‘How many cops are there in town?’ I asked.
‘Active officers? I mean, we have one retiree …’
‘Active officers.’
‘Just me.’ She looked over, smiled. ‘Just us.’
I didn’t want to burst Snale’s bubble, but I didn’t plan on being out in the desert long. Nine days of ‘us’. Then it’d be back to Victoria Snale: Lone Ranger.
The moment Prosecutor Woolfmyer’s AVO expired, I’d be back – back in that jerk’s face, fighting him and the state’s crack team of lawyers about my brother’s innocence.
The empty desert around me was familiar. I’d been shoved aside when Sam had first been arrested, shipped out into the middle of nowhere, away from the public eye, away from my distinctly uncomfortable colleagues and their guilty looks after months of lying to me. Back then, I’d succumbed to the journey. I’d felt such shameful pleasure at having something to think about that was not Sam and what he was facing. Now was no different.
I squeezed my folder of notes on Sam’s case against my chest. A thick binder of papers detailing all the leads I’d tried to chase down. Most of the work I’d done was hopeless, dead ends I’d pursued over the months searching for something, anything, that might set my brother free. The binder was battered and bruised, but it was my lifeline. I wasn’t leaving it behind. I wasn’t putting it in my bag. I was hanging on to it. As long as I had the binder, I wasn’t abandoning Sam.
Chapter 9
‘LET’S CHECK OUT the view before we go down,’ Victoria Snale said, beaming. ‘You’ll love it.’
The officer pulled the four-wheel drive off the side of the highway and let it rumble to a stop. I climbed out and breathed the desert air, felt the warm wind ruffle my hair. The great domed sky was heavy with stars. I felt so far from where I belonged. Wonderfully small.
‘Come this way,’ Snale beckoned me, kicking up dust in the car’s headlights. ‘This is it.’
I stood with her on the edge of a rocky cliff in the dark. ‘This is Last Chance Valley,’ she said.
She swept her hand dramatically across the landscape, indicating a less-than-impressive collection of gold lights clustered at the bottom of a moonlit rise. I nodded, made an interested noise. I felt bad for being so distant for the whole trip towards the town.
‘You can’t see it very well right now, but the town is actually at the bottom of a massive crater.’ She pointed to the curve of the rise we stood on. ‘Biggest crater in the Southern Hemisphere. This ridge is just the edge, it runs all the way around. It’s sort of egg-shaped, with the town right in the centre and properties spreading out around. The first family settled down there two hundred years ago. There are seventy-five residents now.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘They’re not sure what formed the crater, but it may have been a volcano. A meteorite. Every now and then somebody comes out and runs a study on the place. Very exciting stuff. I usually get to brief the town on their visits, tell everybody to behave themselves.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘I guess the settlers thought the crater might shelter us from the desert dust storms,’ she mused, rolling a rock under her boot. ‘It doesn’t. In fact it makes things worse. We get about ten centimetres of dust when the summer winds roll in. It also floods real bad, and the floodwaters hold beneath the earth. When it floods, we get green grass. We can grow wheat here. There’s plenty of cattle. But, being the only grass around for thousands and thousands of kilometres, we get locust plagues.’
I was glad Snale was the local cop and not the tourism director. I tried to maintain a serious face.
‘Locusts?’ I said.
‘Yeah, we’re just getting over the last plague. Here’s one right now, in fact.’
She reached out towards me, and I realised a creature was walking up my bicep, an enormous brown grasshopper covered in the patterns of the desert, spots and stripes in red and brown. I didn’t scream. But it wasn’t easy.
Snale plucked the creature from my shirt and tossed it into the wind. It fluttered into the dark.
‘Oh great,’ I said, brushing off the place where the thing had been. ‘This is great.’
‘They bite, but it’s not that painful.’
‘And what exactly will I be working on out here?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Turns out somebody’s planning to kill us all.’
Chapter 10
WE SAT IN the car together and Snale took a package from the glove compartment. It was a notebook secured in a police evidence bag, a sheaf of photocopies, which she handed to me. She started the car but kept the overhead light on so I could read as she drove.
