MY SLEEP WAS thin. The diary had disturbed me deeply. There was a detailed profile of Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, who’d killed thirty-two people on campus in Blacksburg. Once again, the diarist had listed the elements of Cho’s massacre plan they seemed to find useful for their study.
Chained doors, trapping victims.
Made detailed manifesto video, so reasons would be known.
Low personal profile, maintained non-threatening reputation before attack.
Cho had acted out of a seething rage, making a rambling video manifesto while kitted up for the massacre. His cap turned backwards, the sullen, dark-eyed young man talked about a fiery demise for his enemies. I lay in the dark, his words bouncing around my brain, visions of his victims running for their lives flashing against the backs of my eyelids.
I was starting to get a mental picture of the diarist. If he or she had decided these were the attributes of a successful killer, then surely they’d be putting these behaviours into place in the lead-up to their own plan, whatever it was. They’d be maintaining a low profile, keeping quiet and resisting the temptation to bring collaborators in on their mission. They’d be trying to obtain weapons without raising any eyebrows. It wouldn’t be hard out here. Every farmer in the town would have a gun. It would only be a matter of amassing them on or just before the day, once the killer had worked out where they could all be found.
I tried to tell myself to sleep. Without sleep, I’d never catch this guy. I was drifting in and out when the sound of grunting broke through my consciousness. I thought at first it was the pig. I climbed off the end of the bed and went to the porch screen door. Kash was out there in the barren dirt yard, a barely visible black streak against the rise of the distant ridge. I pushed open the door, still mussed from sleep. He was shirtless. A rippling, sweat-glistening torso lit up as I switched on the backyard light.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
He was jogging back from the end of the property. He ignored me, dropped and did ten seamless, perfect push-ups. The muscles in his triceps looked surgically carved.
‘Are you nuts?’ I continued. ‘It’s … What time is it?’
‘It’s two am.’
‘Why are you working out at two in the morning?’
‘If you want to bring down the enemy, you’ve got to think like the enemy,’ he said. He’d huffed rhythmically through ten jumping jacks, dropped for more push-ups. ‘Think, act, live like them. This is a classic training regime used by the Taliban for their frontline fighters. They conduct sessions at early morning hours to train the brain out of its circadian rhythm. They can eat, sleep and access high levels of physical energy whenever they need to.’
I watched, bemused, as he took off again towards the back of the property. He sprinted back and dropped to complete a set of sit-ups.
‘You’re a bit of an addict of this stuff, aren’t you?’
‘What stuff?’
‘The terrorism gig.’
‘Don’t knock it just because you’re incapable of it.’ ‘Incapable of it?’ I squinted. ‘Of what, exactly?’
‘Of the lifestyle. Of the kind of commitment it takes to work in national-level human security. I mean, there’s a reason you’re a cop. You want to protect people. But if you were capable, surely you’d do it at this level.’ He gestured to himself with one arm as he did push-ups with the other. ‘Not that level.’ He pointed at me.
‘You know, I’ve met some colossal douchebags in my life, Kash. But you’re slowly climbing the ladder to number one.’
‘Number one,’ he mused. ‘Sounds like me.’
‘You’re not even doing those properly,’ I said. ‘Your chest is, like, ten centimetres off the ground.’
‘Is that a challenge?’ he asked.
‘I’m just saying, if you’re going to run around training like a lunatic in the middle of the night, there’s no point in doing a half-arsed job.’
‘A half-arsed job?’ He stopped working out for the first time since my arrival. ‘Are you serious?’
‘ I don’t joke about push-ups.’
‘You wouldn’t last to the end of this workout,’ he said. ‘I guarantee it.’
‘Right,’ I snapped. I went back inside, slamming the door, dragging my bag from where it lay at the end of the bed to search for my shoes. Agent Kash had no idea what I could withstand. In a life like mine, full of darkness and pain, a tough workout was child’s play.
Chapter 21
THE WORKOUT WAS invigorating, my quiet exhilaration heightened when he announced ruefully that I’d completed it. My body screamed through dozens and dozens of burpees, joint-grinding squats and panicked sprints to the end of the yard and back. When I knew he was looking, I scratched my nose with one hand during the push-up sets, the other arm continuing on through the exercise with what I hoped looked like effortlessness. I finished drenched in sweat. There were no congratulations from my new partner. He trudged off towards the house in silence.
I sat in bed making a list, light beginning to creep under the curtains drawn closed around the glassed-in porch. The porch was creaky, and when Jerry the pig came out to join me at sunrise the whole thing rattled like an old wooden wagon. The huge animal stood snuffling at me for a while, its big brown eyes searching mine, then flopped to the floor by my bed with an exhausted sigh.
Snale was right. The snoring was oddly comforting. I lay on my side and watched the animal’s ear flapping now and then as it dreamed. Its body warmth made my corner of the porch cosy. I fell asleep to thoughts of Sam’s case.
I had so much that I wanted to do to help my brother, but all of it was out of my hands. There was so much evidence against Sam. Not least his confession.
I walked up behind her. I was quiet. I swept my arm around her neck, pulled her backwards towards my car …
Sam confessed to all three murders. But less than an hour after leaving the interrogation room, he said the confession was coerced. I didn’t want to believe that my own colleagues might have psychologically tortured my brother, exhausted him and threatened him until he simply surrendered. Maybe they’d beaten him. I’d been known to get a little rough with suspects myself, inside and outside the interrogation room.
But I also didn’t want to believe that Sam was guilty. So I tried not to believe anything.
Marissa Haydon had disappeared from the university grounds, in a small car park behind the campus bar on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. My brother’s credit card records showed he had been in the bar that same afternoon.
Elle Ramone had disappeared from a street three blocks away from the university, in the residential area behind the main street of Newtown. Sam usually walked home that way at around the same time she had gone missing, from his graphic design business in Marrickville, where he worked the three days a week that he wasn’t teaching.
Rosetta Poelar had disappeared from a side street off of Parramatta Road, near the university’s veterinary science building. CCTV inside a bicycle shop captured Sam walking through the area just fifteen minutes before Rosetta was last seen.
Sam had been at the right place, at the right time, for all three abductions. Police had been watching him, and they didn’t like what they saw. He was single. He was antisocial. He had a history of juvenile crime. If he was as violent as his sister when he lost control, he might be deadly. The task force had jumped in and made an arrest even if the evidence was flimsy. The media had been hounding them for progress. Even a false arrest at that point would have been something.