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Epub ISBN: 9781473539488
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Copyright © James Patterson 2017
Excerpt from The Store © James Patterson 2017
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James Patterson has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. All characters and descriptions of events are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Century
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ISBN 9781780897110
ISBN 9781780897127 (export edition)
Never Never (with Candice Fox)
Along Came a Spider • Kiss the Girls • Jack and Jill • Cat and Mouse • Pop Goes the Weasel • Roses are Red • Violets are Blue • Four Blind Mice • The Big Bad Wolf • London Bridges • Mary, Mary • Cross • Double Cross • Cross Country • Alex Cross’s Trial (with Richard DiLallo) • I, Alex Cross • Cross Fire • Kill Alex Cross • Merry Christmas, Alex Cross • Alex Cross, Run • Cross My Heart • Hope to Die • Cross Justice • Cross the Line
1st to Die • 2nd Chance (with Andrew Gross) • 3rd Degree (with Andrew Gross) • 4th of July (with Maxine Paetro) • The 5th Horseman (with Maxine Paetro) • The 6th Target (with Maxine Paetro) • 7th Heaven (with Maxine Paetro) • 8th Confession (with Maxine Paetro) • 9th Judgement (with Maxine Paetro) • 10th Anniversary (with Maxine Paetro) • 11th Hour (with Maxine Paetro) • 12th of Never (with Maxine Paetro) • Unlucky 13 (with Maxine Paetro) • 14th Deadly Sin (with Maxine Paetro) • 15th Affair (with Maxine Paetro) 16th Seduction (with Maxine Paetro)
Step on a Crack (with Michael Ledwidge) • Run for Your Life (with Michael Ledwidge) • Worst Case (with Michael Ledwidge) • Tick Tock (with Michael Ledwidge) • I, Michael Bennett (with Michael Ledwidge) • Gone (with Michael Ledwidge) • Burn (with Michael Ledwidge) • Alert (with Michael Ledwidge) • Bullseye (with Michael Ledwidge)
Private (with Maxine Paetro) • Private London (with Mark Pearson) • Private Games (with Mark Sullivan) • Private: No. 1 Suspect (with Maxine Paetro) • Private Berlin (with Mark Sullivan) • Private Down Under (with Michael White) • Private L.A. (with Mark Sullivan) • Private India (with Ashwin Sanghi) • Private Vegas (with Maxine Paetro) • Private Sydney (with Kathryn Fox) • Private Paris (with Mark Sullivan) • The Games (with Mark Sullivan) • Private Delhi (with Ashwin Sanghi)
NYPD Red (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 2 (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 3 (with Marshall Karp) • NYPD Red 4 (with Marshall Karp)
The Thomas Berryman Number • Sail (with Howard Roughan) • Swimsuit (with Maxine Paetro) • Don’t Blink (with Howard Roughan) • Postcard Killers (with Liza Marklund) • Toys (with Neil McMahon) • Now You See Her (with Michael Ledwidge) • Kill Me If You Can (with Marshall Karp) • Guilty Wives (with David Ellis) • Zoo (with Michael Ledwidge) • Second Honeymoon (with Howard Roughan) • Mistress (with David Ellis) • Invisible (with David Ellis) • Truth or Die (with Howard Roughan) • Murder House (with David Ellis) • Woman of God (with Maxine Paetro) • Hide and Seek • Humans, Bow Down (with Emily Raymond) • The Black Book (with David Ellis) • Murder Games (with Howard Roughan) • Black Market
Torn Apart (with Hal and Cory Friedman) • The Murder of King Tut (with Martin Dugard)
Sundays at Tiffany’s (with Gabrielle Charbonnet) • The Christmas Wedding (with Richard DiLallo) • First Love (with Emily Raymond) • Two from the Heart (with Frank Costantini, Emily Raymond and Brian Sitts)
Miracle at Augusta (with Peter de Jonge)
