Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  “Do you know the bar?” she asked after explaining the situation, gesturing toward the back of the property. “Have you been there? Noticed any murderers hanging about looking devious and lethal?”

  “My standards are a bit higher than that.” The young woman, Lila, rolled her eyes. “I went once. It smelled like possum pee and the bathrooms were filthy. I didn’t go back.”

  “You didn’t hear anything last night? Gunshots? Screaming?”

  “This one barks,” she said, trying to hold the dog back by its collar as it lunged repeatedly in Amanda’s direction. “I don’t hear anything. She goes all night. We haven’t been here long and she reacts to the night creatures. Place is alive from about five o’clock. Crawling with things. Bugs. Bats. Frogs. Urgh. I don’t know why we moved here.”

  “I don’t know either,” Amanda said, wincing as the dog erupted into barks again. She pointed a finger at the dog’s face. “Quiet, you!”

  “She’s just expressing herself,” Lila said. “Talking about her environment in her own language. When animals are in distress they have to verbalize things. She’ll adjust in a few weeks. That’s what her psychologist says, anyway. He suggested the tree change in the first place.”

  “Your dog has a shrink?” Amanda said.

  “Everyone needs a shrink,” Lila said knowingly.

  On the other side of the Songly house, Amanda approached a property that had once been neat, and might at some time have had a manicured garden, but was now more battered and overgrown than the other two dwellings closest to the bar. A pair of officers were just leaving, their notebooks in hand, treading Amanda’s path in reverse.

  “Don’t bother with the other two,” Amanda said, jerking her thumb toward the houses through the forest behind her. “Deaf old lady was asleep, and the yuppie girl’s dog barks too much.”

  “Fuck off, Pharrell,” the female of the two officers said. “We’re trying to solve a murder, not commit one, so we don’t need advice from you.”

  Amanda was used to this kind of disdain. Everyone in the town knew who she was, what she had done, and each generation of cops passed on to the next that she was not to be trusted or befriended, no matter how friendly she seemed to be. She didn’t take it personally. Not a lot of exciting things ever happened in Crimson Lake, so the murder she had committed more than a decade earlier was one of painfully few talking points. While people were frequently mean to her, she knew having a murderer in town was a source of interest for some. Being angry at her for what she had done, even though they never even knew the girl she’d killed, made some people feel good. Amanda didn’t mind. She liked people to be happy.

  She shrugged and went on past the officers to the older house. An obese woman in a floral nightie was just closing the door after the officers but paused when she saw Amanda. She gave the small investigator a suspicious once-over, noting the tattoos with disgust. The woman was covered with a fine sheen of sweat, and seemed only just roused from bed. Amanda glanced at the sun through the trees. She heard a television playing an infomercial loudly somewhere inside.

  “Hi,” she said brightly. “I’m—”

  “I got nothin’ else to say,” the woman snapped. “Me shows are on.”

  The woman slammed the door in Amanda’s face, and that was that.

  A yuppie, an old woman, and an obvious recluse. Amanda decided that the strip of residences behind the Barking Frog Inn was a typical Cairns street. Nothing particularly noteworthy.

  She retrieved her bike and rode through the backstreets, between the towering fields of cane, only just managing to dodge a brown snake making its way across the baking asphalt on her way into town.

  * * *

  At the Shark Bar, Pip Sweeney was just noting how much the place looked like a police station mess hall, patrol officers lounging in the booths cooling their heels, some of them talking on phones, making notes. Many of the men around her had been shipped in from other districts, a kneejerk reaction to the horror of a rare murder in the otherwise sleepy region. They would thrash out the case’s initial leads for forty-eight hours, traditionally the most critical stage in the hunt for a killer. One by one they would then be called back to their own cases as the pursuit cooled. Sweeney’s colleagues were tracking down witnesses, CCTV, bank accounts, and criminal records. They were a hive of hornets stirred by the killings. Under a sprawling painting of a pink hibiscus flower Sweeney sat wedged into a booth across from two large detectives. She had just begun to feel at ease directing the two older detectives to lead their teams over search grounds in the area when Amanda Pharrell appeared out of nowhere, leaning her bike against the front windows of the café.

