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Gone by Midnight

Page 22

by Candice Fox


  ‘No.’ I shrugged. ‘But that doesn’t mean they weren’t there, I suppose.’

  We stood in silence for a long time, the sun roasting the back of my neck, a not wholly unpleasant feeling.

  ‘All right, here it is. Another brilliant criminal prediction brought to you by Amanda Pharrell,’ Amanda said. ‘Hogan’s taken Richie, killed him and thrown his body down an embankment or a cliff somewhere. Realises he’s picked a bad spot, has to move it. He plans to retrieve it, cut it up, move it.’

  ‘It’s not a bad theory,’ I said, watching her face, marvelling at how emotionless it was. Only the streaks and shadows of the light bouncing off the rippling water moved against her eyes. She put out a hand.

  ‘That’s mine. Now you come up with one. Loser makes cake.’

  Amanda always bets cake, on cases, on the weather, on the outcome of football games. There’s a standing agreement between us that whoever’s responsible for solving each case we work together, the ‘winner’ gets a cake made by the other, the ‘loser’. I have demanded she make me complicated, elaborate cakes in an attempt to discourage her from arranging the bets so often, or talking about their outcomes in front of victims or police personnel, but she’s persisted. I’ve found her drenched in sweat, surrounded by curious cats in her apartment, the kitchen a mess as she tries to temper white chocolate on a chilled marble slate. But I have also downloaded recipes for various candy-based no-bake slices to satisfy my obligations. I had no theory on Hogan’s need for the rope and the hook he had bought, but I promised to mull over one.

  ‘We better find this kid soon,’ Amanda sighed. ‘If he’s been dumped anywhere around here he’s going to be eaten. The crocs will get him in the swamps, and the dingoes will get him in the mountains.’

  The cops within earshot of us turned at Amanda’s words, but before there could be any confrontation my partner walked off towards the foyer, smiling at the officers as she went.

  Dylan Hogan had run east from his caravan in the upper section of the Big Lots caravan park, splashing through the creek with the croc warning signs and disappearing into the swamps where pursuit by sniffer dogs would be impossible. From there, we needed to guess where he’d gone.

  I drove and considered Hogan’s problem. If it had been me, I’d have made my way south through the marshlands, risking life and limb to try to make it to the Cairns Golf Club. From there, it was a straight shot west over the golf course, through the forests lining the fairways to the Bruce Highway, where it would be a mystery to police whether I’d hitchhiked north or south. I’d have gone wherever the traffic was heading, anything to get me out of the area before the roadblocks and cordons came down.

  But Dylan Hogan was not me. He was tougher, leaner and more practised in running, a man who had lived a life shifting through the shadows on the edge of society, going days without food in the pursuit of shelter or days without shelter in the pursuit of food. It was possible he had gone east rather than west, into the kilometres of wilderness the locals called White Rock, but which in reality was a sprawling green and brown tangle of impenetrable rainforest. If Hogan had managed to navigate the thick, stinking mud traps, collapsing sandbars, thickets of poisonous vines and croc-infested waterways here in the full darkness of the night, he might have made it out to Chinaman Creek, where there were any number of yabby-fishing boats and abandoned, barnacle-encrusted kayaks lifted up and carried away from the tourist parks. He might have taken one of these across the creek to Trinity Forest, a huge, featureless nature reserve manned only by rangers in four-wheel drives.

  The question was where Hogan was going, and who would harbour him. I knew that there were dozens, if not hundreds, of abandoned little houses on the banks of the creeks and inlets twisting and winding away from the main vein of Chinaman Creek, dwellings that had taken one bad flood and not been worth the trouble to reconstruct. These places might have been a good option for Hogan to spend a night, but in the long term he’d need food, and the mosquitos in those areas would drive him wild, the glass in the abandoned houses invariably having been punched out by bored local teens. There were dope growers nestled in the depths of the wilds, their crops made invisible from helicopters by the thick rainforest canopy, but you had to know where these camps were or stumbling upon them was near impossible, and there was always the threat that before getting anywhere near a camp you’d trip one of their homemade booby traps and they’d come and shoot you before you could explain yourself.