The Worst Years of My Life (with Chris Tebbetts) • Get Me Out of Here! (with Chris Tebbetts) • My Brother Is a Big, Fat Liar (with Lisa Papademetriou) • How I Survived Bullies, Broccoli, and Snake Hill (with Chris Tebbetts) • Ultimate Showdown (with Julia Bergen) • Save Rafe! (with Chris Tebbetts) • Just My Rotten Luck (with Chris Tebbetts) Dog’s Best Friend (with Chris Tebbetts) • Escape to Australia (with Martin Chetterton)
I Funny (with Chris Grabenstein) • I Even Funnier (with Chris Grabenstein) • I Totally Funniest (with Chris Grabenstein) • I Funny TV (with Chris Grabenstein) • School of Laughs (with Chris Grabenstein)
Treasure Hunters (with Chris Grabenstein) • Danger Down the Nile (with Chris Grabenstein) • Secret of the Forbidden City (with Chris Grabenstein) • Peril at the Top of the World (with Chris Grabenstein)
House of Robots (with Chris Grabenstein) • Robots Go Wild! (with Chris Grabenstein) • Robot Revolution (with Chris Grabenstein)
Kenny Wright: Superhero (with Chris Tebbetts) • Homeroom Diaries (with Lisa Papademetriou) • Jacky Ha-Ha (with Chris Grabenstein) • Word of Mouse (with Chris Grabenstein) • Pottymouth and Stoopid (with Chris Grabenstein)
The Angel Experiment • School’s Out Forever • Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports • The Final Warning • Max • Fang • Angel • Nevermore • Forever
Confessions of a Murder Suspect (with Maxine Paetro) • The Private School Murders (with Maxine Paetro) • The Paris Mysteries (with Maxine Paetro) • The Murder of an Angel (with Maxine Paetro)
Witch & Wizard (with Gabrielle Charbonnet) • The Gift (with Ned Rust) • The Fire (with Jill Dembowski) • The Kiss (with Jill Dembowski) • The Lost (with Emily Raymond)
The Dangerous Days of Daniel X (with Michael Ledwidge) • Watch the Skies (with Ned Rust) • Demons and Druids (with Adam Sadler) • Game Over (with Ned Rust) • Armageddon (with Chris Grabenstein) • Lights Out (with Chris Grabenstein)
Crade and All • Crazy House (with Gabrielle Charbonnet)
Daniel X: Alien Hunter (with Leopoldo Gout) • Maximum Ride: Manga Vols. 1–9 (with NaRae Lee)
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SHE WAS PERFECT. And so rarely the perfect ones came, fluttering out of the darkness like moths into golden light. Swift and uncatchable.
He had wandered the third floor of the car park for a couple of hours now, risking it all for his ideal victim. A number of young women had crossed the little grassy field below where he stood as classes at the university ended and new ones began. He watched them toting shoulder bags and the occasional paper coffee cup, blinking in the warm daylight. Then the place was deserted again, and he waited.
It was bright out, leaving a dark shadow in the corner of the parking lot, to the right of the fire stairs. He’d watched a potential girl enter the stairwell, his heart thumping, but she was only halfway up the concrete steps towards him before he realised she wasn’t right. She had a friend on the phone. Cackling laughter. No. He’d know her when he saw her. Big doe eyes. Frightened, down-turned mouth. Thin wrists he could squeeze and twist.
The desire to flee picked at him. It was risky, hanging around too long. The university campus was on high alert after the police had found his previous works. Marissa. Elle. Rosetta. His brunette beauties mangled, ruined. Tragedies laid out on the sand. As news of the Georges River Killer spread, girls across campus had started dyeing and cutting their hair, walking in groups at night, having the security guards take them to their cars. It wasn’t about the hair for him – although he hadn’t failed to notice their striking resemblance to his first, many years ago. No, his university girls had simply been the right kind of innocent. Content, confident. He looked for the forthright stride, the high chin, the captive excitement of rosebuds just before they bloom.
