They followed, keeping their distance.
Without so much as a glance at each other, they came again. I watched the hatchet swing before me, threw myself backward into the shelves. She swung too hard. Before Kazz could swing upward again, I lunged at her, going for that injured collarbone, punching the hammer forward like a sword. I hit paydirt. She screamed but didn’t back off, using her weight to shove me into the shelves. Something sharp pierced my back, not deep. I twisted away, lifted the hammer and brought it down hard. The two claws embedded themselves in the soft meat of her shoulder.
She didn’t have the strength to draw breath, to scream again in pain. While she was stunned, I grabbed for the hand that held the hatchet but missed. The hatchet blade swished past me and thunked into Gammy’s upper arm as she tried to join the fray, slicing right through her jacket into bone. Gammy’s howl made my eardrums throb.
The hatchet fell, Kazz letting go of it in horror. I grabbed it and threw it away, used the distraction to make a break for my gun. Gammy was sitting on the floor, clutching her upper arm, blood running in dark rivulets from between her fingers. She was stunned, out of the fight. Kazz was crawling after me, her white shirt quickly becoming red where I’d stabbed her with the hammer, her teeth bared. I grabbed my gun and rolled, lying on my back, pointing the barrel at her. She stopped her advance in an instant. Her face tightened, grimaced with the realization of her defeat. I smiled and couldn’t resist telling the older woman what she plainly already knew.
“I never lose,” I said.
Chapter 50
WHITT CRASHED. Like a plane slowly pointing downward, sailing toward the ground, rushing faster and faster as gravity pulled him. He let Vada drive him to the dingy motel by the side of the highway that had been commandeered as a base of operations. She guided him between the groups of officers waiting there, just barely getting him through the door before he saw the bed and fell onto it, landing just short of the pillow, his arms and legs limp before they hit the coverlet. In the hours he slept, he recalled snippets of movement. Vada taking off his shoes, turning off the lights, plugging his phone into the charger.
As he struggled to wake, Whitt seemed to recall Vada doing some other things, too. Things he couldn’t understand. He’d thought she was setting an alarm on his phone, but she seemed to handle the phone for a long time, swiping and selecting things. Had he heard the sound of her unzipping his bag? His belongings shifting about? Whitt was sure there was an explanation for these things. She’d cared for him like a girlfriend, a wife. When he opened his eyes, she was there at the bedside, a chilled bottle of water on the nightstand, which she took and placed in his hand.
“Oh, Jesus.” Whitt put a hand to his head, followed the line of searing pain from his forehead to the back of his skull. “Jesus.”
“You can’t pray your way out of this hangover,” Vada said. “Drink the water.”
He sipped, felt his stomach lurch. He wondered if he could make it into the bathroom before he was sick. That would be his rock bottom, surely, throwing up on the carpet of a motel room in front of his new partner.
Vada was freshly dressed, her red hair pulled taut into a high, neat bun.
Her eyes were sympathetic under her bangs, an understanding smile playing on her lips.
“I have a problem,” Whitt said. He struggled to find the words that had been so available to him last time he said them, sitting in a gathering in a dusty Scouts hall, part of a circle of seated men. He tried to drink the water again and failed. “I’m an addict. I was recovering, but I…I lost control. I let Regan go, and it’s because of me that…that…”
Whitt squeezed his eyes shut, pinched the bridge of his nose. He wasn’t going to cry in front of this woman. That would be a level even deeper than throwing up in front of her. Punching a cop in front of her. Passing out drunk in front of her. Whitt wondered how deep the layers went, when he would bottom out. He needed to pull out of the case before he went much lower.
“I knew there was something wrong before we left Sydney,” Vada said. “It’s not as obvious as you think. You hold yourself well.”
Whitt burned with shame, his face in his hands.
