Blood Sunset

3



THE VICTORIAN CORONER’S OFFICE was located in Southbank, less than three kilometres from my apartment. A low-level facility made of steel and glass, the complex spread across half a city block and was divided into three joined buildings: the coronial court, a forensic pathology centre and an area specifically designed for the identification of bodies.
The allocated police bays outside the complex weren’t for the private vehicles of police members, but my Falcon was only two years old and always passed for an unmarked car, so I parked and followed the main walkway to the building in the middle. Inside the foyer, I approached a circular reception desk for the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine. The morgue.
Behind the desk a grey-haired woman sat chewing on a pencil as she stared into a computer screen, Paul Kelly’s ‘Dumb Things’ playing on a radio behind her. Clearing my throat, I asked to speak with Matthew Briggs.
‘And you are?’ she asked.
‘Police,’ I replied, flipping open my badge case.
‘What’s it in relation to?’ She sounded like a suspicious mother guarding her precious child against the neighbourhood riffraff.
‘A case I’m working on. The undertakers said Mr Briggs signed in a body this morning. I need to ask him some questions about it.’
She punched a few digits into a phone, waited a brief moment, then put down the handset and said he wasn’t available before going back to reading whatever it was on her screen.
‘Ah, what does that mean?’ I asked. ‘Has he gone home for the day, or is he just away from his desk?’
She shrugged. ‘Could be in the toilet for all I know. Maybe you could call his mobile.’
‘Good idea. Are you able to tell me what the number is or should I speak to someone more senior – your manager perhaps?’
The woman faced me angrily. ‘I’m getting it for you now, if you can be patient.’
After a moment she was back on the phone. When she hung up, she spoke without looking at me.
‘Take a seat by the window. He’s on his way down.’
Matthew Briggs arrived shortly after, tall and thin, dark eyes set deeply into a pale face, like a skeleton. A green medical gown hung loosely over his hunched shoulders, as though he’d spent too long bending over bodies. We shook hands but Briggs made no attempt to invite me anywhere else.
‘Thanks for your time,’ I said. ‘I just have a few questions about the overdose brought in this morning. Has anyone come by to see the body?’
‘Yep, someone made an ID an hour or so ago,’ he said.
‘Who?’
‘Some guy in a summer suit. I don’t think it was his father.’
‘Then who?’
Briggs shrugged and looked at his watch.
‘I also wanted to ask when there’ll be an autopsy,’ I said, getting to the point.
‘I thought that’s what it might be about. I’m used to working with police.’
He didn’t continue because he didn’t need to. With cops, especially detectives, everything was urgent. Me showing up to put a rush on the post-mortem was about as original as butter on a sandwich.
‘The PM’s scheduled for Monday morning,’ Briggs read off a clipboard. ‘The pathologist is Dr Julie Wong. Why?’
I knew Dr Wong and felt sure she would listen to me. Monday was too long to wait.
‘Tell Julie she needs to change the booking to tomorrow morning,’ I said.
‘Excuse me?’ Briggs said. ‘Detective, I just explained to you that the body is scheduled for Monday. That’s the best we can do.’
‘Well, it’s not good enough. There are things that need to be confirmed before the death is ruled accidental.’
‘You don’t need to tell me that. That’s what we do here. And we do it in our own time, in accordance with key performance indicators.’
‘Spare me the induction spiel, Briggs. Just tell Julie to trust my judgement and book the boy for a preliminary exam tomorrow morning. If she doesn’t find anything in the prelim, you can do it next month for all I care. Just check it in for tomorrow.’
‘You’ve got some nerve, detective. Last night we get three guys brought in from a car crash on the Westgate Freeway. Uni students, heading down the beach for a holiday. For some reason the car flips and, bang, just like that they’re all dead.’
I’d heard about the accident and knew what was coming.
‘The families are having a group funeral on Monday, so we’re putting these guys up front. On top of that, we’ve got a guy who ended up in a fight at a pub last night. He copped one in the jaw, cracked his head open on the pavement. A homicide.’
I understood the predicament of having to prioritise human bodies, but if what I was now thinking was true, Dallas Boyd deserved immediate attention.
‘Listen, there are anomalies with the Boyd case, things that don’t add up,’ I said, handing Briggs the list I’d made earlier. ‘Look!’
He took the list, studied it and pointed to the last line on the page. ‘What do you mean by this? Leather belt – teeth marks?’
‘That’s why I’m here. I need to see the belt, to check if there are any teeth marks on it. You’ve still got it, I presume?’
Briggs shot me a questioning look. ‘Of course we still have it. Things don’t just go missing around here.’
‘Yeah, righto. Can I see it or not?’
‘Why?’
‘Let me see it and I’ll explain. What’s the big deal? I don’t need to touch it.’ I realised I was standing over him and stepped back. ‘Look, it can stay in the audit bag. Just let me see it.’
‘Only if it stays in the bag.’
‘Fine.’
‘Come with me.’
I followed him through a door into a hallway. Long familiar with the layout of the building, I knew he was taking me to a storage room where personal belongings of the deceased were kept, but was glad he left me at the door. I often found it worse to be surrounded by the clothes and personal belongings of dead people than the actual bodies.
When Briggs came back he closed the door and handed me a clear plastic bag with a thin leather belt inside. It seemed somehow smaller and more innocent than it had around the boy’s arm.
‘The belt was used as a tourniquet,’ I explained, turning it in my hands. ‘As you’d know, junkies keep the tension in the belt by pulling it tight with their teeth, so they can use their other arm to inject the syringe. They pretty much have to when they’re alone, but look here.’ I pointed at the surface of the leather. ‘This doesn’t have any teeth marks on it.’
Briggs nodded, thoughtful, as I gave him back the belt. He was probably wondering why I hadn’t noticed this, along with the missing phone and syringe lid, earlier, or why the incident had been classified by the police as accidental.
‘As individual anomalies they mean very little,’ I said, following Briggs out to the foyer. ‘But now I’m putting them all together it starts to look like the kid may not have whacked up in the loading bay.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Briggs said. ‘Coagulation and lividity are consistent with the position he was found in.’
I lowered my voice as two doctors walked in front of us. ‘I’m not saying he didn’t die in the loading bay. I’m saying he might have injected himself elsewhere. If that’s the case, then we have to ask how he got there.’
‘Okay, I see your point, but it doesn’t change the fact that you green-carded this as accidental. You can’t just come in here and change your mind, then expect us to juggle bodies like tables in a restaurant.’
‘I realise that,’ I said, ‘but if it turns out someone else may have been involved, we can’t leave it until Monday. I don’t even have a TOD.’
‘That I can help you with,’ Briggs said. ‘We had stable temperatures most of last night, so calculations were made on body movement at the scene. I shouldn’t be telling you this, because they’re only estimates, but based on rigor mortis you’re looking at time of death around midnight last night.’
I nodded my appreciation. All I needed now was the final step.
‘Listen, just give Julie Wong this list and tell her I’ll be here tomorrow morning. If she can’t do the preliminary exam, then so be it, but she needs to see this list.’
Briggs sighed, his face exhausted.
‘Just give her the list,’ I said gently. ‘It’s not your decision to make, Matthew. It’s hers.’
?

