'I don't smoke,' he said.
The little one knew, now.
Three metres, two.
Wait.
Frankie realised he had missed the feeling of adrenalin pissing into his gut, the flurry of fear constricting his anus.
This guy was going to need care, he thought. In times to come, he and Tua would talk about tonight. He tried to signal to Tua, to let him know to beware, but his best friend was in the zone, pumping up.
Frankie knew he'd have to go in fast.
He felt his heartbeat in his hands.
Tua knew that somehow he should've been calculating a new strategy, but the first thing he felt was admiration for the guy's block and duck from Frankie's knife. Still wondering whether he could use that move playing footy on the weekend, he found himself on his arse. The cunt had kicked him! He stood and lurched forward, enraged, and he was on the ground again. Huh? No one had touched him, 'cause the fucker was busy kicking Frankie. He stood. He fell. What the . . .
Tua looked down at his legs and blinked. He screamed.
His left shinbone had burst through the skin above his ankle and stood like a forty-five degree erection out from his flesh, some of which was clinging pinkly to the bone.
He fainted.
Joss could see that the little one was just conscious; he was nursing his broken arm as he lay in the gutter.
'Don't go to sleep now,' he said calmly to the Asian youth at his feet. 'Your friend needs an ambulance.'
A couple of people stared as he jumped on the train just before it pulled out from Cabramatta station. Joss looked down at his hands, clothes. No blood. What?
He didn't realise that his eyes glittered and his grin had stuck his lips to his teeth.
The unit felt empty tonight. In the past, that had been the only way Jill could bear it. She liked it locked down and silent – the only noises those she generated herself, or the familiar hums and purrs of her cleaning appliances. On odd occasions, she'd feel an urge to invite her mum and dad over for dinner. Sometimes her brother and sister-in-law would drop by with Lily and Avery, her four-year-old niece and six-year-old nephew. More often, she'd visit them in their homes. She could probably count the number of times Cassie, her sister, had been by. When she did have visitors, while she wanted to be with them, Jill also found herself watching and waiting for the cues that indicated they would soon leave.
Control. It meant everything to her. And when people were in her house, when she couldn't see where everyone was, or identify each noise in her space, she couldn't relax. She'd do her best, but couldn't resist the urge to maintain her order – surreptitiously re-straightening magazines, re-aligning cushions when she thought people didn't notice. She often caught her mum at such moments, smiling in her direction, cueing her to try to let things go until everyone left.
Tonight felt different. She frowned at her apartment. For the first time ever the gleaming surfaces, blonde beech, stainless steel and cool granite seemed sterile somehow. She wondered whether more colour could help – some jewel-coloured cushions on the chocolate sofas, maybe a big painting on the loungeroom wall. A rug?
Maybe I should move altogether, she thought suddenly. This unit had quadrupled in value since she had taken out the mortgage ten years ago. The outrageous Sydney property boom, coupled with her gorgeous ocean view, had made her rich. Well, on paper. Of course, as soon as she purchased another Sydney property she'd be back in debt.
She'd never thought this way before. She hated change. Anyway, where would she go? It would be pretty hard to give up living at the beach. The noise of the inner city would drive her crazy. And she couldn't see herself in a house in the suburbs, mowing the lawns.
Why was that? Where was that urge for kids and a husband? Holidays to the Gold Coast, school fetes, a four-wheel drive? She paced her kitchen, opened cupboards, closed them again, looking for something.
She walked to the phone. Punched in seven digits and hung up before dialling the eighth. Scotty. What would he be doing now? Probably Emma Gibson. She smiled viciously, thinking of the grey-eyed glamour girl they'd worked with at Maroubra. She's one person glad to see me out of there, she thought.
The next number she dialled unconsciously, listening to the machine's familiar message while she pictured Emma's shiny black hair in Scotty's big hands. Her mum picked up at the end of the recorded spiel. She always let it play whether she was home or not – stopped the telemarketers, she said.
'So, how's the case going, darling?' her mum wanted to know.
