Hell on Earth. I’d seen slivers of that place myself, seen its flames flicker in the eyes of bad men I’d sat across from in the interrogation room, listening to them confess their crimes. I’d seen evil intentions in the eyes of foster fathers who’d welcomed my brother and me into their damp, cluttered homes, television light glaring on the walls, the blank faces of other abandoned children peering from shadowed corners. I understood the realisation Kash had experienced as he stood watching Zac Taby’s body burn in the driver’s seat of Snale’s car, a decade and a half after he’d watched his friends burn among the remains of dozens of others on a terrible night in Kuta. Sometimes, it’s easy to get caught up in this job, to think that you’re getting on top of evil. That in some wonderful distant future there will be no terrorists. No killers. No rapists and fiends. A dream like that is worth sacrificing everything for. Love. Friends. Marriage. Kids. It seems worth the fight.
And then you realise that no matter what you throw on the flames, they keep on burning, mighty and unquenchable. The fight would in fact be eternal. Like Kash, I’d given my life over to my job. I breathed it. I obsessed over it, nurtured it, the way I should perhaps have been nurturing friendships, relationships, maybe children. That sort of stuff hardly occurred to me. And yet it was all other people lived for. Was that what had so strangely drawn me to the baby in Jed Chatt’s arms? I’d defied logic, crept close to a man who’d only minutes before held a gun on me, so that I could see a child’s eyes. Was something inside me whispering of things I was losing because I refused to believe the world needed to be as bad as it was?
Kash had lost his wife because of his commitment to the eternal fight. He needed to get her back.
I lay in the hospital bed and held my broken arm against my chest and wondered if I’d be happier if I stopped fighting.
I pulled out my IV, pushed aside the blankets and started untying my hospital gown. Two nurses were standing just outside my cubicle, chatting at the counter. As I tied my shoelaces, they wandered on. I snuck past them and made for the car park.
Fighting was all I was good at. I couldn’t stop now.
Chapter 75
KASH WAS STANDING by a police cruiser loaned from White Cliffs to get us home. He was leaning on the driver’s side door, talking gently into the phone. He straightened as he saw me.
‘My partner’s here,’ he told the caller. ‘I gotta go. Love you, too.’
‘Love you too, huh?’ I said.
‘Force of habit.’ He watched me approach. ‘But it’s the first time in a long time there were no raised voices. I’m assuming the nurses have not signed your official release.’
‘They have not,’ I said. ‘So let’s quit the small talk and get out of here.’
On the road in the darkness, the cruiser sailed over the asphalt between oceans of featureless desert sand. The sun was just beginning to light the horizon. I looked at my phone. There was a text from my mother telling me she’d got the money I’d transferred. No mention of her disappointment that it was not in cash. A call came through as I was looking at the screen. It was an unfamiliar number. I answered with trembling fingers.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s Tox.’
‘Oh,’ I said. Tox was notoriously difficult to get on the phone, and even harder to converse with once the connection was made. His already-poor people skills seemed halved by the distance. My heart sank. ‘What’s happened?’
‘We found Caitlyn McBeal,’ he said.
I reeled, absurdly looking to Kash to see if he’d heard the news. My skin was tingling all over, and not just from the burns.
‘Is she –’
‘She’s alive.’
‘Jesus.’ I sat bolt upright in my seat. ‘Jesus! What’s she saying?’
‘Don’t get excited. She’s not saying much at all, and what she is saying doesn’t sound good for you. She says a guy has been keeping her in a cellar for the last few months. Practically starving her to death. She thinks he’s connected to Sam. A partner, maybe.’
‘What do you mean, she thinks that?’
‘I mean that’s what she thinks.’
‘Christ, Tox! Explain what you mean!’ I tried not to yell. Every fibre of my being was telling me to scream. ‘What exactly did she say?’
‘She says he didn’t touch her the whole time,’ he grumbled. ‘Didn’t rape her. Didn’t torture her. Hardly looked at her. Just seemed to go on standby mode, almost like he didn’t know what to do with her. Caitlyn thinks it’s because Sam was arrested. She thinks they were a double act, and once Sam was gone, the guy who kept her lost interest.’
