Redemption Point

by Candice Fox

  “Six is Ted’s girlfriend,” Amanda mocked, gesturing to the cat trying to maul her partner. “She loves him. She’s obsessed with him. She wants to marry him.”

  “I’d shake your hand, Inspector Sweeney, but I’m in a bit of a tangle.” Ted took a seat beside her, trying to wrestle the mewling animal down into his lap.

  “It’s fine.”

  Amanda narrated the cat’s voice, a high, anxious titter. “Oh, he’s here. My soul mate. I thought he’d never return!” She switched to her own voice. “You can’t marry him, Six, he’s a human being!”

  “How are things?” Ted glanced at Sweeney’s notebook, which was sitting on the desk. “I’m sorry I’ve been distracted. I’m here now, ready to focus. This is what’s important. Everything else will sort itself out.” He seemed to be assuring himself more than her.

  “Are you sure?” Sweeney said. “You’re headlining every online news site.”

  “My lawyer’s onto it.”

  “How did the new allegation come about, exactly?”

  Sweeney listened as Ted explained, his eyes lowered to the cat in his lap, a big hand stroking the creature. It had finally settled, but its purring was loud and deep, like the hum of an old air conditioner. Amanda was leaning on the desk, watching her partner. Sweeney noted a new kind of warmth in her face, perhaps an affection for him, a sorrow at Ted’s obvious pain. But just as Sweeney noticed the look, it seemed to have disappeared. A flash of rare connection.

  “I spoke with the lawyer this morning,” Ted continued. “I’m sure when we get in touch with Elise Springfield she’s going to put all of this to rest. But she’s refusing all media requests at the moment. I haven’t looked at the Innocent Ted website. Are they saying anything about it?”

  “There’s an emergency podcast out tomorrow, I think,” Pip said.

  “Right.”

  “Have the police called you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “If you get arrested in the middle of our case, Ted, you still have to make my cake.” Amanda pointed an accusatory finger at her partner.

  “Her cake?” Sweeney looked to Ted.

  “We made an agreement that whoever solves the next case wins a cake,” Ted said. “The loser has to make it. When I say we ‘made an agreement,’ of course, Amanda came up with the idea and I wasn’t really listening and suddenly it was a done deal, which is how most things work around here.”

  “This guy—” Amanda flopped a hand in Ted’s direction. “He makes out like it was all me, but he had quite an elaborate cake in mind and he had it straightaway, as soon as I asked, like he’d thought of it before. I was happy with a no-bake Mars Bar slice but he wants a black forest gateau.”

  “With hand-tempered chocolate shavings.” Ted scratched his wife-cat behind the ears.

  “Hand-tempered.” Amanda leaned over the table, fixed Sweeney with a glare. “Chocolate shavings.”

  “Getting back to the very serious accusations against your good name…” Sweeney said.

  “I don’t know anything about the accusations,” Ted sighed. “All I have is a clip played during my interview that talked of me having a ‘predatory relationship’ with Elise Springfield when I was eighteen and she was eight. I don’t know what that means. I don’t know if Melissa is talking to the police. I…” He threw up his hands. “Maybe we should just focus on the case before us and let my life sort itself out.”

  “Whatever you like.” Sweeney shifted uncomfortably, opened her notebook and spread the papers before her. She extracted a forensic report. “Here are the autopsy reports for Keema and Andrew. I’ve got the print and DNA analysis of the scene. In my opinion, there are three key elements to the crime scene itself that we should note. The safe was wiped clean after it was emptied. The gun was most likely a Browning Hi-Power nine millimeter.”

  “How do we know that?”

  “I’ve used our local ballistics guy from Cairns, but he’s referred to an expert from Macquarie down in Sydney,” Sweeney said. “A real gun nut. He reckons he can tell the type of weapon not only from marks scored into the bullet as it was fired through the barrel of the gun but also from tool marks made on the casing as the bullet was slotted into the chamber. These days they seem to be able to tell which gun a bullet came from even if you never fired it.”