I went back to my car and sat in the driver’s seat with the door open. Heat radiated off the concrete and the bushfire smoke irritated my eyes and throat. The missing syringe lid was one thing, but the absence of a mobile phone and now the confirmation of no teeth marks on the tourniquet smacked of another person’s involvement. What that involvement translated to, I wasn’t sure. There was one thing I was sure of: I’d made a mistake in writing the overdose off so quickly and that needed to be rectified.
How to achieve it was going to be a problem. What was I going to do, walk into the squad room and tell Eckles I’d f*cked up? Admit that the psychologists were right all along, that I shouldn’t have come back so soon. That I wasn’t ready for desk duties, let alone dead bodies.
I looked around for a tissue to blow my nose but didn’t have any. I was angry with myself, and the heat and the hayfever were only making it worse. I drove to a service station, bought a pack of tissues and a bottle of water. At the counter, I guzzled the water and noticed the front-page headline of the Herald Sun: FREEWAY HORROR. I knew it referred to the accident Briggs had mentioned. It reminded me that Dallas Boyd had died a silent death and I knew that if I kept quiet, no one would ask questions. My reputation would remain intact and the overdose would remain an accident, just like the hundreds of others each year.
As much as I hated the idea of admitting fault, I wondered whether somebody out there had been counting on Dallas Boyd dying silently, that we would rush the job, write it off as another overdose and simply wipe our hands of it. The very idea of this struck a nerve, because I’d always been alert to such attempts. People tried to trick the police every day and most of the time they failed. Or did they? How many other kids had died an accidental death that wasn’t an accident?
Being a good investigator meant being in tune with your instincts; instincts that let you know when something wasn’t right. During my rehabilitation I’d allowed those skills to gather dust, to go blunt. Worse still, early this morning I’d allowed a junior officer to cloud my judgement. As I drove out of the service station, I made a decision. It was time to face the smirks of my colleagues, the whispering behind my back and the rumours that I’d lost the touch. And it was time to prove them wrong.