He told himself to be patient. The plan had gone so well so far. His finale was worth the risk. A few more minutes. He wandered into the stairwell as he heard footsteps.
Then he saw her, her hand on the rail, gripping, pulling as she ascended. A slice of her soft cream brow and high cheekbone as she turned the corner.
Oh, there she was. His perfect girl.
SHE EMERGED FROM the stairwell door and he swept an arm around her throat, yanked her backwards. The sickening rush of chemicals through his veins threatened to knock him off balance. She didn’t make a sound at first. The breath left her instantly. Her bag fell. Then the clap of his palm over her mouth, her heels dragging as he turned and pulled her towards his vehicle.
‘No!’ a muffled wail. ‘Stop! Stop! Stop!’
She bucked, twisted, tried to sink out of his arms. He was ready for the movement, knew the victim’s dance by heart. He sank with her, gripped tighter, pulled her body hard against his. Never letting her think for a moment that she had a hope of escape. Hope was a dangerous thing.
He had no idea where it came from. She was totally under his control. But hope had infected her, as tangible in her body as an electric pulse. Without warning she stiffened, let go of his hands and swung her fists over her own head at his face.
A fumbling blow. The shock of it. He let her go. She hit the ground and the scream erupted out of her, rapturous, like a song. He punched her in the stomach, tried to gather her up. This wasn’t the plan!
She twisted and scrambled against a car. He swiped at her. Missed.
She was up and running. And as she ran, she almost knocked over another girl standing there watching, mouth hanging open, phone in hand.
‘Run!’ his victim screamed at the girl, already disappearing into the fire stairs. ‘Run!’
He righted himself. The new girl was too shocked, appalled by what she’d witnessed, to take a step back out of range. Big brown eyes, dark skin, the slowly opening and closing mouth of a woman feeling paralysing terror wash over her.
She wasn’t his perfect girl, but she was a delightful surprise.
He seized her wrist.
SHE FIRST BECAME aware of the television in the corner, its robotic noises, bleeping and zooming and piercing jingles, the crash and tumble of advertisements. Caitlyn shifted her face against the mattress. She was sweating badly, or bleeding, she couldn’t tell. She tried to speak and found her lips were sealed by tape. Panic shot through her. A spike of pain that reached from the heel of her bare foot to the crown of her skull. She turned, struggled against the tape on her wrists. Her nose was broken.
A damp concrete room. A bare mattress, a blanket bunched at the end. Rusty beer kegs and wooden crates, a pile of trash in the corner waist high. Mop heads and buckets and a milk crate full of bottles, a vacuum cleaner covered in an inch of dust. Caitlyn reeled, tried to get her bearings, scrabbled against the wall. Her ankles were bound. The terror was so loud in her brain that for a moment it blocked out all sound from the television. She saw him standing before the screen, turned away from her, his hands hanging by his sides.
The university. The car park. She’d been on the phone to her mother in California, fending off her ridiculous warnings about the killer on campus. It had been bright. Sunny. Afternoon. Then, in a snap, a different picture altogether, the curtain sailing closed and sailing open again on a horror-movie scene. The girl fighting with the hooded figure between the cars, rushing past her, a blur of heat. Run! Run! Caitlyn hadn’t run. Hadn’t done anything. And then he’d been right in front of her, impossibly fast, his fist swinging down towards her face.
Every story she’d ever heard of abduction and death and rape rushed through her mind, a whole catalogue of atrocities collected since she was a child and her teacher first taught them about Stranger Danger. True crime novels she’d browsed in airports. Macabre, late-night episodes of SVU, young girls being dragged out of sex dungeons, recounting atrocities, shivering in the witness stand. Now you are one of them, Caitlyn thought. Now your nightmare begins.
The man in front of the television was angry. His broad shoulders were high. She watched, wild-eyed, as he gripped the back of his shaven skull, ran a hand down his neck and back again, scratched hard. Caitlyn looked at the television screen just beyond him, the police leading a cuffed, black-haired man towards a waiting paddy wagon.
