Lethal Factor

by Gabrielle Lord

  She looked up at me, her face pale in the streetlight. ‘Don’t say anything,’ she said and climbed into her car, not looking back at me.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ I said. Then I watched as she drove away.

  •

  I didn’t sleep very well that night. I wondered if Alix could become dangerous and I was ashamed I’d lacked the moral fibre to put her out of my door the first time she turned up. I could have regaled my grandchildren with stories about how I’d ordered a naked blonde from my bed. Not now. All I had was another sad secret. And a sense of shame. With some women, there is just no winning and the only safe thing is not to get involved at all. Once I’d have had a few whiskies and a sleeping pill to get off to sleep. These days, I just endured whatever was going on. So that meant lying in the darkness, wide awake, in the bed that still held the memory of Iona’s perfume, as all my problems chased each other around in my head until I finally dropped off around three am.

  I was woken by my mobile at nearly eight o’clock and I jumped up, pissed off that I’d slept in so late.

  It was Colin Reeves. I was immediately awake. ‘How’s your team going?’ I asked.

  ‘In the bag,’ he said. ‘Jack, it’s going to be okay. I’ve got everyone teed up. Now I’m just waiting for the nod from you.’

  We arranged to talk again soon and he rang off and I grabbed the towel. One thing at least in my life was going as it should.

  I had a shower and wished I could wash away all the mess that seemed to be so much a part of my life at the moment. I could barely think of the events of last night without cringing. And underneath everything else, the thought of Marty Cash maintained a steady smoulder.

  Back at the laboratory, I faxed an urgent request to the Department of Ag requesting samples of BA strains from other areas of Australia so that we would have profiles to compare. I also asked them to send copies of the DNA profiles of the strain used in the two murders to all States, in case they matched any known source. Together with the genetic information I would receive back from the Institute of Genomic Research, I was hoping to establish where this deadly version of the disease might have originated. It wasn’t much, but in an investigation like this, every little tile in the mosaic helps to build up the picture. I spent the best part of the afternoon ploughing through the never-ending pile of papers on Digby’s desk and writing up the final sections of the tests I’d run on the contaminated aftershave.

  Late in the afternoon, Bob rang to let me know he was back in town. ‘I’ve tracked down Toby Speed,’ he said.

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked.

  ‘On my way out to the convent. I want to clarify a couple of points in Jeremiah’s statement.’

  I jumped at the chance to join him. I’d had enough of the desk and of endlessly recycling the events of the night before.

  •

  As I passed the main gates, I could see that the lower windows facing the front driveway now had bars on them. The nuns were upgrading their security since the murder on their premises. Bob was waiting for me in his car, leaning back in his seat, listening to old-style jazz when I drove up.

  ‘You might get Speed at this number,’ he said, passing me a note. ‘It was the best I could do.’

  I glanced at it and put it safely in my wallet.

  We walked around the back of the main building, looking around, but could see no signs of Jeremiah. The afternoon was changing to dusk and light shone out from one of the rooms that opened onto the yard at the back of the convent. Our breath steamed in clouds as I looked inside. It was a laundry filled with old industrial washing and drying machines. All that black serge must be a challenge to get dry in winter, I thought. Overhead in one of the wintering trees just beyond the last of the frostbitten roses, I heard one of the big honeyeaters’ liquid, piercing alarm calls.

  Although it was getting too dark for work, Jeremiah was still nowhere to be seen when we approached his cabin. I went to the door, intending to knock, and it was then I noticed that the door wasn’t quite closed. I looked at Bob and he looked at me.

  ‘It’s almost an invitation, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘I want to have a look,’ I said, pushing the door open a little more. ‘I want all his clothes.’ I flicked the low-wattage light on.

