Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(4)

But, four months earlier, my own colleagues had left the police station where I worked on their way to make the biggest arrest of their careers – a man they believed was a vicious serial killer who had tortured and murdered three university students. No amount of intuition, or skill, or training had prepared me for the fact that that man was my own flesh and blood.

Sam’s case was all the nation was talking about. The newspapers were calling him Australia’s worst serial killer, and that was no small claim – every article compared him with the fiends who’d taken up the mantle before him. Ivan Milat, the Backpacker Murderer. Arnold Sodeman, the Schoolgirl Strangler. Eric Edgar Cooke, the Night Caller. Now came Samuel Jacob Blue, the Georges River Killer, responsible for the prolonged, brutal deaths of three beautiful, young students.

For four months, I’d been determined to do everything right to help my brother go free. He was innocent. I was sure of it. The man who abducted, raped, tortured and strangled the three women I saw every night on the news was not the man who’d once been a boy snuggled beside me in the temporary beds at the offices of the Department of Children’s Services. He was not that terrified boy, whispering to me in the dark, wondering which foster home we were going to be shipped to next. He was not the teenager who’d defended me at various high schools when the kids came to pick on the shabby interlopers. The one who made me birthday cards when our new families forgot. Whoever he was, he did not have my brother’s soulful kindness. His never-ending generosity.

On the footpath nearby, the usual gathering of gawkers and court ghouls waited for the doors to open. One caught my eye and spat on the ground, spoke loudly to his friend in the queue.

‘She knew what he was up to,’ he said. ‘How could she not?’

‘Don’t listen, Harry.’ My partner, Detective Edward Whittacker, tried to take my arm and turn me away from the crowd. ‘You’ll only make yourself madder.’

‘I’m not mad,’ I lied, shrugging him off. ‘I’m cool. I’m calm. Today’s going to be the day. We’ll find it today. The key.’

I’d been talking about the ‘key’ to my brother’s case since his arrest. The thing that freed him. A piece of false testimony. A surprise witness. Something, anything. I’d been looking into Sam’s case, and I hadn’t found the key that proved he wasn’t the killer. But I had high hopes. Hell, my hopes got so high sometimes I had fantasies of the killer himself walking into the courtroom and confessing. Giving up was far from my mind.

I spotted my brother’s prosecutor, the enormous, broad-shouldered Liam Woolfmyer, strolling towards us with a colleague beside him. Whitt had my arm again, his other hand fumbling at his necktie.

‘Don’t say a word,’ he growled.

‘You keep pawing at me and it’ll be more than words you have to worry about.’

‘I’m warning you, Harry.’ Whitt glared over the top of his glasses at me. The gentle, fastidious detective had been mortified to hear me sneer a stream of obscenities at Woolfmyer the first morning of my brother’s hearings.

Sometimes there’s a wild Harriet in me, a woman I can’t control. She rears her ugly head without warning. The comment from the queue already had her twitching. But then I stole a glance at Woolfmyer, and the worst of all things happened. He locked eyes with me, smiled, and leaned over in mock confidence to his companion.

‘Samuel Blue won’t last a single night in Long Bay prison,’ Woolfmyer said. ‘He’s far too pretty. Someone will make him their bitch.’

The bad Harriet in me swelled, like white-hot steam, blinding and painful behind my eyes. As Woolfmyer passed I was already taking steps to catch up with him. I barely heard Whitt’s call.

The few metres between Woolfmyer and me closed in an instant. I was behind him. My hand reaching up, completely beyond my control.

I tapped him on the shoulder. Woolfmyer stopped and turned.

I punched him as hard as I could in the temple.





Chapter 5


I’VE ALWAYS BEEN a fighter. It’s necessary, when you have a childhood like mine, to know how to defend yourself physically. I was a scrappy, dirty fighter before my police chief taught me how to box. He made the mistake of honing the self-taught craft of a brutal, remorseless combatant. Size means nothing when you know what you’re doing. I swung up and to the left with a hard, balled right fist and smashed the prosecutor with all the force in my arm, shoulder and hip.

The only sound was the dull thump of his body on the pavement, the whisper of his settling robes, a big bird brought down out of the sky by a rifle blast.

My regret was instant. I looked around. Woolfmyer’s friend staggering back. Whitt nearby, his hand still out, reaching, desperate. The crowd, a huddle of journalists. Horror and guilt rushed up through my body. Cameras flashed.

I felt a bizarre impulse to reach down and help the unconscious lawyer to his feet. To brush him off, slap him on the back, pretend it was all going to be OK.

But everything was far from OK. The police officer who had been guarding the front doors of the courthouse began to march towards me, taking his cuffs from his belt.





Chapter 6


I STOOD IN the entrance to the holding cell and stared at the women there. They were like lazy, uninterested cats lounging on the steel benches. One girl was lying on her belly on the floor, a magazine spread out before her. There were more magazines in a stack on one of the benches, trashy celebrity rags. An adult slumber party in a concrete bedroom. A gaggle of arrested shoplifters, prostitutes, drug runners. I went to the nearest bench and sat down, put my face in my hands as the steel door slammed shut.