‘A trucker found this diary in a backpack on the side of this highway, at a rest stop.’ She pointed over her shoulder. ‘Back the way we came, about five kilometres. He spotted it sitting there when he stopped to pull a dead roo from his front grille. Brought the diary into town and handed it in to me. It contains detailed analyses of spree killers, weapons, massacre plans. We think someone is, or was, constructing a plan to kill as many people in Last Chance Valley as possible.’
‘When was this?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘And you vetted the truck driver?’
‘Yeah, I let him go.’
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I looked at the photocopied pages before me. My eyes breezed over the tight, small writing and fell upon the hand-drawn images, sketches of a person in a hood running towards fleeing groups of people, mowing them down with a huge rifle. There were diagrams of the layout of the town below, lists of names and addresses. I examined the notebook in the evidence bag, turned it over. Of course, there was no name on it. That’d be too much to hope for.
The thing that struck me immediately about the pages I was looking through was the sheer weight of preparation that the diarist had gone to. Every page was filled on both sides with either illustrations or notes, or with excerpts from books that had been copied and pasted onto some pages. It was all very calm and methodical. Where there were illustrations, they were very well done. More like scenes of war than the macabre scribblings of a maniac. There were photographs of buildings, I assumed areas of the tiny town below us from different angles. This was more than a speculative work. This was serious.
Snale drove us over the edge of the crater and down towards its depths. I looked up at the other edge of the valley, rocky and pointed against the burnt-orange light.
And as I looked across the crater I saw the explosion.
The sound it made took seconds to reach us across the distance. A bass thump I felt in the centre of my chest.
The sky lit up with a fireball directly across from us, on the steep rise.
‘Oh my God!’ Snale swerved, gripping the wheel.
I shoved the papers aside and sat bolt upright. ‘Get there. Get there now!’
Chapter 11
THE EXPLOSION ON the other side of the town seemed to have ignited the brush there in flames. I kept my eyes on the dim glow as we raced up the main street and between the fields beyond. Small houses. Fences. Snale’s jaw was set. She squinted at the dark rise before us.
‘Might have been kids with fireworks,’ she murmured. ‘The kids around here, they’re pretty feral.’
‘Those are some pretty big fireworks,’ I said.
We took the winding road up the slope at a roaring pace. I gripped the door of the vehicle as Snale took the corners. Country driver. She’d been taking these roads at breakneck speed since girlhood.
We could smell the blast zone from the side of the road as we parked. Snale was no athlete but she bounded into the bush ahead of me, agile as a rabbit, her gun drawn. I had no torch, but followed the bouncing white light of hers, razor-sharp desert plants slicing at my jeans. The fire was burning itself out in the tough grass and the oily leaves of the eucalypts above us.
The smoke seared my eyes. We split up. I almost tripped over a plastic chair, or what
remained of it. Three of its metal legs were buried in the dirt, and the back had melted to a black husk, sharp, sticking upwards like a dagger. Snale came back to me, huffing, winding her torch beam across my face, then to where I was crouched, examining the chair.
‘Can I?’ I grabbed the torch and swept it over the chair, found the crater where the bomb had gone off. There were bodily remains here, tangled in the dirt and grass. The blackened and burned slivers of flesh of something or someone blown to bits.
‘Oh no,’ Snale was saying gently, following close behind me. ‘Oh no. Oh no.’
I zeroed in on a shiny object – a hand wheel valve. There were splinters of metal shining in the dust. Entrails, blood everywhere. Hair. An animal? I nudged the valve with my boot, didn’t have evidence bags with me.
‘Propane gas bottle,’ I said.
‘Oh man,’ Snale gave a frightened shudder, taking the torch from me with her cold fingers. ‘Oh maaaaan!’
I followed her. She’d noticed something hanging from a nearby branch, swinging gently in the breeze. It was a man’s hand and forearm, blackened and charred, held there by the remains of a shred of melted duct tape. The tape wrapped around the wrist seemed burned to the flesh.