‘… the arrest of Samuel Jacob Blue over the murders of three young women abducted from the area surrounding the University of Sydney campus. Police say Blue was apprehended in …’
‘This wasn’t the plan,’ the man with the shaved head murmured. He turned and glanced at Caitlyn where she sat huddled against the wall. He seemed to be assessing, his mind churning with decisions. ‘Fuck. Fuck!’
The rage rippled through him. She saw it creep up his arms until his neck tightened, the thick jugular standing out against sweat-sheened skin.
He turned and watched the screen and gripped his head again. ‘It wasn’t finished yet!’ Caitlyn watched as he knelt, almost shakily, before the screen. His fingers twitched, inches away from the glass, as Samuel Jacob Blue appeared, glancing fearfully at the crowd as the paddy wagon doors closed on him.
‘I need you,’ her captor said, his eyes locked on Blue. ‘I need you, Sam.’
FOUR MONTHS. ONE hundred and twenty-seven days, to be exact. That’s how long my brother had been in prison for a crime he did not commit. I stood on the steps of the courthouse, ignoring my partner, trying to decide if my maths was correct. It was. As I waited, staring down at my ridiculous high heels, listening to the shouts of the crowd nearby, another day of Sam’s life was being lost. I drew hard on my cigarette, clutched the stupid pink handbag into my side. The passing seconds were agony. Waiting for the court to open once again on the circus that was the Georges River Killer case. Another day I would fail to bring him home.
I am a Sex Crimes detective with the Sydney police. I used to think I was pretty good at my job. Versatile. Adaptable. I had a keen sense for bad men, and I wasn’t afraid of bending the rules to make them admit what they were. A cracked tooth here, a broken finger there. I made men tremble in their seats. Harriet Blue: Terror at Five-Foot Two. While I was the natural enemy of the caged rape suspect, I could be also soft and gentle enough to coax a tiny, bruised child into revealing what his or her abuser had done, when no amount of coddling and bargaining by trained psychologists had struck paydirt.
But, four months earlier, my own colleagues had left the police station where I worked on their way to make the biggest arrest of their careers – a man they believed was a vicious serial killer who had tortured and murdered three university students. No amount of intuition, or skill, or training had prepared me for the fact that that man was my own flesh and blood.
Sam’s case was all the nation was talking about. The newspapers were calling him Australia’s worst serial killer, and that was no small claim – every article compared him with the fiends who’d taken up the mantle before him. Ivan Milat, the Backpacker Murderer. Arnold Sodeman, the Schoolgirl Strangler. Eric Edgar Cooke, the Night Caller. Now came Samuel Jacob Blue, the Georges River Killer, responsible for the prolonged, brutal deaths of three beautiful, young students.
For four months, I’d been determined to do everything right to help my brother go free. He was innocent. I was sure of it. The man who abducted, raped, tortured and strangled the three women I saw every night on the news was not the man who’d once been a boy snuggled beside me in the temporary beds at the offices of the Department of Children’s Services. He was not that terrified boy, whispering to me in the dark, wondering which foster home we were going to be shipped to next. He was not the teenager who’d defended me at various high schools when the kids came to pick on the shabby interlopers. The one who made me birthday cards when our new families forgot. Whoever he was, he did not have my brother’s soulful kindness. His never-ending generosity.
On the footpath nearby, the usual gathering of gawkers and court ghouls waited for the doors to open. One caught my eye and spat on the ground, spoke loudly to his friend in the queue.
‘She knew what he was up to,’ he said. ‘How could she not?’
‘Don’t listen, Harry.’ My partner, Detective Edward Whittacker, tried to take my arm and turn me away from the crowd. ‘You’ll only make yourself madder.’
‘I’m not mad,’ I lied, shrugging him off. ‘I’m cool. I’m calm. Today’s going to be the day. We’ll find it today. The key.’
