Blood Sisters

by Caroline de Costa

  Marcie had paid Maria Angela so that Dorrie could stay with her in her house. Maria Angela had always had a soft spot for Dorrie ever since the day they’d crossed the bridge together, so she was happy to have Dorrie in her home until her time came. Marcie had to borrow money from Jack to pay Maria Angela, and more money when Dorrie needed a caesarean birth and had to stay in the hospital for two weeks. Then, when Maria Angela saw Little Ronny, the day he was born, she said straight away that she would look after him, but she’d need money to do it.

  There was no work for Dorrie in Maria Angela’s village. She would need to earn money in Angeles, enough money to keep herself and pay Maria Angela, and there was only one way Marcie knew for a 15-year-old school dropout to do that.

  4

  Cairns

  Wednesday 22nd August 2013

  From Mooroobool, Cass and Drew took Marcie to the hospital mortuary to see if she could identify the body of the young woman. Laurie, who assisted the pathologist, Dr Leah Rookwood, opened the heavy steel door that led to the shelves where the bodies were kept.

  ‘She’s your cousin? ’Laurie asked gently.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry you have to do this. We just need you to look at her for long enough to be sure it’s really her. Have you seen a dead person before?’

  ‘Many times.’

  ‘Again, I’m so sorry. You’ll find she looks very pale now. And if you touch her, she’ll feel cold. But otherwise she looks like she did before she died.’

  He wheeled in a trolley and unzipped the body bag to show the woman’s face and upper body.

  Marcie wept loudly, holding the face of the dead woman between her hands. After a few moments Cass said gently: ‘Marcie, we need you to confirm who this person is. Is this your cousin, Dorentina Lavides, born 3 April 1995?’

  ‘Yes. Oh, oh my Dorrie! Ano ang ginagawa mo rito? Ano na ngayon ang dapat nating gawin?’ She leaned forward and kissed the dead woman’s face.

  ‘Are there any identifying marks, any scars or anything you can show us that confirms to you that she is your cousin?’ asked Laurie.

  Marcie picked up Dorrie’s left arm. Cass could see that it was crooked.

  ‘Her broken arm,’ said Marcie. ‘Broken in Malaysia. She went to the hospital, but they didn’t fix it right. So then she got the tattoo.’ She pointed to the inside of Dorrie’s arm. ‘See here. Ronny. That’s her baby.’

  Cass reached out a hand to squeeze Marcie’s shoulder, and Laurie said: ‘Later on the funeral people will make her look really good, like how you’ll want to remember her, you and all your family.’

  Marcie took a tissue from her bag and wiped her eyes. She looked up at Laurie.

  ‘No family,’ she said. ‘Not anymore.’

  5

  South Luzon, the Philippines

  1994–2004

  Marcie was six when her father came back from Libya the first time. Nanay had put her in her very best dress and they walked to the bus station to wait for him.

  Tatay had bought lots of presents for the whole family with the money he’d saved.

  Marcie’s present was a Cabbage Patch doll with yellow hair and a white horse to ride on. She called her Ellie. He’d also brought her three new dresses, but Tatay didn’t know how much she’d grown by then and they were all too small for her. Her father also brought a Play Station which at first Marcie thought was for her but then Tatay sat down and began playing with it. Neighbours and relatives came in to watch. Nobody in their barangay had ever seen anything like it.

  There was a party that lasted all night and all the next day; Marcie always remembered tasting halo-halo made with pink ice cream for the very first time.

  Tatay said that they could live in a bigger house now; and the very next week they moved up the hill to a house that had a fence around the garden, an inside toilet with a plastic seat and a kitchen with water that came out of a tap.

  Nanay was very happy the whole time of Tatay’s visit. The house was always full of relatives and friends eating everything she cooked, and drinking brandy and palm wine. There were dozens of people at every meal.

  After three weeks Tatay had to go back to work, still in the oilfields but this time to a better job. Nanay cried a lot after he was gone.

  Eight months later Aimee was born. She slept in a crib in Nanay’s room, in the new house.

