‘You sound more pissed about the bikes than you do about your face,’ I noted.
‘I am,’ Gotten said.
‘Priorities.’ I glanced at Whitt. ‘What can I say, Jax? I wish I’d had time to reverse up and give it another crack. I loved those smashy, crunchy sounds. Metal twisting. Glass shattering. And then there was the girly screaming you were all doing in the house when I flung the oil at you. The whole afternoon was music to my ears.’
‘What kind of police force arranges for a victim be confronted in a locked room by their attacker?’ Jax asked. ‘Should I add emotional trauma to my assault charge?’
‘I don’t know. Should I add triple murder to your drug trafficking rap?’
‘There will be no drug trafficking rap.’ Jax smirked. ‘The cops went out to the property and had a good look around, waving a half-arsed, judge-bought warrant. There’s no evidence of any illegal activity on the premises. The evidence of your attack? That’s all over the place. All over my face. I can see why a pair of balls-out psychopaths like the two of you had your badges taken away.’
‘You’re not putting up an assault charge, Jax,’ I said. ‘Let’s be real. Whitt and I might be very unpopular with our fellow police right now but if you keep this up you’ll have every available copper from here to Panuara breathing down your neck for the better part of six months. Officers popping by unexpectedly to see how your recovery is going. Officers pulling your car over because they haven’t been able to get you on the phone. Officers visiting your friends and relatives to interview them about your emotional state.’
‘I don’t know anything about any murders.’ Jax’s words were clipped, his teeth flashing as he spoke. ‘Not Wendell’s, not the junkie’s, not her kid’s. You’re barking up the wrong tree here. All you have is a hot shot in a motel room that might not even be hers, and certainly isn’t mine. This is bullshit.’
‘It’s not bullshit,’ Whitt said. ‘The hot shot from Tonya’s room was chemically linked to the one that killed Wendell. That ties Wendell and Tonya together. And Joe Woods put Wendell away. That ties them together, too. Whoever killed Wendell Hamm set out to kill Tonya.’
Jax sighed. ‘And what? You think that person is me?’
‘You’re the boss, aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Did you attempt to farm the job of killing Tonya and Rebel out to Travis Blenk?’ I asked. ‘It would have been a smart move. Rub out Wendell, rub out Tonya and the kid, get the job done without looking like you’re a leader who hits men in his own crew, and little girls.’
‘No comment.’ Jax shrugged.
‘If the girls are still alive, now’s the time to tell us,’ Whitt said. ‘You’re circling the drain. It’s not too late for us to pull you out before you get flushed.’
Something flickered in Jax’s features. I stared hard, trying to decipher it, but his eyes shifted to the door as it burst open and a man entered the room.
‘Alright, that’s enough,’ the guy said. He was wearing a navy pinstripe suit with a bright red shirt and red satin tie. ‘My client and I will need the room immediately to confer. He has nothing further to say. You and you – get out.’
I looked at Jax. He showed no recognition of the man standing over him. He was examining his blond-tipped hair and waxed eyebrows with the surprise and distaste of someone who had not seen them before. I left the room with Whitt and we stood in the hall. Across the office, a group of young detectives was eyeing us and whispering.
‘He’ll clam up now,’ Whitt sighed. ‘That’s the best we’ll get, and it’s nothing.’
‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘I thought what just happened was rather interesting.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that lawyer in there works for Louis Mallally.’
Chapter 60
TOX AND OFFICER Caroline Forage leaned on a large stainless-steel bench in the Forensics lab, their faces inches away from a photograph of a man standing in the desert. Caroline’s fingers were long and slender, her nails acrylic, so that when she put her hands on the tabletop the nails clicked loudly. She straightened the photograph between them.
‘I think this is the clearest we’ll get it,’ she said.
Tox grunted his affirmation.
‘So that’ll be all?’ she asked. ‘We’re square?’
‘Are you kidding?’ Tox said.
‘Oh, come on,’ she sighed. ‘I rushed that baggie of heroin through for you yesterday!’