I’d been talking about the ‘key’ to my brother’s case since his arrest. The thing that freed him. A piece of false testimony. A surprise witness. Something, anything. I’d been looking into Sam’s case, and I hadn’t found the key that proved he wasn’t the killer. But I had high hopes. Hell, my hopes got so high sometimes I had fantasies of the killer himself walking into the courtroom and confessing. Giving up was far from my mind.
I spotted my brother’s prosecutor, the enormous, broad-shouldered Liam Woolfmyer, strolling towards us with a colleague beside him. Whitt had my arm again, his other hand fumbling at his necktie.
‘Don’t say a word,’ he growled.
‘You keep pawing at me and it’ll be more than words you have to worry about.’
‘I’m warning you, Harry.’ Whitt glared over the top of his glasses at me. The gentle, fastidious detective had been mortified to hear me sneer a stream of obscenities at Woolfmyer the first morning of my brother’s hearings.
Sometimes there’s a wild Harriet in me, a woman I can’t control. She rears her ugly head without warning. The comment from the queue already had her twitching. But then I stole a glance at Woolfmyer, and the worst of all things happened. He locked eyes with me, smiled, and leaned over in mock confidence to his companion.
‘Samuel Blue won’t last a single night in Long Bay prison,’ Woolfmyer said. ‘He’s far too pretty. Someone will make him their bitch.’
The bad Harriet in me swelled, like white-hot steam, blinding and painful behind my eyes. As Woolfmyer passed I was already taking steps to catch up with him. I barely heard Whitt’s call.
The few metres between Woolfmyer and me closed in an instant. I was behind him. My hand reaching up, completely beyond my control.
I tapped him on the shoulder. Woolfmyer stopped and turned.
I punched him as hard as I could in the temple.
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN a fighter. It’s necessary, when you have a childhood like mine, to know how to defend yourself physically. I was a scrappy, dirty fighter before my police chief taught me how to box. He made the mistake of honing the self-taught craft of a brutal, remorseless combatant. Size means nothing when you know what you’re doing. I swung up and to the left with a hard, balled right fist and smashed the prosecutor with all the force in my arm, shoulder and hip.
The only sound was the dull thump of his body on the pavement, the whisper of his settling robes, a big bird brought down out of the sky by a rifle blast.
My regret was instant. I looked around. Woolfmyer’s friend staggering back. Whitt nearby, his hand still out, reaching, desperate. The crowd, a huddle of journalists. Horror and guilt rushed up through my body. Cameras flashed.
I felt a bizarre impulse to reach down and help the unconscious lawyer to his feet. To brush him off, slap him on the back, pretend it was all going to be OK.
But everything was far from OK. The police officer who had been guarding the front doors of the courthouse began to march towards me, taking his cuffs from his belt.
I STOOD IN the entrance to the holding cell and stared at the women there. They were like lazy, uninterested cats lounging on the steel benches. One girl was lying on her belly on the floor, a magazine spread out before her. There were more magazines in a stack on one of the benches, trashy celebrity rags. An adult slumber party in a concrete bedroom. A gaggle of arrested shoplifters, prostitutes, drug runners. I went to the nearest bench and sat down, put my face in my hands as the steel door slammed shut.
I guessed a lot of women who ended up in a cell at the Parramatta Police headquarters thought what I was thinking in that moment. That their lives were over. That they’d had some fuck-ups in their lifetime, sure, but this was a whole new level of idiocy. Holding cells are where mistakes are offered up for evaluation. This is it. This is where all a person’s chickens come home to roost.
Detective Inspector Nigel Spader was at the door to the holding cell now as I sat cracking my aching knuckles. He leaned on the wall and looked through the bars at me, folding his hairy ginger arms.
‘Harriet,’ he said. ‘What a mess you’ve got yourself in.’
Spader had spearheaded the case against my brother. During the active investigation, I’d fought hard for entry onto the Georges River Task Force team, annoyed and confused as to why I was being kept away from what was possibly the nation’s most important case. I had the skills. I had the enthusiasm. I’d had no idea that I was being shut out because the main suspect was Sam. I’d always hated Nigel anyway, had got into a few fistfights with him in the past.
