-legged beauty who tried to get free shots from me there were four angry men who felt overlooked in the line and let me know it in no uncertain terms. The vomit and piss all over the bathrooms, swimming with cigarette butts and used condoms, were suddenly my responsibility.

  No one was supposed to work in places like this for very long. It was a place for backpackers to drop in and grind out some cash to fund their way north toward Thailand, a place for locals to dwell for a while before they laced up their boots and got out into the real working world. This filthy, rotting place was supposed to be a launch pad only, a rest stop on the way to better things. The only people who were supposed to dent its benches and bar stools would be the local drunks and long-haul truckers who’d already given up on young people’s dreams. The small ghosts of Andrew and Keema would be out of place here in the silent hours. They’d be confused, bright-eyed spirits still wiping the counters and changing the kegs, so unprepared to be dead that they didn’t even know that they were. I held the photo of the young people drinking on the porch and felt sad.

  Sweeney appeared beside me, her face still quizzical.

  “How’s your case?” she asked. I remembered her trying to ask me questions about my arrest back when I first met her. I didn’t want to be interrogated on it now, standing by the cooling bodies of two kids. So I just shrugged.

  “Is that what this is about?” She looked at the gash in my cheek. “Are vigilantes still messing with you?”

  “No,” I said. “It was just a pub fight over something stupid. A snooker table. It’s fine. It’s all fine. Thanks for asking.”

  I tried to move away, went to the front porch and stood looking at the wall of rainforest across the road behind my car, a tall, impenetrable tangle
of green. Someone had finally come to join Michael Bell, another graying, rough-edged man who was trying to cajole him into a car. Sweeney followed me, pulling off her latex gloves.

  “Amanda will be your only contact from our end for a couple of days,” I said, gesturing back inside to where my partner was raiding the bar for cigars. “If you decide to let her interview victims, don’t leave her alone with them for too long. She’s about as subtle as a kick in the face. I wouldn’t leave, but I’ve got to head down to Sydney for a couple of days. It’s my daughter’s birthday. I can’t cancel.”

  Sweeney nodded gravely. Whenever I mention anything to do with my daughter, people do that, nod gravely, like she’s dead. There were press vans turning up outside the bar now, officers directing them away from the parking lot, where they were trying to photograph tire tracks. I prepared to do the old duck-and-run to my car before they cornered me for an interview I couldn’t give.

  “I’ve been listening to the podcast,” Sweeney said suddenly.

  I stopped. Exhaustion swept over me.

  Toward the end of my first case with Amanda, a group who believed in my innocence had formed. It had started with a journalist named Fabiana Grisham, who’d come to Crimson Lake to pursue me for her newspaper. She’d expected me to be the sniveling, bent-backed, hand-wringing child predator of her nightmares, but she’d been struck by how normal I was, as most people are. She’d started asking me questions about my alleged crime, and I’d had answers for all of them. After a while I turned her around.

  Fabiana had gone back to Sydney and started an organization called Innocent Ted, which had a website, a podcast that chronicled the crime and speculated over the evidence, and a few videos on YouTube. As the group grew, the media took interest in it and they insinuated that Fabiana and I had been romantically involved.