I SLAMMED the door of the interrogation room in the Chief’s face and marched across the office to the Homicide case room. Dozens of eyes followed me. I threw open the door and spotted that slimeball Nigel Spader standing before a huge corkboard stuffed with pinned images, pages, sketches. He flinched for a blow as I walked over but I restrained myself and smacked the folder he was holding out of his hands instead. Papers flew everywhere.
“You sniveling prick,” I said, shoving a finger in his face. “You dirty, sniveling…dick hole!”
I was so mad I couldn’t speak, and that’s a real first for me. I couldn’t breathe. My whole throat was aflame. The restraint faltered and I grabbed a wide-eyed Nigel by the shirtfront, gathering up two fistfuls of his orange chest-hair as I dragged him to the floor. Someone caught my fist before I could land a punch. It took two more men to release my grip. We struggled backwards into a table full of coffee cups and plates of muffins. Crockery shattered on the floor.
“How could you be so completely wrong?” I shouted. “How could you be so completely, completely useless! You pathetic piece of—”
“That’s enough!” The Chief stepped forward into the fray and took my arm. “Detective Blue, you get a fucking hold of yourself right now, or I’ll have the boys escort you out onto the street.”
I was suddenly free of all arms and I stumbled, my head pounding.
And then I saw it.
The three girls, their autopsy portraits beside smiling, sunlit shots provided by the families. A handprint on a throat. A picture of my brother’s hand. A map of Sydney, studded with pins where the victims lived, where their families lived, where my brother lived, where the bodies of the girls were found. Photographs of the inside of my brother’s apartment, but not as I knew it. Unfamiliar things had been pulled out of drawers and brought down from cupboards. Porn. Tubs and tubs of magazines, DVDs, glossy pictures. A rope. A knife. A bloody T-shirt. Photographs of onlookers at the crime scenes. My brother’s face among the crowd.
In the middle of it all, a photograph of Sam. I tugged the photo from the board and unfolded the half of the image that had been tucked away. My own face. The two of us were squeezed into the frame, the flash glinting in my brother’s blue eyes.
We looked so alike. Detective Harry Blue and the Georges River Killer.
Chapter 7
I’VE HAD two cigarettes in the past ten years. Both of them I smoked outside the funeral home where a fallen colleague’s body was being laid to rest. I stood now in the alleyway behind headquarters, finishing off the third. I chain-lit the fourth, sucked hard, exhaled into the icy morning. Despite the chill, my shirt was sticking to me with sweat. I tried to call my brother’s phone three times. No answer.
The Chief emerged from the fire exit beside me. I held up a hand. Not only did I not want to talk, I wasn’t sure that I could if I tried. The old man stood watching as I smoked. My hands were shaking.
“That…that rat…that stain on humanity, Nigel Spader, is going to go down for this,” I said. “If it’s my last act, I’m going to make sure he—”
“I’ve overseen the entire operation,” the Chief said. “I couldn’t tell you it was going on, or you might have alerted Sam. We let you carry on, business as usual. Nigel and his team have done a very good job. They’ve been onto your brother for about three weeks now.”
I looked at my Chief. My trainer. My friend.
“I’ve thought you’ve been looking tired,” I sneered. “Can’t sleep at night, Boss?”
“No,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I can’t. I haven’t slept since the morning the Homicide team told me of their suspicions. I hated lying to you, Blue.”
He ground a piece of asphalt into the gutter with his heel. He looked ancient in the reflected light of the towering city blocks around us.
“Where is my brother?”
“They picked him up this morning,” he said. “He’s being interrogated by the Feds over at Parramatta headquarters.”
“I need to get over there.”
“You won’t get anywhere near him at this stage.” The Chief took me by the shoulders before I could barge past him through the fire door. “He’s in processing. Depending on whether he’s cooperative, he may not be approved for visitors for a week. Two, even.”
“Sam didn’t do this,” I said. “You’ve got it wrong. Nigel’s got it wrong. I need to be here to straighten all this out.”
“No, you don’t,” he said. “You need to get some stuff together and get out of here.”
“What, just abandon him?”
“Harry, Sam is about to go down as one of the nastiest sexual sadists since the Backpacker Murderer. Whether you think he did it or not, you’re public enemy number two right now. If the press gets hold of you, they’re going to eat you alive.”