“I smoothed over the fight on the bridge,” Vada said. “Those Boyraville cops don’t want us to support the young driver’s claim that he was assaulted. That’s if he makes a claim at all. When I put you in the car, I went back and it seemed like the boy just got caught up in a love triangle he never knew he was a part of.”
Whitt nodded, trying to breathe through the sickness.
“What are you on?” she asked.
“Dexedrine,” he admitted.
“Wow.”
“What?”
“They use Dexedrine to treat patients with narcolepsy,” she said. “Too much of it and you’ll give yourself a heart attack.”
“That wasn’t my main concern at the time,” Whitt said. “I just needed to bounce back. I needed something to keep me going.”
Whitt reached reflexively for his heart. His chest felt tight, but that might have been from sleeping on his front, something he never did. “I’ll bin the rest of them.”
“Don’t,” Vada said. He frowned at her. “You shouldn’t go off them too quickly, not if you’ve been popping them like candies. Give them to me, and I’ll dole them out to you.”
“It’s okay. They can give me something to come down on in rehab.”
“You can’t go to rehab,” Vada said. She seemed about to say more, but her words failed. She sat on the bed beside him, slid the tie out of her hair and ran a hand through it, sighing as she shook out the burnt-orange curls.
“You can’t go. I want you here,” she said.
Whitt was surprised by one of her hands in his, the other on his chest. How had he missed this? All the time he had been focusing too hard on trying to stay even, trying to get through the minutes and hours on the chase for Regan, he’d never noticed her watching him, wanting him. He couldn’t remember even a hint of it, a smile held too long or a conversation wandering into intimate territory. But then, she was moving toward him now, and the sudden awakening of a furious hunger in him made it hard to breathe. Vada was in his arms, and her lips were against his, and he was pulling her and turning her and stripping her clothes off without a spare thought for any of the horror of the night just beyond their door.
More easily than it seemed possible, she was all that mattered.
Chapter 51
I THOUGHT ABOUT shooting Kazz and Gammy in the legs, just to teach them a lesson about robbing people. Just a single bullet each in the calf, not a deadly serious injury, just a little reminder for the rest of their miserable lives that crime doesn’t, or at least shouldn’t, pay. I stood holding my gun, considering my options.
I bound both women with the duct tape and wrapped Gammy’s badly bleeding arm with some cloth I found in a tub on the bench. Kazz’s wounds weren’t so bad—I’d punctured her in the right side of the chest, but no deeper than a couple of centimeters. It was the broken collarbone that had her seething. I dug into Gammy’s pockets and retrieved my money, then stuffed my papers back into my backpack.
“I’ve decided I’m not going to hurt you further,” I told them. “But you might consider making an honest living before the next no-hoper you try to scam puts you in the ground. Gammy, you’re probably just smart enough to sort plastic cutlery in a factory. Kazz, they’re always looking for people to put the bolt in the cows’ brains at the abattoir. I think you’d enjoy that.”
“We know who you are.” Gammy tried to sound tough, but she was holding back tears. “We’ll find you!”
I went into the pockets of Kazz’s jacket and found a set of keys.
“This is your bike, huh?” I jangled the keys in her face.
“Fuck you,” she snarled.
I leaned in close so she could feel my breath on her face. “When I get where I’m going,” I told her, “I’m going to torch it.”
Kazz screamed a str
eam of abuse at me, the colorful language of old-school bikie chicks. I left the women there and walked out of the shed.
I found the bikes, a couple of ancient Harleys meticulously restored and gleaming, parked behind the bar. Kazz’s had a big, flaming K airbrushed into the fuel tank. I wheeled the bike around to the side of the shed and threw my leg over it, revved it a few times so that the women would hear, before I rode out into the fading light.
Chapter 52
CHIEF TREVOR MORRIS entered the small house with his hat in his hand, the way he had done many times in his career, bringing news of a loved one’s death to frightened, wide-eyed relatives. But the elderly woman who walked ahead of him now had already heard that news many years ago. He imagined that night, the patrol officers who had come into the neat dining room and sat at the table with the Howeses, the way they’d tried to avoid looking into the eyes of the couple in case they should accidentally, somehow, worsen their experience. Death notifications were, in a strange way, ceremonial. There was a script. A right and a wrong way to hold one’s facial expression. Pops was sure that none of it helped.