‘Hey, you don’t want to pay a guy back for his services, don’t call me in the first place.’ Tox shrugged. ‘When the loser ex-boyfriend starts up again, hanging lacy panties on your doorknob, calling you sobbing like a wuss in the middle of the night, showing up at your office with puppies and following your mother to her doctor’s appointments, don’t call me. I’m happy enough to spend my weekend not hanging guys off the sides of buildings by their ankles.’
Caroline sighed. ‘I think you’re exaggerating.’
‘What kind of puppy was it?’ Tox asked.
‘A schnoodle.’
‘Sounds boutique,’ Tox said. ‘Expensive.’
‘What do you want, exactly?’
‘Use the photo to tell me where he is.’ Tox tapped the image.
‘What?’ Caroline squinted.
‘Use your science.’ Tox shooed his hand in the direction of her computer. ‘Your special technical wizard science.’
‘You’re out of your mind.’ Caroline looked at the photograph. ‘It’s a guy standing in the desert with a shovel. It could be anywhere on Earth.’
‘It’s not anywhere on Earth,’ Tox said. ‘It’s a hundred kilometres, maybe two, outside Panuara, western New South Wales.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Because bikies are lazy,’ Tox said. ‘They’re creatures of habit. Old school. They don’t drive around scouting out various safe kill-and-dump spots to do their dirty work in, like, say, Lebanese or Armenian mobsters do. They make a chop shop at home in their clubhouse where they do all their other dirty deeds and they bury people a reasonable drive from home. As far out of the nest as practicality calls for and no further.’
‘OK.’ Caroline widened her eyes. ‘Good to know.’
They leaned over the photograph again.
‘My special technical wizard science,’ she groaned, ‘identifies a few things we can work with.’
‘I knew it would,’ Tox said.
‘I assume you’ve arrested this guy and you know how tall he is?’ she said.
‘He’s six foot five.’
‘Right.’ Caroline nodded. ‘So we have that. Then there’s the shovel in his hands. We can do a search, try to find out what brand it is. That’ll give us two measurements. Then we’ve got these.’ She tapped the edge of the photograph. The endless blue sky behind Jax Gotten was hooked and ridged by huge steel towers disappearing into the distance. ‘These are two hundred and seventy-five kilovolt transmission towers. Telstra can probably give us the exact building specifications of those, so we can determine their height and width. There’ll be a map of their locations. Then there’s this peak. A little hill in the distance. Probably granite. But I can check with the geography guys. We could maybe have one of our botanists look at the scrubland in the picture. Try to see if they can confirm a region.’
‘I saw that,’ Tox agreed.
‘We can draw a perimeter two hundred kilometres around where you say this bikie clubhouse is. Once we do our calculations on the shovel, the guy, the transmission towers, we might be able to come up with a plus or minus for elevation. We can look at a geographical survey map and see if we can find some possible landscape markers that might fit the little granite rock hill within the estimated proximity of the towers.’
Tox clapped his hands together once in excitement, a noise that made Caroline wince in the quiet lab. She straightened, cracked her neck.
‘Don’t get excited,’ she said.<
br />
‘Why not?’ Tox asked. ‘All that stuff, everything you just said, it sounds great.’
‘It’s not,’ Caroline said.
‘It’s not?’
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘This isn’t science we’re using here. It’s guesswork. You’re guessing it’s a body you’re looking for. You’re guessing it’s within two hundred kilometres of desert around Panuara, and not anywhere in the other millions of hectares of desert that make up the continent. Approximately a third of Australia is desert, and you’re deciding to ignore all that because you have a theory that bikies are lazy.’
‘I am,’ Tox said. ‘They are.’
