Trust Me When I Lie

by Benjamin Stevenson

They were talking for the recording with simple words that had simple meanings. But even the calm, poker-faced Winter poured subtext through his words. Understated meaning that could be used later. In court, if it came to that. Both of them aware of how important minor details could become—how with television documentaries and podcasts wielding microscopic focus on the tiniest discrepancy, anything could become a linchpin of a case. So that was how they talked: each on their guard, having two conversations at once, only one verbal.

  “Do you want a coffee?” Winter asked.

  Subtext: I am treating the interviewee with respect.

  “Do I need one?”

  Subtext: How long will I be here?

  “Depends.” Winter returned to the beginning. “Where were you yesterday, from dawn until around midday?”

  Subtext: Did you kill Alexis White?

  “I had a preparation meeting with my publicist ahead of my interview with Vanessa Raynor that evening. The meeting with the publicist started at ten, finished around lunchtime. Before that I was alone, at home.”

  “That’s not much of an alibi.”

  “I’m not much of a suspect.”

  “You made one of the most watched shows of the year.” Winter hadn’t written anything yet, but his pen was poised, waiting for something. “But now Curtis is out, and your story has come to an end. Maybe you need a new one. Maybe you made one yourself.”

  “That’s thin.”

  “As ice. I have to ask. Rule you out.” He was playing it by the book, ticking all the boxes.

  “I don’t need to kill someone to manufacture a story. I have the profile to make anything I want to make. You’ve got nothing if you’re trying to verify an alibi from dawn. Every single person will say they were at home in bed and that’ll hold up. What was the time of death?”

  “I’m interviewing you, remember, Mr. Quick.”

  “Would you like me to politely leave?”

  “It’s in the papers, I suppose.” Winter put the lid back on his pen. “Yes. We are actively interested in the period just before dawn. Let’s say 5:00, 5:30-ish. And I’m telling you that so you can tell me if you heard from her around that time.” Winter rolled the joints in his neck. “I know what you’re doing. I know why you were in her house. We don’t need some renegade civilian chasing after this one, Jack. You’re here to tell us anything useful and then leave it to us.”

  This is pointless, thought Jack. Winter clearly didn’t subscribe to the give-a-little, get-a-little ethos of television (or, more accurately, give-a-little, get-a-lot). He could find more out from McCarthy later. “Finish your questions then,” Jack said.

  “You knew the victim?” The cap came off Winter’s pen again.

  “Which one?”

  “There’s only one victim.”

  “I knew Alexis, yes. But there’s two victims here. Is Curtis Wade not a suspect?”

  Jack felt very hot in the neck, his mouth dry. He wasn’t nervous at the questions. He was angry. The police were only doing a half job. They were treating the murders separately.

  “I’m not commenting further on the investigation.”

  “Listen, I want Alexis’s killer found too. I am actually trying to help you here.” He was getting carried away, but he didn’t care, letting emotion get in his answers.

  “I can’t say you’ve been very helpful so far, Mr. Quick.”

  “I’m trying now, for fuck’s sake,” Jack snapped.

  Winter blinked, unflustered by Jack’s sudden rise in volume, steady gray eyes fixed on him.

  “Who cuts off fingers? If Curtis killed Eliza Dacey, then you need to look into him. You can’t treat these cases in isolation.”

  “Curtis Wade was proven innocent in a court of law for the murder of Eliza Dacey. That case is unsolved. And you endorsed that, championed it even. We have no motive to accuse him of a new murder, based on the similarities to a murder that, legally, he did not commit. It’s called double jeopardy, Mr. Quick.”

  Winter was calm, even, but Jack had a sudden creeping feeling he’d walked straight into something.

  Winter let the bomb drop. “Are you now saying you have evidence to think otherwise?”

  Fuck, thought Jack. Winter must have already interviewed Ted, who would have tried to implicate Jack or suggest he knew more than he was letting on. He could see it in Winter’s eyes, a twitch of his cheek, a hint of ecstasy. Jack should have realized. Winter drip-feeding him ammunition, coddling him with titbits of information, which suggested he might be as leaky a tap as Ian. But it wasn’t ammunition at all; it was false security. Jack’s show had gone to great effort to make the cops look corrupt. Every cop was compromised.

