Beneath the table, the three dogs settled in a scruffy pile, surrounded by our shoes.
‘OK,’ Whitt said, laying photographs of Tonya Woods and her daughter at the centre of the table. ‘Let’s find this woman and her child.’
‘And a killer, too.’
‘Huh?’ Tox frowned.
‘The doctor at my correctional facility, Bernadette Goldman,’ I said. ‘You would have seen her picture in the news by now. She was stabbed to death yesterday morning in her surgery room. A friend of mine has been accused of the murder, and she’s innocent.’
‘So what?’ Tox shrugged.
‘So while we run this case –’ I pointed to the pictures on the table ‘– we also run mine.’
‘Whoa, whoa, whoa,’ Pops broke in. ‘Hang on a minute. Harry, you’re only sitting here now because of a very flimsy deal with Woods to find these two.’ The old man also pointed at the pictures on the table. ‘If you don’t put everything you have into this case, you’re looking at going back inside – for a long time.’
‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘Doctor Goldman was very well liked among the inmates. Staff too, I’m guessing – at least the ones who didn’t want to use her for her ability to bring drugs into the prison without raising eyebrows. My friend Dolly has been pinned for the murder of a very popular person. She’s a target now for anyone who wants to take it upon themselves to avenge the doctor’s death.’
‘Look, Harry,’ Whitt said. ‘We’re underequipped as it is. Our suspensions mean we won’t have the resources we usually have to handle one case, let alone two. We won’t have police databases for search capabilities. There’ll be no patrol back-up if we corner a suspect. We’ll basically be civilians, without bulletproof vests, undercover cars, radio …’
‘Whitt, if not having a pussy vest is the only thing stopping you from helping me on this, you’d better go buy yourself one, because we’re taking this case.’
‘Perhaps I will,’ he sighed. ‘But listen. Your friend will be in protection, surely,’ he said, googling Bernadette Goldman murder on his phone. ‘It can wait. The guards won’t let anything happen to her.’
‘It can’t wait. You know how this goes. The inmate winds up dead in her cell and it’s ruled a suicide and no one investigates. Or she’s escorted out to the exercise yard and someone throws a bucket of boiling water over her. She was my cellmate. She’d help me if the situation was reversed. I have to do something, and I’ve decided to do it from out here. I’ll have more power that way.’
‘How do you know your friend is innocent?’ Whitt asked.
‘That’s beside the point,’ Tox broke in. ‘Whoever killed your doctor – they’re not going anywhere. Tonya Woods and her kid? They may be in grave danger right now. If they turn up dead, you don’t know what Woods is going to do. That guy could have you locked in solitary for the rest of your life. You need to focus on –’
‘Tox, I –’
‘– on what’s important!’
‘This is important to me!’
‘Alright!’ Pops slammed his hand on the table. Tox and I had risen out of our seats. We sank reluctantly back into them.
‘We just don’t want to lose you again.’ Pops put a hand on top of mine. ‘There are four of us. That’s plenty. Harry, I’ll assist you with your murder case. I’ve got contacts in Corrections who could help. But you’ll spend the bulk of your time investigating with these two.’ He pointed at Tox and Whitt.
Whitt put his phone on the table. On the screen was a picture of Bernadette Goldman. Beside her, Tonya Woods and her baby girl stared out. I looked at the three faces and felt a sense of dread envelop me. One of them was gone already, her last moments spent in terror, lying on the floor of her surgery while the world grew dark around her. I said a silent prayer that the other two would not share a similar fate.
Chapter 27
‘THIS IS WHAT we have,’ Whitt said, placing a slim stack of papers on the table before me, face down. ‘Tonya Woods and her daughter were last seen by Deputy Commissioner Woods himself. He’d been letting Tonya take the baby overnight occasionally, as she seemed to be sober and doing well. He saw her drive away, supposedly to the apartment in Rose Bay that he’d been renting for her, but we know she didn’t stay there.’
‘How?’
