by Candice Fox
When had he stopped breathing? the operator asked.
Only moments ago.
Did Pip know CPR?
Yes.
Had she tried it?
Yes.
Would she continue applying it now while the ambulance came?
Of course. Yes.
The dispatcher hung up. The ambulance left the hospital. Details were entered into a computer somewhere. Alerts and signals appeared on screens. Pip imagined these things happening as she sat and clutched the phone and looked at her dead dad and didn’t do CPR. Didn’t touch him at all. Didn’t even pretend.
When Pip got older and became a cop herself, she learned what she’d done wrong that evening. She’d told the ambulance dispatcher on the phone that her father had died only moments earlier. That she’d tried CPR, but he hadn’t responded. That she’d try again. It would have been obvious to the paramedics when they arrived that those were lies. Pip’s father had fallen on his front and remained there. The purple patches rapidly spreading over his chest and the undersides of his arms and the side of his face as his blood stopped circulating and headed downward told as much. He’d died and he’d lain there, untouched. Pip had obviously not attempted CPR. Her father’s shirt was still buttoned. His body temperature, and the pale, gray, waxy finish to his skin would have told the paramedics that he had been dead at least an hour before the call was made. Probably two.
There should have been consequences. Probably not criminal ones. But failing to render assistance to her dying father, and then lying about the fact that she hadn’t, were not the actions of a mentally healthy teenager. Someone might have insisted an official file be created for this child. A legal caution entered. Someone might have enforced a psychological assessment and entry into a counseling program, brought Pip’s actions to the attention of the Department of Social Services. In all, someone might have marked this moment in fifteen-year-old Pip Sweeney’s history. Made sure she never forgot it. And that it never forgot her.
But instead, preparing at any moment to be handcuffed and dragged off to jail, Pip silently accompanied her father in the ambulance to the Cairns Base Hospital and then waited in a long, empty hallway while someone tried to track down her mother. She stared at her shoes and listened to the clicking and beeping of machines in the rooms around her and rehearsed what she would say when they finally asked her why she had let her father die. She hardly noticed when an old woman in a white coat came and sat down beside her and spoke to her for ten minutes, not about her father but about her school life, her friends, idle chatter. The small encounter with the old woman with the big wet eyes and purple painted fingernails had hardly recorded itself on Pip’s brain.
When the police did finally come, Pip had burst into tears at the sight of the cuffs on their belts, the police car visible through the distant glass sliding doors to the hospital. Once she had started, it was hard to stop. The tears had been so panicked, so desperate, that the two officers had looked at each other, concerned. They’d got in contact with her uncle, they told her. They were taking her there to stay with him until further arrangements could be made. Pip had risen shakily, assisted by the tall, wiry female of the police pair. The woman’s warm hand had slid down into hers as they walked down the corridor together, and for the first time in a long time Pip felt like she was in the presence of her mother.
* * *
Pip was thinking about her father now as she signed in to the visitors’ log at the medical examiner’s reception desk at Cairns Hospital, just two floors below the corridor where she had sat all those years ago. He would have come through these doors then, down the long green hall and into the tiled rooms beyond. It was Dr. Valerie Gratteur who had sat and talked with the teenage Pip for a short while, who had ignored the blotches on her father’s arms and chest and face, left them out of the unexpected death report. She’d ruled that she believed CPR had been performed to no avail to save the man’s life. Years later, when Pip was newly graduated as a young constable, she’d come here and tried to ask the old woman why she had done what she’d done. Val had brushed her aside, trying to say at first she didn’t remember the case. When Pip insisted, she’d said only that her job didn’t involve just looking at the body. “I see everything,” she said. Dr. Valerie Gratteur had disguised Pip’s failure.
And yes, that’s how Pip thought of it now, as a failure to save him. She should have understood his downfall better. Should have helped him recover from her mother’s loss. Should have called an ambulance. Should have flipped him, ripped open his shirt and pumped on his chest, and given him another chance.
She tried to shake these thoughts away as she opened the door to Lab One.