I was just beginning to wonder how on Earth it was still hanging on when it fell, slapping to the ground at our feet. Snale yelped in terror. She grabbed at me as a new fear rushed through her; the sound of a large vehicle leaving the roadside back near where we’d parked.
We could hear it crashing through the undergrowth towards us.
Chapter 12
DEER HUNTING LIGHTS. Eight of them. They pierced the night around us, blasting through my vision, making me cower behind my arm. It was like an alien ship landing. Snale cocked her weapon, but in seconds she seemed to relax.
‘Oh. It’s only Kash,’ she said. There was a slight upward lilt to her voice, like she’d just been given good news. I was still blinded. I stumbled forwards, grabbing the back of her shirt to guide me through the painfully illuminated blast zone.
‘Jesus, those lights!’
‘Hands up!’ someone bellowed. ‘Identify yourselves!’
‘It’s me!’ Snale put her hands up. I didn’t bother. ‘It’s us. Vicky, and my new friend Harriet.’
I thought ‘friend’ was going a bit far.
An enormous man emerged out of the light like an over-excited dog, a flurry of hard breath and wild gesturing. Incredibly, he had a torch in his hand.
‘Vicky. Right. Have you seen the suspect? Where’s the suspect? Any signs of where he went?’
‘The what?’ I tried to see his face, glimpsing a chiselled jaw, black curls. ‘What suspect?’
‘You,’ Kash pointed at me, ‘head down the hill and sweep south-east in a standard second-leg search pattern. Snale and I will take south-west. Give it a K, maybe a K and a half. We’ll meet back here in twenty.’
‘A search?’ I yelled. ‘Using what? I’m not sure I’ll ever see again.’
‘Double time! Let’s go!’
The muscled goliath took off into the bush, crashing over plants and shrubs like a tank. I jogged, confused, in the general direction he’d indicated.
There was nothing to indicate that a suspect was on the loose. But the big man in the dark had overcome my decision-making abilities with his barking voice, like a slap to the side of the head. I was annoyed and bristled, but I did what he said. There was no one south or east of the blast zone.
Snale and the big man, Kash, were there when I returned. She was searching the remains again with her torch beam. Kash was standing uselessly with his hands on his hips, looking generally ‘in charge’ of whatever might have been about to happen. In the light of the enormous truck I saw an action-figure body and Clark Kent glasses on a head as square and thick as a sandstone block. When I came back into the light, he walked towards me, hand extended.
‘Elliot Kash, Counter-Terrorism Task Force, Islamic Fundamentalism Division, ASIO.’
‘Of course.’ I nodded. I understood all the dramatics now. This guy was in national security. I’d come across his type before. ‘Of course you are.’
‘You’ve heard of me then? Good. That’ll save time. Let’s secure the entry to the blast zone, erect a checkpoint on the road. We’ll do hourly sweeps of the search grid to see if the suspect comes back. They often return to film their work for their online campaigns.’
I noticed Kash hadn’t asked me for my name, or a long-winded explanation of my position within the police. I let it go.
‘Who exactly are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘We’ve got a dead guy and a bomb. How do you know who else was involved?’
‘You’ve seen the diary?’
‘Barely,’ I said.
‘Well, you’re behind,’ Kash sighed. ‘You can get a debriefing once we’ve established a secure boundary. We need to act now and ask questions later. Get going. I’ll take charge here.’
I suffered the same verbal slap to the head, the phenomenon of compliance sweeping over me like a spell. I found myself walking back towards the road, thinking I’d move Snale’s truck, put lights on the road, see if she had some traffic cones in the back to guide any passers-by onto the shoulder so we could question them. I didn’t further analyse Kash’s resolve that a dangerous suspect was behind this, and that it was possible he or she was somewhere around here.
The spell wore off before I hit the roadside. I stopped, frowned, tried to get my thoughts in order. Snale bumped into me from behind. She’d been jogging up the path behind me.