‘Then there’s the photograph.’ Caroline gestured to it. ‘We don’t know how accurate the camera is. What the upload of the image onto the computer and then onto the printer has done to its dimensions. We don’t know how tall the photographer is, or how high he’s holding the camera, or whether the six-foot-five subject was measured properly. Was it by a doctor? Or was it by some half-asleep patrol cop with a bashed-up measuring tape improperly affixed to the wall? Was he wearing boots when he was measured, and is he wearing the same boots in this picture? We don’t know what time of the day this picture was taken. You’re tallest in the morning when you first get out of bed, and then you can shrink up to two centimetres by the end of the day. The shovel is probably fine, if it’s brand name, factory assembled, fairly new and never repaired. But then there are the transmission towers. They expand and shrink depending on the climate and so do their concrete housings.’
Tox stared at Caroline, one hand on the stainless-steel tabletop beside him, the picture lying flat, inches away. Caroline stared back at him, the silence between them punctured by the printer suddenly whirring to life, spitting out a sheet for someone else in the building.
Tox raised an eyebrow, said nothing.
Caroline sighed and snatched the picture from the table and went to her desk.
Chapter 61
PAINT COVERS ALL manner of ills. Johnsonborough prison was an enormous rambling institution of concrete and steel, which, without paint, might have resembled something too Orwellian to pass inspection, with its low ceilings and narrow walkways, lack of natural light and the pervasive smell of human bodies. Thick plasticky layers of paint were splashed over everything, the same colour sliding up from the floor to the bench I sat on, up the wall, across the ceiling and down the adjacent wall of the intake desk.
I had only been out of prison mere days, but this life seemed an eternity ago. The starkest thing was that no one was watching me. Once I had been searched and admitted to the prison, guards looked away, went back to their tasks, talked and laughed with each other. Guards look at you all the time when you’re an inmate. Study your eyes, your hands, your walk. The prison inmate is always hiding something, planning something. I felt like an imposter, a terrorist wandering through an airport with a bomb strapped to their chest. The front-of-house staff weren’t familiar enough with me to know I had once lived here.
I sat with the families waiting for visitation time, watching toddlers playing with Lego on the dirty floor and someone’s elderly mother sleeping open-mouthed in the corner of the room. I stood now and then to read the posters about sexual assault and drug trafficking in the prison.
The duty officer came in and read off the list of visitor names. Everyone in the room stood. My name was not read out. The officer lolled her head as she looked at me at the back of the line. I realised she was the officer with the barbed wire tattoo and short white hair who had rapped my knuckles in solitary. Steeler.
‘Wait there, Blue,’ she said as the visitors filed past her. ‘The warden wants to see you.’
‘I don’t care what the hell he wants. I’m here to visit Dolly Quaddich. I’m perfectly within my rights to –’
Steeler left and I sat back down on the bench. For three hours I waited, getting hungry, receiving nothing but hostile glances from behind the desk when I tried to enquire about what was happening. I drank a Coke from the vending machine, then bought two big chocolate chip cookies. By the time the guard came back I was $14 down, halfway through a tube of Mentos and feeling queasy.
I was led to the warden’s office. He was a surprisingly young man, in his thirties at most, in a snappy suit. Bald, glasses with plastic frames. The desk was bare but for a keyboard, a computer monitor and a mug with a big red Porsche logo on it.
‘Dolly Quaddich,’ I said, sitting in the chair before him.
‘Detective Blue, good morning.’ He stood from his big leather desk chair and offered me his hand. ‘It’s good to have you back in the facility, certainly in a different capacity to when we saw you last.’
‘When you saw me last?’ I said. ‘You didn’t see me at all. I’ve never laid eyes on you in my life, Mr …’ I looked at his gold-coloured name plate. ‘Parkinson. You know, most wardens like to take a tour of the facility every now and then, if not to convince the officers they’re not a puffed-up pencil-pusher then to give the inmates a fair shot at flinging a cup of urine at them.’
‘It used to be that way, back in the old days,’ Parkinson said. ‘But most of what I do at this facility is personnel management, believe it or not. It’s the officers who run the place. I’m just here to make sure they’re happy and they have everything they need to succeed.’
‘Uh-huh.’ I rolled my eyes.
