Whitt was following Vada through the tidy kitchen and out the back of the house, the only sound in his ears the rushing of his own breath. He knew he was gasping, panting loudly, but couldn’t stop the sound. Images he wasn’t sure he’d even really seen were flashing before his eyes, as detailed and colourful as photographs.
Matted hair. Strips of wet duct tape. A handprint on a wall.
A group of three men in tactical suits rushed up to them in the lush garden.
‘Detective, I’ve got men north, west and east,’ an officer said. ‘I’ll send this team south.’
‘No, send these men west,’ Vada said. ‘I’ve just heard a callout on the command line that Regan’s been sighted near the end of the street.’
The officer nodded and the men fled. Whitt found he was grabbing Vada’s arm, something to hold on to as terror rushed through him in waves.
‘I didn’t hear any callout.’ He tugged at the radio on his belt. ‘Are we on the same frequency?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ Vada peeled his hand from her arm. ‘Stay here. Take charge of the crime scene. I’ll do a quick sweep south and be back in a flash.’
Before he could answer, she was gone, her absence leaving him cold, shaken. He caught a glimpse of her, gun drawn, as she disappeared through the gate and into the forest at the southern end of the property.
Chapter 65
IT WAS TIME to run.
I’d stayed as long as I could, crouched behind Eloise and Gary Jansen’s house, watching the patrol car lights on the trees. I’d called the local police as soon as Regan gave me the address, not knowing if there was a chance the couple might still be alive. I’d arrived just minutes before the first officers, hoping to catch Regan, but finding only my dead foster parents. As crews of tactical officers headed towards me, blind to my presence, I turned and ran through the yard, through the gate.
I imagined myself running from what I had seen, but as I pushed on, the tears forced their way up from my chest, into my throat. I sobbed once, giving myself just a second to surrender to the pain. Then the fury came, hot and comforting as it always was, rushing like fire through my veins. I glanced up and saw a helicopter tracking west. Curtains were twitching and front doors were opening. A neighbourhood responding to Regan’s horror.
Eloise and Gary had fostered me when I was a teenager. I had almost no memory of my time there, meaning I’d probably been in their care only a couple of months. The address hadn’t rung a bell, but the extensive garden, full of wet flowers and flat, sprawling trees, had. I remembered Eloise had put the most effort into trying to crack my armour. She’d started predictably, with baked treats. Invitations to have ‘girl’ chats. New clothes. The couple had been fostering a pair of toddlers at the time they had me. I had spent much of my time in the garden, brooding in the shade of one of the trees, a book in my lap that I only lifted as a shield when Eloise approached me.
I ran through the forest now and turned left down a wide dirt track cutting through the trees. I was breathless, unable to stop a furious growling coming from between my teeth, tears streaming down my face. The blood rushing through my head was pounding so hard that when I slowed and searched my pockets for the keys to the bike, I didn’t even hear her approaching. I went to the bike, hidden behind a huge eucalypt trunk, and brought the keys out of my pocket.
‘Harry.’
I jumped at the voice, turned and saw a red-haired woman standing at the roadside, seemingly as puffed as I was. I’d seen the woman through the back windows of the house, sweeping the crime scene with her gun. Whitt’s new partner. She must have spotted me as I turned and ran off into the woods.
She didn’t say another word. As I turned to flee, she raised the gun and fired.
Chapter 66
THE FIRST SHOT whizzed over my shoulder, the muzzle flash lighting up the trees around us. She was not experienced with the weapon. The gun had kicked and she had to adjust her grip on it, her fingers sliding, probably with sweat from the run. I turned and saw she was aiming right at my chest. I fell, scrambled, the keys falling from my hand. I got up and ran. The second shot knocked my right leg out from under me. I sprawled on the soil, then rose and staggered away from the trail and into the trees.
I’d been shot before, so I recognised the sensation. A biting, burning pain in my calf, creeping up to fever pitch, making the whole limb shake as I powered along. I told myself I wasn’t going to stop, though every ounce of my body begged me to.