Only Diane, Rachel’s mother, was here tonight. She’d told Pops on the phone that Rachel’s father couldn’t handle talking about their daughter’s murder by Regan Banks more than fifteen years earlier. He had gone out for the evening while Pops visited. Pops hadn’t been assigned the case at the time, but he’d seen pictures of what Regan had done to the pretty veterinarian in the clinic on that awful night. He put a notebook on the dining-room table and refused coffee. Diane Howes was a picture of her daughter at an age she would never reach. Elegant, slender, the strong hands and short nails of a woman accustomed to wrangling animals. Pops spied a pair of enormous Great Dane hounds staring at him through the windows to the patio, taking quiet but intense interest in his presence.
“I know you’ve already been interviewed by police as recently as a week ago about Regan,” Pops said gently, finally allowing his eyes to rest on Diane’s. “But I’ll just make sure by asking what I’m sure you’ve been asked—Regan has made no contact with you, has he? You’ve received no strange calls or visits?”
“No, nothing,” Diane Howes said. “Honestly, Regan Banks has been responsible for so much horror, I’m sure he doesn’t even remember Rachel or the effect he’s had on our lives. I saw her picture in the newspaper the other day. A single photograph as big as a stamp in a collection of others, distinguished only by being his first victim.”
She glanced at a folded newspaper at the end of the table. Pops wrung his hands in his lap.
“Regan was seventeen at the time.” Pops tried to take refuge in his notebook. “You got to see him in court.”
“He was a ratty-looking child.” Diane nodded. “Lean, lanky. Hollow-cheeked. He’d been out that night stalking around the neighborhood, trying to get into trouble. Rachel shouldn’t have been working so late, but they’d had a particularly difficult surgery that day. A young dog that had been hit by a car. She would often stay late with the very sick ones.”
“Was there ever any suggestion, as far as you’re aware, that Regan might have had company that night?” Pops felt the muscles beneath his eyes twitch as he braced for an answer he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear. “The reason I ask is that I’ve come into some information that might explain the connection between Regan and Samuel Jacob Blue.”
“The Georges River Killer,” Diane said. “Or so they say.”
“Yes.”
“It’s his sister who’s missing now, isn’t it?” Diane looked at the newspaper again. “They think Regan’s after her. Or that she might be after him.”
“That’s her,” Pops admitted.
“I don’t believe anyone but Regan was responsible for my daughter’s death,” Diane Howes said. “I looked into that boy’s face, and he stared right back at me, and I could almost see in his eyes what he had done to my child. As a mother, you can feel these things, and I felt a cold wave of emptiness coming off that boy that could cut you right to the bone.”
Pops nodded.
“In court they played a recording of a phone call,” Diane said. “It was made at the same time that Rachel was being attacked, some streets away. The anonymous caller contacted Crime Stoppers and posed as someone who was watching the break-in at the clinic happening, but of course that wasn’t possible from such a distance. So it was someone who had seen Regan go into the clinic, but someone who hadn’t hung around to see what occurred. Police theorized it was a young woman who’d perhaps driven by and stopped at the phone box and then continued on her way.”
“I see.” Pops nodded as he wrote.
“But when I heard the call, I thought that the voice wasn’t a woman, but a boy.” Diane squinted as she remembered. “The voice was high. Young. I thought he sounded uncertain. Almost guilty.”
“Guilty because he’d helped with the break-in?”
“Maybe,” Diane said. “But I’ve always felt it sounded more like he was dobbing in a friend. I don’t know how to describe it. He almost sounded disappointed.”