‘And I can see everything perfectly well from here.’ He turned the computer monitor on the desktop towards me. It was split into a dozen small coloured screens. I saw the yard, a row of cells, some classrooms.
‘It was from this screen that I watched you assault Officer Hugh Ridgen and set fire to classroom 5A,’ he said.
‘Oh, right. Well, you must have seen Ridgen attempt to sexually assault an inmate in that room, then,’ I replied.
‘The camera was malfunctioning and didn’t capture Officer Ridgen, who I believe was supervising you and Inmate Chambers.’ Warden Parkinson smiled. ‘It was proper procedure for Ridgen to separate you and Chambers, both notoriously violent inmates, from the rest of the prison population if he felt you might –’
‘I’m bored,’ I interrupted. ‘Can I see Dolly now?’
‘Well, see, Inmate Blue. Sorry, Detective Blue. That’s why I’ve brought you here. The prison is a private facility. You can think of it like a cafe. Members of the public come in and go out at certain designated times. And during those times, I – the operator – can refuse anyone entry, for any reason I see fit.’
‘You’re not going to let me see her?’ I gripped the arms of my chair. ‘Why?’
‘Well, like a cafe owner,’ Parkinson said, ‘I don’t have to state my reasons for refusal of entry. But I will, in this case. While you were incarcerated here, you demonstrated a lack of concern for the welfare and safety of my staff and a willingness to treat our physical resources destructively. The damage you caused to classroom 5A has run into tens of thousands of dollars, and allowing you to return to the facility would surely be a violation of our insurance policies. I can’t, in good conscience, subject my staff or my facility to that behaviour again.’
I stared at him. He stared right back, unblinking, a cyborg in a suit.
‘What’s happened to Dolly?’ I asked. ‘You won’t let me see her because the guards have done something to her. Is she OK?’
Parkinson clasped his hands together, patiently, on the desk.
‘If anything has happened to her …’ I said carefully.
‘Inmate Quaddich was moved to the infirmary last night,’ he said. ‘She’s under suicide watch.’
‘She should have been under suicide watch from the beginning.’ I felt my jaw click hard as my muscles locked. ‘What happened to her? Did one of your guards string her up?’
‘Detective Blue.’ Parkinson opened his hands. ‘I’ve been more than generous with my time here today. But you know I’ve got a big job to do. Hundreds of inmates, dozens of staff. I can’t sit here and shoot t
he breeze all day, no matter how enjoyable that might be.’
He stood and gestured to the door. Officer Steeler was waiting for me. I walked ahead of her back down the stairs, out of the visitation intake entrance and into the long diamond-wire tunnel that led to the gates.
I stopped walking and turned around. She grabbed the radio on her shoulder in preparation to call for backup.
‘Problem?’ she asked me.
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I want to get the word out among Johnsonborough staff. If anything else happens to Dolly Quaddich they’ll have to deal with me.’
‘You really like your threats, don’t you, Harry?’ Steeler asked. ‘You’re just full of them. Thing is, you’re out there, and we’re in here, and so is Dolly. There’s nothing you can do to us. Your words are empty.’
‘You think so, huh?’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘Now run along. As you would know, it’s almost lock-up time. I’ve got stuff to do.’
I looked her hard in the eye and then at her name badge one last time before I left. Steeler. I added it to a mental list as I walked back towards the gates, a list that was long and that I had been adding names to for as long as I could remember.
Chapter 62
A HAND LANDED on Chloe Bozer’s shoulder, hard and sudden, making her yelp with fright in the hallway outside the locker room. Tox Barnes gave a husky laugh that rippled off the walls of the basement level of the hospital.
‘Have I told you lately that I hate you?’ Chloe shrugged her backpack back on where it had slipped to her elbow in shock. ‘You’re not allowed to wander around in the staff area.’
‘Staff area, public area.’ Tox shrugged. ‘This whole place feels like home to me. Are you just starting your shift?’
‘I’m just finishing. I’ve been on the floor eighteen hours.’ She swiped at a lock of sweaty hair. ‘But you knew that. That’s why you’re here.’
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