  In the end, Amanda and I decided that if Hogan hadn’t hitched a ride from the Bruce Highway he would be holed up with the homeless of the Cairns region. They were his people. He knew their code, their practices, and among them he would be just one of many fugitives trying to start again, public enemies shying away from the light.

  I followed Amanda along the winding dirt roads on the edge of the cane fields and marshlands, keeping up with her at times only by following her fresh tracks in the soft clay. It was clear almost immediately that the police were on the same mission we were – patrol vehicles popping up unexpectedly from around tight corners in the forest, officers giving me the stink eye as they navigated their car around mine on the narrow bends. I stopped at the first few camps and agreed to let Amanda go in ahead of me. With her tattoos, wild hair and crazy stories, she seemed to get a curious if not appreciative gaze from the drunks and skittish men we found lounging on the banks of the rivers. I sat in the car and watched her gesticulating wildly at them in the midst of their little tent communities, unable to tell if she was describing our quarry or regaling them with tales from her extraordinary collection of half-true adventures. When the men nodded or shrugged or gazed off at the river at her words, she slipped them banknotes from a thick bundle she had folded into the pocket of her motorcycle jacket, and that seemed to get them talking.

  She walked back to the car on the fifth or sixth stop and leaned in the window, squinting in the afternoon sunlight as she pushed her sparkly sunglasses up onto her brow.

  ‘The fuzz is going through ahead of us and messing up people’s camps,’ she said. ‘They’re pushing guys around and kicking over their shit. It’s not making for very conducive witnesses.’

  ‘You might end up spending your life savings just finding out the time of day.’ I glanced at her jacket pocket. ‘How much have you got there?’

  ‘A bit.’ She gave me a dismissive wave. ‘It’s fine. I’ll claim it on tax. Work expenses.’

  I knew she wasn’t serious, but the appearance of the money in Amanda’s hands had sent shivers through me. A rumour had circulated after our last major case that Amanda had made off with millions of dollars belonging to an ancient corrupt police officer. There was no way to say if there was any truth to it. I knew how the Crimson Lake cops felt about Amanda, and most of the rumours had originated with them. The facts were that Amanda had busted a pair of men trying to find said missing millions, and no millions were found, and Amanda had at times demonstrated almost supernatural observational skills. Not much to go on. But Amanda had given me an unexpected pay rise mere days after the case ended, and here she was handing out twenties and fifties around the homeless camps of Cairns like a pint-sized Robin Hood touring Sherwood Forest.

  The handout seemed to be generating good will. The homeless men and women were giving her tips about all kinds of local crimes, tidbits we could tuck away for use in future cases. But no one was willing to admit they had seen Dylan Hogan, and Amanda’s pile of money was thinning.

  We had arrived at a camp beneath an overpass off the Bruce Highway when my phone buzzed on the seat beside me. It was a message from Laney Bass.

  Reminds me of you, the message said. There was a laughing face emoji and a link. I clicked the link and my phone took me to YouTube, where ‘Watching the Detectives’ by Elvis Costello began to play. I laughed, then checked to see if Amanda could see me. She was adjusting something on her bike. I put the phone down and tried to think of songs about animals or veterinarians, feeling like a t
eenager writing secret love letters to my sweetheart at the back of maths class.

  The dread and guilt about lying to Laney began to creep back in and I tried to shake it off, actually bristled in my seat. There was no need to ruin a good thing yet. It was possible, I told myself, that she would never find out. That we’d go on a date, have a great time, kiss and hold each other, laugh and roll around and make pancakes in the morning. It was possible that we’d go on like this for years, getting bored at work and sending each other funny texts. I remembered her patting Lillian’s hair; the girl instinctively trusting her, and Laney naturally loving and caring for my child in return. Maybe it was a sign. The odds were a billion to one, sure. But if I never told Laney about my accusation, maybe it would never enter our lives.

  I copied the YouTube link for ‘The Love Cats’ by The Cure. Love was maybe a bit forward, but I thought it was worth the risk. I wrote Got you in my head! and attached the link, and had just hit send when I realised I had replied to the wrong number.

  The phone started ringing. I squeezed my eyes shut and answered.

  ‘Is there something you want to tell me, Conkaffey?’ Chief Clark asked.

  ‘No, Chief. There’s certainly not.’

  ‘For the girlfriend, was it?’ he asked. I got out of the car.

  ‘No. Yes.’