‘The place was not her,’ Tox said. He pulled a cigarette out and glanced at Pops, who waved, resigned. ‘I went in, but I didn’t need to. You could tell just from looking at the building. Big secure place, nice balconies, stone and steel artwork in the gardens. Fucking posh. It’s like Woods was rubbing it in his kid’s face that he was successful and had money, and that he was spending it on her ungrateful arse. It was too good for her. Made her feel like a failure.’
‘She’s been staying at the Oceanside Motel in Punchbowl,’ Whitt said. ‘More her style. Closer to her connections. We believe she went there with the baby that night, and she, or someone else, rigged her room to look like a struggle had occurred there.’
I looked at the pictures on Tox’s phone of Tonya’s sad little motel room.
‘How do you know it was done that night?’
‘I found a receipt in the bin for a petrol station just up the road from the motel. The time and date put Tonya there that evening, about an hour after she left Woods’s place,’ Tox said. ‘She bought a couple of pies, chocolate milk. Dinner. We know she didn’t turn up to meet a girlfriend she was supposed to have coffee with the next morning, and there’s been no activity on her social media since about six o’clock that evening. She was a voracious Facebook and Instagram user. She hasn’t gone longer than twenty-four hours between checking both sites in the past couple of years, and now we’ve got total inactivity from that point on. No calls or texts on her phone, no bank account movement.’
‘Were the pies and the chocolate milk in the motel room?’ I asked.
‘Not that I saw,’ Tox said.
‘So it’s supposed to look like she got home from the petrol station, she and the kid ate dinner and then someone grabbed them,’ I concluded.
We all sat silently for a while. Whitt was looking at the wine bottles sitting in a rack on Pops’s counter.
‘There are two reasons I can see why a person might fake an abduction,’ Pops mused. ‘First, you want someone to offer ransom for you. Tonya might have got together with a boyfriend and decided she wants some of the old man’s money without having to ask him for it.’
‘No ransom demands thus far, though,’ Whitt said. ‘It’s been nine days.’
‘Then there’s the second reason. Whatever has happened to her wasn’t an abduction, but it was bad,’ Pops said. ‘Someone wants the police all tied up in the abduction theory. They’re diverting attention away from what really happened. Sending us down the wrong track.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t something bad that happened,’ I reasoned. ‘Maybe Tonya wants the police tied up so she can get away on her own.’
‘Why not just run away?’ Pops asked me. ‘Why cause all this fuss?’
I shrugged.
‘Well, the wrong track is where the police are going, either way.’ Tox exhaled smoke over his shoulder. ‘I spoke to the Poodle this morning about the official police investigation. Spader didn’t give me anything more than the phone and internet account stuff, but he took my advice about the apartment and the fake snatch without gratitude. Their team had discovered Tonya wasn’t using the Rose Bay apartment but hadn’t got to where she was really living yet.’
‘No wonder Woods brought us in.’ Pops squeezed my shoulder. ‘He knows who gets the job done around here.’
‘Which brings us to this.’ Whitt flipped over the pages in front of me and split them. ‘Here are two hospital forms Tonya has filled out in the last twelve months. The first one is for an OD. The second is for a concussion. Spot the difference.’
The men waited while I read the reports. Tonya’s handwriting was pretty; wide cursive with lots of loops, a throwback to her expensive
education. On the first form, Tonya was giving her medical history after having been revived from an OD. She’d been found in her car on a lonely suburban street, unconscious in the passenger seat, a needle in her arm. It was Christmas Eve.
The second form was a report filed after Tonya had sought medical attention for a laceration above her eye. She’d needed five stitches. Tonya had told the nurses her infant daughter had thrown a toy at her face, but it was clear to the staff on duty that night that Tonya had been punched. She was given an MRI and diagnosed with concussion. The Department of Family Services had been notified of the incident, but without proof of an assault, and with Rebel having not been in Tonya’s custody at the time of the incident, there wasn’t much they could do.