  Winter was looking for a reason to sweat Jack. Humiliate him. Better still—though he didn’t yet know he had the means to do it—send him for a stay in Long Bay himself. That wasn’t his play though. His intention was to try to force Jack away from the case, rather than draw him into it, even as a suspect.

  “I put my evidence on-screen,” said Jack. “That’s all there was. Evidence that was independently assessed ahead of the retrial.” The same lies he’d used on Vanessa Raynor’s show. But this time not just lies: felonies.

  “I want to know what you think though. Personally.”

  “My opinion was expressed in the final show.”

  Winter sniffed. Jack’s head ached, his nose pulsing. No more to be won today.

  Winter asked some more background questions. Jack gave him the details of their meeting in the inner west, the last time he saw her briefly at Long Bay, and what he knew about her personal life. Very little, it seemed. After he’d finished telling Winter that Alexis had left the bar to meet with a new boyfriend—or casual fling, he wasn’t sure—Winter tapped the back of his pen. Seemed interested.

  “Called her, you say?”

  “Twice. I didn’t see exactly, but that was the implication. Phone buzzed twice anyway. Could have been two different callers, I suppose.”

  Winter wrote something down at last.

  “Okay,” said Winter, “now let’s talk about the breaking and entering.”

  “It was just an enter, actually. The door was open.”

  “Fine, call it trespassing.”

  “Trespassing involves private property. The owner is dead, so…” Jack shrugged.

  “Trespassing involves you being an interfering little shit and being somewhere you’re not supposed to be.”

  Jack tapped his phone, dormant in his pocket. “Did you record that?”

  “I don’t care. I’m not charging you.” Jack must have looked surprised. “Not because you haven’t done anything wrong, but because I don’t need any more media around this thing. I walk you out of here in cuffs and my days will disappear to press conferences, petitions, more bottom-feeders like you. I don’t need it. But I also don’t need you around this investigation. I don’t want to see you, at all, unless I ask for you. If I see a single camera, I’ll find a way to charge you with obstruction. You are not a police officer. Let us do our job.”

  “I’m here to help.”

  “I look at you sitting here, and I’m horrified that you genuinely don’t know what you’re doing wrong. Look around this place.” That whispering rustle as Jack was guided into the interview room. The sprawl of desks—corkboards and photos of Alexis pinned up. Her name on everyone’s lips. “You want me to look into Curtis Wade because you regret your part in getting him free? And, yeah, maybe he did kill her, but you’re the one who butchered any chance we had at lining up the similarities. You’re telling me you want to help? You’re the one who’s handed him everything he needs to deny it. You’ve helped enough.”

  Winter leaned over and pressed a button on the table. Recording off. Considered his words, lowered his voice. Those gray eyes were now steel.

  “You made Andrew Freema
n out to be a villain, and you made the rest of the Hunter cops look like headless chickens. You fuck with one of us, you fuck with all of us. I see you snooping again, I charge you. Got that? Now”—he pointed at the door—“I think you have a busy day of fucking off to take care of.”

  State of play? Jack tapped out a text message as he walked into the sunshine of Kings Cross. The smell hit first, the bright day encouraging the concrete to sweat out last night’s deposits. Wafts of kebabs, cigarettes. Piss. A jackhammer rattled his teeth. It seemed there was almost constant construction work in this part of town. Every day, new apartments, bars, gyms. Spires of cranes reached into the sky. Sydney gorged itself on construction. Always rebuilding itself, knocking itself down.

  His father sat behind the wheel of a VW Golf across the street, jutting out of a loading zone. Jack felt his stomach roll. Not hunger. That was a sense he knew all too well. This was different—unease. Because something Winter had said spooked him. There was a buzz in his pocket, a reply from McCarthy.