There were two bodies on tables in the center of the room. Pip hadn’t been ready for the sight of them lying there, stark beneath white sheets, toes pointing upward, making peaks in the spotless fabric. They looked absurdly like stage props, Halloween decorations, the obvious curves and dips of the human form illuminated by bright light from above. Two young lives destroyed. Dr. Gratteur was nowhere in sight.
Pip waited, fiddled with the badge on the chain at her chest. A sickly curiosity pulsed in her. She went to the nearest corpse, tried to see the face through the tiny holes in the fabric. Closed eyes. Dark hair. Pip glanced toward the double doors at the end of the room and reached out.
The body surged upward.
“DON’T TOUCH THE BODIES!” Amanda screamed.
Amanda thrust the sheet downward, ripping the fabric from Pip’s fingers, springing into a seated position like a jack-in-the-box. Pip’s yowl of horror ballooning up against the ceiling, the tiled walls, seemed impossibly amplified. She fell back against the bench at the side of the room as Amanda’s laughter cracked through the air, maniacal hacking.
“You fucking bitch,” Pip snarled, feeling heat rush up from her chest into her face. “You fucking little bitch!”
“Oh god,” Amanda was gasping. “Oh, I got you good. I got you so good. Oh Jesus. Oh my god that’s funny. Oh. Oh.” She covered her face, rocking back and forth, a grotesque puppet of a dead body on the mortuary table, lamenting its own death. The laughs seemed impossible to suppress. Amanda struggled for breath.
“What exactly is going on in here?” Val Gratteur had pushed through the rubber double doors with a steel gurney, a body covered in a sheet, the rightful corpse to complete the duo of murdered bartenders. “You two are screaming blue murder.”
“I got Sweeney so good,” Amanda gasped, thumping her own chest with her fist, trying to drive out the giggles still rippling up from her belly. “She just about shat her pants. Didn’t you, Sweens? Didn’t you? Oh god, that was funny.”
“The old animated corpse gag.” The doctor gave Sweeney a sympathetic look. “I haven’t played that one in a long, long time. We used to get the trainee nurses down here on their first shifts and give them the terrors with that one. Really, Pip, you might have expected it, knowing this idiot here was coming along today.” She nudged Amanda off the slab.
“This hilarious idiot,” Amanda corrected.
“You two know each other?” Sweeney straightened her clothes, trying to take the focus off her own humiliation.
“She knows my handiwork.” Amanda winked at the doctor. Val shook her head.
“I have dealt with cases involving Amanda in the past,” Val said. “We met for the first time at Ted’s. I care for Ted’s geese when he’s away, and Amanda was there last time, making a nuisance of herself.”
“A hilarious nuisance.”
Sweeney kept her eye on Amanda as Dr. Gratteur uncovered the bodies of the two murdered bartenders. The petite investigator stood with her lower back leaning against the table, her arms folded, wearing the wandering look of someone quietly sinking into a daydream, her mind floating off somewhere else. All over Amanda’s body, little itches and twitches seemed to flicker, a shift of weight from her right to left leg, a finger tapping restlessly against her bicep, the gentlest of tics of her hea
d to the right. When the bodies were uncovered completely, Amanda looked up and yawned. Sweeney felt her stomach tightening at the sight of the girl’s jaw clicking back into place.
There was no emotion in there. Amanda might have been looking at mannequins, rather than the bodies of two young innocents.
“All right,” Dr. Gratteur said, pushing back the sleeves of her blouse. She pulled a pair of pale rubber gloves onto her fingers. “Here they are. The lovers.”
“Amanda told you her theory?” Sweeney piped up. “About the affair?”
“No.” Dr. Gratteur dropped back on her heels. “Why? Was this a secret?” She pointed to Keema, Andrew.
“Yes. He’s got a girlfriend. Had a girlfriend.” Sweeney cleared her throat.
“Well, Keema’s saliva was on Andrew’s penis,” Dr. Gratteur said. “So unless there’s some fantastic explanation for such a phenomenon, I’m going to assume they were having a sexual relationship.”