I knew, somewhere, Tonya’s Family Services file was littered with such reports. Overdoses, arrests, fights with boyfriends, assessments of her mental health by crisis teams at St Vincent’s and other hospitals. My own mother had such a file, forty-five years’ worth of chaos, pain and suffering housed in the cold boxes and lines of the reports. I looked at the child’s name on the paperwork. Rebel. Her mother had given her a weird, alternative name, marked her for life as different from the Sarahs and Kates and Michelles who would fill the kindergarten classrooms, the teenage dances, the offices where she went for her first job. My middle name was Jupiter, something I had loathed people finding out all my life.
‘Harry?’
‘Yes, sorry. I was thinking.’ I rubbed my eyes. Pointed to the bottom of both pages. ‘I’ve spotted the difference. On the first form Joe Woods is listed as her next of kin. And as recently as four months ago we have a new name. Louis Mallally. Who’s he? The scumbag who punched her, or her dealer?’
‘Neither.’ Whitt smiled. ‘That would be too simple. So far, nothing about this case had been what it appears at the outset.’
‘Louis Mallally,’ Pops said, ‘is the most expensive lawyer in Australia.’
Chapter 28
ONE OF MY tactics as a detective in the Sex Crimes unit was never to show the whole investigative team to a party being questioned. A number of times over the years I or another team member had been forced to tail a suspect or go completely undercover, which was hard if the suspect knew who everyone was. So Whitt and I set off to speak to Louis Mallally without Tox.
Whitt’s phone rang as we were getting into his immaculate car. I sat in the passenger seat and thought about Dolly waking up in ad seg. If she had been brought her breakfast at all, she would be chewing it carefully, fishing through the mush for razor blades or shards of glass hidden by inmates or staff. Then she would be staring down the barrel of an unknown number of hours waiting for a lawyer to arrive, nothing but the bare walls and choking dread to occupy her mind.
Whitt winced away from the phone as soon as the caller came on and handed the device to me.
‘For you,’ he said.
‘Why aren’t you at the Oceanside Motel?’ Woods barked. I could hear traffic in the background of the call. I made a mental note to get my own phone as soon as possible, to spare Whitt’s ears.
‘Hello, good morning,’ I said. ‘I’m fine, thanks. I slept OK, but –’
‘Let’s get this straight, Blue,’ Woods snapped. ‘You’ve agreed to help me. You’re walking free now – on bail. I can take that away at any second. So when you’re talking to me, you do it on my terms. If you think I’m going to waste my time with pleasantries and chitchat, you’ve got another thing coming.’ He drew a ragged breath. ‘Nigel and his team are down here at the Oceanside, and I want to know why you’re not.’
‘Because we’ve been there,’ I said. ‘Tox has, anyway. I guess Nigel didn’t tell you it was Tox who found the motel room in the first place. How unusual of him to take credit where it isn’t due.’
‘So you know Tonya and Rebel were taken,’ Woods said.
‘No, we don’t.’
Woods gave an exasperated sigh.
‘They were taken,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve looked at the scene. It’s plain as day. The place is trashed. There’s blood on the floor.’
‘The blood is from Tox,’ I said. ‘Some bozos turned up when he was checking out the room and tried to shake him down, so he knocked their heads together.’
‘You need to be looking into people from my past,’ Woods rattled on, as though I hadn’t spoken at all. ‘I’ve arrested some big names, pissed off a lot of people. I can give you a list of men who are out, who might have organised something like this as an act of revenge. In the meantime, Nigel and his guys are going to go to the media and try to make contact with the abductors. I’ll need you to handle ransom demands if they come in.’
‘No,’ I said. The line went quiet. I heard a distant sound, as though Woods had taken the phone from his ear and growled. Whitt looked over at me expectantly as he drove. It was Saturday, and on every corner an open-house sign flashed by, advertising a property for sale. Kids gathered in parks in sports kits, mothers waited to cross the road between cars and playing fields.
