Blood Sunset

by Unknown

  She punched a few digits into a phone, waited a brief moment, then put down the handset and said he wasn’t available before going back to reading whatever it was on her screen.

  ‘Ah, what does that mean?’ I asked. ‘Has he gone home for the day, or is he just away from his desk?’

  She shrugged. ‘Could be in the toilet for all I know. Maybe you could call his mobile.’

  ‘Good idea. Are you able to tell me what the number is or should I speak to someone more senior – your manager perhaps?’

  The woman faced me angrily. ‘I’m getting it for you now, if you can be patient.’

  After a moment she was back on the phone. When she hung up, she spoke without looking at me.

  ‘Take a seat by the window. He’s on his way down.’

  Matthew Briggs arrived shortly after, tall and thin, dark eyes set deeply into a pale face, like a skeleton. A green medical gown hung loosely over his hunched shoulders, as though he’d spent too long bending over bodies. We shook hands but Briggs made no attempt to invite me anywhere else.

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ I said. ‘I just have a few questions about the overdose brought in this morning. Has anyone come by to see the body?’

  ‘Yep, someone made an ID an hour or so ago,’ he said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Some guy in a summer suit. I don’t think it was his father.’

  ‘Then who?’

  Briggs shrugged and looked at his watch.

  ‘I also wanted to ask when there’ll be an autopsy,’ I said, getting to the point.

  ‘I thought that’s what it might be about. I’m used to working with police.’

  He didn’t continue because he didn’t need to. With cops, especially detectives, everything was urgent. Me showing up to put a rush on the post-mortem was about as original as butter on a sandwich.

  ‘The PM’s scheduled for Monday morning,’ Briggs read off a clipboard. ‘The pathologist is Dr Julie Wong. Why?’

  I knew Dr Wong and felt sure she would listen to me. Monday was too long to wait.

  ‘Tell Julie she needs to change the booking to tomorrow morning,’ I said.

  ‘Excuse me?’ Briggs said. ‘Detective, I just explained to you that the body is scheduled for Monday. That’s the best we can do.’

  ‘Well, it’s not good enough. There are things that need to be confirmed before the death is ruled accidental.’

  ‘You don’t need to tell me that. That’s what we do here. And we do it in our own time, in accordance with key performance indicators.’

  ‘Spare me the induction spiel, Briggs. Just tell Julie to trust my judgement and book the boy for a preliminary exam tomorrow morning. If she doesn’t find anything in the prelim, you can do it next month for all I care. Just check it in for tomorrow.’

  ‘You’ve got some nerve, detective. Last night we get three guys brought in from a car crash on the Westgate Freeway. Uni students, heading down the beach for a holiday. For some reason the car flips and, bang, just like that they’re all dead.’

  I’d heard about the accident and knew what was coming.

  ‘The families are having a group funeral on Monday, so we’re putting these guys up front. On top of that, we’ve got a guy who ended up in a fight at a pub last night. He copped one in the jaw, cracked his head open on the pavement. A homicide.’

  I understood the predicament of having to prioritise human bodies, but if what I was now thinking was true, Dallas Boyd deserved immediate attention.

  ‘Listen, there are anomalies with the Boyd case, things that don’t add up,’ I said, handing Briggs the list I’d made earlier. ‘Look!’

  He took the list, studied it and pointed to the last line on the page. ‘What do you mean by this? Leather belt – teeth marks?’

  ‘That’s why I’m here. I need to see the belt, to check if there are any teeth marks on it. You’ve still got it, I presume?’

  Briggs shot me a questioning look. ‘Of course we still have it. Things don’t just go missing around here.’

  ‘Yeah, righto. Can I see it or not?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Let me see it and I’ll explain. What’s the big deal? I don’t need to touch it.’ I realised I was standing over him and stepped back. ‘Look, it can stay in the audit bag. Just let me see it.’

  ‘Only if it stays in the bag.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Come with me.’

  I followed him through a door into a hallway. Long familiar with the layout of the building, I knew he was taking me to a storage room where personal belongings of the deceased were kept, but was glad he left me at the door. I often found it worse to be surrounded by the clothes and personal belongings of dead people than the actual bodies.