“I told you so!” Amanda yelled, startling Sweeney. The girl’s grin was spread wide. “Urgh. I love to say that. I was right. Every night I’m right. I’m right because I’m quite bright, out of sight, filled with intellectual light.”
“Trite,” Val said.
“The affair puts Andrew’s girlfriend Stephanie up on the suspect list,” Sweeney mused. “She might have come in and shot them as an act of revenge for his infidelity. We’ll look at her alibi again. See if Keema was involved with anyone, also, who might have been upset by the relationship.”
“This one.” Dr. Gratteur moved around the gurney that held Andrew’s body. “He might hold some clues for you. Come closer, both of you.”
Amanda skipped over into position beside the doctor. As Sweeney approached, she felt the tightness in her stomach increasing. She had managed to barely glance at the bodies of Keema and Andrew before, but now there was nowhere to look but at the young man’s pale, limp form, his flaccid penis and dark pubic hair, thick thighs flattened against the polished steel. The cavity in his chest and abdomen where Dr. Gratteur had cut into him to investigate his internal organs, to be sure beyond question that it had been the gunshot wound to his head that had killed him, had been neatly closed. But Sweeney knew that the organs, returned to their place in his body, were not sitting right. His stomach was strangely deflated. The mussed, sleepy look to his face she knew was caused by the sagging of tissue and muscles no longer being pumped with blood. He looked like a bad clay replica of himself. Impossibly smooth. Slightly pudgy.
And the wound at the top of his head. A mess of flesh and hair and bone. Sweeney exhaled and looked away.
“There was dirt,” Dr. Gratteur said, lifting the corpse’s palm. “Here, in the webbing of his fingers. Caught up beneath a silver ring he was wearing. None under the nails.”
“Dirt,” Amanda said. “Huh.”
“What’s a bartender doing with dirt on his hands?”
“Well, he must have been outside the bar. In the rainforest,” Sweeney said. “He must have … I don’t know. Picked something up? Picked up a dirty rock or a stick?”
“Was there any dirt on his clothes?” Dr. Gratteur asked. “I didn’t get the clothes. They went straight to forensics.”
“I don’t know. I’ll check.”
Amanda was examining Andrew’s hands. She smelled the fingers, held them against her cheek. Spread the palm and looked at the lines there.
“Maybe he fell,” she said suddenly.
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, the dirt was in the webbing.” She spread her hands before her, fingers wide. “If he’d picked something up, the dirt would have been on the palm. On the outer surface of the ring. If he fell, though, he’d have spread his hands out to stop himself. Scooped up the dirt in the forward motion, getting it in the webbing, into the gap between the ring and the finger. He’d have dusted his hands, maybe, when he got up, but the dirt in the webbing would have remained unless he washed his hands.”
“That’s what I was thinking.” Dr. Gratteur smiled. “So he fell outside the bar. Didn’t have time to wash his hands before he was killed. Why did he fall? What was he doing out there?”
“Maybe he saw the attack coming,” Sweeney said. “Maybe he was running. Trying to get away. The earth is moist. Fallen leaves everywhere, wet. He slipped.”
“If he was running, why run into the bar?” Amanda asked. “Why not run away?”
“Maybe he was running in to grab a weapon,” Sweeney mused. “Warn Keema.”
The three women looked at the bodies before them. Amanda was still holding the dead boy’s hand, like the family member of a coma patient, trying to give the lifeless body strength, trying to warm the limp fingers. Sweeney watched her. Her face was still cold. Nothing behind the eyes.
Total mental shutdown. I recognized the sensation from my time in prison processing, those red-hot minutes between incarceration at my own police station and internment at Silverwater remand center. I was moved about, herded like a mindless cow, my wrists in chains. Onto the bus. Off the bus. Down a corridor to the back of a queue of men waiting to be seen by the medical officer. Being given my physical, standing naked in a room filled with prison guards with batons. Only complete emotional detachment could have got me through it, through this absurd transition from police officer to criminal. I went where I was told to go. Lifted my hands, turned, bowed my head, signed pieces of paper thrust before me. Took the stack of folded clothes and toiletry items and went to my cell. Sat on the bed. Focused on continuing to breathe.
