Blood Feud (Little Town)

by JD Nixon

  “Don’t thank me for anything. I’m really pissed off with you.”

  “I’m really pissed off with you.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Picked a fight with my boyfriend.”

  He snorted. “That wasn’t a fight. That was merely a disagreement. It was over in a blink.”

  “A disagreement with fists.”

  “It happens,” he shrugged. “Emotions were running high.”

  “Brainless testosterone was running high, you mean. I suppose you think it makes you look macho.”

  “No. I’m ashamed of myself actually. It’s not the way I prefer to settle differences of opinion.”

  “Well, I can’t stay pissed off with you if you’re going to be all reasonable like that.”

  “I, on the other hand, will never stop being pissed off at you for what you did last night. I’ve been given this thankless task of trying to keep you safe, and you pull a stunt like that. It was incredibly stupid and dangerous, not to mention you went off on your own when I distinctly remember telling you . . .”

  He carried on in the same vein for another couple of minutes, but I switched off.

  “I could have caught him if you hadn’t stopped me. I know I could have,” I said when he took a breath and pulled into the station carpark.

  He sighed in frustration. “Did you listen to anything I just said?”

  “No.”

  “Damn it, Tess,” he said under his breath. He turned off the engine and we sat in the car in silence. He faced me. “Look, I understand how much you want to recapture Red Bycraft, and how important it is to you. But it’s important to me to keep you safe and alive, no matter that you don’t seem to care much about that yourself sometimes.”

  I experienced an unusual sensation of defiant misery as I stared at him.

  “You could help me by at least not actively seeking out trouble.”

  “I’m not actively seeking it. Things just happen sometimes.”

  “All the time,” he muttered as opened his door. He abandoned me to go for his own breakfast and shower.

  I fired up my computer, and spent a while writing up a report about Phoebe and adding an addendum to my report on Young Kenny. I rang the Greville detectives and tried to persuade Gil that there was a link between the graffiti in Miss G’s bedroom and the experiences of Young Kenny and Phoebe.

  He tutted with a patronising chuckle. “Oh, that town of yours. Full of eccentrics.”

  “This guy’s not an eccentric. He’s dangerous – probably a murderer.”

  He laughed indulgently. “What an imagination you have, Tessie. You just leave the investigation to us and concentrate on doing what you do so well – looking pretty.”

  Ugh! He probably thought that was a compliment.

  “Have you at least logged what I’ve told you?”

  “Typing it into the system as we speak.” I couldn’t hear any keyboard tapping at his end. “Now don’t you worry your pretty little head about it any further. We’ll look into it.”

  When we finished speaking, I slammed the receiver down in frustration. “Numbnut!”

  The counter bell rang. An elderly man I didn’t know too well waited patiently. He lived in one of the town’s furthest outlying properties and wasn’t a sociable man by nature. I was on nodding acquaintance with him, and Dad, who knew everybody well, had barely held a half-dozen conversations with him his entire life.

  “Mr Krysztofiak,” I greeted, wondering what could be important enough to have brought him into town and into the station.

  “Officer Tess,” he acknowledged in a slow, gravelly voice that didn’t sound as if he used it very often. He approached the counter, a grimace of pain creasing his face as he moved. He was paler than the last time I’d seen him, and appeared thinner, older, and infinitely more tired.

  “Are you okay? Why don’t you take a seat on the bench and we can chat there instead of making you stand at the counter.”

  Gratefully, he lowered himself down onto the bench with evident pain.

  “Do you want a glass of water or a cup of tea?” I asked, joining him on the bench.

  “No, no. Don’t go to any trouble. I’ve been in hospital for the last fortnight having an operation and I just arrived home today. I’m a little sore still. I should be in bed resting, but I really needed to talk to you.”

  “You could have rung and we would have been happy to come to your place,” I scolded mildly.

  “I didn’t want to make a fuss over something that might be nothing.”