  When Briggs came back he closed the door and handed me a clear plastic bag with a thin leather belt inside. It seemed somehow smaller and more innocent than it had around the boy’s arm.

  ‘The belt was used as a tourniquet,’ I explained, turning it in my hands. ‘As you’d know, junkies keep the tension in the belt by pulling it tight with their teeth, so they can use their other arm to inject the syringe. They pretty much have to when they’re alone, but look here.’ I pointed at the surface of the leather. ‘This doesn’t have any teeth marks on it.’

  Briggs nodded, thoughtful, as I gave him back the belt. He was probably wondering why I hadn’t noticed this, along with the missing phone and syringe lid, earlier, or why the incident had been classified by the police as accidental.

  ‘As individual anomalies they mean very little,’ I said, following Briggs out to the foyer. ‘But now I’m putting them all together it starts to look like the kid may not have whacked up in the loading bay.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Briggs said. ‘Coagulation and lividity are consistent with the position he was found in.’

  I lowered my voice as two doctors walked in front of us. ‘I’m not saying he didn’t die in the loading bay. I’m saying he might have injected himself elsewhere. If that’s the case, then we have to ask how he got there.’

  ‘Okay, I see your point, but it doesn’t change the fact that you green-carded this as accidental. You can’t just come in here and change your mind, then expect us to juggle bodies like tables in a restaurant.’

  ‘I realise that,’ I said, ‘but if it turns out someone else may have been involved, we can’t leave it until Monday. I don’t even have a TOD.’

  ‘That I can help you with,’ Briggs said. ‘We had stable temperatures most of last night, so calculations were made on body movement at the scene. I shouldn’t be telling you this, because they’re only estimates, but based on rigor mortis you’re looking at time of death around midnight last night.’

  I nodded my appreciation. All I needed now was the final step.

  ‘Listen, just give Julie Wong this list and tell her I’ll be here tomorrow morning. If she can’t do the preliminary exam, then so be it, but she needs to see this list.’

  Briggs sighed, his face exhausted.

  ‘Just give her the list,’ I said gently. ‘It’s not your decision to make, Matthew. It’s hers.’

  •

  I went back to my car and sat in the driver’s seat with the door open. Heat radiated off the concrete and the bushfire smoke irritated my eyes and throat. The missing syringe lid was one thing, but the absence of a mobile phone and now the confirmation of no teeth marks on the tourniquet smacked of another person’s involvement. What that involvement translated to, I wasn’t sure. There was one thing I was sure of: I’d made a mistake in writing the overdose off so quickly and that needed to be rectified.

  How to achieve it was going to be a problem. What was I going to do, walk into the squad room and tell Eckles I’d fucked up? Admit that the psychologists were right all along, that I shouldn’t have come back so soon. That I wasn’t ready for desk duties, let alone dead bodies.

  I looked around for a tissue to blow my nose but didn’t have any. I was angry with myse
lf, and the heat and the hayfever were only making it worse. I drove to a service station, bought a pack of tissues and a bottle of water. At the counter, I guzzled the water and noticed the front-page headline of the Herald Sun: FREEWAY HORROR. I knew it referred to the accident Briggs had mentioned. It reminded me that Dallas Boyd had died a silent death and I knew that if I kept quiet, no one would ask questions. My reputation would remain intact and the overdose would remain an accident, just like the hundreds of others each year.

  As much as I hated the idea of admitting fault, I wondered whether somebody out there had been counting on Dallas Boyd dying silently, that we would rush the job, write it off as another overdose and simply wipe our hands of it. The very idea of this struck a nerve, because I’d always been alert to such attempts. People tried to trick the police every day and most of the time they failed. Or did they? How many other kids had died an accidental death that wasn’t an accident?

  Being a good investigator meant being in tune with your instincts; instincts that let you know when something wasn’t right. During my rehabilitation I’d allowed those skills to gather dust, to go blunt. Worse still, early this morning I’d allowed a junior officer to cloud my judgement. As I drove out of the service station, I made a decision. It was time to face the smirks of my colleagues, the whispering behind my back and the rumours that I’d lost the touch. And it was time to prove them wrong.

