‘Everyone’s fine,’ he said. ‘Except Zac.’
I lay sweating in the neck brace, listening to the game show host introducing the rules of the next round. There was forty thousand dollars on the line. A lot of money for some people. Enough to give a life for. Enough to die for. Three more days, and I’ll be home, Sam. I could last the distance, but not like this. Not lying here, staring at the lights.
I pulled off the neck brace. Kash didn’t stop me this time. Probably tired of my bullshit. I sat up and felt the stitches in the back of my skull, the bald patch shaved there.
‘ What kind of bomb was it?’ I asked.
‘You shouldn’t worry about that right now.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘It was a circuit-breaker,’ Kash sighed. ‘Like I thought. Forensics have a few pieces of it that they’re examining. It was a more sophisticated job than the one that killed Theo Campbell, but not by much. There would have been two triggers. One was a pop-up hinge, like you see on kitchen cabinet doors, the flashy ones without handles. Instead of pulling the door open, you push it, it clicks and when you release it, the door pops open. You have to push again and hear the click for the door to close. The killer would have wired the hinge so that when Zac sat down it clicked and completed the circuit. If he’d have got off the seat, it would have popped open, breaking the circuit, setting off the bomb.
‘Looks like the secondary trigger was a plastic kitchen timer that we heard ticking. You can get them at the supermarket for about three bucks. The whole thing would have cost little and been easy to source without raising suspicions.’
‘Still. Let’s check with the store in Last Chance and the surrounding towns and see if any kitchen timers have been bought recently, and by whom.’
‘The results on the IP searches across the valley have come back. No one teaching themselves to make bombs in the last year. We’ll need another warrant to go back further.’
‘Christ.’ I rubbed my eyes. ‘Why didn’t I think about someone targeting us? The first victim was the chief of police. Of course it makes sense they’d go after Snale next.’
‘It mightn’t necessarily have been Snale that they were after.’ Kash shrugged. ‘Maybe it was you or me. Maybe it actually was Zac.’
I lay back against the pillows and watched my partner watching the TV. His mouth was turned down and his eyes were set. He wasn’t his usual self. All the bravado, all the heroic puff had left his voice. He seemed drained. When he spoke, I realised why.
‘I know you spoke to Tenacity,’ he said.
Chapter 73
I SAID NOTHING. My job as a Sex Crimes detective includes working with the utmost discretion at all times. A good majority of the victims I deal with don’t want anyone to know what has happened to them, particularly their families. Confirming or denying that I knew Tenacity at all was completely against the rules. Kash seemed to know, didn’t seem to care. He kept talking, turning the wedding ring on his finger around and around.
‘You must have dealt with her after the assault,’ he said. ‘I know you can’t say anything. She thinks I don’t know. Her mother told me not long after it happened, said Tenacity didn’t want me to know because she thought I’d probably turn it around, make it a part of my obsession. Well, she was right, of course. I just added it to the hatred I was already feeling. It spurred me on. I’d only just come back from a deployment in Afghanistan, and went right back as fast as I could. Stupid. So stupid.’
He stretched and settled in the seat, his long legs splayed before him. The woman on the television screen was dying of joy. She was up to seventy-five thousand dollars.
‘ That night in Kuta, in Bali,’ Kash said. ‘I’d only been out of the bar for about thirty seconds. I walked out to take a phone call from my mum. It was too loud in the bar. I got out the front doors, turned left and went over to stand on the street corner. I felt the pressure wave thump right through the middle of my body. I was actually knocked off my feet by it. I didn’t even hear the bomb blast. I felt like I’d been hit by a car.’
He ran a hand through his hair. I sat watching, seeing him standing on the corner of the moonlit street hung with neon lights. People screaming.
‘And then I look back and the whole place is on fire,’ he said. ‘And people are running out of it. Some of them are burning. Some of them were missing pieces. I was a surfer. I’d never seen anything like that. Not even in the movies. It was like I’d died suddenly and I’d awakened in hell. And I knew right away – whoever had caused this, they were from hell. They had to have been. Because this wasn’t the sort of thing that happened on Earth.’
The woman on the game show was up to a hundred thousand dollars. A heat rash was creeping up her neck and cheeks. She wiped at her eyes, breathless. Kash watched her.
‘From then on, that’s how I saw it,’ he said. ‘I thought there were evil people, demons, walking around on the Earth, plotting to open up the ground and unleash their world on us. I had to fight them. Because if I didn’t fight them, what was the point of it all? I dropped everything. I went after them. I devoted my life. It was like my wife and my job and my family and my friends had never existed. I had a clear mission, with clear enemies, and that was all that mattered. And then last night …’
He seemed to drift away. I waited.
‘Yesterday I was right back where it all started. Feeling the blast. The pressure wave. Staring at the flames.’
‘It’s not …’ I struggled to find the words. ‘That time hasn’t been wasted. You’ve fought a good fight. There’s no way of knowing how many lives you’ve saved through your work.’
‘But I wanted to put a stop to the badness,’ he said. ‘In my mind, it would have all been over by now. There would be an end, and everything I had sacrificed would have been worth it. But badness is everywhere. There’s a little bit of hell on Earth, and you never know when you’re going to see it next.’
Chapter 74
‘TALK TO TENACITY,’ I said. I reached over and grabbed his hand. ‘Call her.’
We watched as the woman on the screen battled her emotions, trying to decide whether to risk her hundred grand for what was hidden inside the last briefcase. She was pulling on her neck, tugging her ears down, the weight of the decision seeming to physically force her downwards. She picked the mystery briefcase. Animated sad clown faces flitted and flashed across the screen as a ten-dollar note was revealed, taped to a board on the inside of the case.
Kash took out his phone and left me watching the woman crying on the screen.