‘He shot at someone’s cows?’
She nodded. ‘I told you. He’s always doing crazy shit.’
‘Does he hit you?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Can you leave? Do you have family around here?’
‘No. I ran away from home years ago. We don’t talk. But I have a friend that lives in the city. I called her this morning and said I might come to stay soon. She’s at uni. I wanted to go to uni too but Robbie says we can’t afford stuff like that.’
In the end, Stacy did leave. I didn’t see her again until the trial. After she’d gone, I watched Robbie whenever I had a spare moment. I drove past the house, I spied on him at his worksites. I followed him to the pub and sat in the corner observing as he threw back beers and leered at women and threw darts with such frightening precision that I found myself swallowing nervously while I sipped my wine. I don’t know why I didn’t pull him in about the cows or the car. I think I just sensed that something bigger would happen. It had become important to catch him, to show everyone that I could do more than traffic offences and petty theft.
Two weeks after Stacy left, I watched Robbie drinking beers with several men on his front porch from my dark car. After an hour, I carefully followed when he jumped into his ute and drove to the Saloon Bar, a dive of a place that doubled as a half-hearted strip club. He’d been in high spirits at the house, laughing and animated. By the time he got to the club he was clearly getting drunk. He ordered more drinks, pulling the waitresses close to him as they walked past, whispering in their ears.
Another hour went by and I was about to leave—Scott’s missed calls were compounding on my phone—when suddenly, like a spider, Robbie struck out and grabbed a girl, yanking her onto his lap. There was a roughness to his movements, I could see it from metres away, and even though she was laughing, it was obvious she was scared. I gripped the stem of my empty wineglass as he whispered to her. Then suddenly they were on their feet and out the door. By the time I got outside, his ute was squealing out of the car park. With my heart in my throat, I jumped in my car and raced after him. I worried he was very drunk; I’d watched him knock back at least three beers and as many bourbons. I prayed he wouldn’t crash and kill the girl, hoped I wouldn’t round a bend and be confronted with her dead body, him alive, roaming the scene like a rabid dog.
Instead, I pulled up at the end of his street with my lights off and watched through the trees as he shoved the girl against the wall near the front door. She cried out. He grabbed her face and I realised he was gagging her, covering her mouth so she couldn’t scream, and I thought to myself, My god, he’s going to kill her, it’s actually happening, when he rammed her head hard against the wall. I saw it loll back, limp, and then he yanked open the door and they both disappeared inside.
I called for back-up then grabbed my gun and sprang out of the car. Lights came on inside, indicating his path through the house, and I stood just shy of the porch, trying to decide what to do. I knew I shouldn’t go in alone—I didn’t even know who else was in the house—but I was convinced that he would kill the girl and in the end that was all I could think about. I pushed into the house and followed the sounds, noting a shabby-looking wooden table in the kitchen with bags of white power on it. The air smelled like stale booze and sweat and fear, and I wondered how many girls had been brought here, powerless and terrified.
When I got to the bedroom Robbie was attempting to rape the poor girl, who was out cold. Her bruised lip was like a strawberry in the dim light and a black eye was just starting to show. Her bra was dotted with tiny smiling cartoon suns. I held up my gun and said all the right things and I wanted nothing more in that moment than to shoot him dead, but I held my stare and calmly directed him to get up, pull his pants up, and go and stand against the wall with his hands high.
‘You piece of shit,’ I said to his freckly back.
Robbie grunted and then laughed as he swayed slightly against the wall.
The girl didn’t move. After checking for a pulse and finding one, I carefully draped a sheet across her.
The house turned out to hold more of Robbie’s secrets than I had ever expected, though I am sure there are many more that we will never know. The drugs in the kitchen were just a taste of the fully operational amphetamine lab we found in the garden shed. Then there were the weapons: four unlicensed shotguns and an antique dagger. We turned up fake IDs and wads of money stashed away under the house. But it was the two bodies we found in an old well in the yard that really changed my fortunes. A runaway, just like Stacy, who had gone missing five years earlier, and an Italian backpacker who had been assumed to have suicided down one of the local gorges due to a carefully placed backpack, had died at the hands of Robbie. Several of his friends were fingered for the weapons and the drugs but only Robbie was linked to the murders. Annie Charleston, the eighteen-year-old student he’d attempted to rape that night, was battered and bruised but recovered in full, at least physically. Her family moved away after the trial. I don’t know whether Robbie would have killed her that night, but I know the part of me that had been dormant for a long time came alive as I stood in that room with my arm out, heavy with the weight of the gun, my body burning with the ability to make the badness stop. It felt incredible.
I did my interview with Candy Fyfe, up-and-coming reporter, the next day.
I had woken, feeling sluggish, just after 9 am, with Scott hovering nearby offering me water and telling me that even though what I had done was amazing, I really shouldn’t have risked my life like that. I nodded, knowing that if given the chance I would do it every day.
When I was sitting across from Candy in her boss’s office, her perfect dark skin glowing, she was all sisterhood and girl power, and I know I came across as cold and prickly. She was not a good enemy to make but I felt sick and anxious, increasingly panicked about what the last few weeks of my Robbie obsession had allowed me to ignore.
‘How does it feel to have virtually single-handedly taken down a serial killer? I mean, some cops will go through their whole careers never doing what you have done in a couple of years. You’re a star!’
She managed to make it sound like I’d put extra cinnamon in some already tasty muffins.
‘I’m just glad he was caught. He was dangerous, like a loaded gun.’
‘A loaded gun. Great, yes.’ She tapped her pen against her teeth. ‘That’s a good visual. I like to write as if I’m painting, you see.’