  “People are so clever,” Amanda mused. “What do we know about Browning Hi-Power nine millimeters?”

  “They’re easy to obtain,” Ted said. “They’re a common law-enforcement gun. So some cops, correctional officers, security guards have them. They became the standard handgun of the Australian army in 1935 and haven’t relinquished the position since. They’ll be one of the easiest pieces to get hold of on the street. All someone with a standard-issue weapon has to do is go to their boss and tell them they need to replace a part of the weapon, and get a friend to do the same a few weeks later. Pretty soon they’ve assembled a totally new weapon from ordered parts, which they then sell on the street.”

  “Great,” Amanda sighed. “Nothing special, then. Nothing memorable.”

  “Aside from the weapon, we know that the victims were ordered to lie facedown next to each other with their hands on the back of their heads, fingers interlocked,” Sweeney said.

  “That’s no amateur,” Ted said.

  “No. The fingers interlocked—that’s experience speaking.” Sweeney nodded.

  “So you put the safe robbery, the gun, and the directions given to the victims and what do you get?” Amanda said.

  “Someone with forensic knowledge,” Ted said. “Enough forensic knowledge to think, even in the heat of the moment, of wiping the safe clean of DNA traces and prints. The same someone in possession of a knockabout, commonly used police and security gun. And someone with enough training to know how to subdue people calmly and efficiently, to place them in a position that would make it difficult for them to move around, to plan their escape.”

  “I hate to say it, but this sounds like a police officer,” Sweeney said.

  “Or a security guard,” Amanda offered. She was doodling a curly mustache on the autopsy photograph of Andrew Bell. “Ex-military. The army, navy, or air force. Reservists, also.”

  “What else does the scene analysis tell us?” Ted wondered aloud, watching Amanda’s doodles with an expression of quiet horror. “Do we have footprints?”

  “We have the bloody set. That’s a standard Blundstone work boot, newish, men’s size ten,” Sweeney said.

  “Oh good,” Amanda said. “So every man in Australia’s got a pair.”

  “I’ve got two,” Ted said.

  “What size are you?” Amanda squinted at her partner. He rolled his eyes.

  “We can’t tell if he came in the back door, but he definitely went out the back door after the murder. There are a lot of other footprints,” Sweeney pressed on. “The chefs and the bartenders would all traipse back and forth out the rear door on smoke breaks. The earth is quite moist out there. Black soil. It was the bartender’s duty to do the floors before they left for the night. Very last job on the closing checklist, according to the owner. Evidence suggests they were just about to do it.”

  She explained the dirt on the webbing between Andrew’s fingers and what Dr. Gratteur had said about it, picking up the autopsy report. Ted leaned in close, followed her finger across the page.

  “Something’s not right,” Ted said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.” He smoothed his cat-wife’s head. “I can’t quite get a picture of the assailant in my mind.”

  “His behavior doesn’t make sense,” Amanda said, putting her feet up on the desk. “The killer is cool, calm, and collected enough to take over the joint and subdue two fully grown human beings. But on the way in he’s unprepared and clumsy enough to alert Andrew, standing out the back of the bar, to his intentions, causing him to run back into the building, to slip and dirty his hands on the way. So which is it? Is the killer a fully prepared assassin, or is he a d
umbass who almost messed the whole thing up?”

  Sweeney made some notes in her notebook. Then it struck her, suddenly, that neither Ted nor Amanda were taking notes. The thought hit her like a punch in the stomach. Ted had been a drug-squad detective when he was arrested. In fact, were he still in the force, he’d likely have outranked her. She was sitting next to someone who had far more experience in the job than she did, and then of course there was Amanda, who had a kind of experience of criminality she would never be able to obtain—the perspective of the perpetrator, the killer accused, tried, and incarcerated. There was neither experience nor worldliness on Sweeney’s side. Intimidation picked at her, so that she almost shrunk in her seat, watching uneasily as Ted and Amanda bounced ideas back and forth.

  “Two assailants?” Amanda wondered.