  Marcie was nine when her father came back again, but this time it was different. He was in a wheelchair and both his legs had been cut off above his knees. A wall he’d been working on had collapsed on top of him.

  Nanay told Marcie and Aimee that they would have to move back to the old house. Aimee didn’t understand this; she was just three and she had never seen the old house. Nanay said the oil company had paid for Tatay to come home and also for the wheelchair but Tatay had to pay the money back. And it would be hard for Tatay to work now. Marcie could see this, and she could also see how sad Tatay was. To stop himself being sad he would drink palm wine every day.

  To make money Tatay began to raise fighting cocks and take them to sabong fights. Sometimes in the village cockpit, sometimes just in the fields. At first the roosters he raised were no different from the one scratching around in their yard. They didn’t much want to fight. But at least each time a cock lost a fight he could be put in the cooking pot, her mother said.

  Then Tatay began to feed up the birds with scraps of meat and cooked rice. Huh, her mother said, you Filipino men treat those birds better than you treat your women. As the chicks grew strong he encouraged Marcie and Aimee to provoke them. He wanted his birds to be winners. Marcie and Aimee would stand up on the fence around the birds’ pen, and fly down, waving their arms like wings as they jumped, shouting: Eeee-yo! Labananlabanan! Para manalo!!!! Fight, fight, you silly old rooster! Fight to win!

  Tatay studied the art of fitting the spike, the tare, to the cock’s left heel. He wanted it at just the right angle so it gave the fullest impact in the fight with the smallest amount of movement of the bird’s leg. Properly aimed, the spike tore into the head, eyes or flesh of the opponent in the first minutes of the fight. Fighting cocks mostly had a short lifespan, one or two fights. But Tatay had birds who would win and win, surviving five or six fights before being turned into adobo stew.

  Nanay had to go with Tatay to the fights, to help him carry the birds in their cages, which was difficult for a man in a wheelchair. Also, to bring him home before he had spent all his winnings on drink. There were arguments between them that Marcie overheard.

  Marcie was ten when her mother got sick. She was vomiting every morning. She made a trip into the town, but when she came back, she was worse not better. Then she began to bleed a lot. Marcie didn’t really understand where she was bleeding from but all the women from the barangay came and gathered around her bed. A while later she was taken to the hospital. Marcie was taken to see her, but Nanay was lying very still in the bed and couldn’t speak.

  That was the last time Marcie saw her mother.

  Later she was told that her mother had been expecting a baby but had somehow lost it. Marcie didn’t understand how her mother could lose a baby. She had always been very careful of Aimee when she was a baby.

  After Nanay died, Marcie had to stop going to school, so she could look after Tatay and Aimee. And she had to take her father to the cock fights. These were mostly illegal fights during the week in a secluded spot outside the village. They had to be careful the police didn’t turn up.

  Marcie loved the fights; she loved the tremendous noise and argument before the fight began—it was more exciting than the fight itself which was often over in a couple of minutes. In no time she became expert at the betting system. A finger pointed upwards meant tens of pesos. Pointed horizontally, it meant hundreds. And pointed downwards it meant thousands, big money. She could remember in her head every bet on their birds made with the kristo, the bookie.

  Marcie also became very good at training the birds. After each f
ight their birds won, she would wash and bandage their wounds, then nurse them back to fight again, often singing to them. Their very best bird, Ferdy, won thirteen fights before having his throat savagely torn open. Marcie cried for days; she had loved Ferdy. She and Tatay had believed he would always be lucky. They both could still believe in Lady Luck even after Nanay had died.

  Marcie learnt from the birds how to look after herself. In a fight she used her feet to kick where it hurt the most, learning to defend herself and her little sister from the taunts of other kids in the barangay, taunts about her father who had no legs. Kids soon learnt to stay clear of her when she was angry.

  But the cockfights were always followed by the drinking, whether Tatay’s rooster won or not, and Marcie couldn’t fight her father. He could win a lot of money, but he could spend a whole lot more. Marcie understood why her parents had argued so much when her mother was alive. She learnt to keep back money for food and Aimee’s schooling.