The forest floor fell away suddenly, a steep embankment. I rolled and slid, pushing myself off a thick tree trunk, using the momentum to keep my pace towards the river.
Chapter 67
WHITT COULD BARELY comprehend what he had seen. He walked stiff-legged down onto the track where Vada was standing. She was panting with adrenaline, trying to unjam the pistol’s slide and eject the round stuck in the chamber. When Whitt’s foot snapped a twig lying across the road Vada turned on him, her eyes wild.
‘You shot her,’ Whitt breathed, hardly believing the words as they came out of his mouth. ‘You shot Harry.’
‘She pulled a gun on me,’ Vada said, handing the weapon to Whitt. Whitt unjammed the pistol as though in a dream, picking the round up from the mud with shaking fingers. Vada held her hand out for the weapon, but Whitt found that his own hands were clamped on the gun so tightly, he didn’t seem to be able to give it back. His mind was screaming for him not to hand it over.
Again and again, he saw Vada’s arm rise as she pointed the gun at the shadowy figure of Harry.
Harry’s back had been turned.
Hadn’t it?
‘Harry’s now a dangerous fugitive,’ Vada said. ‘She pointed a gun at an officer. You saw it. You saw her try to fire on me, didn’t you?’
Whitt stood trembling, looking at Vada’s open palm.
‘Whitt,’ Vada said. ‘Give me the gun.’
He didn’t resist as she pried the weapon from him. She tucked it into her holster, her eyes imploring him. When her hands came to his shoulders, he almost sank into her arms.
‘I need you to back me, Whitt,’ she said. ‘The way I’ve been backing you. Remember those officers on the bridge? No one needs to know about this.’
‘She was turned away.’
‘You’re buzzed out of your mind. You don’t know what you saw. Harry’s your friend. She made a mistake. We’ll find her before she hurts herself or anyone else.’
He said nothing. She gave his hand a squeeze, then went ahead up the narrow animal trail towards the crime scene. While her back was turned, Whitt considered his plan.
Chapter 68
THE OLD ADAGE was that crime didn’t pay. Pops thought that even though that probably wasn’t true, there was something to be said for maintaining the illusion. He parked the patrol car a block down from Judge Boscke’s enormous house in Kirribilli, thinking that while he was saving the judge the embarrassment of being seen to be hosting a police officer in the early evening, he was probably loading that same embarrassment on some politician or actress or another. As he switched off the ignition, a reminder pinged on his phone. Pops opened his internet app and found the live feed of the press conference without trouble. A dark-haired woman was on the screen, reading from a piece of paper at a lectern. Cameras flashed in front of her. The paper in her hand was shaking, as was her voice.
‘My name is Annie Parish. Doctor Samantha Parish was my sister,’ the woman said. ‘She was a warm, clever, funny person. She was a gifted medical professional, and a good mother to my beautiful niece Isobel, who was also taken. I’ve lost two members of my family to Regan Banks.’
Pops turned the sound up on his phone, glancing outside the car.
‘It is my understanding,’ the woman continued, wiping at a tear with a trembling hand, ‘that there is a police officer, Detective Harriet Blue, who is missing out there somewhere. A reward is being offered for information on her whereabouts. I would like to speak directly to Harriet Blue, if she
is listening.’
Pops winced, realising he had chewed his thumbnail down to the tender flesh beneath. The woman on the screen looked at the cameras, letting the hand that held her written speech settle on the lectern’s surface.
‘Detective Blue,’ Ms Parish said, ‘I encourage you to find that son of a bitch Regan Banks, and kill him.’
Pops’s mouth fell open, as did those of the men and women at the edges of the screen, standing behind Ms Parish. Someone strode forward, a family member maybe, and put a hand on Ms Parish’s shoulders. Tears were streaming down the woman’s face.
‘Make him suffer,’ she said, her blazing eyes looking right down the camera. ‘Make him suffer the way my sister and my niece suffered.’