  Not supposed to talk to you. Instructions from the top. Curtis not a primary suspect. Sydney guys interviewed him already. Not forgotten, but nothing to move on. Innocent, remember? Copycat killer preferred theory. Or…

  A car horn rippled through him. He’d had his head down while crossing the road. He looked up, copped a middle finger at a passing window, and hustled across. Pulling open the door to his father’s VW, he looked back down at his phone, but that was the end of the message. An ellipsis showed McCarthy was still typing.

  “How’d it go?” Peter asked.

  “As expected,” he said.

  Or? he typed.

  He could picture McCarthy at his desk, pecking at the letters with a single finger. McCarthy wasn’t great with technology. He’d never even heard of podcasts, and, luckily, he didn’t watch TV. Having leaked most of the case details to Jack, that was probably a blessing. On television, Jack had edited McCarthy to look like a classically incompetent small-town cop. The comic relief: letting criminals slip under his nose while he sipped tar-black coffee out of a polystyrene cup, boots crossed on the desk in front of him. Thank God McCarthy didn’t own a television, Jack thought. Otherwise he’d be pissed, and Jack would lose his only source.

  Peter pulled away from the curb. Jack’s phone buzzed.

  Original killer.

  A brief pause. A second text.

  Delete these texts.

  Shit. Jack closed his eyes and let his head loll back on his neck. Shit.

  Alexis’s murder couldn’t be tied to Curtis, because the only evidence the police seemed to have was circumstantial. Mainly, the matching MO to Eliza’s death. But Curtis couldn’t be linked to that—he’d been tried and acquitted. Double jeopardy, like Winter had said. In order to tie Curtis to the MO of the new murder, they needed new evidence to tie him to the first. That would enable them to try the second murder with precedent. Fresh and compelling new evidence, Jack believed was the legal speak.

  Jack was the only one with any potential physical evidence. Just like Winter had said, Jack might not only have allowed Curtis to kill again, but he might have primed him to get away with it too.

  Before, even when Curtis was walking free across the Long Bay parking lot, Jack had always fallen back on the fact that maybe Curtis was innocent. He’d hung his hat on reasonable doubt. On his flour-dusted musings in his kitchen. But now Alexis was dead, and he had the only piece of evidence that could place Eliza at the vineyard. That could show precedent and MO and bring Curtis back into the picture on Alexis’s murder. Not reasonable doubt anymore. Reasonable suspicion.

  But bringing that knowledge forward would mean admitting to tampering with the case. Obstruction, Winter had threatened. Accessory even, in the hands of a particularly cavalier prosecution. Even a vague confession would lead to warrants, searching of footage. They might find nothing. They might find everything. He would have to find another way.

  But he was locked out of the Alexis investigation. He’d burned every cop from here to Byron, McCarthy was off-limits, and Winter was out for blood too. But there was no way Winter could solve the case if they weren’t looking into Curtis Wade.

  Jack was the only one who knew everything about the Dacey case, top to bottom. More than every lawyer and every detective on the case. Who better to tie the two together?

  “Can you drop me home?” he said, noticing his father about to exit the freeway.

  “I thought you could stay until you felt better?” Peter said but flicked the indicator off and prepared to remerge. His words like Winter’s. Subtext: You’re on the precipice of a relapse here; you shouldn’t be on your own.

  “I have to go away for a few days.”

  Peter nodded. They both knew where he was going. Back to Birravale. To open up old wounds once more.

  There was only one way to clear that black mass in his gut, the one that couldn’t be thrown up. That fear. That guilt. That grief for himself, Alexis would have said. Because as long as her murder remained unsolved, she would weigh heavy within him. She would follow him just as Eliza had, and one ghost was enough for Jack.

  He’d spent his whole adult life lying to others: to his father, to himself, to his own body. Enough.

  If he was going to find out what happened to Alexis, he was going to have to find out what really happened to Eliza Dacey.

  The truth, this time.