  One night when Marcie was fourteen, she left Tatay drinking after a fight and went home with Aimee. Early next morning, she realised her father had not come back. Anxious, she ran towards the house where she had left him. On the way, she had to pass a neighbour’s flooded rice field, and there, beside the path, she saw the wheels of Tatay’s wheelchair sticking up out of the water. He’d been trapped underneath when he’d toppled into the water and drowned beneath the chair.

  Two weeks later, Aimee disappeared. It seemed she had been taken away early one morning on her way to school. No one in the barangay had seen anything, and Marcie didn’t know she was gone until her sister didn’t return home from school that afternoon. Marcie knew then that Lady Luck had really turned against her, that she had malas —bad fortune. Much too much bad fortune for one young person.

  The people in the barangay thought that Aimee must have been kidnapped and taken to Angeles. There were thousands of child prostitutes on the streets of Angeles, they said. The person who took Aimee could make a lot of money with a virgin as young as Aimee, they told Marcie.

  By then, Marcie was nearly fifteen. She sold everything she could to pay for her bus journey to Angeles, including the Play Station, the frilly dresses Tatay had brought for her which only Aimee had been able to wear, and Ellie, her Cabbage Patch doll. Arriving in the city, she trailed from one bar to another, asking everyone she saw. She found a lot of girls of Aimee’s age, but not Aimee. People laughed at her, and many men offered her money. After four weeks, Marcie’s funds ran out. She realised that she’d have to stay in Angeles and work. But up until the day Dorrie arrived to join her, she spent an hour of every day searching for her sister.

  6

  Cairns

  Wednesday 22nd August 2013

  Cass helped a sobbing Marcie out of the mortuary door and into the car.

  ‘We’ll take you back home now,’ Cass said. ‘But we’ll need a statement from you at the police station. We should do that this afternoon. We can send a car to get you that doesn’t have a police sign on it, if you like.’

  Marcie nodded. ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Would you like an interpreter?’ asked Cass.

  Marcie shook her head. Remembering the man in the blue Toyota, Cass understood this—Marcie had no wish for other people to know her private business in a town the size of Cairns. They dropped her at the corner of her street: marked police cars were not warmly regarded in this part of Mooroobool.

  On the way back to Sheridan Street, Cass said to Drew: ‘Just fill me in on the basics about Rita.’

  ‘Yeah, there are definitely parallels to Dorentina here. Rita was 22 when she died. A sex worker living in a unit in Mooroobool, not all that far from Marcie’s place.’

  Cass nodded. She knew the territory.

  ‘She came from Manila and had been working in Sydney before she came to Cairns. We could check what kind of visa she was on. She’d had a husband and small child in Manila but the husband had walked out on her. It looks as if Rita was attracted to Australia because she thought she could make a lot of money in a short time to set herself up back home.’

  ‘So, what brought her to Cairns?’ Cass asked.

  ‘Good question,’ answered Drew. ‘That was never clear. It was a bit odd, because she’d been working in a brothel in Sydney that on the face of it paid quite well and took care of its girls. And she seemed to have worked alone here. There was no evidence of a syndicate running her. There were problems with syndicates here, though, around 2010. Taskforce members came up from Brisbane to sort it out. But those problems involved Japanese women, not Filipina.

  ‘She advertised and found guys the same way everyone does: by putting her mobile number into the paper. Seems like she did well. The old lady who lived across the way told us there were around eight blokes a day and that Rita worked late every night. The Brisbane homicide boys were laughing at her—the old biddy has nothing better to do than peer out her curtains.’

  ‘But that old lady didn’t see who did it?’ Cass asked.

  ‘Unfortunately, the old biddy was away looking after her grandkids in Innisfail that night. It was only two days later, when grandma returned home, that she realised something might be wrong.’

  ‘The old lady found her?’