  “Well, why don’t I hear you out, and then we’ll decide if it’s something or not?”

  “It’s my great-nephew, Dylan. Dylan Krysztofiak. He’s twenty-two. He’s been living with me for about six months now.”

  “I didn’t know you had a relative living with you.” I didn’t know he had a relative.

  “He doesn’t come into town.” He took a deep breath. “Dylan’s a good person, but he has some problems.”

  “Problems?”

  “Yes. He’s a clinically diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. He was committed to a facility for a while after an . . . episode. But fortunately, the doctors were able to diagnose him and find the right antipsychotic medication for him. So he was released back into the community six months ago, and soon afterwards came to live with me. The family felt it best that he be given a chance in a quiet location to settle and get his life into order.” He stared at me earnestly. “I want you to understand that he’s basically a good person.”

  I nodded and pulled out my notepad, jotting down a few notes.

  “When he’s on his medication, he’s able to live a quiet and useful life helping me around the property. I haven’t had any cause to regret offering him a home. If you met him you would think him socially awkward and shy, but certainly not a dribbling lunatic as some might like to think if they knew of his illness. That’s one of the reasons he’s so shy. Unfortunately, mental illness often comes with a public stigma.”

  He leaned forward with great intentness until a stab of pain made him wince.

  “You have to understand, Officer Tess, that he has an illness. It’s like diabetes or dementia, but his illness is a mental illness, not a physical one. It’s not something he’s brought on himself, or something he can control by himself.”

  “I understand, Mr Krysztofiak.”

  “I didn’t like leaving him alone when I went into hospital, but he assured me he could cope and would remember to take his medication. Lots of diagnosed schizophrenics live independent lives in the community. He’s been conscientious about taking his medication for the entire time he’s lived with me, so there was no reason to think he wouldn’t continue to be so in my absence.”

  I didn’t like where this conversation was heading. “But?”

  “But as I said, I arrived home from hospital only today. The first thing I noticed was that Dylan was nowhere to be found, which was unusual but not unheard of. He’d taken to tramping around the countryside a lot by himself, exploring, always excited when he came home to tell me of a new track he’d discovered. It was a good hobby for him. It kept him busy and healthy. But the second thing I noticed was the cigarette butts everywhere and the stink of cigarette smoke throughout the house.”

  I stopped writing. “Is that significant?”

  “Yes. He stopped smoking when he started his medication. You may not know, but studies have shown that schizophrenics are two or three times more likely to smoke than the average population, and they often smoke quite heavily. So it was definitely a warning sign to me to find the house littered with butts.”

  I scribbled on my pad and looked up again when I’d finished.

  “Of course I then checked his medication. It remains at almost the same level as when I left. And I keep a very close eye on it to make sure he’s taking it.”

  “Almost?”

  “I’d say at a guess he continued to take it for no more than another couple of days after I left and t
hen he stopped.”

  “What would be the consequences of a paranoid schizophrenic going without medication for almost a fortnight?”

  His eyes held a mix of apprehension and sorrow. “Depends, Officer Tess. He might be fine. But if he has a violent psychotic episode, then the consequences could be dire, both for him and for others. The reason he was institutionalised was because he attacked his mother, my niece-in-law. He claimed an angel promised him that if he destroyed his mother, he would be freed from the disturbing hallucinations that tormented him throughout his later teenage years. I shouldn’t just say he claimed it, he actually wrote about it. Over and over. Notepads full of meaningless garbage phrases that made no sense to anyone except him in his delusional state.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said without thinking, clasping a hand to my mouth.

  “What? What is it, Officer Tess? Oh God, has something happened?” His eyes grew huge with anxiety. “Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Please tell me Dylan is safe. He’s a good person, Officer Tess. This illness tortures him. He’s a good person, please believe me.”

  He paled so much I thought he was about to faint. I raced to the kitchenette to fetch him a glass of cold water. He spilled as much as he gulped, his hands trembling so much.