‘Sorry,’ she sniffed. ‘I’ve got to get to the radio and call in the team from the next town over. We need more people. This is bad. This is really bad.’
‘It’s OK.’ I jogged alongside her. This was probably the most terrible crime to ever happen in Last Chance Valley. Maybe the only serious crime they’d ever had. ‘Agent Dickhead’s got it all under control.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I just found the victim’s head. I know who he is. He’s my chief.’
Chapter 13
HE CAME EVERY second night when the temperature began to sink, at what Caitlyn assumed was sunset outside her concrete room. The first few times, she tried to brace herself for what was about to happen. She visualised it for hours on end, her skin crawling and stomach turning, trying to decide how she would endure the rape or torture or prolonged death he had planned for her. But after a week, when none of those things had happened, a deep, sickening confusion set in. And then there was the rage. Caitlyn sat on the mattress in the dark and boiled with a quiet, dangerous rage.
The man with the shaved head came and unlocked the door, walked down the steps and put her supplies on the floor. Two packaged sandwiches, one chicken and one roast beef, the kind a person buys at the service station. Two bottles of water. Two chocolate bars. One roll of toilet paper for the bucket in the corner. He wouldn’t look at her. The ritual was always the same. He came, he dropped the supplies, he changed the bucket and he left, locking the door securely behind him.
Caitlyn had tried everything she could think of. She’d waited by the door and swung a wine bottle she’d found in the crates at his head, missed her target by centimetres. The wine was expired and tasted foul, but after breaking a couple of bottles she’d come up with a good, shiny dagger that she came at him with the next time, again to no avail. He’d shoved her hard down the stairs, and she’d lain crying, the back of her head bleeding on the cold stone floor.
The next time, she’d been a bit trickier. Caitlyn had pulled lengths of fabric from the old mattress and woven them into a strong trip-wire, pulled this across the doorway. He’d tripped, and she’d launched herself at him, clubbed him hard in the back of the skull with a lump of wood broken from one of the crates. She’d got through the doorway and looked down the dark hall that led to wherever she was before he’d grabbed her ankle and dragged her back into her prison room. Down the hall she’d seen a long concrete walkway, stairs to the upper lev
els, and plenty more heavy trash that he dragged in front of the door after he locked it. Caitlyn glimpsed flyers on the ground, warped and yellowed, a box of moulded brass numbers, the kind a person would screw to a door or the front of a house. An old hotel? The power must still be turned on for her television to work. Why couldn’t anyone hear her cries? Was she underground?
Caitlyn didn’t know if her captor was just unusually strong or if the rations and the lack of sleep had left her weak. She was no match for him. As the days passed, it became harder for her to wake. Harder to think. Harder to cry. In the daytime, she screamed for help. At night she sat and watched the television in the corner, pulling at strands of her hair.
Caitlyn recognised this for what it was. A holding pattern. Something had gone wrong with his plan, whatever it had been. Now he was simply keeping her alive. Uninterested. Out of ideas. If he didn’t want sex from her, and he didn’t want to torture her, and he didn’t want to talk to her, why the hell was he doing this?
When the news came on, it was more often than not about the Georges River Killer’s arrest. Sam Blue had featured in the media for months.
She sat chewing her nails and remembering the first night in the concrete bunker, one of the only times she’d seen her captor show overt emotion. Surprise and rage at the image of Samuel Blue on the screen. He’d said it wasn’t finished yet. That this wasn’t the plan.
What wasn’t the plan? Caitlyn knew she hadn’t been her captor’s planned victim. That the girl she’d interrupted him trying to abduct had been the one who was supposed to be here now. But was it more than that? Caitlyn remembered the man standing before the television screen, running his fingers up the back of his skull, gripping at the muscles in his neck as they locked, rock hard, with anger. Sam Blue’s arrest. Did that have something to do with it all?
Was this man the Georges River Killer’s partner?
Fifty Fifty: (Harriet Blue 2) (Detective Harriet Blue Series) Page 3