  “Could be. Everything is not as it seems here,” Ted said. “I feel like there’s something right in front of us that we’re not seeing. We’ve got to find that gun. There’s something about it being such a cheap and boring gun that’s bothering me.”

  “How so?” Amanda asked.

  “I’m just speculating,” Ted said. “But if this whole idea started out as a robbery—was always meant to be a robbery but ended up as an execution—then why get yourself such a throwaway gun? You’re not going to throw it away. From the kind of experience this person is demonstrating, it’s like they’ve robbed before and they’re going to rob again. Why not get yourself a proper gun?”

  “Something reliable,” Sweeney caught on, straightened in her seat. “Something big and showy that’s going to scare your victims.”

  “Maybe it was a one-time-only thing,” Amanda sighed. “And they couldn’t have been bothered spending big bucks on a proper gun.”

  “A one-time-only, go-out-with-a-bang robbery of twelve hundred bucks?” Ted asked.

  “Maybe they expected there to be more in the safe,” Sweeney chipped in.

  “Based on what?” Ted said. “You’ve seen the Barking Frog. Place looks like it’s on its last legs. If it was a one-time robbery, it was a gross overestimation.”

  “We need a new perspective,” Amanda said, leaning over, trying to turn her head upside down while still sitting in her chair, like an owl. She disappeared under the desk. “Find the gun. Find the answers.”

  “Well, of course, I’m already on that,” Sweeney said. “I’ve had teams of men going up and down the sides of the road looking for it. And another team dredging the river on either side of the nearest bridge.”

  “Ooh, treasure hunt.” Amanda perked up. “We could help.”

  “You’re not going to just wander in and find anything they haven’t already found, Amanda,” Sweeney said.

  “It would be terribly annoying for everyone if I did.” A smile spread over Amanda’s face. “Almost sounds like a challenge.”

  “You’re due to meet the owner there anyway, right?” Ted said.

  “Yeah.” Sweeney glanced at her watch.

  “Good.” Ted got out of his seat. “Let’s go back there and get a new perspective.”

  * * *

  I was so distracted by the thought of Dale Bingley at my house that I completely zoned out for most of the ride to the bar. I’d given Pip Sweeney a lift so she could give her patrol car to another officer who wanted to run out to Cairns hospital and have a look at the bodies again. She sat in the passenger seat asking me questions about Amanda, looking at me in that quiet, quizzical way, like she was trying to read sins written on my face. I knew she still hadn’t decided if she could trust me, whether I was the hidden monster the entire world had made me out to be. Every time she interacted with me, Pip Sweeney was crossing a new line with herself. She’d spoken to me. She’d agreed to work with me. She’d got into a car with me. That was how it had been for everyone in my life since my accusation. My own ex-wife had been unsure whether hugging me was something she was prepared to do.

  I’d helped Dale Bingley up onto the couch on the porch and left him sleeping there, unsure of what else I could possibly do with him. There’d been no chance of sleep after that. I’d cleaned the kitchen, though it was spotless, as always. Prison had left me with a strange affection for housework, for scrubbing and wiping and dusting. If you’ve read your weekly ration of books, there’s not much to do in your cell in remand but clean, arrange, and rearrange your few precious items.

  As I’d prepared to leave the house at half past nine, Dale had still been asleep. I’d stared helplessly at him for a bit, listened to him snore, but that didn’t solve anything. I couldn’t decide whether it was more inappropriate for me to tell him to go away or to allow him to stay. When I tried to predict what might happen when he heard about my new accusation, if he hadn’t already, there were far too many equally likely possibilities. He might disappear, leaving all my possessions intact and closing the front door quietly behind him. He might burn my house down and kill all my birds.

  Alerting Amanda to the situation outside her office hadn’t gained me any useful advice, either.

  “A sleepover!” she’d cried. “Can I come?”

  I realized Sweeney had asked me a question, and I’d been watching the walls of green rainforest on either side of the road sail toward us, flashing by the windows, trying to figure out why Dale Bingley had come to my house. He’d said it was because of the envelope, the evidence Amanda had collected about Claire’s attacker. Was he here to confront me because he didn’t believe it? Or did he believe me, and want my help pursuing it? Which was worse?