Pops pursed his lips. It made sense. Regan had told Harry that Sam had been responsible for his going to prison. An anonymous call to police during the attack on Rachel Howes would have made Regan a sitting duck.
“Did Regan ever say anything to you at all during the trial?” Pops asked.
“Oh, no.” Diane spread a hand on the lace tablecloth, stared at it, remembering. “He pleaded guilty. Didn’t offer an explanation or an apology for the sentencing part. Something that’s always confused me was that the prosecution wanted to bring in a report from Regan’s childhood to aid their argument during sentencing, but the judge wouldn’t allow it.”
“The prosecution?” Pops said.
“Yes.” Diane nodded. “Whatever it was, the report would have aided the case against Regan. It spoke of his inherent danger as an individual.”
“There are plenty of reports of him being violent during his childhood years in care,” Pops said.
“And we heard all of those.” Diane said. “But this one was something different. I believe it was about what happened to get Regan into care in the first place.”
Pops felt the hair on the back of his neck rise.
“Did the judge say why he wouldn’t allow the report?”
“No. I don’t think so.” Diane shrugged. “But I remember only a few things from those days, because I was so weighed down by my grief all the time. Walking through fog, you know.”
Pops folded closed his notebook, signaling that Diane could end their meeting then if she would like. He had imposed on her enough, and the heaviness of the grief she spoke of was plain in her face. He expected her to rise from her chair, but instead she spoke.
“I remember the psychologist saying something that ended up being struck from the record,” Diane said. “That always stayed with me. It confirmed an idea that I already had about Regan.”
“What was it?” Pops asked.
“He said Regan gave him the impression of someone who knew how to kill.” Diane lifted her eyes to his. “Because he’d done it more than once.”
Chapter 53
I APPROACHED MELINA’S house from the rear, having walked the motorbike from the end of a narrow alleyway behind the property. I remembered parking at the front of the house years earlier, in what felt like such a carefree time in my life—the hard-nosed cop striding up to the house in the daylight, folders of perp photographs clasped against my chest. The properties here were wide and sprawling, divided by an asphalt lane where kids had left their tricycles and footballs, and a small fort constructed in a bottlebrush tree in the neighbor’s yard. There wasn’t the thick forest cover I’d had behind Bonnie Risdale’s house, so I left the bike by a fence and walked forward on my own, settling by a low stone wall.
The sun was sinking on the horizon. All was still. A strange calm settled over me, as though simply by being here I was protecting Melina from Regan. He wasn’t going to touch her. I
f I had to, I would give my life to make sure of it.
An hour passed. I knelt in the wet grass, a loyal sentry, watching the house. Doubt drifted through my mind, a haze that descended and rose unpredictably. I didn’t know for sure that Melina was Regan’s next target. I didn’t know where he was leading me, or when he would decide it was time for us to face each other. Was he planning to torture me until he became bored, or was there some special date he was waiting for, a day selected in his sick diary on which he would mark our union? Our first date. The first steps after our journey of getting to know each other. When was that day? There were so many important moments in Regan’s life he might choose. The day he killed Rachel Howes. His first day in prison. The day he met Sam. The day Sam died.
I had perused Regan’s file and knew none of those dates were soon. It was only weeks since my brother had been laid to rest. I brought my knees up to my chest and stared at Melina’s house and tried to think.
I could see down the left side of the building from my vantage point, right to the empty front yard and the street beyond. But the right side of the house was a mystery to me.
So I had no warning when, from that direction, he appeared.
Chapter 54
POPS PERCHED ON the edge of the pool table and looked at the whiteboard before him. Deputy Commissioner Woods had commandeered his office and banished the chief from the bullpen where the Robbery, Homicide, and Sex Crimes divisions were based. He had entered paperwork for Pops’s suspension, but the old man hadn’t bothered to hang around to wait for it to be issued to him. His new center of operations had been easy to find. He’d spent many years here on the first floor of the command building in a small, dingy room off the car park. The night patrol’s rec room.
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