  4

  THE SMALL ROOM LOOKED over the main floor of the YMCA gymnasium, a row of treadmills and exercise machines facing a wall lined with televisions and mirrors. I stood in the doorway watching two men spotting for each other over a bench press. The stronger of the two was pressing eighty kilos. If you counted the bar, it put it up to ninety. There’d been a time when I could max that. Not now. Not yet anyway.

  I closed the door, unbuttoned my shirt, stripped down to my underwear and studied a poster of a male body depicting core muscle groups. Another showed nerve points, ligaments and skeletal structure. I flexed my biceps, and decided I’d need to live in the gym and do nothing else but lift weights if I ever wanted to look like the men in the posters. I put my pants and shirt on a coat hanger and hung it from the door handle. Relaxation music played from a stereo in the corner. The room was warm and humid and filled with the smell of lavender and baby oil. I could hear the faint pounding from the squash courts next door and felt better already, even if I could no longer participate in any of the activities going on around me. Just being here was therapy. That and the massages.

  ‘Early,’ Anthony said as he entered the room. ‘Good form.’

  I shook my older brother’s hand and sat on the padded table.

  ‘Stretched, warmed up?’

  ‘Of course,’ I lied.

  Anthony unzipped his gym bag, removed a towel and a bottle of oil.

  ‘Don’t lie, Rubes. This’ll hurt if you don’t stretch.’ He tossed the towel over. ‘Do some now. Back in a sec.’

  I stood in front of the mirror and rolled my shoulders, neck and arms, then gripped my elbow and held it behind my head, stretching the lateral muscles in my back and my triceps. After a minute I grabbed a handful of fat on my stomach in frustration and tugged at it. Not a big handful. Not a sixpack either. Used to be.

  ‘Worried about the gut, Rubes?’ Anthony said, coming back into the room. ‘Don’t stress too much. You wanna see some of the slobs that come in here with their New Year’s resolutions that last all of two sessions. Mate, I’ve seen better bodies in a scrapyard.’

  ‘How do I get rid of it?’

  ‘You need to sweat it out.’

  ‘Sit-ups?’

  ‘Useless.’

  I stood still while he examined the scar on my shoulder. Anthony was taller than me, thinner, fit as a butcher’s dog. Lighter hair too. The golden boy. Our father’s genes.

  ‘How’s it been? Stiff in the mornings?’

  I smirked and Anthony pushed me playfully. ‘So stiff you could hang a towel off it, right? You know how many times I’ve heard that one?’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Lost count. What about this, a guy comes in the other day with a sprained ankle. I asked how he got it and you know what he says?’

  ‘No, but I assume you’re going to tell me.’

  ‘Smart arse. Maybe now I won’t. How’s your shoulder?’

  ‘Tight. Tell me.’

  He lifted my arm, moved it in an arc and listened with a stethoscope to my ligaments clicking. ‘Still swimming regularly?’

  ‘Three times a week. Tell me about the ankle guy.’

  ‘No weights, I hope. Told you about that, remember?’

  ‘Just the swimming,’ I said. ‘Come on, now I wanna know about this guy.’

  He put the stethoscope down and rolled his own shoulders, like a boxer before a fight. ‘Okay, he was riding his bike along the Esplanade, checking out all the chicks, and bang! He goes over the edge and falls three feet down to the sand, comes off the bike in front of the whole bloody beach and twists his ankle.’

  Anthony was laughing and so was I. I’d once seen a man do the same thing on roller blades, except he went into a palm tree. St Kilda was full of dangers.

  ‘Okay, let’s get going,’ Anthony said. ‘You’re not running yet, are you?’

  ‘That’s why I’ve developed a gut. How long before I can?’

  ‘I said soon. On the bed. I’ll do your back first.’

  I lay on my stomach, closed my eyes while he ran oily hands up and down my back. Good pain, they called it. The hands moved up to my neck.

  ‘Geez, you’re tight as a frog’s arse.’

  ‘That’s what Ella used to say.’

  I heard him chuckle. ‘Been a bit tense lately?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Stressed?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Dangerous job, police. Bad for you.’