‘What’s the word?’ I asked.
‘Mr Woolfmyer’s going to be fine. He’s got a mild concussion.’
‘Is he going to go for an assault charge?’
‘Of course he is,’ Nigel snorted. ‘You knocked him out cold.’ ‘Woolfmyer, the lawyer?’ the girl on the ground broke in. ‘You punched a lawyer?’
I turned towards Nigel and tried to signal that my conversation with him wasn’t for public consumption. But the other women in the holding cell were watching me with interest now.
‘If they’re going to lock me up, I want my notes on Sam’s case,’ I said. ‘They’re in my handbag. I’ll still be able to work on his defence.’
‘Harry.’ Nigel shifted closer to the bars. ‘Your brother is a killer. You’re going to have to move past the denial phase and wake up to what’s happening here. I know you and I have had our differences. But we didn’t lock him up to spite you. We locked him up because he murdered three girls.’
I grabbed a handful of the magazines from the stack beside me and hurled them at the bars. Nigel flinched. The girls in the cell around me cheered. I was shocked by the noise, brought suddenly out of my fury. I realised my jaw was clenched so tight that my teeth were clicking as they ground together.
‘I reckon you forced that confession out of him,’ I told Nigel, giving my fellow inmates a warning look. ‘There was a lot of pressure to catch the killer.’
Nigel shook his head. ‘Harry, you and Sam are violent people. I’ve experienced your family’s violence personally.’ He touched his brow, an old scar I’d given him about the seventh or eighth time he’d parked in my designated spot.
The girl on the floor had shifted closer to me, her grin spread wide.
‘Wait a minute,’ she chirped up. ‘You mean, you punched this guy, too?’ she said, flicking her chin at my colleague.
‘I did,’ I said. I looked at Nigel. ‘And he cried like a baby.’
I WAS TEACHING the women in the cell how to land a left hook without fracturing their wrists when I noticed Pops standing at the door, waiting for the guard to unlock it.
My chief. My friend. My boxing trainer, a man who’d also seen the hair-trigger aggression that thrived in the very marrow of my bones. Pops said nothing as we walked down the sterile hall towards the offices. I tottered on my ridiculous heels. Eventually I stopped, reached down and pulled them off. We were standing between the row of holding cells and the doors to the bullpen where my colleagues worked, a corridor between two worlds. My brother existed in the world we’d just walked through, the criminal world. My own life, until then, had been ahead of us, in the swirling blue universe of police and their struggle against evil-doers. Here I was, balancing on the tightrope connecting the two.
‘I had a private chat to Judge Steiner,’ Pops said. ‘We went ahead and held the assault hearing in your absence.’
‘What?’ I said. Suddenly, I could hardly find words, which was unusual for me.
‘Woolfmyer agreed not to push forward with an assault conviction, but he applied for an AVO, and Steiner granted it.’
Still no words came.
Pops raised his bushy eyebrows. ‘Yeah. You’re banned from the trial. You’re banned from the entire courthouse, in fact. You’re not allowed to come within five hundred metres of Prosecutor Woolfmyer. Which means anywhere he regularly goes is off limits to you. The prison where your brother is, for example. Sam’s lawyer’s office.’
‘This is …’ I was shivering with rage.
‘This is perfectly reasonable.’ Pops shrugged, angry. ‘Judge Steiner could have recorded the conviction and granted Woolfmyer the apprehended violence order. But he didn’t. Because I convinced him you were going to get your arse out of town.’
A young probationary constable was walking up the hall with my handbag, confiscated from me when I was arrested. I snatched the stupid pink bag off him and started rummaging through it for cigarettes.
‘I told Steiner I’d find you a case. Send you off into the desert again for a couple of weeks so you can cool down.’
‘I’m not going back out there,’ I snapped. ‘I’m going to sit on the front steps of the courthouse. If I can’t go inside, I’ll still be there. I’m not leaving Sam.’