‘Blue,’ Woods said. I’d expected a voice full of fury, but when he said my name it was small and weak. ‘I took a real gamble letting you out, bringing your team on board. I need … I need you to help me.’
‘So stop blubbering and let me do my job,’ I said. I disconnected the phone and handed it back to Whitt. He took it and slipped it into his pocket.
‘Cold as ice, Harry,’ Whitt said. I looked at him, thought for a long time, watching the suburbs roll by as we headed towards the city.
‘Was it?’ I asked.
Whitt seemed to have drifted off into other thoughts. ‘Huh?’
‘Was it cold as ice?’
‘A little. The guy’s just trying to find his family.’
‘I’m a bit worried about that. About my coldness.’ I shifted in my seat.
‘What do you mean?’
‘When Pops picked me up at the prison, I feel like I should have cried,’ I said. ‘I stood there thinking, a normal person would be feeling something at a time like this. A wave of emotion. Pops is the closest thing I’ve ever had to a father. He hugged me, and it was nice, but I just felt … blank. Same when you hugged me yesterday. It was like I was numb.’
Whitt nodded.
‘Sometimes, when I was on the inside,’ I said, ‘I’d forget what I had done. People would ask me what it was like, killing Regan. And I’d think, oh shit. Yes. I killed a man, didn’t I? I mean, I’ve done it before, of course. But who forgets about killing someone? There’s got to be something wrong with me.’
Whitt thought for a while. I watched his eyes flicking between the mirror and the road ahead as he changed lanes.
‘You know what happened with me,’ Whitt said. ‘The first time I fell off the wagon.’
I did know what had happened. He’d planted evidence in the case of a murdered child, been caught, and all but assured the release of the girl’s killers back into the community. He lived every day with the knowledge that they would probably reoffend, and that whoever they harmed next, it would be his fault. His struggle with drugs and alcohol were a direct result of the case.
‘I was searching for numbness when I started drinking,’ he said. ‘It’s self-preservation. Your brain can’t handle what’s happening so it shuts down your emotions, becomes mechanical. When you get the emotions back, they won’t necessarily be good.’ He glanced at me. ‘I’m not drinking. I’m not numb. And living with what I did doesn’t call for very enjoyable emotions.’
I watched as the houses of the suburbs transformed into the high-rises of the inner city. Little apartments leaning over the motorway. A tiny knot of homeless people camped on a traffic island at the entrance to the Cross City tunnel, an orange umbrella their only shelter.
‘So how do you cope?’ I asked.
Whitt shrugged his big shoulders.
‘Look at me.’ He gave a sad smirk.
I nodded. ‘You just exhaust yourself every day working out.’
‘It’s
the only way I can sleep at night,’ he said. ‘It’s this or knock myself out with a half-bottle of Jack and a couple of Xanax.’
I looked at his hard forearm extending to the steering wheel, veined and taut, leading to vice-grip hands. Whitt had made himself a living temple to his pain, a hurt being housed and protected by hard-won muscle. I knew that before the Whitt I was seeing now, the one who looked like a body builder, there had been a different kind of shield – of neatness, order, painful precision.
‘You’re really not OK, are you,’ I said. It wasn’t a question.
A rueful smile crept to his lips. ‘Neither are you,’ he said. ‘So I’m in good company.’
I wondered what I would use as my body armour against the pain when it came. As we made our way towards the beachside Eastern suburbs, I felt vulnerable and exposed, waiting to be hit with the reality of the last few months at any moment. There were lives on the line, and that made my sanity all the more precious. I needed to get my mind together before it was too late for Dolly, Tonya Woods and her tiny child.
Chapter 29
LOUIS MALLALLY’S MANSION was perched high on the hill above Bondi Beach, with sweeping black glass balconies pointing towards the sea on one side of the building and towards the distant city on the other. There was a silver BMW convertible sitting on the street outside the double doors of the garage. The security gate beside the garage was open, so Whitt and I approached the house via a small path that led through a garden of desert plants and white stones, past a fountain made from polished concrete blocks bubbling quietly in the shade.
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