We could smell the blast zone from the side of the road as we parked. Snale was no athlete but she bounded into the bush ahead of me, agile as a rabbit, her gun drawn. I had no torch, but followed the bouncing white light of hers, razor-sharp desert plants slicing at my jeans. The fire was burning itself out in the tough grass and the oily leaves of the eucalypts above us.
The smoke seared my eyes. We split up. I almost tripped over a plastic chair, or what remained of it. Three of its metal legs were buried in the dirt, and the back had melted to a black husk, sharp, sticking upwards like a dagger. Snale came back to me, huffing, winding her torch beam across my face, then to where I was crouched, examining the chair.
‘Can I?’ I grabbed the torch and swept it over the chair, found the crater where the bomb had gone off. There were bodily remains here, tangled in the dirt and grass. The blackened and burned slivers of flesh of something or someone blown to bits.
‘Oh no,’ Snale was saying gently, following close behind me. ‘Oh no. Oh no.’
I zeroed in on a shiny object – a hand wheel valve. There were splinters of metal shining in the dust. Entrails, blood everywhere. Hair. An animal? I nudged the valve with my boot, didn’t have evidence bags with me.
‘Propane gas bottle,’ I said.
‘Oh man,’ Snale gave a frightened shudder, taking the torch from me with her cold fingers. ‘Oh maaaaan!’
I followed her. She’d noticed something hanging from a nearby branch, swinging gently in the breeze. It was a man’s hand and forearm, blackened and charred, held there by the remains of a shred of melted duct tape. The tape wrapped around the wrist seemed burned to the flesh.
I was just beginning to wonder how on Earth it was still hanging on when it fell, slapping to the ground at our feet. Snale yelped in terror. She grabbed at me as a new fear rushed through her; the sound of a large vehicle leaving the roadside back near where we’d parked.
We could hear it crashing through the undergrowth towards us.
Chapter 12
DEER HUNTING LIGHTS. Eight of them. They pierced the night around us, blasting through my vision, making me cower behind my arm. It was like an alien ship landing. Snale cocked her weapon, but in seconds she seemed to relax.
‘Oh. It’s only Kash,’ she said. There was a slight upward lilt to her voice, like she’d just been given good news. I was still blinded. I stumbled forwards, grabbing the back of her shirt to guide me through the painfully illuminated blast zone.
‘Jesus, those lights!’
‘Hands up!’ someone bellowed. ‘Identify yourselves!’
‘It’s me!’ Snale put her hands up. I didn’t bother. ‘It’s us. Vicky, and my new friend Harriet.’
I thought ‘friend’ was going a bit far.
An enormous man emerged out of the light like an over-excited dog, a flurry of hard breath and wild gesturing. Incredibly, he had a torch in his hand.
‘Vicky. Right. Have you seen the suspect? Where’s the suspect? Any signs of where he went?’
‘ The what?’ I tried to see his face, glimpsing a chiselled jaw, black curls. ‘What suspect?’
‘You,’ Kash pointed at me, ‘head down the hill and sweep south-east in a standard second-leg search pattern. Snale and I will take south-west. Give it a K, maybe a K and a half. We’ll meet back here in twenty.’
‘A search?’ I yelled. ‘Using what? I’m not sure I’ll ever see again.’
‘Double time! Let’s go!’
The muscled goliath took off into the bush, crashing over plants and shrubs like a tank. I jogged, confused, in the general direction he’d indicated.
There was nothing to indicate that a suspect was on the loose. But the big man in the dark had overcome my decision-making abilities with his barking voice, like a slap to the side of the head. I was annoyed and bristled, but I did what he said. There was no one south or east of the blast zone.
Snale and the big man, Kash, were there when I returned. She was searching the remains again with her torch beam. Kash was standing uselessly with his hands on his hips, looking generally ‘in charge’ of whatever might have been about to happen. In the light of the enormous truck I saw an action-figure body and Clark Kent glasses on a head as square and thick as a sandstone block. When I came back into the light, he walked towards me, hand extended.
‘Elliot Kash, Counter-Terrorism Task Force, Islamic Fundamentalism Division, ASIO.’
‘Of course.’ I nodded. I understood all the dramatics now. This guy was in national security. I’d come across his type before. ‘Of course you are.’
‘ You’ve heard of me then? Good. That’ll save time. Let’s secure the entry to the blast zone, erect a checkpoint on the road. We’ll do hourly sweeps of the search grid to see if the suspect comes back. They often return to film their work for their online campaigns.’
I noticed Kash hadn’t asked me for my name, or a long-winded explanation of my position within the police. I let it go.
‘Who exactly are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘We’ve got a dead guy and a bomb. How do you know who else was involved?’
‘You’ve seen the diary?’
‘Barely,’ I said.
‘Well, you’re behind,’ Kash sighed. ‘You can get a debriefing once we’ve established a secure boundary. We need to act now and ask questions later. Get going. I’ll take charge here.’
I suffered the same verbal slap to the head, the phenomenon of compliance sweeping over me like a spell. I found myself walking back towards the road, thinking I’d move Snale’s truck, put lights on the road, see if she had some traffic cones in the back to guide any passers-by onto the shoulder so we could question them. I didn’t further analyse Kash’s resolve that a dangerous suspect was behind this, and that it was possible he or she was somewhere around here.
The spell wore off before I hit the roadside. I stopped, frowned, tried to get my thoughts in order. Snale bumped into me from behind. She’d been jogging up the path behind me.
‘Sorry,’ she sniffed. ‘I’ve got to get to the radio and call in the team from the next town over. We need more people. This is bad. This is really bad.’
‘ It’s OK.’ I jogged alongside her. This was probably the most terrible crime to ever happen in Last Chance Valley. Maybe the only serious crime they’d ever had. ‘Agent Dickhead’s got it all under control.’
‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I just found the victim’s head. I know who he is. He’s my chief.’
Chapter 13
HE CAME EVERY second night when the temperature began to sink, at what Caitlyn assumed was sunset outside her concrete room. The first few times, she tried to brace herself for what was about to happen. She visualised it for hours on end, her skin crawling and stomach turning, trying to decide how she would endure the rape or torture or prolonged death he had planned for her. But after a week, when none of those things had happened, a deep, sickening confusion set in. And then there was the rage. Caitlyn sat on the mattress in the dark and boiled with a quiet, dangerous rage.
The man with the shaved head came and unlocked the door, walked down the steps and put her supplies on the floor. Two packaged sandwiches, one chicken and one roast beef, the kind a person buys at the service station. Two bottles of water. Two chocolate bars. One roll of toilet paper for the bucket in the corner. He wouldn’t look at her. The ritual was always the same. He came, he dropped the supplies, he changed the bucket and he left, locking the door securely behind him.