  We went inside, not touching anything at first, just checking it out. It was a simple life, I thought, but there were a few worrying signs, like the TAB tickets everywhere and the marked racing form guides in piles, with annotations in the margin regarding wins and losses. Jeremiah was a gambling man. There was also a lot of material from a local club, where soccer and prawn nights seemed to be the most popular forms of entertainment. And cover versions of famous singers. The low wattage of the globe made it hard for me to read, until I held the writing right under it. ‘Dusky Springfield,’ I read, ‘will take you down memory lane.’ I also noted Elvis Paisley among a list of club entertainers who did the rounds impersonating the famous dead. There were folkloric groups in kitschy national dress and unfamiliar stringed instruments. I picked up the photograph of the drag-queen woman and peered closer. She seemed to be the genuine double X, although there’d been a lot of enhancement of one sort or another, judging by the huge bustline and the puffed-up lips.

  Bob looked around with me and it felt just like the old days when we’d been partners in the Physical Evidence Unit. Those days seemed simple compared to my present life, I thought.

  ‘There’s a lot of stuff here,’ he said, bending over but not touching a pile of papers, ‘indicating that Jeremiah is a devoted member of the Saint Sava Social Club.’

  ‘That’s out Kenilworth way,’ I said. ‘Sporting club of some sort.’

  ‘Soccer, pokies and dancing the night away,’ Bob read from a flyer. ‘Top-line musicians and cabaret acts.’

  ‘He worked at a club,’ I said. ‘Could be this one.’

  Bob straightened up. ‘I’ll get my torch and I’ve got some gloves in the car,’ he said. ‘Won’t be a tick.’

  I turned my attention to the old maple chest of drawers with the speckled mirror on top. The first drawer contained nothing more sinister than piles of well-worn underclothes and socks which I’d get Bob to bag up for me. I wished I’d brought a torch myself. It was still dark in the corners of this place, despite the meagre light. The second drawer was packed with betting slips and racing magazines.

  I had just pulled out the last drawer when some sixth sense warned me to get up and turn round. But it was too late. Someone jumped on my back, knocking me hard against the corner of the chest of drawers. The blow briefly stunned me. In that moment, my assailant seized me from behind in a stranglehold. I took evasive action, lashed out and stamped on his foot, at the same time attempting to twist my body. But the throttling hold did not ease off. I felt a terrible pressure in my ears. It was impossible to take the breath I so badly needed. Panic rose. This bastard knew how to fight. I was dealing with someone skilled in close-up combat. I managed to get my right arm free for a moment, but then it was pinned again. I knew I only had the strength for one or two decent blows left. I lashed out again with my right arm, but my attacker used it as a lever against me and smashed me to the floor.

  Then he seized something from the bottom drawer, something that glinted in the dim light. For the first time, I felt complete fear. I might not survive this. I curled around on the floor, protecting my body, desperate to regain my feet. Then I heard Bob shout, and relief and gratitude gave me extra strength. Like an old man I scrambled to my feet, clutching my bruised throat. There was Bob standing over Jeremiah, who was bent double, pinned in one of Bob’s arcane holds.

  ‘Jesus,’ I croaked. ‘Talk about just in time.’

  I rubbed my throat. I didn’t like to think of the outcome of this situation if Bob hadn’t been with me.

  ‘It’s you!’ Jeremiah whispered from
his position half on the floor.

  ‘Who did you think it was, you little prick?’ I croaked again, unable to give my voice the authority it needed.

  ‘Look what he was about to hit you with,’ said Bob, his gloved hand retrieving something from the floor.

  With one strong arm subduing the cowering man on the floor, Bob held up a small steel hatchet. Even in the dim light I could see that it was exactly the right type of weapon to have made the deep lacerations to the side and back of Sister Gertrude’s neck. Bob put the hatchet down.

  ‘It’s not mine,’ said Jeremiah. ‘I don’t know where it came from!’

  ‘Of course you don’t, my friend,’ said Bob. ‘Maybe it dropped down from above, carried on the shafts of God’s energy.’

  I tried to forget my bruised voice box and the sickening feeling in the small of my back. Bob squashed Jeremiah down onto one of his own rickety kitchen chairs. I pulled on the gloves that Bob passed me, opened the bottom drawer and stood back, studying what I’d discovered in the beam of light from Bob’s torch.

  My friend let out a long whistle. ‘Well, bugger me,’ he said. ‘Will you look at that.’

  ‘Not mine,’ said Jeremiah. ‘A man of God has no need for things like that.’