  “Do you think it made her the way she is?” Sweeney asked.

  “What, sorry?”

  “Amanda.” She seemed a little frustrated. “Her crime.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve just had a terrible morning.” I rubbed my weary eyes, straightened in the driver’s seat. “Can’t sleep. I haven’t been listening to you.”

  “I wondered whether you thought Amanda’s crime formed much of her personality.” Sweeney’s tone softened. “She’s so … cheerful.”

  “Yes.” I laughed. “A murderous little forest fairy.”

  “Is it a deflection thing, do you think?” Sweeney persisted. “The cheerfulness. Her … inability to show grief. Is it an act? Does she refuse to have any complex emotions because they’ll drag her down into those memories again?”

  “I’m not a psychologist,” I said. “But if I had to guess, I just don’t think Amanda has very complex emotions. I mean, I’ve seen her less than chipper. I’ve seen her angry. She does feel things, just not very often. Or, not in public. I think there’s a whole lot that goes on with her that we never really get to see.”

  “Maybe she has Asperger’s,” Sweeney said.

  “Everybody thinks everybody’s got Asperger’s these days. It’s very fashionable.”

  “Well, it would explain her inability to read other people’s feelings,” Sweeney reasoned. “She carries on like the whole world’s full of daisies in front of the victim’s family.” She told me about Amanda dropping a bombshell about Andrew’s cheating ways in the middle of the meeting with his loved ones.

  “I don’t think it’s useful to diagnose her with anything.” I shrugged. “Maybe she has Asperger’s. Maybe she’s a sociopath. Maybe she’s just chocko-bananas.”

  “Chocko-bananas?”

  “One of her terms.” I smiled. “She rubs off on you after a while. Point is, she solves a mean crime. And that’s really all that counts for me.”

  “I’m just interested to know if she’s genuine or if it’s an act. How can you be around someone day in and day out without knowing if they’re lying to you?”

  “I don’t think it’s an act,” I said. “Amanda is genuinely amused by her own antics. She thinks she’s hilarious. Ask her—she’ll tell you. Most of the time I think she’s just going around entertaining herself.”

  “But how can we tell what kind of person she is if she doesn’t show us anything?”

  “What does it matter what kind of person she is?” I
frowned.

  “Well, she killed someone. That’s got to do something to you.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Make you a bad person.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “Just because you’ve killed someone, doesn’t mean you’re bad.”

  “If it’s in self-defense, I guess.”

  “Or not.”

  “You think?” She shifted closer.

  “Sure.” My dark thoughts were pulling at me again. Worry about my house. My geese. I was only half focusing. Talking as the thoughts popped into my mind. “People kill. Normal people. I don’t think it makes you evil, if you do it. There are plenty of reasons why people do it. I think I know some fairly generous killers.”

  She fell silent. We rolled over a wooden bridge lined with police officers on either side, divers in the brown water, their hooded heads bobbing just a few meters out from the shore. The search teams had cleared the section beneath the bridge and set up nets twenty meters out on either side to protect the divers from crocs, but I was relieved to spot two men on the bridge with rifles just in case, their eyes fixed on the divers, jaws set with tension. There were more men up ahead sweeping the sides of the road with metal detectors. As I watched, Amanda careered out of the rainforest on her bike, startling two of them as she swerved onto the side of the road. She knew all the shortcuts through the forest and fields of cane, often beating me to destinations as though by teleportation. She was like that, slightly supernatural, able to appear seemingly by will exactly where she needed to be, her senses heightened, aware on another plane of people’s thoughts and intentions unspoken. She might have annoyed me with all of her deeply unfair extraordinary abilities if I didn’t like her so much. If I wasn’t so grateful to her. She’d appeared in my life when I arrived in Crimson Lake, exactly when and where I needed her, exactly who I needed, like she’d already known I was coming.

  “Does Amanda annoy you?” I asked Sweeney.

  “Oh no,” Sweeney said without hesitation. I was surprised. “She’s…”