by Iain Ryan
“Sophie?” said Harris.
She turned.
Harris grabbed her by the arm and pulled her in close. He wrapped a hand around her jaw, bringing her eyes level with his.
“You feeling suicidal, Sophie?”
“Who, uh—”
“Quit this business with the senator’s kid.”
She struggled. Harris let her go and pushed her back. She landed in the sand and sat there.
“Enough,” he said. “You’ve been warned.” He walked away.
“I know you,” she shouted after him. “You’ll go down with the rest of them, you fucking piece of shit. You’re all going—”
Harris stopped. He looked back.
Sophie swept hair from her face. “You killed my sister,” she said. “And now you’re all going down for it.”
“I never…”
Sophie Marr stood up. Sand rained down off her clothes.
“I’m coming for you, this time,” she said. “Not the other way around. So go tell whoever you’re working for that this is fucking it. It’s over. Go and tell them.”
Harris started back up the beach.
“You can’t run from this,” screamed Sophie.
She was still calling out to him as he started the car. She was running toward him, silently shouting through the glass like a banshee. Harris put the car into reverse and slammed the thing back. The woman had lost it.
He went back to the office and called O’Shea: “This nonsense with the girl, I’m out. Don can look after his own kids.” And for four weeks, that was the end of it.
8
August, 2004
By the end of August, winter was a distant memory. Romano took to drinking in the yard behind her house. She sat with the radio on and stared at the split sky, half blackened void and half smudged pink by lights of The Strip. This was the yin and yang of Tunnel. She spent hours wincing through every echo of the recent past, seizing every detail and anecdote.
Will.
The boyfriend.
All the boyfriends before him.
The lot. All the turds of one type or another. She refused to say they names, even to herself. They went well with the drugs and the drinking. It all went parallel. The perfect match: bad habits and bad people.
Romano filed further back.
She remembered giving up.
And the realisation she’d given up.
And then the reason behind giving up: the Taradale bust, the compound. The victims they found there. The punishments handed out. The violence. The overwhelming horror of it, of the whole fucking job: all the routine policing between Tradable and Tunnel, all the burnt-out hookers and overdosing teens, the vehicular collisions and suicides, the bodies of old men and women found dead, alone. Decaying lives. Stupid actions. Utter waste. All abetted and protected by dickhead cops. All rats gnawing on an arm, the lot of them.
She was worn down. She felt it now.
Each night—bottle after bottle, cigarette after cigarette, one boring station house hangover following the next—Romano listened to herself and it haunted her. The past rang out like a bell and it kept ringing.
It rang until the call:
A near-dawn morning.
Denny’s half-asleep voice on the receiver.
“You’ve got to go up to the Gold Point, they’ve got some sort of emergency.”
She knew immediately.
Romano put down the phone and smiled.
The big distraction.
Here at last.
9
Friday, September 3, 2004
Spring rain thudded hard against the windscreen. Denny put the wipers on and pulled into the Gold Point drive. He was nervous. On the drive over, he’d kept quiet, constantly fastened and unfastened his hands around the wheel. As they moved through The Strip, the Gold Point rose up. It stood between the road and the beach, nestled in a carefully manicured canopy of trees.
Romano had heard the locals call the place The Lighter, due to its gilded gold exterior. It was true. From a distance the Gold Point looked like a tall Zippo sitting in grass.
At its base, the tree-line opened up to a lavish square courtyard, and Denny steered the police cruiser across it to a small service car park. “The staff in here are a real pain in the arse,” he said. “They almost towed me last time.”
Three men stood waiting at the hotel entrance. They each wore crisp black suits and held umbrellas despite the awning overhead.
Romano stepped from the car.
“You three waiting for us?”
They all bore similar features. Jet black hair. A hard jaw. Dark eyes. One was slightly taller than the others. Another smoked a cigarette. Romano noticed his hand was bandaged, the tip of a finger missing.
The taller one spoke first. “We’ll take you up.”
In the lift, Romano asked, “Who found them?”
The taller one answered. “A cleaner.”
“She still here?”
He nodded.
They followed the three of them out the lift and down a long carpeted hallway to a room in the hotel’s beach-side face. “This is one of our deluxe suites,” said one of the shorter ones, unlocking the door with a card attached to his belt.
Romano did not enter immediately. Instead, she waited and listened. She could hear voices inside. At least two males. She took her notebook out, checked the time, and marked it down.
“Okay, your names?” she said to the staff.
“Simon Alo.”
“Charles Alo.”
“Leo,” said the taller one.
“Leo Alo?” said Romano.
“Yes,” he said.
“You all brothers?”
“Cousins,” Leo said.
“You touch anything in here?”
“I’ve had a look, just to make sure, before I called,” said Leo. “Our security notified us.”
“How about you two?”
The other men shook their heads.
“Right,” she said. “I’m gonna get you two to stay out here. Leo, you stay with me. It sounds like you’ve got half the hotel in here. Denny, you stay put. No one comes in behind us, okay? No one.”
