IN THE CAR, she put her head against the window, the cheerful, clumsy girl I’d witnessed on the road gone. I figured she was tired. My mind was not in the car. It was back in the centre of town, where a killer was possibly planning on breaking out into a shooting spree.
I ran through the checklist of precautions in my mind. I knew Snale and another officer had separately locked down the armoury and the ammunition caches so that even if someone managed to get through their defences, they’d waste precious time trying to get to any useful weaponry. Snale and the team in town would be doing regular check-ins. I should have taken a radio, got onto their channel. No matter. I’d be back there in minutes. We’d need to charge Stieg and Scullen when this was done. Stealing. Unlicensed mining operations on trespassed property. We needed to arrest Mick, alert the families of the dead. That wasn’t important now. I shook my head. What was important was keeping everyone safe for tonight. Even if the killer never showed their face.
I pulled in to the Destro property and began driving up the long, lamplit driveway.
‘You must feel very alone,’ Bella said suddenly. I glanced at her. She was sitting with her hands in her lap, facing the house, her expression calm.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The whole thing with your brother,’ she said as I came to a stop beside the house. ‘He’s in jail. He’s got his own problems to worry about. You’re free, out here in the world, wandering around trying to get on with things. No one believes you when you say that he’s innocent.’
My brother was the last thing I wanted to talk about. I got out of the car. Left my gun right beside her in the centre console.
Stupid. Stupid.
‘No one believes you,’ she said again, looking at me as I opened the door for her. ‘It must be so isolating.’
‘I don’t have time for a deep and meaningful,’ I said. ‘Get out. I’ve got to go. I’m busy.’
That was when she pointed the gun at me.
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ she said.
Chapter 108
I WAS BEWILDERED. At first, my brain told me this was just another inconvenience on what was shaping up to be a horror of a night. I was still cursing myself for not having a radio.
‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said. ‘Put it down.’
‘Harriet,’ she said. Trying to wake me up. Bring me back down to Earth. ‘Focus.’
Focus. Breathe. I was standing like an idiot in the driveway with my hands by my sides, staring at the gun, the strange, unfamiliar sight of my own weapon pointed towards me and not away. She actioned the weapon expertly, and with that sickening sound I came to.
I looked into her eyes.
‘Oh no,’ I said.
Chapter 109
WITH THE GUN at my back I walked numbly up the driveway towards the house, too shocked to offer much resistance. I’d gone into full denial mode, a symptom of my general stress over the case and my emotional detachment after the murders earlier in the night. Cognitive dissonance, the same thing that affects soldiers, sends them wandering into no-man’s-land under shellfire like they’re going for a Sunday stroll. This was a game. A prank by a strange drunken girl. She was going to be in a whole lot of trouble when she gave me back the gun. I was going to be in a whole lot of trouble if anyone ever found out she’d played with it. Yes, ‘played’. Because she was a girl. A young university student home to study for exams. Her major concerns would be trying to get some proper study time in without wasting the entire vacation watching bad TV and chatting on Facebook.
She showed me into the dining room where just days earlier I had sat with her father and listened to her pick at him about racism in small towns. Dez was sitting in one of the dining-room chairs, as he had been on that day. But he was decidedly less comfortable in the seat than he had been before. A line of duct tape started at his shoulders and wound around and around the chair and his body, over his round belly, now and then splitting to reveal the cloth and buttons of his sweat-drenched shirt. The duct tape around his mouth was so tight his cheeks were swelling purple under the wild eyes that watched me enter the room.
Of course. The massacre plan had said ‘Kill Officer Snale’, but ‘Get John Destro’. Snale was only an obstacle. She could be disposed of easily. But this man was the focus. He was the catalyst for it all. He wouldn’t be killed right away. Not until he had fulfilled his purpose.
Chapter 110
I WAS DRAWN straight to the device around his neck, a clumsy thing secured with more silver duct tape that pulled at the loose skin around his throat. A plastic water bottle turned sideways sat under his chin, sloshing with pale brown, almost tea-coloured liquid. I could see wires and fixtures making bumps and veins in the tape around the top and bottom of the bottle. Inside the bottle, awash in the liquid, were more wires crisscrossing each other, tightly wrapped in black electrical tape.
The unprofessional look of the device added to the already deep lack of comprehension I was experiencing. I stood before the man in the chair and looked at the thing around his neck and couldn’t believe that it was in any way dangerous. It was so messily constructed, so awkward, that my only concern at that point was the gun on me and the man’s rapid breathing, threatening a heart attack.
I looked at the girl with the gun. Of course it had been her all along. From the moment I met her, she’d been desperate to make me and everyone around her aware of her searing dissatisfaction with the town, its people, her father, everything.
She was more than dissatisfied. She was angry. Over dinner her disgruntlement at her father’s racism tumbled off her lips like spittle. Her eyes had implored me from across the table. But I’d been uninterested. And that’s the automatic reaction she’d received most of her life, I imagined. A default dismissal of whatever bugged her. Pretty girl. White girl. Student. What could she possibly have to complain about? She flicked the gun towards a nearby chair and I went to it and sat down.
‘I decided I wanted to use you for Day Zero when I found out you were in town,’ Bella began, smoothing her hair down with long, slow strokes. ‘It was so amazing, you coming, you being right in the middle of all this. I knew it was a sign. I’ve been watching you and the case with your brother from the beginning. I watched the footage of you going up to the courthouse for the first day of proceedings. You looked so distressed. I remember thinking at the time – you’re going to be the victim in this that nobody understands. You’re going to be the forgotten one. The forgotten victim.’
She glanced at her father. I followed her eyes, watched sweat rolling down his temple.
‘There will be people who sympathise with your brother,’ Bella said. ‘And there will be people who sympathise with the dead girls. Their families. But right in the middle of it all, there’s you. Nobody sympathises with you. Nobody believes you. I know what that feels like.’
She went to the dining-room table and carefully plucked up a tattered yellow envelope, thick as a dictionary. I noticed another gun on the table. Theo Campbell’s gun. Bella must have taken it the night she stopped the older officer on the road on the hillside, probably with a ruse similar to the one she’d used on me. Helpless, Bambi-legged. The one who needed management. She tossed the envelope onto the ground at her father’s feet. Dez winced. The liquid in the bottle at his throat sloshed.