  ‘Well. I was going to give you a call anyway. They’ve found a burn site at the DeCasper place,’ he said. ‘And they’ve found charred remains in the soil where the dig was conducted.’

  Amanda approached me, trying to analyse my facial expressions, my face flushing with embarrassment and then suddenly draining with dread.

  ‘They think they’ve got bone chips. We don’t know how old they are.’

  ‘Are they human?’ I grimaced.

  ‘We don’t know. Dr Valerie Gratteur is going to take a look at them. She’s based in Cairns. She’s very good.’

  More dread. If Val had agreed to look at the remains from the DeCasper dig, that meant she’d likely be taking Lillian with her to the morgue. My three-year-old daughter in a morgue with bones and a morgue woman. Kelly was going to kill me. I told Clark to keep us updated and filled Amanda in on the news.

  ‘Could be anything.’ Amanda clicked her tongue, nonchalant. ‘A pig. A horse.’

  ‘Why would you burn and then bury a horse?’

  ‘What else would you do with a dead horse?’ she asked.

  ‘I guess I’ve never had that problem,’ I conceded.

  We walked towards the camp together.

  The set-up was much the same as the others we’d been visiting: a group of tents clustered at the bottom of the rocky slope beneath the bridge, their fabric tops spattered with pigeon droppings from a shelf above them. Some of the men here were passing through, but there were two more permanent-looking dwellings on the concrete verge before the river, fishing lines set up so that they could be tended to while a person slept beneath a sheet of corrugated iron propped up by slabs of plywood. A communal billycan was boiling over a rock-lined campfire, almost as though they’d put a pot on in anticipation of our arrival. Two men were lounging just out of range of the fire on blankets, one fanning himself with a scrap of cardboard, the other sleeping, his mouth open and sagging. By the water’s edge, wearing only a black cotton dress that was pock-marked with moth-holes, a woman was checking the fishing lines, pulling each up and testing the weight with her index finger to see if anything had stolen her bait.

  ‘Hearty hobos! Tremendous tramps! Boisterous bums and feisty fringe-dwellers, lend me your ears!’ Amanda announced as we arrived, thrusting out her arms. ‘I am Amanda Pharrell, scourge of Crimson Lake! I come for your assistance and I bring you offerings of shiny coins and ancient wisdom!’

  She took out her stack of notes and ‘made it rain’, as the saying goes, showering the sleeping hobo on the blanket with twenties. He didn’t stir. The man fanning himself sat up and dug deep into his ear with his pinkie finger, as though clearing room for Amanda’s words to get through.

  ‘Whaddaya want?’ He waved an arm at us. ‘Fargoff. We’re allowed-a be here. It ain’t council land.’

  ‘Clean your other ear out too, mate,’ Amanda said. ‘I’m not trying to move you on. I’m looking for this guy.’ She crouched before the fire and handed her phone to the man, the screen showing a picture of Hogan. I watched as she picked up a plastic coffee cup from a pile of debris near the fire. ‘Is this coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Ted, you want a cup?’

  ‘No thanks.’ I put my hands in my pockets, feeling strangely itchy and unwashed. The man on the blanket had noticed Amanda’s twenties and was gathering them up, hardly glancing at the phone.

  ‘Seen that guy around in the past twenty-four hours?’ she asked.

  ‘Nah, nah.’ The man glanced behind him to see if the woman at the water’s edge had noticed the money. ‘I ain’t seen anything like him.’

  ‘You hardly looked.’

  ‘I didn’t look at all, mate.’ The man grinned at Amanda. ‘I’ve only got ten per cent of me vision. I’m legally blind.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ I remarked. He hadn’t had any trouble seeing the twenties littered all over his partner a few feet away. Amanda slurped her coffee loudly, smacking her lips and frowning into the cup.

  ‘This coffee tastes weird. What’s in this?’

  ‘Hepatitis,’ the man laughed. He seemed to find his joke funnier and funnier as the seconds passed, eventually dissolving into giggles and rolling on his side.

  The woman by the water had caught my attention. She’d finished checking the lines and glanced over at us before taking a pair of muddy black work boots from outside a tent and opening the zipper. She put the boots inside the tent and zipped it back up. I thought I saw something move against the taut fabric side of the dirty little dwelling.