Romano stepped inside. Watching her feet, she walked the suite’s hallway, passing a laundry, then a bedroom. An older woman sat on a bed in the second room. She held a glass of water in one hand and a small ball of tissue in the other. The woman was completely still, as if in a daydream.
“This the cleaner?” whispered Romano.
Leo nodded.
“Stay here,” said Romano to the cleaner. “I’ll come back to you in a minute.” She closed the door. At the end of the hallway, the lounge opened up; it was full of people. Romano counted five, all hotel staff by the looks. On the ground, in a clear part of the carpet beside two white couches, were two bodies. Both deceased, blood on their clothes. Romano did not let her eyes linger there for too long. Instead, she took note of the scene around them: two younger women, in neat fitting black pantsuits (cleaners, probably) stood in the kitchen. Across the marble benchtop was an older man, wearing a suit jacket, but not well (security) and standing directly over the bodies were two men in suits (management).
“Okay, everyone stand right where they are,” said Romano.
They all looked at her.
The big man by the bench said, “Constable, I’m—“
“No,” said Romano. She pointed at the men closest to the bodies. “You two first, who are you?”
“Simon Reynolds, I’m the shift manager,” said one.
“Barry Nash, guest services,” said the other.
“Who was in here first?” said Romano.
“Linda,” said one of the women.
“In the bedroom there? Okay, who was next?”
They all looked at each other.
“Me, I guess,” said the big man by the bench. “Carl Yates. I do security.”
“You stay there for me, Carl. Everyone else, I want you to carefully go out into the hall
way outside this room and give your details to Constable Denny out there. Watch your feet. I don’t want anyone to touch anything, or drag anything out of here, right? Okay, let’s go. Come on, out.”
One by one, they walked. The two managers seem to tip-toe around the bodies, as if suddenly realising their presence might interfere with things.
“Denny?” shouted Romano.
“Yeah,” he called back.
“Names, contacts, and full descriptions of how they got in here, when, why, the lot. Write it down.”
“Yeah, okay,” he said.
“Write it down,” she repeated.
“Okay.”
“And get someone to tell you who checked into this room as well. Names, contact details, the lot.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“I can tell you that,” said Carl Yates.
“In a minute,” she said.
Romano took a moment to grid the space out in her mind. She checked the carpet between herself and the bodies. It looked clear enough, so she approached. Both of them were on their backs, both were white, a man and a woman, both young. The man had some sort of puncture wound in his head, beside his ear, almost definitely a gunshot, but there was no gore or residue. The woman had a blue tint to her skin, wide pupils—classic overdose symptoms. Beside her head lay the remains of various plastic wrappers and a rubber glove.
“Yeah, the ambos were here,” said Carl.
“Where are they now?”
“They left.”
“What?”
Carl shrugged.
Romano noted it down.
She tried Chandler on her radio.
No answer.
“Okay, Carl, where were they when you first saw them?”
Carl went to step away from the kitchen.
“No, don’t move. Just tell me.”
Carl pointed to the bedroom. The bedroom looked to be the same room, sectioned off by a small cast iron railing and a curtain. Around the bed, the walls were painted a metallic bronze, and there were matching floor-to-ceiling drapes pinned on the gold-trim runner, almost like a hospital suite. The drapes were drawn. Romano went over and looked inside.
Blood spatter. Sheets caked black. Rot.
Romano felt her body push a long breath out of her.
“Okay, time to go, Carl. Thanks for your help. I’m sure someone will be back to have a chat with you today.”
Carl nodded.
“Time to go,” she said.
He walked.
Romano followed him down the corridor, back to the second bedroom and the cleaner. She crouched down in front of the woman.
“I’m Detective Constable Laura Romano,” she said, out of habit. “Did you find those people?”
The woman shifted her stare to Romano but didn’t speak. Her name was embroidered on her uniform.
“Rosie? Did you find them? Just give me a little nod.”
The woman did it. She seemed to come back to herself. “Yes, I found them.”
“Where they on the bed or on the floor?”
“On the bed. The other one was down beside the bed, against the wall.”
“Was it the woman or the man down beside the bed?”
Romano could tell that this question was testing the limits of how much Rosie wanted to remember. “The man,” Rosie said.
“You’ve been a big help, Rosie. That’s all I need for the moment,” she said. She helped the woman up and took her out to Denny. He looked flustered. He had the guard and the two other cleaners lined up against one wall while he scribbled furiously in his notebook.
“Denny, this is Rosie. She discovered the bodies. Take her details next, then find somewhere for her to sit down.”
“Where?” he said.
“Somewhere close. You need to get everyone out of the hallway.” She came closer and whispered to him, “I just tried Chandler, you need to get him up here as well. I need an extra set of hands. We’re going to have to seal the whole place off. I’ll phone the mainland on the way downstairs.”
Denny kept writing. “Okay but…”
“But what?”
“Why are you doing all this?”
Romano went back inside and closed the door.