‘That’s exactly what Judge Steiner said you’d do.’ Pops shook his head. ‘He wanted to lock you up instead. I said you’re not going to be on the courthouse steps. You’ll be out in the desert, out of trouble, just like you were after they picked Sam up.’
‘Nope,’ I said. ‘Not happening.’
I couldn’t find my cigarettes. My hands were shaking too badly.
‘Blue,’ Pops called as I walked towards the door, following at my heels. ‘This is not up for discussion. You get out of here or he’ll reverse his decision. And then you’ll be no good to Sam at all. You want to try working on his defence from a jail cell? You’ll be lucky if they give you paper and a pencil in there.’
I stopped by the big glass doors.
There was a certain appeal to what he was saying. I could go back out into the Australian badlands, out among the tiny towns where people who didn’t want to be recognised fled. I could run away from the horror of my brother’s situation. Blessed denial.
‘When does the order expire?’
‘Nine days.’
I bit my lip. I wanted so badly to cry. But I was not a crier. I was not weak. I squeezed the doorhandle, trying to hold on to some semblance of control.
‘You fucked up, Blue,’ Pops said. It was rare that he swore. I looked at his eyes. ‘You’re a hothead. And I love that about you. It’s half of what makes you a good cop. Your fearlessness. Your fire. But you need to get away from here before you do some real damage. This?’ He flipped the frilly collar of my blouse. ‘This is not working. When you’re not bashing prosecutors you’re standing around pissed as hell and doing a bad job hiding it. The princess get-up makes you look about as harmless as a hired assassin.’
I exhaled. I wanted a hug. But I was not a hugger, either.
‘It’s only nine days,’ he said. ‘How bad could things go in that time?’
I LEANED MY head against the car window in the dark.
Beyond the glass, New South Wales desert rolled by, barren and hard. I was out here again. In exile for my own good, for the good of Sam’s case.
I was six hours from Sydney, four of them by plane, two of them by car, on the straight edge of the western border of New South Wales. Red dirt country. We were headed to a tiny, dim star in a constellation of sparse towns, most notably White Cliffs to the south of us (population 103) and Tibooburra to the west of us (population 262). My driver, a plump and pretty blonde woman wearing a dusty police uniform and standard-issue baseball cap, shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel. She’d been jibber-jabbering since we left the airstrip, about the region, its history, seasonal precautions about snakes. I was so angry at myself, so distracted, I’d hardly been answering her. I sighed quietly. She was gearing up to take a run at me about why I was there. How I could possibly explain what I’d done? I could feel it – the curiosity.
‘So the papers said …’ She licked her lips, hesitated, as most people do. ‘They said that the lawyer made some derogatory remark towards you?’
‘My brother,’ I answered. ‘He made a joke about my brother being raped in prison. I work in Sex Crimes. Rape jokes aren’t funny.’
‘Struth! You’re right, they’re not. Plus, it’s your brother,’ the cop sympathised. ‘I mean, it doesn’t matter what he did. He’s still –’
‘He didn’t do anything. He’s innocent,’ I said.
I realised miserably that I didn’t even know this officer’s name. My mind was so tangled up in my personal life that I’d completely forgotten it as soon as she’d introduced herself. I reached down for the case file at my feet and pretended I was shifting it to the back seat so it wouldn’t get damaged. I glanced at the name on the cover. Senior Sergeant Victoria Snale.
‘I’ve got to say,’ – Snale’s voice was irrepressibly cheerful – ‘it made an amazing picture for the front pages. You standing over the lawyer. Him all splayed out on the concrete. It must have really been some punch.’
I felt microscopically uplifted. ‘It doesn’t have to be hard if it’s on target.’
‘And now you’re here,’ she sighed brightly. ‘I can’t say I’m sad about that. It’s pretty lonely out here, to be honest. It’ll be good to have some more cops around. Someone who can relate. You know?’
‘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.
‘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.’
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!’
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.
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.