  “Here,” he said, his shaking hands struggling to pull a photo from his pocket. It was a small snap of an unsmiling young man with longish hair and haunted eyes. “This is the latest picture I have of Dylan.”

  The Sarge walked through the front door and stopped, eyeing us off. “Everything all right here?”

  “No,” I said, looking down at the picture. “I think we’ve finally identified our mystery man.”

  Chapter 27

  I left it to the Sarge to bring Mr Krysztofiak up-to-date with happenings in the town since his departure. The elderly man’s grief and regret at the death of Miss G were genuine and heartfelt. He didn’t need to say it, but his feelings of guilt were palpable as he confirmed that the phrases left on the bedroom wall were entirely consistent with the type of things Dylan had written before.

  “It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have left him unsupervised,” he reproached himself, wiping away the tears that pooled in the crepey skin beneath his eyes. I handed him a couple of tissues, almost needing some myself. His honest affection, and now sorrow, for his great-nephew shone through in every word he spoke.

  “Mr Krysztofiak, does Dylan have any bush skills?” asked the Sarge gently.

  “As I told Officer Tess, he’s very fond of tramping around the bush and became quite interested in bush survival skills. He spent a lot of time on the internet researching, and then practising, what he could in the backyard in his spare time.”

  “So he would be able to live rough for a longish period of time?”

  “Yes, I believe so. Of course he won’t be taking care of himself. He’s probably not bathing or eating or sleeping regularly. He has a bit of a thing about his teeth though, so he’ll be trying to keep up his dental hygiene as much as he can.” His frightened eyes beseeched us each in turn. “What’s going to happen to him? You’re not going to hurt him, are you?”

  “No,” soothed the Sarge. “We’re going to report this to the detective team in Big Town for their decision. I won’t lie to you – it’s a difficult scenario. We have to apprehend Dylan for the community’s safety and his own well-being. But he could be anywhere, and there’s a lot of terrain to cover around here. I just don’t know what Superintendent Midden will decide to do.”

  “He can’t go to jail. He wouldn’t cope in jail. It’s not the right place for him, no matter what he’s done. He needs help, not incarceration.”

  “I doubt he’d be sent to jail. I think he’d more likely be found mentally unfit to even stand trial.” Mr Krysztofiak nodded sadly. “He’ll probably end up in mandatory detention at a secure mental health facility where he can get the care he needs.”

  “I failed him,” Mr Krysztofiak sniffed, reaching for another tissue.

  “You couldn’t help it if you had to go to hospital,” I consoled, patting his arm.

  “I should have arranged for someone to stay with him. But to be honest, everyone in the family is now afraid of him. There was no one to ask. I told you earlier that we agreed it would be best for him to come to me, but the truth is nobody else in the family was willing to take him. Not even my nephew and his wife, his own parents. That saddened me. I figured since I’m old and have lived most of my life anyway, why not give the kid a chance. And like I said, I haven’t regretted it. He’s a nice, quiet kid. And as long as he takes his medication, everything’s fine.”

  “What about Community Services?” the Sarge asked. “They might have been able to help.”

  A sound of exasperation burst from his lips. “Sure, if I needed to go to hospital ten years from now they might have had a spare community carer to help me out. Any sooner than that, forget about it. I did try, Sergeant.”

  “Mr Krysztofiak, did Dylan ever mention any favourite places to you? Somewhere he may have established a base for himself?” I asked.

  “He was always fascinated by Mount Big. The size and cragginess of it impressed him. If he’s holed up, it’s probably on the mountain somewhere.”

  The Sarge and I exchanged a glance over the top of his head. Mount Big was exactly that – big. Not to mention difficult, if not impossible, to traverse in many places. It would be a hopeless task trying to comb it for Dylan.

  “Thanks for coming to us today, Mr Krysztofiak,” said the Sarge. “We’ll do everything we can to make sure Dylan receives the help he needs.”