  ‘Have the cops come through here today?’ Amanda asked, unfathomably still drinking the coffee.

  ‘Oh, they came,’ the man said, fanning himself again. ‘I told ’em to fargoff just like I told youse. This here ain’t council land. It belongs to me brother-in-law. Me dad’s brother-in-law, I should say.’

  ‘Is it just the four of you here?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep,’ the man said. He folded one of the twenties in half and used the bent corner to scrape the dirt out of his toenails. The penny took a while to drop. ‘Three, I mean. Just the three of us.’

  ‘Right.’ I put a hand on the gun tucked into the back of my pants. Amanda put her coffee down. ‘Could I get you all out here so we can talk, please?’

  ‘We’re all here,’ the woman piped up, pushing her greasy hair back behind her ear. ‘This is all there –’

  The man on the blanket grabbed the billycan off the fire with his bare hand and hurled it at me, the scalding water hitting my lower legs. I barely felt the burns. Amanda had sprung to her feet and bolted for the tent by the water’s edge just as Hogan ripped down the zipper and emerged, almost losing his balance in the dusty earth as he turned and sprinted under the bridge. I drew my gun, shouted, but Amanda was doubling back towards me for her bike. I ran down the hill and under the bridge, Hogan by now a distant smear of colour in the long grass.

  ‘Stop!’ I called, swinging the gun as I ran, every muscle springing awake in pain and protest at the sudden urgent movement. ‘Hogan, stop!’

  I don’t know how long we ran for. My body passed through its initial shock phase, the pain eased and I warmed into a steady rhythm, making gains on Hogan but too puffed to call out to him. My limbs remembered chases of days past, when I’d run through suburban or city streets in full tactical gear, climbing and leaping over fences, my heavy boots thumping the pavement. Amanda whizzed past me on the bike before I could hear its thick, puttering engine, almost knocking me off the path. Hogan heard the bike and ducked into the rainforest, blasting through a wall of vines and brush without stopping.

  Amanda ditched the bike and we followed, panting, my partner having just enough breath to
shout after our quarry.

  ‘Hogan!’ she yelled. ‘Stop, you stupid fuck!’

  I lost sight of Hogan, followed Amanda, slammed into her as she lost sight of him too. Around us the rainforest was alive with noise, birds in the canopy, wind through the undergrowth. Everything seemed to move. I couldn’t catch my breath. Amanda had been whipped in the face by a low-hanging branch and her cheek was streaked with thin, bright blood.

  ‘Motherfucker,’ she gasped, grabbing at a stitch in her side, her eyes darting around the forest. ‘Mo … ther … fu–’

  She cut off her own words, seeming to spot him in the distance. She ran, but the stitch was bringing her down. I pulled ahead. When I found Hogan he was standing at the edge of an embankment, his chest heaving beneath his filthy shirt, his arms lined with scratches the same as the one Amanda had across her cheek.

  ‘Hands up.’ I lifted my gun. ‘On your knees.’

  Dylan Hogan was even more ragged on the run than he had been in his everyday life, the revelation of his crime seeming to have somehow stripped weight and strength from him, hollowing his cheeks, reddening the whites of his eyes. He looked over the embankment.

  Amanda’s gun appeared beside mine. ‘I will shoot you, Hogan,’ Amanda promised.

  ‘It was an accident,’ the man said. His face crumpled momentarily as emotion overwhelmed him, his teeth showing between his lips. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. It was a bloody accident.’

  ‘We can talk about it later.’ I gestured with my gun. ‘Get on your knees now or Amanda will shoot. She’s fucking crazy.’

  I felt Amanda glance at me. Hogan gripped his hair, spittle flying from between his teeth as he fought for breath, fought to hold back his tears.

  ‘They won’t believe me now,’ he said. ‘They won’t believe I didn’t mean it. I’ve ruined everything. I’ve ruined everything. Oh, Jesus. Oh, Jesus. I killed a fucking kid.’

  ‘Where’s the body?’ I asked, but Dylan didn’t have a chance to answer. Amanda started walking forward. I didn’t know if she was going to shoot Hogan, hit him with the gun or try to make a grab for him without my assistance. I reached for her shoulder, and in the time it took to distract Amanda from her goal, Hogan threw himself off the embankment.

 

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