‘And now you’re here,’ she sighed brightly. ‘I can’t say I’m sad about that. It’s pretty lonely out here, to be honest. It’ll be good to have some more cops around. Someone who can relate. You know?’
‘How many cops are there in town?’ I asked.
‘Active officers? I mean, we have one retiree …’
‘Active officers.’
‘Just me.’ She looked over, smiled. ‘Just us.’
I didn’t want to burst Snale’s bubble, but I didn’t plan on being out in the desert long. Nine days of ‘us’. Then it’d be back to Victoria Snale: Lone Ranger.
The moment Prosecutor Woolfmyer’s AVO expired, I’d be back – back in that jerk’s face, fighting him and the state’s crack team of lawyers about my brother’s innocence.
The empty desert around me was familiar. I’d been shoved aside when Sam had first been arrested, shipped out into the middle of nowhere, away from the public eye, away from my distinctly uncomfortable colleagues and their guilty looks after months of lying to me. Back then, I’d succumbed to the journey. I’d felt such shameful pleasure at having something to think about that was not Sam and what he was facing. Now was no different.
I squeezed my folder of notes on Sam’s case against my chest. A thick binder of papers detailing all the leads I’d tried to chase down. Most of the work I’d done was hopeless, dead ends I’d pursued over the months searching for something, anything, that might set my brother free. The binder was battered and bruised, but it was my lifeline. I wasn’t leaving it behind. I wasn’t putting it in my bag. I was hanging on to it. As long as I had the binder, I wasn’t abandoning Sam.
Chapter 9
‘LET’S CHECK OUT the view before we go down,’ Victoria Snale said, beaming. ‘You’ll love it.’
The officer pulled the four-wheel drive off the side of the highway and let it rumble to a stop. I climbed out and breathed the desert air, felt the warm wind ruffle my hair. The great domed sky was heavy with stars. I felt so far from where I belonged. Wonderfully small.
‘Come this way,’ Snale beckoned me, kicking up dust in the car’s headlights. ‘This is it.’
I stood with her on the edge of a rocky cliff in the dark. ‘This is Last Chance Valley,’ she said.
She swept her hand dramatically across the landscape, indicating a less-than-impressive collection of gold lights clustered at the bottom of a moonlit rise. I nodded, made an interested noise. I felt bad for being so distant for the whole trip towards the town.
‘You can’t see it very well right now, but the town is actually at the bottom of a massive crater.’ She pointed to the curve of the rise we stood on. ‘Biggest crater in the Southern Hemisphere. This ridge is just the edge, it runs all the way around. It’s sort of egg-shaped, with the town right in the centre and properties spreading out around. The first family settled down there two hundred years ago. There are seventy-five residents now.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘They’re not sure what formed the crater, but it may have been a volcano. A meteorite. Every now and then somebody comes out and runs a study on the place. Very exciting stuff. I usually get to brief the town on their visits, tell everybody to behave themselves.’
‘Sounds great.’
‘I guess the settlers thought the crater might shelter us from the desert dust storms,’ she mused, rolling a rock under her boot. ‘It doesn’t. In fact it makes things worse. We get about ten centimetres of dust when the summer winds roll in. It also floods real bad, and the floodwaters hold beneath the earth. When it floods, we get green grass. We can grow wheat here. There’s plenty of cattle. But, being the only grass around for thousands and thousands of kilometres, we get locust plagues.’
I was glad Snale was the local cop and not the tourism director. I tried to maintain a serious face.
‘Locusts?’ I said.
‘Yeah, we’re just getting over the last plague. Here’s one right now, in fact.’
She reached out towards me, and I realised a creature was walking up my bicep, an enormous brown grasshopper covered in the patterns of the desert, spots and stripes in red and brown. I didn’t scream. But it wasn’t easy.
Snale plucked the creature from my shirt and tossed it into the wind. It fluttered into the dark.
‘Oh great,’ I said, brushing off the place where the thing had been. ‘This is great.’
‘They bite, but it’s not that painful.’
‘And what exactly will I be working on out here?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Turns out somebody’s planning to kill us all.’
Chapter 10
WE SAT IN the car together and Snale took a package from the glove compartment. It was a notebook secured in a police evidence bag, a sheaf of photocopies, which she handed to me. She started the car but kept the overhead light on so I could read as she drove.
‘A trucker found this diary in a backpack on the side of this highway, at a rest stop.’ She pointed over her shoulder. ‘Back the way we came, about five kilometres. He spotted it sitting there when he stopped to pull a dead roo from his front grille. Brought the diary into town and handed it in to me. It contains detailed analyses of spree killers, weapons, massacre plans. We think someone is, or was, constructing a plan to kill as many people in Last Chance Valley as possible.’
‘When was this?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘And you vetted the truck driver?’
‘Yeah, I let him go.’
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I looked at the photocopied pages before me. My eyes breezed over the tight, small writing and fell upon the hand-drawn images, sketches of a person in a hood running towards fleeing groups of people, mowing them down with a huge rifle. There were diagrams of the layout of the town below, lists of names and addresses. I examined the notebook in the evidence bag, turned it over. Of course, there was no name on it. That’d be too much to hope for.
The thing that struck me immediately about the pages I was looking through was the sheer weight of preparation that the diarist had gone to. Every page was filled on both sides with either illustrations or notes, or with excerpts from books that had been copied and pasted onto some pages. It was all very calm and methodical. Where there were illustrations, they were very well done. More like scenes of war than the macabre scribblings of a maniac. There were photographs of buildings, I assumed areas of the tiny town below us from different angles. This was more than a speculative work. This was serious.
Snale drove us over the edge of the crater and down towards its depths. I looked up at the other edge of the valley, rocky and pointed against the burnt-orange light.
And as I looked across the crater I saw the explosion.
The sound it made took seconds to reach us across the distance. A bass thump I felt in the centre of my chest.
The sky lit up with a fireball directly across from us, on the steep rise.
‘Oh my God!’ Snale swerved, gripping the wheel.
I shoved the papers aside and sat bolt upright. ‘Get there. Get there now!’
Chapter 11
THE EXPLOSION ON the other side of the town seemed to have ignited the brush there in flames. I kept my eyes on the dim glow as we raced up the main street and between the fields beyond. Small houses. Fences. Snale’s jaw was set. She squinted at the dark rise before us.
‘Might have been kids with fireworks,’ she murmured. ‘The kids around here, they’re pretty feral.’
‘Those are some pretty big fireworks,’ I said.
We took the winding road up the slope at a roaring pace. I gripped the door of the vehicle as Snale took the corners. Country driver. She’d been taking these roads at breakneck speed since girlhood.