'Mmm, okay. Not fast enough though of course. It never is, is it? Especially this case.'
'It's just terrible. I hate to think of you working on these things. The stories on the news today were just awful.'
'Don't watch the news.' Jill modified her tone when she realised how abrupt she sounded. 'Yeah, it's a pretty bad case. We hope to get a breakthrough soon.'
'How's everything else out there, Jill? What are the people like? You didn't manage to tell me anything about Gabriel last time we spoke,' her mum reminded her.
'They're okay. I don't really know anyone yet. Gabriel seems okay, though.'
'How old is he?'
'Mum. I don't know how old he is. Maybe the same age as me.'
'And he's nice?'
Jill paused. Nice? It was probably not the first word she'd use to describe her new partner. What could she say about him him?
'He's a good cook,' she tried.
'He's cooked for you? You had dinner at his house? Was his wife there?'
Oh boy. 'He doesn't have a wife.' As far as I know. 'We had to watch some videos from the case. His house was close and he cooked. Lunch.'
'So what did you eat?'
'Fish. Look, Mum, tell me what's happening out your way. How's Dad?'
'Your father – I don't know what's got into him lately. He hasn't been himself.'
'What do you mean? Is he okay?' Jill sat up straight at her breakfast bar.
'Oh, he seems healthy enough. But he's . . . well he's doing a lot of shopping.'
'Shopping. Dad?'
'I know. Stuff for the house. Clothes for him. Yesterday he bought me a swimming costume.'
'He did not.'
'With parrots on it.'
Jill felt her eyebrows rising. Her father could not be dragged into a shopping mall, and had always made her or Cassie buy his presents for their mum. He had no difficulties at the hardware shop – but visiting a store that sold women's clothing? She couldn't imagine it.
'I know what you're thinking,' her mother continued. 'Midlife crisis. I bought a book today.'
Jill smiled. Pop psychology. Her mother had a library.
'Oprah recommended it. He's a little old for it all, according to the book, but I'll finish reading it and let you know.'
'How's everyone else?'
Frances Jackson sighed through the phone.
'Cassie.' Jill guessed.
'I don't know, love. I think she's not eating again.'
Jill's younger sister made a living as a swimsuit model. Like the rest of her colleagues, she perennially flirted with anorexia nervosa. Jill shifted on the barstool. Not a lot she could do about it: she found it harder to talk to Cassie than almost anyone, and when she tried to discuss weight with her sister, Cassie would scoff – Jill's own struggles with food from time to time made her concern seem hypocritical.
'Bob and I called around there on Tuesday,' Frances continued. 'It was after lunch, Jill, and she was still in bed.'
'She'd probably been on a shoot, Ma.'
'That's what she said, but it looked more like she'd had a party over there. It was a mess.'
'Good for her,' said Jill, suddenly almost envying her sister's glamorous lifestyle.
'Mmm.' Jill's mother did not approve. 'Some of her friends had stayed the night.'
'Uh huh.'
'They're all very beautiful, Jill, but none of them seem very . . . diligent.'
'Diligent?'
'
Oh, I don't know. I just wish she'd settle down a bit. She's thirty now. And you should have seen the empty bottles everywhere.'
Jill rubbed at a non-existent smudge on her breakfast bar. 'Well, you said it was a party.' None of them spoke overtly about the fact that they rarely saw Cassie without a drink in her hand.
'Yes. Anyway, darling, I don't want to worry you. I'm sure things will be fine. How's Scotty? Have you seen him since you started at Liverpool?'
'No. Oh, Mum, I just got call waiting.' Jill lied. 'I'll give you a ring again tomorrow.'
Jill hung up feeling slightly guilty about lying to her mother. But speaking about Scotty was the last thing she felt like tonight. Right now, she just wished he was here scoffing food in her loungeroom, his huge feet overhanging her lounge.
She walked dispiritedly around her empty unit and finally found herself in her gym. She got to work.