  “You’re in my spot,” Amanda said as she reached the booth. Sweeney and her colleagues looked up from the pages spread before them, the policewoman still clutching a phone to her ear. One of the male detectives looked Amanda over, gave her a sneer.

  “Fuck off, Pharrell. This café is headquarters now.”

  “Everybody is telling me to fuck off today!” Amanda threw her hands up.

  “Maybe you should take the hint.” The detective smiled.

  “Look, you guys can use this place as headquarters, but not that spot.” Amanda pointed to the seat beneath the bulging man. “That’s my spot. I own it.”

  “You don’t own a seat in a public café.”

  “Yes I do.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes,” Amanda said, “I do.”

  “She does,” Vicky the waitress said, breezing by the table, collecting stained coffee cups as she went. “Amanda did a deal with Keith, the owner, maybe a year ago. She owns zero-point-zero-eight percent of these business premises. Specifically, the seat you’re sitting on.”

  Sweeney slowly put down her phone. The men in the booth with her stared after the waitress as she moved on, wiping nearby tables, seeing to officers across the room with their hands raised for more drinks.

  “Detective Sergeant Hanover,” Sweeney said carefully. “Would you be so kind as to move for Ms. Pharrell?”

  The detectives shifted awkwardly out of the seat, muttering obscenities. Sweeney watched as Amanda slid neatly onto the bench before her, the twitches in her neck and jaw momentarily out of control with apparent revulsion at the warmth of the bench after the detectives’ presence.

  “If someone had told me police headquarters was going to be here, I’d have warned you guys about my seat,” Amanda said.

  “I didn’t purposefully exclude you from that information,” Sweeney said. “I guess I just forgot about you. I apologize.”

  “Apology accepted.” Amanda smiled.

  “Amanda, I’m not sure if you’re aware…” Sweeney shifted uncomfortably “… but I’m brand new on the Crimson Lake beat. And I’m new to the rank of Detective Inspector. I was promoted and shifted over after Damford and Hench were arrested.”

  Sweeney remembered walking to work that fateful morning six months earlier and seeing the front page of the newspaper being flung into every yard, Amanda’s picture sandwiched between mug shots of the two policemen who were now behind bars. Amanda’s murder committed a decade ago was now back, sprawled across a four-page extended feature, the harrowing self-defense story that had exposed officers Damford and Hench to be monsters. One teenager had been slain, another sexually assaulted in secret and then stuffed into prison. It was fuel for nightmares. Sweeney was indebted to Amanda now for her job, but she couldn’t ever say so. Nothing Amanda had gone through had been worth her new stripes, her pay upgrade.

  “Well, look at you.” Amanda grinned, her eyes wandering appreciatively over the woman before her. “Out of the uniform and into the detective’s duds. Has someone bought you a deerstalker and a calabash yet?”

  Amanda reached over and gave the other woman a celebratory punch on the shoulder. Sweeney felt blood rush into her face, looked around the café at the other officers, who were all watching with hardly an effort to disguise their gaze.

&nbs
p; “Uh, no.” Sweeney cleared her throat. “And there’s no time for congratulations. My chief, Damien Clark, seems to believe in baptism by fire.”

  “Oh, I know Damien Clark.” Amanda nodded. “Or I know of him, anyway.”

  “Well, look, Amanda, Chief Clark has made me lead on the Barking Frog murders.”

  “And you’ve never dealt with a murder before,” Amanda concluded.

  Sweeney cringed. Again she looked around. Though no other officers were near enough to hear their conversation, she felt inescapably as though they were all listening.

  “Did someone tell you that?”

  “No. But Holloways Beach is hardly murder central,” Amanda said. “Rich foreign bankers in their big white mansions on the sand, stealing from shareholders and avoiding taxes. Their bored wives having too many semillons over lunch and yanking one another’s hair extensions out, plowing the Beemer into a palm tree. I’d be surprised if you’d dealt with anything more exciting than that.”

  “You may be close to the truth.”

  “Well, this is exciting then.” Amanda bounced in her seat. “Your first bloodbath! Congratulations again!”

