‘It’s drugs,’ Olivia said as she and Snale settled on the lounges. ‘People are saying it’s terrorism, or it’s related to the diary they found. But I’m telling you, it’s some drug gang that’s got him.’
Snale and I exchanged glances, shocked. I didn’t know what I’d expected. Some small talk about Theo, about how Olivia was coping. But she launched straight in. Kash looked sceptical. He stood at the bookcase, looking over the tattered paperbacks there. He zeroed in on a copy of the Qur’an like a hawk and seized it from the third shelf, as though he’d find the answer to Theo’s demise there.
‘What do you mean, drugs?’ Snale asked gently. ‘We’re on top of the drug situation in the region. We don’t have any gangs out here.’
‘Theo said was running an undercover sting,’ Olivia explained. ‘See, we went to bed one night, maybe a month ago, and I woke up at around midnight and Theo wasn’t beside me. I went to the front windows and looked out. I saw him talking to Jace Robit and his crew. I asked him what was going on when he came back inside. He wouldn’t tell me much about it. He said he thought there was drug activity going on. Ice production.’
Snale shook her head ruefully, disbelieving. I came and settled on the edge of the couch.
‘There is ice around here,’ Snale told me. ‘Softer drugs, too. Lots of weed. But any amphetamines are mostly brought through by the truckers heading to Bourke, about four hours out. Bigger town. People buy it at one of the local pubs there, we think, to keep themselves running until the next round comes through.’
‘It’s only small amounts?’
‘The kids use it recreationally. They’re bored. There’s nothing to do out here. We’d know if anyone in town was manufacturing it. Something like that would be difficult to hide. And there’d be no point in making it. You wouldn’t be able to sell huge amounts of it out here. Ice is made in the cities, where you’ve got a chance of blending in.’
I remembered the wonky-toothed, narrow-bodied man with the rifle, Jace. His little gathering of similarly sun-worn types.
‘Robit has a cattle property on the south side of the valley.’ Snale pointed.
‘Was Theo sure it was drugs they were manufacturing?’ Kash asked Olivia, who looked up, red-eyed. ‘Or was he just suspicious?’
‘I don’t know.’ Olivia wiped her nose on a well-used tissue. ‘I only saw them that one night, and I didn’t ask for any more details. I remember them all standing out there on the road. Their headlights were all on. The forensic officers, they told me that whoever killed Theo had been pacing around near him. Had him tied to a chair.’ She fought back tears. ‘Maybe it was some sort of interrogation, see whether he’d told anyone else.’
I wandered into the office while Snale comforted Olivia. This was obviously Theo’s domain. There was a cracked leather desk-chair and an old, dusty laptop, a collection of brass nautical navigation equipment on the desk in desperate need of a polish, more books. I went and sat in Theo’s chair, looked out the window onto the bare lawn. There were papers on his desk. A half-finished memoir of a rural police chief’s life. Zac Taby had said that diaries were for little girls, but Theo Campbell had spent hours upon hours reflecting on his long career, setting down his personal history in these pages. I flipped through and caught the occasional word. Honour. Evidence. Tragedy. Arrest.
‘He would have told Snale about an undercover operation,’ Kash whispered from the doorway. He was still holding the Qur’an like a much-loved teddy. I watched him go to the bookshelves here.
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘If farmers were making ice out here, there’d be no need to run an undercover sting. Just go raid their properties. Ice manufacture is expensive. Complicated. And it reeks. How on Earth would they hide the smell? Besides that, there isn’t a big enough market for it out here. I can understand how the truckers get away with it. Some city drug dealer gives them a package and they slowly sell it off, town by town, all the way across the country. But cooking it out here? It would be stupid.’
‘It might have been a one-off,’ Kash mused. ‘Make one big batch, take it to the city, sell it and make a fortune. Pay off your debts. Theo found out and was trying to talk them down, so they killed him.’
‘And the diary?’
Kash stared at his feet.
‘Maybe it was a decoy,’ he said.
I hadn’t thought about that. That someone might have constructed the diary to throw us off. It wouldn’t be hard. A few late evenings sketching, doodling, noting down tidbits from what was perhaps a passing interest in spree killers. Maybe the diary had nothing to do with Theo Campbell’s death. Maybe his was a straight-up drug-related killing.
A guilty little zing of excitement ran through me. If I could wrap this case up as quickly as that, I could go home to Sydney. Sure, I wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near my brother or the courthouse, but I would at least be closer to him. All of that was calling me. Conduct a raid on Robit’s place. Find something. Anything. Lock up him and his cronies and be done with it all. Ignore the possibility that the town was in further danger, that someone here was planning a day of reckoning. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am – some quick arrests and the six days I had to wait to go home would become zero.
I realised I was shuffling idly through the objects in Theo Campbell’s desk drawer. Pens and little notepads. I shoved the desk drawer closed and a plastic ruler wedged itself in the gap. I tried to yank the drawer back open but it stuck, the plastic biting into the wood. I threw my weight backwards and the drawer shunted open, rattling the desk, causing a flush wooden panel at the front to flop open.
Kash and I looked into the cavity the panel had revealed.
My hopes of leaving dissolved.
Chapter 39
I KNELT AND peered into the dark slot in the side of the desk, ten centimetres wide, crammed with black plastic. I pulled out a package. It was as big as a shoebox, wrapped tightly in duct tape to form a lumpy rectangle.
‘Christ, she was right,’ I breathed. I took a pair of scissors from the desktop and began to carefully slit open the side of the package. ‘What do you think it is? It’s heavy. Might be black tar.’
Kash knelt beside me. I could smell the sweat on him. That morning, I’d woken to the sound of him huffing back and forth across Snale’s lawn, stopping, dropping and pumping out push-ups to timed beeps from his phone. Snale had been standing at the windows to the porch, enjoying a coffee, watching the show. Kash’s bare chest glistening with sweat in the new pink light of sunrise.
I slipped a small bag out of the package. A heavy, dusty brown rock about half the size of a golf ball. I opened the bag and took out the rock.
‘ Brown rock heroin,’ Kash said. ‘I’ve seen it over there in northern Africa. Dirty stuff from back-shed kitchens. Goes cheaper than black tar.’
‘Guess again,’ I said. I spat on the rock in my palm. ‘This rock’s only brown on the outside.’
I rubbed the top layer of dirt from the nugget. The gold shimmered, dull yellow and porous in the light.
‘Whoa!’ Kash snatched the gold from me. I rolled my eyes and took another rock from the package. ‘That is one massive piece of cheese!’
‘That’s about two ounces you’re holding,’ I said. I crossed my legs and took out my phone, looked up a converter on Google. ‘About a thousand bucks on the market right now.’
We looked at the bag between us. I weighed it in my hands. I guessed I was holding about two kilos, or seventy ounces. Approximately eighty thousand dollars’ worth of precious metal.
‘What. The. Hell.’ Kash looked at me. ‘You think it’s legit?’
‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘You can’t buy it like this. This is right out of the ground. So, what? Campbell’s taken it out of the ground, or someone he knows has? This is not his retirement nest egg. I’m betting it’s not even declared as a personal asset for tax purposes, if he’s got it squirrelled away like this.’