The following hours involved a lot of walking around the hotel. After she was done with a preliminary write-up of the crime scene, Romano took herself down to the front desk to speak with the head concierge, a manicured man who managed to be both flamboyant and icy at the same time. The concierge and all of his staff refused to identify the deceased or any other guest. They would not seal the hotel either. There was simply no way to stop visitors checking in or out of the hotel without the advice of another manager, who eventually turned out to be one of the men from the room, Barry Nash. Barry told her he needed to consult an executive assistant manager, who in turn immediately insisted that they seek the advice of the Gold Point’s General Manager, a man named Jeff Bruno.
Bruno was on the mainland. Over the phone, he refused every request Romano made. He was polite, but during the two minutes Romano could speak with him, he gave no consideration at all to police procedure. There was, he said, another procedure. Island procedure.
“Our guests come here, and stay with us, and trust us with their privacy. That doesn’t change because they’re no longer with us. And we absolutely do not shut the hotel down because a guest has passed. That’s ridiculous. Our security men are well trained. I believe emergency services have visited. The hotel is under no obligation—not with any previous law enforcement body I know of—to go into lock-down or to tender information. We’ll do what we can to assist you, but I won’t punish our other guests—or our future guests—for what my staff tells me appears to be an unfortunate accident.”
“Listen here, sir, the specifics are a police matter and the protocols I’m following are the only thing I’m interested in,” said Romano. “In the next couple of hours, you’re going to have homicide detectives from the mainland, a forensics team, the whole box and dice, trawling through your place here. If you—”
“Am I?” said Bruno.
“Are you what?”
The man sighed into the phone. “Put Barry back on.”
Barry Nash took the phone. He rested a hand on his barrel stomach and said, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right. Okay.” He rang off and turned to the staff around them. “Back to work, everyone. And you”—he frowned, levelling his eyes with Romano—“No go. You do what you have to, but this is the extent of our cooperation.”
“Are you joking?”
“’fraid not,” said Barry.
As she rode the lift back up to the scene, Romano took a call from Chandler on her mobile. He sounded worse than usual, angry almost. “I’ve got every dickhead in hospo calling me while I’m out on the boat, Romano. What the fuck is happening up there?”
“Two dead, and the scene looks like a dog’s breakfast. The hotel is fucking me every which way. State Crime are going to string me up by the tits when they see this mess.”
“Wha…did you call it in?”
“Of course I fucking called it in. Christ.”
An engine roared on Chandler’s end.
“This is bullshit,” he shouted. “I’m coming back.”
Romano fumed. She paced around in the elevator.
She hated lifts.
She hated the mirrors in them.
“Fuck,” she screamed.
10
Friday, September 3, 2004
Jim Harris came in through a service exit. He had a master key for occasions like this. He took the stairs, and slipped from the well into the hallway on level four. The way Barry Nash had made it sound, the new constable was raising hell. She was downstairs now, threatening to close the Gold Point down and bring half the mainland over. Yet the fourth floor was clear. They had the room taped off. He could hear voices in another room nearby. That was the extent of it.
Harris took a pair of surgical gloves from the pocket of his shorts and slipped them on.
He gently lifted the scene tape and swiped himself in. He could see the bodies from the doorway, and it was much as he’d been told. They’d been moved. The humidity was already ripening them. Harris went to them, squatted down and looked. Bachelard had his best suit on, but up close it looked like he’d been sleeping in it. His head wound was neat, consistent with topping himself. Sophie had OD’d. Emergency Services had worked on her, but it had been too late. Harris stood up and took photos of the bodies.
I should have stayed with you.
He went to the bedroom and carefully peeled back the drapes surrounding the bed. As expected, it was a mess. The interior of Bachelard’s head was sprayed across one side of the mattress, and the girl had vomited over hers. He took more photos and noted details: dirt caked on the sheets, what looked like semen spread about. About halfway up the mattress, on Bachelard’s side, there was a small butterfly-shaped pool of blood. It could have been anything, but it looked fresh. Harris closed the drapes back up and gave the rest of the suite a once-over.
Drugs and fits in the bathroom. No smack, but plenty of other things that could kill you. There was a stack of two-hundred-dollar drink cards in the bathroom drawer. He left them. The drawer was stiff to close. He took it all the way out and turned it over; a black Moleskine notebook taped to the underside. He picked it up and tucked it in his waistband.
Then Harris got down on his hands and knees and searched the bedroom again. Ran his hands under the mattress.
Nothing.
He mapped out the room.
Torn masking tape in the carpet. Small scraps of paper. Mud and sand. A condom wrapper. A crumpled suitcase against one wall, spewing clothes. He searched it—the contents, the pockets, the lining—and came away with very little. Bachelard and Sophie were either living out of the thing or about to go somewhere. They had expensive tastes but were behind on laundry. He left it be. At the end, Harris checked his watch: three-thirty-five, ten minutes since he stepped in. She’d be back soon.
Time to go.