The crowd of reporters burst into questions, yelling, microphones rising out of the gathering below the stage. Pops watched as the news program cut back to the anchors, and then he shut his phone.
So much for the two-pronged plan.
Chapter 69
POPS WALKED TOWARDS the judge’s house, caught glimpses of the sparkling harbour between the mansions, the golden bridge yawning across the shores. After he was admitted through the gates of the Boscke residence, Pops stood watching a marble water feature bubbling by the front door for an inordi-nate amount of time. Judge Boscke answered the door himself, wearing black slacks and a T-shirt pulled down over a belly rounded by wealth.
The library was on the second floor. It wasn’t often that Pops felt young these days, but he did following the judge up the stairs, pausing to give him a better lead every three steps or so. They sat in leather armchairs, and no drink was offered, though there was an elaborate drinks table by the windows. It was a bad sign.
‘Joe Woods’s father was a great man,’ Boscke said by way of beginning. ‘I spoke at his funeral.’
Pops felt the air leave his lungs heavily, pressed out by a new, great weight.
‘I’m not trying to make waves here.’ Pops put his hands up in surrender. ‘Obviously, Joe and I have our differences. We’re not on the same page about running this investigation, and that’s fine. But disarming me so that he can go ahead and do things his way? That was wrong.’
‘He shouldn’t have suspended you,’ the judge reasoned. ‘From what I know of Joe, he was probably just trying to be the big man in town. He’s a hothead. It works for him. Sometimes you need the swift, heavy-handed players in this game and sometimes you need the slow, methodical types, like yourself. But the two types shouldn’t interfere with each other.’
‘I’m not going to obey the suspension,’ Pops said.
‘Nor should you,’ the judge said. ‘This Banks fellow is a runaway train and we’re all his terrified passengers. We need everyone we’ve got on this.’
Pops shifted, preparing to begin his request.
‘I know why you’re here,’ Boscke said before he could speak. ‘The sealed report. I can’t help you with that.’
Pops slumped in his chair.
‘In accessing the sealed files on Banks, he’s inadvertently cut you out,’ the judge said. ‘Even if I wanted to tell you what those records say, I couldn’t. I don’t have them here, and the approval was for Woods only. I rushed it through because I know the man. If you want to see them you’ll have to have Joe show you or you’ll have to make an application to the court yourself, which will take time.’
‘Woods isn’t going to let me see the file.’
‘What’s your interest in it, exactly?’ Boscke asked.
Pops explained his theory that something in Regan’s early childhood might be calling him, that maybe he was heading south, leading Harriet towards a place that was meaningful to him.
‘If there was some clue in the files, why would Joe keep that from you?’
Because he’s an arsehole, Pops thought.
‘Maybe he’s missed something in there,’ Pops sighed. ‘He doesn’t see the file’s significance. He’s very focused on finding Harriet. He doesn’t trust her.’
‘I think we can both understand why that is,’ the judge reasoned. Pops hadn’t considered it before, but perhaps part of Woods’s hyper-focus on Harriet was to do with his own daughter’s troubles. At seventeen years old, Tonya Woods had been in the back of a vehicle full of her less-than-reputable friends when a pair of patrol officers pulled them over in Blacktown, in Sydney’s Western suburbs. The officers had made the car as identical to one described driving by a house only minutes earlier and opening fire on the front of a property. The house that was fired upon had seven people in it. A man had been killed, and a six-year-old boy had taken a bullet in the arm as he slept in the front bedroom.
The papers had loved the story. Joe Woods had been an up-and-coming Homicide star not yet faded from the national news, the head of a team who had solved a serial rapist case a month earlier. He’d caught a whiff of celebrity, of the promotions and power that would come with being a police poster boy, and then suddenly his own daughter was on trial for murder. Tonya had escaped with good lawyers and convincing stories about not having any knowledge of what her friends had planned to do. But she had been in and out of the newspapers in the years since; drunk, high, on the periphery of violent crimes.