I shivered in my seat. The drugs were still in my system, making my mind fragmented, twitchy. Again I felt that magnetic pull towards my home. I needed to get back there. Speak to Caitlyn. Convince her that she was wrong. Three days. I’d go to her hospital room. Look her in the eyes.
‘How … I mean, what did he …’
‘I haven’t got time to relate it all to you play by play,’ Tox said. ‘We’re standing outside Caitlyn’s hospital room, waiting to go in. Detective Nigel Fuckface is giving us fifteen minutes with her.’
‘Who’s the guy?’ I gripped the phone tight. ‘The guy who abducted Caitlyn. Did you catch him?’
‘No, he slipped away,’ Tox said. ‘You’ll see the sketch on the news in a couple of hours, I reckon.’
‘But –’
The line went dead.
‘Fuck!’ I screamed long and loud, looking at the phone screen, Tox’s number and the ‘Call ended’ message. He’d hung up on me. ‘Fuck! FUCK!’
Chapter 76
WHITT AND TOX stood side by side, leaning against the wall outside Caitlyn McBeal’s hospital room. A few metres down the hall from them, a group of detectives lingered, people from Sex Crimes and Major Crimes, some trauma-trained officers Whitt recognised from the Parramatta headquarters. Beyond them, at the nurses’ station, a group of journalists had already assembled, arguing with three beat cops who held them back from the hall.
A photograph of Caitlyn McBeal in her current state would have been worth a lot of money, Whitt thought. It was guaranteed front-page news. Over the four and a bit months she had been held captive, Caitlyn had lost a good ten kilos, and her hair had thinned by half. The girl Tox had carried to the ambulance outside the abandoned Pinkerton Hotel had looked like a cancer patient. Sunken eyes and yellowed teeth, her neck and arms covered in bedsores. Her lips had been dry and cracked and bleeding. Tox had described finding her in the alley outside the hotel, desperately trying to crawl towards the street, the exertion of escaping her captor having reduced her almost to unconsciousness. The doctors were saying that, had the unfortunate homeless man Ronnie Hipwell not stumbled upon her makeshift prison cell and initiated her escape, she would have been mere days from death. It was both a miracle and a tragedy that Hipwell had ventured down to the lower basement level after rain flooding the ground floor had pushed aside the trash that had been obscuring the door leading downstairs. Caitlyn was free. Hipwell was dead.
Detective Nigel Spader emerged from the room and closed the door behind him, eyeing Tox suspiciously as he tucked his notebook into his back pocket.
‘Five more minutes,’ he said.
‘You said that an hour ago,’ Tox said.
‘Yeah. Maybe I did. What are you going to do about it?’
‘I’m going to go in there.’ Tox stepped forwards, pointed at the door behind his fellow officer. ‘And if you try to stop me, you’ll find yourself downstairs in triage.’
‘You’re lucky you’re getting access to the witness at all, Barnes,’ Nigel spat. ‘You are not on this task force. Neither of you are. And I can deny an interview any time I want.’
It was the first time Whitt had seen Tox almost lose his cool. ‘Let me tell you a few things,’ Tox said, jerking a thumb at Whitt. ‘This two-man investigation right here, we’ve got enough to get a mistrial and bail in the very least.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘We’ve traced the camera from Sam Blue’s apartment to a hock shop in Bondi,’ Tox started listing on his fingers, ‘and we’ve got video of a man purchasing the camera who digital imaging analysists say is far too tall to be Blue. You yourself admitted that your people muscled Blue to extract the confession. We found Caitlyn McBeal’s mobile phone at the crime scene you guys released. Your ten-man crack team of task force cockheads is going to look really stupid when the press gets wind of this. You need to fuck off and do some damage control, and leave Caitlyn McBeal to us.’
The bigger man had all but backed Nigel into the wall. Nigel shoved Tox’s chest.