25
SATURDAY MORNING SAW Jill at a computer terminal in the detectives' quarters of the Liverpool police complex. She and Gabriel had decided to split tasks; the pressure from the media upon the investigations team was huge. Jill would've preferred Superintendent Last to get angry, scream at them – anything other than having to watch his stoop deepen. He had chewed through half a packet of antacid tablets in the meeting yesterday morning.
Jill and Gabriel knew they needed to find the connection between Henry Nguyen, Isobel and Joss. At the same time, because they had learned so much from re-interviewing the victims of the home invasions, they'd decided they couldn't afford to abandon that process. The logical choice was for Gabriel to continue the interviews, while Jill investigated Isobel and Joss's backgrounds, looking for links with Nguyen.
She'd expected another warm day, and now Jill sat freezing and miserable in shirtsleeves in the squadroom. The temperature on the air-conditioner, she was convinced, had been set by some demented maintenance guy who hated cops. She knew without checking that her top lip would be blue; she had the kind of headache she usually got when she ate icecream too quickly. No good trying to get someone to make the thing warmer. In these buildings the thermostat was always 'centrally controlled' and adjusting it 'a major drama'.
She stuck her hands under her armpits for a moment and then turned her attention to Henry Nguyen, creating a file of what they knew about him already. The anonymous caller – Isobel Rymill, they were almost certain – had rattled off a series of his convictions and sentences. Jill opened another window on the computer and called up his sheet. There was a long list, as Superintendent Last had indicated yesterday, and the caller had missed a few. Juvenile record, Jill noted. Career criminal. She copied the information and tidied it up a little; pasted it into her own file.
One of the juvie cases caught her eye. Nguyen had done nine months at Dharruk for a smash and grab that had left an adolescent dead, his throat cut. She calculated dates and figured young Henry had been thirteen. The charge was break and enter – with the actions leading to accidental death – but she wondered whether there had been more to it. What did they call Nguyen? Cutter. Maybe he'd started early? His record did not include murder or manslaughter, or anything involving serious knife attacks, but she knew that a charge sheet generally only reflected a fraction of what an offender had been up to.
She searched the COPS database for the juvenile case and scanned it quickly. She copied it, deleted irrelevant notations, and pasted it into her file. The smash and grab had been at a bike shop; the deceased, the owner's son. Henry Nguyen's fingerprints, already on file even at that early age, had been found at the scene, and when they'd gone around to his grandmother's home in Cabramatta to pick him up, they'd found one of the stolen bikes in his bedroom. Jill could remember nothing of the story at the time. She'd have been about eleven when this went down. Eleven. A year before her own world went to hell when she was abducted.
The victim, Carl Waterman, had been around the same age as Nguyen at the time; the cops investigating figured that the boy, who lived with his father above the bike shop, had heard the noise when Cutter broke into the store and come down to investigate. There were ten COPS entries on the same event.
According to the files, Nguyen had told the investigating officers that he'd broken into the store alone by smashing one of the two glass panels at the front of the shop. He'd told the officers he hadn't seen the Waterman boy in the shop and couldn't explain how the kid had come to be impaled by a large section of the glass. He also could not explain how he'd managed to steal five bikes on his own.
Jill skimmed the wrap-up on the case. The officers assumed that Nguyen had committed the robbery in company with at least a couple of older youths, possibly adults – people smart enough not to leave fingerprints. They believed the second panel of glass, destabilised when the first had come down, was what had killed Carl Waterman. The prosecutors had had to ask for a committal, given the child's death, but Jill figured that the relatively light sentence reflected a belief that Nguyen had been led astray by more seasoned criminals.
She wondered whether the smash and grab had really gone down that way. The case could actually establish a very early propensity for this Cutter to make people bleed. They knew he liked blood a hell of a lot nowadays. She thought with horror of young Justine Rice watching this sicko bring himself to orgasm by cutting himself. They had to find him fast.
Jill needed to stand up. Pins and needles throbbed in her fingertips. This cold is ridiculous, she thought. She stared at the ceiling above her terminal. A half-metre air-conditioning vent was positioned directly above her chair. She imagined she could see the frigid air streaming from the vent, drenching her desk. She cupped the tip of her nose in her palm to try to get some feeling back. The back of her throat felt scratchy, and she wished she could be doing this work from home. Or at Gabriel's. She bet his computers would have access to these databases.