  “Mmm.” Sweeney winced. “I’m not going to lie. It’s pretty tense. There are officers around who consider themselves to have been more worthy of the position. And it has caused further tension that Michael Bell has hired you.”

  “Oh, come on. If someone had popped my kid I’d go straight to C&P Investigations, too.” Amanda jutted her chin smugly. “We’ve got a brilliant track record. No case we ever pick up is going to slip between the cracks—all Ted or I would have to do to get some publicity would be to stick our faces in front of a camera and tell the world what we’re working on. Every time I do my laundry it’s national news, and Ted’s everyone’s favorite pedo.”

  “Amanda, please keep your voice down.”

  “And as an added plus,” Amanda continued, “mine and Ted’s physical differences are very reassuring to the potential client—Ted’s the lumbering lughead, the basher and bruiser of villains, and I’m the spritely spider monkey, scaling back-alley walls in pursuit of baddies on the run.” She made a ferrety face and scratched at the air. Sweeney nodded, but concluded from her advertising spiel that it was likely Amanda had no idea why Michael Bell, then sitting in initial interviews with some of Sweeney’s officers, had jumped the gun and brought in private dicks.

  “There’s also the fact that he believes you lot killed his dad,” Amanda yawned, waving dismissively at the room full of cops.

  Sweeney choked on her coffee.

  “Uh, what?”

  “Well, not that you killed him yourselves, but that you were responsible for it,” Amanda said. “Michael Bell’s father was Christopher Layot.”

  “The biker guy?” Sweeney said, shocked. “Why was I not told this?”

  “Different surnames. I think Michael changed it to distance himself from dead ole daddy. He’s legit. Or so he says.”

  “Christopher Layot was—”

  “A Los Diablos man.” Amanda nodded. “Down in Taree. Police were surveilling the Taree Satan’s Saints gang and knew there was a hit out on Christopher Layot for some offense or another. Didn’t warn him. The police botched a stakeout—the Angels crew slipped right out from under the noses of their watchers, killed Michael’s dad and slipped back in beneath the radar again. Well, that’s what Michael believes, anyway. He was eight.”

  “Oh, great.” Sweeney put her face in her hands.

  “Could be he’s wrong,” Amanda continued. “Layot’s body never showed up. Could be he just blew town and is in the Philippines spearfishing lobster and tanning his arse.” She shrugged. “I dunno.”

  “Jesus.” Sweeney rubbed her eyes. “Michael Bell told you all this? This morning?”

  “Yup.”

  “How did you…” Sweeney trailed off. She glanced around, wary of trying to learn anything from Amanda in front of her colleagues.

  “We’ve got the same tattoo artist in Cairns,” Amanda offered. “And I’m a talker. What can I say? Sometimes people talk back at me just to get me to shut up.”

  “This is just what I need,” Sweeney said. “An uncooperative family member and…” She trailed off again, but the additions to her concerns didn’t warrant listing aloud. Her first major case as a detective. A double homicide. A biker connection, and the town’s two most hated people smack-bang in the middle of it trying to assist. Sweeney looked at Amanda, who was carefully tearing off a corner of a napkin, which she rolled into a ball and began to chew. A table of male police officers nearby weren’t even pretending to work now—they stared in obvious contempt at the tattooed investigator as she worked through her napkin snack.

  “Amanda.” Sweeney took a deep breath. “I’m not going to tell Chief Clark that you and Ted are on the investigation.”

  “Oh?” Amanda raised an eyebrow.

  “No,” Sweeney said. “He’ll find out, of course, from one of my fellow officers. And he’ll berate me for not telling him. And he’ll insist that I get rid of you. But before that happens, perhaps you can come up with a few leads for me.”

  “You sneaky, sneaky detective.” Amanda smiled, waggling a finger. “I like your style. And I like being in secret relationships. Ooh, dangerous liaisons. Undercover partnerships. Covert alliances. I feel like I’m on an episode of Survivor.”

  “So,” Sweeney broke in. “Maybe you—”

  “Being hush hush gives me a rush.” Amanda was talking to herself now. “Makes me gush, flush, blush like I’ve got a crush—”

  “Amanda?”