  ‘Is this what you were trying to stop me from seeing, Jeremiah?’ I said, still struggling to speak through my bruised larynx. ‘Is that why you tried to kill me?’

  ‘I never tried to kill you,’ he said.

  ‘You were about to whack my friend with this,’ said Bob, shining the torch onto the hatchet and I remembered the glinting object Jeremiah had snatched up from the bottom drawer, the hatchet that he’d been going to strike me with. ‘Just like you did to Sister Gertrude,’ Bob concluded.

  ‘On the back of the neck,’ I added, ‘same way you killed her.’

  ‘I didn’t kill her! I didn’t touch her!’

  I turned back to the contents of the drawer. Barely covered by an old jumper that had been hastily thrown over them lay a wicked-looking knife. I twisted my sore neck, getting a closer look at the hasp of the knife which was decorated with a silver cross. I looked closer. It was the very cross whose origin I’d been chasing ever since I’d seen it cut into the skin of Sister Gertrude’s leg. I dragged another of the chairs over and sat on it, pleased to take the weight off my aching body.

  ‘Come on, Jeremiah. Let’s drop all this man of God bullshit. Tell us what’s going on.’

  In the light of Bob’s torch, I saw Jeremiah pale under the tan, and noticed the tiny red veins in the whites of his eyes.

  ‘Why was this in your drawer?’ I asked, holding the knife by the tip in my gloved fingers. ‘And that hatchet?’

  He shook his head. He seemed terrified now, hunched in the chair, folded up in fear. ‘They’re not mine,’ he said, turning to the hatchet on the table. ‘And neither is that bloody thing. I just grabbed it. I just grabbed the first thing I saw! You scared me.’

  ‘I scared you?’ I asked, rubbing my throat.

  ‘How come they’re here,’ Bob said, ‘in your drawers. Hidden under your clothes? Explain that.’

  ‘I can’t. I don’t know where they came from.’ He thought of something. ‘Must belong to those Satanists.’

  I felt like giving him a good whack. ‘The only fucking Satanist around here is you, Jeremiah,’ I said. ‘That’s your hatchet. That’s your knife. And that’s your Satanic emblem on it, isn’t it.’ I indicated the cross with its four tiny Ls in each right angle of the crossbars.

  Bob dragged Jeremiah out of his chair. ‘You’re coming into town with us,’ he said. ‘You and me, we’re going to have a nice long chat.’

  ‘You can’t do this to me,’ he said. ‘I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘What about murder, attempted murder, assault, resisting arrest and that’s just for starters.’

  Jeremiah started to struggle but soon gave up. ‘I didn’t know he was the police,’ he said to Bob, pointing at me. ‘I thought someone was pinching my stuff and I just jumped him.’

  ‘It didn’t feel that way to me, Jeremiah.’ I rubbed my neck again and took a rasping, painful breath.

  ‘I was scared,’ he said. ‘I didn’t think.’

  ‘You’ll have plenty of time for thinking,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t know it was you,’ he said again. ‘Maybe you copper bastards stuck those weapons there so’s you could trap me.’

  ‘Oh Jeremiah,’ said Bob, in tones of deepest disappointment. ‘Is that the best you can come up with?’

  Bob and I loaded Jeremiah into my car and drove to Heronvale Police Station while Bob rang the Kenilworth police to organise a driver to bring his own vehicle back to town.

  Once we’d settled Jeremiah into a locked interview room at the station, I checked with Brian Kruger about the original search of Jeremiah’s shack.

  ‘I did the chest of drawers myself,’ said Brian. ‘There was nothing in that bottom drawer then except old clothes.’

  I knew Brian Kruger. He was solid and if he said there was nothing in that drawer when he searched it, I believed him. Either Jeremiah or someone else had placed the weapons there after the initial police search.

  I signed the receipt for the now bagged and labelled hatchet and knife so that I could take them with me. Both weapons appeared clean to the naked eye, but blood will out, as the saying goes, and it is almost impossible to remove every trace even from the smoothest surface. Tiny machining flaws and nicks are often rich with hidden red blood cells. Killers fail to appreciate this, and even if they did, there is nothing they could do about it short of ‘disappearing’ the weapon in some way.

