“I tell you, I would be climbing the bloody walls.” Raco shuddered behind the steering wheel. Outside, a thin wire fence protecting yellow scrub flashed past. Beyond, the fields were beige and brown. “Cooped up in the middle of nowhere with no one but the old lady. That house was like a weird museum.”
“Not a fan of china cherubs?” Falk said.
“Mate, my gran is more Catholic than the pope. When it comes to quasi-religious ornaments, I can see you and raise you,” Raco said. “It just doesn’t seem like much of a life for a guy his age.”
They passed a fire warning sign by the side of the road. The alert level had been lodged at severe since Falk had arrived. The arrow pointed insistently at the bright orange segment of the semicircle. Prepare. Act. Survive.
“Was he being straight with us, you reckon?”
Falk explained how Sullivan’s grandmother had reacted to his claim he’d been at home that evening.
“That’s interesting. She’s quite batty, though, isn’t she? Bit of a mean streak as well. There was nothing in the reports suggesting Sullivan was out and about, but that doesn’t really mean anything. He probably wasn’t checked too thoroughly, if at all.”
“The thing is”—Falk leaned forward to fiddle with the air conditioner—“if Sullivan wanted to kill Luke, it would have been easy. They were out in the middle of nowhere with shotguns for over an hour. It’s an open invitation to stage an accident. His gran could have pulled it off out there.”
Falk gave up on the air conditioner and wound down his window a crack, letting in a stream of boiling air. He hastily rolled it back up.
Raco laughed. “And I thought the heat was bad in Adelaide.”
“That’s where you were? What brought you all the way out here?”
“First chance for a sergeant’s posting. Seemed like a good opportunity to run my own station, and I was a country kid, anyway. You always worked in Melbourne?”
“Mostly. Always been based there.”
“You like doing the financial stuff?”
Falk smiled to himself at Raco’s tone. Polite yet complete disbelief that anyone had chosen that route. It was a familiar reaction. People were always surprised to discover how often the banknotes he handled were sticky with blood.
“It suits me,” he said. “Speaking of, I started going through the Hadlers’ financial records last night.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Not yet.” Falk stifled a yawn. He’d stayed up late peering at the numbers under the weak wattage of his room’s main light. “Which is telling in itself. The farm was struggling, that’s obvious, but I’m not sure it was doing much worse than any of the others round here. At least they’d planned for it a bit. Put some money away during the good times. Their life insurance policy was nothing special. Just the basic attached to their pension.”
“Who gets that?”
“Charlotte, via Luke’s parents. It’s pretty minimal, though. It’ll probably pay off the mortgage and not much more. She’ll get the farm, I guess, whether she likes it or not. So far no other real red flags—multiple accounts, large withdrawals, third-party debts, that sort of stuff. I’ll keep at it.”
The main thing Falk had learned from the exercise was that Karen Hadler was a competent and thorough bookkeeper. He’d felt a pang of affinity with her as he’d followed her ordered numbers and careful pencil markings.
Raco slowed as he approached a deserted junction and checked his watch.
“Seven minutes gone.”
They were following Luke’s route home from Sullivan’s place. Raco turned left onto the road toward the Hadlers’ farmhouse. It was paved, but not well. Deep cracks showed where the asphalt had swelled and shrunk with the seasonality of a crop.
It was technically a two-way road but was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass side by side. A head-on meeting would force one to take a neighborly dip into the scrub, Falk imagined. He didn’t get the opportunity to find out. They didn’t meet a single vehicle the whole way.
“Nearly fourteen minutes, door to door,” Falk said as Raco pulled up at the Hadlers’ driveway. “All right. Let’s see where Luke’s body was found.”
It was barely even a clearing.
Raco managed to shoot past it and swore quietly, screeching to a halt. He reversed a few meters and pulled over at the side of the road. They got out, not bothering to lock the doors. There was no one else around. Raco led the way to a gap in the tree line.
“It’s in here.”
There was a pocket of eerie silence as invisible birds were momentarily stilled by the sound of his voice. The gap opened into a small space, big enough for a vehicle to drive in but not turn around. Falk stood in the center. It was fractionally cooler here, shaded on all sides by a sentry line of ghost gums. The road was completely hidden by the thick growth. Something in the bush rustled and scurried away. The yellow earth was baked solid. No tracks or wheel marks.
Directly beneath Falk’s feet, in the center of the clearing, lay a dusting of loose sand. He realized what it had been put down to cover and hastily stepped off. The area had been trampled over by dozens of boots recently, but other than that it looked ill-used.
“Pretty miserable place to spend your last moments,” Falk said. “Was this spot supposed to mean anything to Luke?”
Raco shrugged. “Hoping you might have some idea about that.”
Falk searched his memory for old camping trips, boyhood adventures. Nothing came to mind.
“He definitely died here? In the back of the truck?” Falk said. “No chance he was shot somewhere else and moved?”
“None at all. Blood pattern was definitive.”
Falk tried to organize the timeline in his head. Luke had left Jamie Sullivan’s around 4:30 P.M. Luke’s truck was on camera at the Hadlers’ farm about thirty minutes later. Longer than it had taken Falk and Raco to drive the same distance. Two gunshots, four minutes, and the truck had driven away.
“It’s fairly straightforward if Luke shot his family,” Falk said. “He drove himself to the house, taking the scenic route for whatever reason, killed them, then drove himself here.”
“Yeah. Gets a lot more complicated if it was someone else, though,” Raco said. “The killer had to be inside Luke’s truck at some point soon after he left Sullivan’s, because Luke had the murder weapon with him. So who drove it to the farmhouse?”
“And if it wasn’t Luke behind the wheel, where the hell was he while his family was being murdered? Sitting in the passenger seat watching it happen?” Falk said.
Raco shrugged. “Maybe he was. I mean, it’s a possible scenario. Depending on who the other person was, what kind of hold they might have had over him.” They looked at each other, and Falk knew Raco was also thinking about Sullivan.