  ‘No—fortunately not. She called police headquarters because her neighbours told her Rita hadn’t been seen for a while. They sent a squad car.

  ‘There was no evidence of forced entry,’ Drew continued, ‘so it seemed Rita knew her killer and let him in, then took him to the bedroom, where he killed her. She was naked when she was found on the bed, which fitted that theory. There were eight guys whose numbers were found in her phone. They all agreed they’d been with her that day, and were interviewed, but none of them could be linked to her killing. There were eight condoms in Rita’s rubbish bin and the DNA from them matched the eight guys. There was no ninth condom, so it was not known whether the killer had sex with her first or not. I can tell you there was a lot of blood in that bedroom too, but it was all Rita’s.

  ‘Police found Rita’s mobile in a drawer in the bedroom with lots of missed calls on it, all from potential clients. There were also hundreds of numbers in the call log of men who’d availed themselves of her services over the previous six months, in both Cairns and Sydney. The Embassy—the Philippines Embassy—got involved, too, demanding the killer be found. There’d been a couple of bad incidents that year, in Malaysia and Saudi Arabia, of other Filipina women being murdered, so the Embassy was keen to restore their national image. That’s why Brisbane was called in to help from the beginning.’

  ‘Troy was closely involved in the case, wasn’t he?’ Cass asked.

  ‘Yeah, and he did great work,’ Drew said, ‘tracking down the guys whose numbers were in Rita’s call log. Not all of them were happy to receive a call from him, I can tell you!’

  After weeks of tedious crosschecking of alibis, fingerprints and phone records, mostly by Troy, the team had been able to eliminate 77 potential suspects. They hadn’t found anyone among the remainder who seemed likely to have done it. There were around 50 unidentified samples of DNA, mostly from hair and semen, stored in Brisbane awaiting some moment of breakthrough in the case. The samples had been there now for four years.

  ‘So I’ll get out the files that we have here,’ Drew finished up as he turned into the station, ‘and you can take your time going through them. The boss’d be really happy if you solved the case, I can tell you!’

  Cass laughed. ‘We’ll see.’

  At Sheridan Street she walked into the foyer and spoke to Di at Reception.

  ‘Can you send an unmarked car with a woman PC to pick up this woman in Mooroobool at three o’clock,’ she asked, handing Di a note with Marcie’s address on it. ‘And tell whoever it is to be nice to her, she’ll be distressed. She’s the cousin of that woman who died in the motel last night.’

  ‘Sure,’ Di said.

  Cass took the stairs back to her office, four floors, it was something she
made herself do whenever she could. As she climbed, she was thinking about Marcie in the back of the police car. Alone. Young. Frightened. Even though she had done nothing wrong.

  7

  Cairns

  Wednesday 22nd August 2013

  At three o’clock Marcie appeared at Reception in Sheridan Street. Cass went downstairs to collect her. It was clear the young woman had been crying for much of the time since they’d dropped her off in Mooroobool.

  ‘Have you had any lunch?’ Cass inquired. Marcie looked at Cass doubtfully. She’d had no lunch but why would the police lady care about that? She decided to say yes.

  ‘All right, then, we’ll go upstairs,’ Cass said, and took Marcie into the lift and up to an interview room on the first floor.

  ‘Would you like some tea?’ asked Cass, when she’d sat Marcie down. ‘Or coffee?’

  Marcie decided that though she really would like coffee the answer to this one must be no. She shook her head.

  ‘Well,’ said Cass, hoping there would be better communication soon, ‘I’m going to record what you tell me and type it out so you can read it, then you can sign it if you agree that what I’ve written is an accurate record of your statement.’ Marcie didn’t want to say then that she couldn’t read English, only speak it. She should have said yes to the interpreter. But who might the interpreter be? Who might the police know who spoke Tagalog? Who else might that interpreter know here? Cairns was a small place, not that she had seen much of it. If Dorrie was here she could read for her. But, of course, Dorrie was dead and that’s why Marcie was here now.

  ‘So, your name is Marcellina Lavides?’ Cass began. Marcie nodded.