She walked to one of the windows of the squadroom, hugging her arms around her body, and stared down into the street below. A camera flashed. She stepped sideways, back against the wall, and angled her head to peek out without showing her face. Two media trucks occupied the parking spots in front of the courthouse below. She saw a third in the Spotlight carpark across the road. A news camera was now angled up at her, two men and a woman sidestepping, heads weaving, trying to see behind the window. Anything at all to do with this case was big news. Not since the 'Bodies in the Barrels' homicides in Adelaide had Australia been as deliciously terrified. People in the immediate area, however, got no thrill at all from it. Counsellors had been brought into local schools because children had been producing artwork depicting their fathers and pets dismembered.
Jill wondered what Gabriel would be able to get out of the dead man's daughter, Donna Moser. He planned to interview her sometime today. She was well enough to have been moved to a private psychiatric hospital in Burwood, so she should be up to talking, they'd figured.
On her way to the coffee machine, Jill passed another woman, head down over a computer. Muriel? Marilyn? Lawrence Last had introduced them a couple of days ago. Marion? Yep, that's it, she thought. The woman raised her head briefly and nodded at Jill. She looks comfortable enough, thought Jill, starting to shiver. The extra twenty kilos Marion had on her would be helping. She slid a mug under the expensive espresso maker and added two heaped teaspoons of sugar. Wrapping her hands around the cup, she held its warmth to her body as she walked back to her desk.
Next step: known associates of Henry Nguyen. There had been no mention in the meeting yesterday of any known past connection between Nguyen and Dang Huynh – the suspect forensics had identified as having vomited at the Capitol Hill crime scene. Jill thought about Gabriel's rapid conclusion that the vomit indicated that at least one member of the gang didn't have the same bloodlust as the killer. Huynh hadn't been able to keep his dinner down, so there was little chance he was the one doing the butchery.
Jill wondered how long Huynh had known Cutter as she typed and underlined his name in her notes. She ent
ered his nickname, 'Mouse', and called up his sheet. Car theft, aggravated robbery. She kept digging. Well, well. At age seventeen, Dang Huynh had gone up on an assault charge in company with Henry Nguyen. They'd bashed a boy and a teacher at Bonnyrigg High during school hours. Neither attacker had been a student at the school. Jill remembered the case from Nguyen's criminal records. The school's vice-principal had lost an eye when Nguyen had smashed a bottle into his face; the teacher had been trying to break up the attack. Nguyen had been sent to Mt Penang that time. She read on. Yep, there it was, Mouse had also been remanded at Mt Penang after the assault.
So at least these two members of the home invasion gang went back a long way. The thought gave Jill an idea. She pushed her already cooling coffee aside and bent back over the computer.
Cutter tucked his lucky socks into a drawer inside his wardrobe. Head on an angle, he peered into his black eyes in the mirror stuck inside the wardrobe door. He closed it and lowered himself onto his carefully made single bed. It and the wardrobe were the only furniture he'd moved over from Cabramatta. Same bed he'd had since he was a boy. In fact, his grandfather used to sit just about there, as he taught him the needle lessons. Cutter's orange towelling bedspread was so worn it was transparent in patches. So soft. He smoothed it over and over under his palm.
He felt very pleased with this basement room. The door was heavy, made of metal for some reason, and when he closed it, the small window, and the curtain covering it, he could hear nothing at all from outside. He felt certain that no one outside could hear him in here, either. The walls were double brick, coated in thick white paint, and he sniffed in the dirt-tang of mildew that bubbled underneath. He loved that smell. His grandmother had not. No, she had told him, you cannot live here! The water is stagnant. Your luck cannot flow. Your cold will be worse! Come home with us where you belong, she'd entreated in Vietnamese as he signed the simple, single-page contract that his new landlord, Mrs Miceh, had produced.
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