  I was very keen to take the suspected murder weapons out to Forensic Services so, leaving Bob to deal with Jeremiah, I took the hatchet and knife back to the lab. It was late and the place was deserted, but that was fine with me. I had a strong possessive sense about these weapons. They were mine. I’d found them, and I’d nearly been strangled for doing so. Every time I swallowed, I was reminded of Jeremiah’s violence. I didn’t like to think what might have happened if Bob hadn’t returned when he did.

  After gearing up I took the bagged weapons into one of the labs. I got a positive reaction from the Kastle-Meyer test, but this only gives a presumptive result. To confirm these findings, I needed to carry out a precipitin test using a human antiserum to ensure that this was human blood and nothing else. It was. The next stage was to confirm whose it was. I was betting it would be Sister Gertrude’s.

  Before we had access to the marvellous replication of DNA material provided by the Polymerase Chain Reaction machine, our giant forensic ‘duplicator’, we needed at least a match-head sized bloodstain. But now we can multiply our findings so that even a couple of cells or traces of cellular material can give a surprisingly good result. I took a portion of the extract I’d made down to Florence’s lab. In the morning, she would start the process towards getting a DNA profile from this as soon as possible.

  Despite the hour, I couldn’t resist dropping in on the Heronvale Police Station on the way home. I found Bob taking a breather outside. It was cold and dark and I suddenly longed for spring with its colours and sounds and hopefulness. In the spring, I thought, Jacinta will be safe, Pigrooter will be well and truly locked up, whoever was sending scientists anthrax in the mail might have been caught and the Convent of the Assumption could get back to its contemplation. We’ve got to nail Jeremiah, I thought.

  ‘Ask him what he did with whatever he took off the wall,’ I said to Bob, thinking of the paler square of wall next to the painting of the grazing cattle. ‘Watch his reaction.’

  Bob and I walked along the side of a rather sad garden bed, where the lights fell on neglected geraniums struggling to survive.

  ‘I found human blood on the weapons,’ I said. ‘Another twenty-four hour
s or so and we’ll know for sure if it’s Sister Gertrude’s.’

  ‘I wonder if he’s our man,’ said Bob, kicking at the bricks edging the forgotten garden bed. ‘What if he really thought you were a thief?’ he said. ‘The light was poor. What if he’s telling the truth?’

  We stood in silence in the night, listening to the noises around us, the hum of the traffic on the highway, the phones ringing in other offices in the police station, the distant sound of music from a private house or bar somewhere nearby.

  ‘He did seem genuinely shocked,’ I said, still rubbing my bruised throat, ‘when he saw it was me. But the murder weapons were in his possession. How’s he going to explain that?’

  ‘Something or someone’s really got him scared,’ Bob said. He looked up at the stars, brilliant in a winter sky. ‘The Satanists might knock him off as a sacrifice.’

  I laughed. Then I considered some more. ‘He’s scared all right,’ I said. ‘He’s thinking of doing life in Goulburn Gaol.’

  Almost on cue, Brian Kruger came out of the interview room looking as haggard as I felt.

  ‘He’s denying everything,’ he said. ‘Says he doesn’t know anything.’

  ‘That’s his job,’ I said. I suddenly realised how stuffed I was. I needed to get a decent night’s sleep. ‘Let me know if anything happens.’

  Bob promised he would. I didn’t envy them. It looked as if it was going to be a long night.

  •

  As I got out of my car at University House, I checked to make sure Alix wasn’t lurking around, intent on more of the same. I didn’t want a repeat of last night’s fiasco. I wanted to find new lodgings, too. A place with better security and clean of Alix. There was no sign of her, however, and I had a meal sent to my room, rang my brother, heard Jacinta was at the Bondi flat, rang there and had a short chat with her.

  Then I rang my son in the UK but he wasn’t in and a youngster from the college took a message for me. ‘Tell him his Dad rang,’ I said. ‘I’ll try again soon.’

  I found the number for Toby Speed that Bob had given me and called him. My call went straight to voice mail and I left a message and my number.