‘Whatever daddy–daughter issues Joe has with his child, they can’t come into this investigation,’ Pops said. ‘He can’t punish Harry because he doesn’t have the balls to rein in his kid.’
‘What can I say?’ Judge Boscke held up his hands. ‘You’ve got an impasse, the two of you.’
Pops leaned forward, clasped his hands as though in prayer.
‘I know you’ve tried thousands of cases in the family court,’ he said. ‘And Regan was taken into state care more than thirty years ago. You couldn’t possibly remember the details of every single case. But is there anything at all that you can remember from the Banks case? Do you remember what happened with his parents? Why you sealed the file? Did you look at the file before you approved for it to be released to Woods?’
‘Morris.’ The judge shook his head slowly. ‘These days I struggle to remember my own damn phone number. I didn’t look at the file when I signed the release.’
Pops hung his head.
‘All you could do,’ Boscke carried on, ‘is have a look at my notes from the year Banks entered the system. I always kept a journal, especially when I was in the Family Courts. Some of those hearings went on for years.’
The judge stood and went to a set of shelves nearby. He selected a red leather book from a vast collection, opened it and leafed through the pages idly.
‘I might have written about sealing the Regan Banks file. I might not. If there’s anything about it, it’ll be in here somewhere.’
Pops found he’d risen from the chair without meaning to, his fists clenched in anticipation. He could hardly wait to launch into the books as the old man left the room. He took down the one the old man had picked out, but it was the wrong year. He fumbled through the books, sliding them out and dumping them on the little desk, flipping pages and staring at dates. The sections were uneven, the judge’s hand-writing almost indecipherable.
Regan had gone into care in 1982 at seven years old. But when had the state decided they would pursue full custody of Regan? Had Regan’s custody automatically been handed over to the foster care system after the incident that got him removed from his parents, or had there been a hearing? Had his parents fought to have him back? Pops needed to know exactly when the decision to seal the file been handed down in all the proceedings after the incident, and he didn’t even know exactly when the incident, whatever it was, had occurred. Pops found his head was pounding. He sat down at the desk, slightly woozy, and forced himself to advance more slowly through the yellowed, scrawled pages.
Chapter 70
AT FIRST, WHITT tried to get through it one second at a time. Tick, tick, tick. He set his features, cleared his mind, nodded and did what he had to do, his hand on his phone in his pocket, waiting for the safest moment. All afternoon he directed
the techs as the bodies were removed and the evidence and photographs taken, standing beside Vada as she took reports from the teams searching for Regan in the local area. As evening descended, senior officers arrived from Bombala and surrounds and took over some of the required duties, cordoning off the street and keeping the neighbours and press who gathered on the nearby lawns at bay. When he was convinced it was safe, Whitt walked in the dark towards his car. With apprehension sitting sharp and heavy like a rock in his stomach, he glanced back towards the house, where he had left Vada supervising the crime scene, and dialled.
Pops answered on the second ring.
‘I was just going to call you,’ Pops said before Whitt could speak. ‘I’m chasing down what I can on the Regan Banks CIR file. I feel like we need to take a different angle on this. The answers are right here. I just need to find them.’
Whitt drew a deep breath, tried to keep his voice steady. He couldn’t think how to respond to Pops’s comments about the files, had hardly heard them. He closed his eyes and let the words come.
‘Harry’s been shot at,’ Whitt said.
There was a pause. Whitt heard the older officer’s strained intake of breath.
‘She’s been shot?’
‘Shot at,’ Whitt corrected. ‘I don’t think she was hit. She ran off. We’ve got a new crime scene here in Bombala. It’s Regan. Harry showed up. Regan must have told her where to go. My partner discovered her, and she shot at her, and I don’t know where Harry is now.’
Pops was speaking, but Whitt’s head was pounding so hard he couldn’t focus. He held the car for support, felt adrenaline rush through him, the Dexedrine responding to his terror.
Liar Liar: (Harriet Blue 3) (Detective Harriet Blue Series) Page 14