The interview with Lara Eggington actually went on after my old girlfriend Melanie Springfield’s revelation. I was aware that Sean had tried to bring it to a halt. That the crew had filmed him arguing with the producer. That there had been threats. Talk of contracts. I’d answered more questions. The focus had turned away from the new accusation. I had no memory of the rest of the interview when the lights above me clicked off.
I stood and relinquished all control again, all emotion. Sean and the goons argued in the hall. I looked out the windows at the street, where a crowd of press was gathering. They’d got wind of the fact that I’d be appearing on Stories and Lives, probably had people camped out, waiting to see when I would exit the building. Word had spread fast. The driveway of the Channel Three offices was crowded with people, cameras.
“He’s coming with me,” Sean was saying. “I’ll have my colleague come over. We’re going to work on a strategy. We’re going to sue. We’re fucking suing. Ted? Ted? Come on, mate. You’re coming with me.” He grabbed my arm.
“Khalid says to take him to the house,” Linda said. “So he’s going to the house.”
I guess the goons won out, because hands directed me, and voices propelled me, and I found myself in the huge, lush car again, two enormous silhouettes in the front seats, motionless, cameras flashing at the windows. I had vague memories of them pushing through the crowd, one ahead of me, one behind, slapping cameras away from me. Sharon palming a cameraman in the chest, almost knocking him off his feet.
I looked at my phone as we drove away. I googled myself without realizing what I was doing, without making the conscious decision to do it. Already, the page was filled with links.
BREAKING
New Conkaffey accusations revealed on upcoming Stories and Lives exclusive.
BREAKING
Stories and Lives producers tight-lipped on new Conkaffey developments.
BREAKING
Speculation hidden Conkaffey victim will speak.
Breaking. Breaking. Not only had someone leaked that I’d be at the Channel Three building giving an interview, but someone somewhere had let it slip to the world that there were new allegations. The news was spreading lightning fast, rushing through layers of cyberspace like bushfire. I gripped my head, hid my face in my palms. I could almost feel my mind splitting, falling apart. Logical thoughts ceasing to come to any conclusion, an impossible tangle of disconnected impulses.
How could she—
I never—I didn’t—I don’t even know—What if she—Why didn’t she—
I lost time. Suddenly I was following the big men through the huge double doors of a mansion somewhere, wincing at the light bouncing off the water of an oversized fountain embedded in the manicured lawn. There were voices inside, a clatter of dull sounds punctuated here and there by the sparkle of female laughter. Khalid Farah’s house. I realized I had been here before. I had kicked down these very doors, seated the immaculately dressed man on these very cream couches in the front sitting room while my colleagues crashed through his belongings, looking for drugs.
There were drugs here now, on a coffee table surrounded by tattooed men. I glimpsed them lounging in the dim light as I walked past the door. Dark eyes rimmed by long black lashes, snarling lips, silver chains. The front room guards. A team of men with greased, shining haircuts, patterns shaved into the stubble above ears. I kept walking. Almost ran into a woman carrying a plate of little meatball-y looking things in through the double doors to a huge kitchen. There was a table of people in another expansive room off the foyer, sitting down to lunch. Children. Old people. Lots of red wine.
“Cappuccino!” Khalid’s voice came through the French doors to the balcony. We emerged into the day again. I remembered walking out onto the sweeping, empty space during the drug raid, looking at the glimmering harbor beyond, peeking between similarly oversized houses. The young prince was leaning against the stone railing now, a glass in hand. It was cold out here. Or was I still in shock, still reeling from the interview hours earlier? My phone was buzzing in my pocket. I noticed a group of ladies further down the huge patio, sitting crowded around deck chairs, wineglasses in hand.
“Now there’s a face.” Khalid smirked, jutting his chin at me. “I’ve seen that face on little boys headin’ off to the can for the first time. You look sick, bro.”
