‘Give me the rundown on this case, Whitt,’ I said. ‘Where are we headed?’
‘To the very edge of nowhere.’
‘We were just there.’ I jerked my thumb towards the highway behind us, the tiny town in the middle of a sandy abyss.
‘Oh no, there’s plenty more oblivion to come. Right now we’re on the edge of the Great Victorian Desert. It’s as big as California, and largely uninhabited. Bandya Uranium Mine is smack bang in the middle of it. It’ll be another five hours of this.’ He gestured to the bare landscape.
‘Five hours? Christ Almighty.’ I slumped back in my seat.
‘We’re on the hunt for one Daniel Stanton, twenty-one years old.’
I opened the file and found a photograph of a tanned young man with blond, shaggy hair. A big infectious smile. In the picture, he had his arm slung around the neck of a black Labrador.
‘Cute. What did he do?’
‘He died.’
‘Well, that was a poor choice,’ I sighed.
‘His divisional manager at Bandya reported Stanton missing about eleven days ago,’ Whitt said. ‘It wasn’t a huge deal at first. Guys go missing from the mine all the time, so he tells me.’
‘They do?’
‘Well, I mean, they usually turn up. These mines are so isolated that they’re operated by workers who fly in from cities all over the country. They work three weeks, then they fly out again and get a week off back in their home town. The young guys sign up to do it because the money is incredible.’
‘How incredible?’
‘Are you sure you want to know?’
‘I’ll ask the questions here, Detective Whittacker.’
‘Entry-level positions at this mine are about three times our salary as detectives,’ he said.
I couldn’t reply. I just stared at my new partner, my mouth hanging open.
‘Yeah,’ he laughed.
‘So why the hell do they go missing?’
‘Well, there’s a reason the money is so great. The work is hard, dangerous, and for three weeks of the month they’re stuck in the middle of the desert away from their families. They’re young and impatient, most of them. When they get tired of it, they just go on leave and never come back. Or they drop their tools, hitch a ride back into town and go home. It breaks down even the toughest guys after a while, apparently.’
‘So what happened to Danny Stanton? Did he just walk off the job?’
‘Well, if he did, he went the wrong way entirely.’ Whitt glanced at me. ‘Straight out into the desert.’
‘FLIP FORWARD A couple of photographs,’ Whitt said. I shuffled through and found a forensics lab shot of a decomposing foot.
‘Oh, hello,’ I said, holding the picture close to my face in the dim light of the car. ‘Never leave home without both feet, Whitt. You won’t get far.’
‘The foot was actually found on the camp,’ he said. ‘Three days after Danny went missing, a couple of miners found a dingo inside the fences dragging a steel-capped boot around, trying to get at what was inside. The camp is plagued by dingoes scavenging for food scraps, so it didn’t raise any alarms at first. Inside the boot, the guys found the foot, and the foot is Danny’s. Was Danny’s. Whatever.’
I squinted at the picture. The foot had been severed at the ankle joint. The photograph was good enough quality that I could see shredded bits of white material stuck to the hairy skin at the ragged incision. His sock.
‘Forensics in Perth say the foot became disconnected from Danny’s body post-mortem, by animal predation.’
‘So the kid was already dead by the time the dingoes started to pick him to pieces.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Well, I can’t see a dingo carrying a boot very far,’ I said. ‘The body must have been within boot-carrying distance of the camp, right?’
‘Wrong,’ Whitt said. ‘That’s the interesting part. They haven’t found the body yet. The mine operators and police in Perth sent out aerial and ground search teams for two days. Nothing. No trace.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
Whitt shrugged.
‘Don’t shrug at me, Whitt. I want answers.’
‘I don’t have any answers for you,’ he said. ‘I haven’t even reached the camp yet.’
I sat back and looked at the photograph of Danny’s foot. Why would the kid walk out into the desert if he wanted to go AWOL? Why wouldn’t he just get a ride back into town? If he’d walked out into the desert on his own and got lost, maybe died from dehydration trying to find his way back, why wasn’t the foot covered in blisters from the sweat running down his ankle into the boot?
I stared at the foot until I fell asleep with my head against the window. The sun was setting, warm on the backs of my eyelids. The Chief had been right. Suddenly, blissfully, my mind was full, even if it was only that one darkness in my life had been replaced by another.
STORIES AT THE SPEED OF LIFE
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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by BookShots
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