  ‘A plumber died in a ditch last week,’ I countered. ‘He didn’t retain it properly and got buried alive. All jobs are dangerous.’

  ‘Not this one. Brace.’

  I closed my eyes as Anthony ran an elbow down my back. I didn’t come here to be lectured.

  ‘How’s the family?’ I asked in between elbows.

  ‘Going away next week, actually. Echuca. Mate’s got a team in the Southern 80. You should come.’

  A ski race on the Murray River. Lots of drinking and fast boats. A couple of deaths every year. Car accidents, boat accidents, all sorts of mishaps and drownings. And he thought my life was dangerous.

  ‘Can’t,’ I said. ‘I’m working.’

  ‘Righto. On your side. Arms relaxed.’

  I rolled over and he kneaded his hands up and down my biceps and triceps. This was the worst part, the most painful.

  ‘Shoulder’s starting to loosen. Might be able to get on some light dumbbells soon. Nothing too heavy. Been to see Mum lately?’

  The question caught me off guard, just as it was meant to.

  ‘Ah, not since Christmas.’

  ‘Since Chrissy?’ Anthony whistled. ‘Been four times this year, I have. It’s only a two-hour drive, mate. It wouldn’t kill you to visit occasionally.’

  ‘I’m going on Sunday,’ I said.

  ‘You should. She misses you.’

  ‘How d’you know that? She can’t even talk.’

  Anthony pushed me back down on the bed, face first. I didn’t resist because I deserved it.

  ‘She’s our mother. Of course she misses you. It’s a stroke, Rubes. Shit, it’s not Alzheimer’s. She knows what’s going on.’

  I said nothing. He was right.

  ‘She was there for you, remember? All of us were. Lot of time waiting in the hospital. It’s not right if you don’t go. Disrespectful.’

  I let my body go limp and welcomed the pain. Mum’s stroke had happened last spring and I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’d visited since. My beautiful mother, the matriarch of our family, reduced to a vegetable.

  ‘Roll
over. On your back.’

  I did as instructed and stared at a framed photo of my brother’s family on a desk in the corner. Son, daughter, wife. Perfect nuclear family. It reminded me of the photo I’d looked at in my lounge earlier in the day. Perfect camping trip.

  ‘Don’t forget Jonathan’s birthday tomorrow,’ Anthony said. ‘Spit roast. DJ in the garage, the works. You’re still coming, I assume?’

  I had the invitation on my fridge, but had forgotten all about it and suddenly hoped I hadn’t double-booked.

  ‘I’ve put in for a night off. Hopefully I’ll be there.’

  ‘Come on, Rubes. He’s turning eighteen, mate.’ Fingers pressed painfully into my left shoulder. ‘Wouldn’t be the same without you. He loves you, you know?’

  ‘I’ll be there, Andy,’ I said, using the name we’d all called him since childhood. It didn’t really match, but he liked it better than Tony.

  ‘Is it all right if I bring Ella?’ I asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  Anthony continued working, unsure how to follow up.

  ‘How’s it all going?’ he asked.

  ‘Okay, I think. I’ll be seeing her tonight as well. Nothing fancy, just a DVD and a few bevvies.’

  ‘Sounds nice.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  We were silent then and I wondered what lay ahead. My separation had affected the entire family and I knew everyone wanted us to rekindle our relationship. It was a difficult topic.

  ‘How’s Chloe – halfway through uni and loving life?’ I said, changing the subject.

  The hand pressure released.

  ‘Yeah, uni starts up again next month. Summer comes to an end, thank Christ. Her social life’s getting out of hand. She goes out to nightclubs and parties and God knows what else. She came home at seven the other morning. Gabrielle nearly had a fit. Can you believe it, seven in the morning?’

  ‘That’s pretty normal, Andy. She’s still a good kid.’

  ‘A good kid, right,’ he repeated, and there was a long silence before he said, ‘Caught up with Dad lately?’

  ‘Jesus, what is this, the Spanish Inquisition?’ I said, pushing his hand away and rolling off the bed. ‘I haven’t seen him since Christmas either. Just over a month ago. You gonna earbash me about that as well?’