  Chapter 11

  The suspension rather than the road signs told him he was getting close. It had been lightly raining the whole drive, clouds settled in low over the road. Jack had stayed an extra night at his father’s, so was doing the drive in daylight this time. The canyon-spanning bridges soared over rolling treetops, the light wind rippling them together, puffs of mist spiraling out of the rolls of green fire. Since the freeway turnoff, potholes had cropped up with more regularity. The seats shook, the road thinned, and the white lines disappeared. This was a road where you pulled over to let another car pass. Where a cyclist rode in the dirt or copped a Get-the-Fuck-Off-the-Road. The cracked blacktop sloped away from the center, eroding into the dust at the edges. A long, fat snake of a road, bulbous at its middle, digesting a meal.

  As he passed into Birravale proper, Jack stopped at the single set of traffic lights. There was only one road through this part of town. He’d used footage from here in his show: locals, with jeans rolled up to their knees and red-stained shoes, mops and squeegees and strong bristled brushes in their hands, pushing the miniature flood to the drains. Scrubbing the road. All out together, lining the road with bent backs like a prison chain gang.

  Another image surfaced in his memory—a steel table with a yellow L-shaped ruler on it. Next to that, an ax. The ax head was a dull chrome, the handle long and wooden. The handle was stained a deep maroon at the head, the color crawling up the shaft, until tapering off about halfway. It was a powerful image: Curtis’s ax, varnished in red. But the stain was wine, not blood. Nevertheless, seeing as they hadn’t been able to match her finger wounds to any weapon at all, the prosecution clung to this image. With its own nonverbal power. That red-handled ax the very definition of red-handed—and it was guilty of something, all right. Of tearing through Andrew Freeman’s storage tanks, of soaking the main street in wine. But of playing a part in Eliza’s murder? Never proven.

  On Jack’s left, he passed “Australia’s Best Pies” splashed across a two-by-four plank hanging from the awning of the bakery’s veranda. That was the fourth such sign he’d seen on the two-and-a-half-hour drive. Inside, there’d probably be a third-place ribbon from over a decade ago: Best Vanilla Slice, Hunter Valley Showgrounds 2004. Country bakeries gave him a run for his money in the honesty stakes.

  He drove past a sign for a bed-and-breakfast. He’d prefer the motel on the other side of town. He drove past a pub, the dilapidated cinema, then past another pub—named the Royal Stag, of course. It was curious that th
ere were two pubs in this tiny town, though perhaps the wine drinkers needed a break every now and then, lips and teeth pink, searching for a cold one at the end of a day.

  The wineries were where the real money was. There was a small constellation of them, most within a fifteen-minute drive down back roads from the center of town. The Wades’, then the Freemans’ would pop up on the right at the edge of the town. Jack was now driving slightly uphill. The road climbed until the Freeman place, up at the top of the hill, cut into the side of the hilltop like a millionaire’s tree house, before dropping over the crest and winding downward. Over the crest, the corners could only be taken at forty. In the wet, fifteen. A confident driver could get down the other side in thirty minutes. Some drivers, unlucky ones, had found ways to get down it faster. Crosses and flowers periodically dotted sections of mended fence.

  Jack drove past single-story, flaking-paint, weatherboarded houses, rusting cars and rusted dogs scattered on front lawns, hoses curled on steps like dead snakes. Wheelie bins with yellow lids lined the curb. The Brokenback Range sat on the horizon, the mountains hulking guardians, the lushness of their canopy looking soft, like fur, from a distance.

  The motel owner was standing in his garden, waving a hose back and forth over the garden, disregarding the general moistness in the air. He idly watched Jack’s car pull into the lot, ceased waving the hose, the stream of water puddling in the low end of the garden and trickling over the curb. Jack parked in front of a random room. No competition here. There was only one other car in the lot, a corroded white Holden utility vehicle. Salt’s victim.

  He got out of the car and stretched. The owner put the hose down and retreated into the office. Jack could see him through the window, taking up residence behind the desk, ready for a booking. He reached out to the wall, flicked a switch. The sign above the driveway flickered from Vacancy to No Vacancy. Jack looked around the empty lot and sighed, got back in his car. Another lap of the single street ahead.

  The pub was empty but full too, rooms booked by shadows. Though the owner at least had the decency to tell him to fuck off.