  “—plush—”

  “Amanda.” Sweeney leaned forward, taking up her pen again. “In the spirit of cooperation, maybe you could fill me in on anything else you have already, anything as significant as your biker connection.”

  “Ah, yes, I could.”

  Sweeney set her pen to the page, but Amanda stood, brushed flecks of napkin from the end of her shirt. “But you’re going to have to bide your time, Sweeney McBeany. I’m a lady. I don’t go around giving it all away at once the first time someone expresses interest. I’ll be in contact.”

  Sweeney watched in horror as Amanda turned and left the café, winking to the nearest table of officers as she went.

  Dear Diary,

  I’m sorry. That should count for something. I’m sorry that I am this way, and I don’t want to be this way, and when I do the things that I do and think the way that I think, I feel bad about it. You know, you see a lot of pedophiles on TV shows. They’re happy, smiling guys. They’re not sorry. They’re confident, nasty. I watched an episode of Law & Order one night, Chloe with her head in my lap, half-asleep, the light on her face. It’s terrifying to see pedophiles on-screen, even fictional ones. This pedophile guy, the leader of a child sex ring, he was telling a young boy that it was okay, he didn’t need to worry—he was into little girls. He and the little boy’s father were friends. The boy needn’t recoil from his touch, needn’t feel uncomfortable beside him at the table.

  It would be so great if my life was like that. If I was so callous that I could tell a small boy, as casually as I would report the weather, my darkest, secret shame. Say it as a consolation. Imagine if I had a “ring” of friends who shared my “predilection.” What bullshit. I wouldn’t dare go looking for someone like me. It would be too risky, even online. Maybe if I had friends like me, they’d have been able to talk me out of Penny. Convince me that she wasn’t all that I thought she was.

  I caught sight of Penny the day Chloe and I moved in to the Wish Street house. She was sitting on the porch steps digging holes in the lawn with a stick, poking the tip deep down into the rain-pregnant earth while she waited for her mother to come out. Weirdly, I didn’t experience the usual stomach-collapsing thump of desire, the one Dr. Hart had told me to be wary of. Penny was wearing a little sky-blue tunic, something expensive, Charlie&Me maybe. Tiny heels. I notice children’s fashions. Try not to let people know I do. I see
that mothers are getting into heels for little girls these days, and I’m all for it. Handbags and sunglasses. Gorgeous. I saw Penny as I was moving boxes into the house and I thought: “There’s a pretty girl.” That was it. Maybe the therapy was working. Maybe I was distracted. A bit depressed. I’d seen a newspaper article that morning that bothered me a lot.

  Camden Park residents are being asked to assist police with information about a man frequenting the area who may have engaged in inappropriate contact with children. There are reports a man has approached children near the Angela Leigh Dance Academy and spoken to them inappropriately. The man is reported to be 20–30 years of age, Caucasian, with shoulder-length dark blond hair.

  I’d cut my hair, given Chloe some shit about wanting a change. But I couldn’t shake off the guilt. It had happened before, when I was a teenager and got a bit handsy in the surf one day after “accidentally” getting swept into a group of little blond nippers. Had a couple of lifeguards chase me after a mother made a complaint. The idea that someone was going to come knocking was never far away. My life is like that. Whenever the phone rings and it’s a number I don’t know, or there’s an unexpected rapping at the door. Or one of my mates has to confide something, or Chloe tells me we “need to talk.” I think, This is it. At least once a day I think This is it. It’s exhausting.

  I’d been standing by the barbecue in the backyard, listening to Chloe inside unpacking the kitchen, nesting, when the girl I’d seen at the front of the house next door suddenly popped her head up over the fence. I was still a little self-conscious about my newly shaven head and found myself rubbing a hand over it, trying to hide it. So I suppose I cared, maybe liked her, even then. She was white-haired, around ten. A bit old for me, but I returned the curious smile anyway.

  “Hi.”

  “Hi.”

  “I’m Penny.”

  “I’m Kevin.”

  A little tingle in the belly. I went about setting up the barbecue. Didn’t want to look too keen. She watched me, picking at the top of the fence palings with her chipped, pink painted nails.