  “The poor kid. He’s a good boy, really,” Mr Krysztofiak repeated sadly, painfully hauling himself to his feet.

  “I’ll drive you home and Senior Constable Fuller will drive your vehicle for you. You’ve had a terrible shock this morning. You shouldn’t be driving,” said the Sarge kindly. We helped him to the patrol car.

  After we’d dropped him off and arranged for a neighbour to pop in regularly to help him out, we headed back to the station. The Sarge rang Big Town, and not able to speak directly to Gil or Nathan, left a detailed message of what we’d discovered. We both agreed that there was no way they could possibly ignore what we were trying to tell them now.

  “Should we issue an alert for Dylan?” I asked. “To warn townsfolk that he’s dangerous and they should stay away from him?”

  “We better wait for the okay from Big Town first. We don’t want jeopardise the investigation by doing something like releasing his name without authorisation. We’re in enough deep shit with the Super as it is.”

  I couldn’t argue with that, so turned instead to writing up my report on what Mr Krysztofiak had told me. I often thought how strange it was that as a frontline cop, I spent so much time on my computer doing paperwork.

  We waited patiently for the rest of the day for some instructions from the Super or Gil and Nathan, but nobody contacted us. Confused, the Sarge rang the dee team and unable once again to speak to them directly, was forced to leave another detailed and urgent message about Dylan. Not sure what we were supposed to do about him, I plucked up my courage and rang the Super. But she was also unavailable, so I left her a brief message.

  “I don’t think they want to know about us,” said the Sarge, shutting down his computer.

  “It’s starting to feel that way,” I agreed.

  “Nice to be popular.”

  I laughed. “Is it? I wouldn’t know.”

  Just as we were about to leave the station, bickering about what to have for dinner, the phone rang. He raised an eyebrow.

  “All right, all right,” I grumbled. “Mount Big Town police station. Senior Constable Fuller speaking.”

  “Hello, Tessie.”

  Red Bycraft.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m up for some partying tonight. Wanna join me? There’s already a party in my pants just thinking about you and me together tonight.”

  “Where
are you?”

  He laughed. “Wouldn’t you like to know, lovely? Let’s just say I’ve hit the big smoke.” A pause. “My, my. There’re lots of luscious girls around here tonight. Young too, just the way I like them.”

  “You’re not in Big Town. Don’t bullshit me.”

  “Why not? You fell for it last time,” he laughed again. I went to hang up. “Here, listen to this.”

  Through the phone I heard the distinctive discordant jangling of the chimes of the old town clock situated in the middle of the main open shopping mall in Big Town. The clock always ran late no matter how many times it was corrected, and its awful and shockingly loud booming harmonies every hour frequently startled takeaway coffee cups out of unsuspecting tourists’ hands.

  There was no replicating that sound. Red Bycraft was definitely in Big Town for a night of hunting.

  “You’re a cold bastard.”

  “Cold? Tell that to the hot rod in my pants.” The clock kept chiming as he spoke so I knew it hadn’t been some kind of recording to trick me.

  “You’re sick.”

  “You have no idea how much. The girl I choose tonight will find out though. She is going to suffer and it’s all your fault. I want you to remember that for the rest of your life, Tessie. It’s your fault what happens to her tonight.”

  “Where are you, you sick bastard?” I shouted into the receiver.

  He laughed, more assured now that I was losing my cool. “Come nightclubbing with me, lovely. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  I hung up on him and rang Jake, violently jabbing his numbers into the phone.

  “I’ve been waiting all day for you to ring me to apologise for –”

  “Jake, ring Red now and ask him where he’ll be tonight. But be casual about it. Don’t let him know I’m the one asking.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “Do it!”

  “I can’t. I don’t know his number.”

  “Do it! He’s going to attack a woman tonight.”

  “I told you, I don’t –”

  I hung up on him and turned to the Sarge. “We have to ring the Super. Red’s in Big Town. He’s going to hit the nightclubs.”