Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(51)

And then you realise that no matter what you throw on the flames, they keep on burning, mighty and unquenchable. The fight would in fact be eternal. Like Kash, I’d given my life over to my job. I breathed it. I obsessed over it, nurtured it, the way I should perhaps have been nurturing friendships, relationships, maybe children. That sort of stuff hardly occurred to me. And yet it was all other people lived for. Was that what had so strangely drawn me to the baby in Jed Chatt’s arms? I’d defied logic, crept close to a man who’d only minutes before held a gun on me, so that I could see a child’s eyes. Was something inside me whispering of things I was losing because I refused to believe the world needed to be as bad as it was?

Kash had lost his wife because of his commitment to the eternal fight. He needed to get her back.

I lay in the hospital bed and held my broken arm against my chest and wondered if I’d be happier if I stopped fighting.

I pulled out my IV, pushed aside the blankets and started untying my hospital gown. Two nurses were standing just outside my cubicle, chatting at the counter. As I tied my shoelaces, they wandered on. I snuck past them and made for the car park.

Fighting was all I was good at. I couldn’t stop now.





Chapter 75


KASH WAS STANDING by a police cruiser loaned from White Cliffs to get us home. He was leaning on the driver’s side door, talking gently into the phone. He straightened as he saw me.

‘My partner’s here,’ he told the caller. ‘I gotta go. Love you, too.’

‘Love you too, huh?’ I said.

‘Force of habit.’ He watched me approach. ‘But it’s the first time in a long time there were no raised voices. I’m assuming the nurses have not signed your official release.’

‘They have not,’ I said. ‘So let’s quit the small talk and get out of here.’

On the road in the darkness, the cruiser sailed over the asphalt between oceans of featureless desert sand. The sun was just beginning to light the horizon. I looked at my phone. There was a text from my mother telling me she’d got the money I’d transferred. No mention of her disappointment that it was not in cash. A call came through as I was looking at the screen. It was an unfamiliar number. I answered with trembling fingers.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s Tox.’

‘Oh,’ I said. Tox was notoriously difficult to get on the phone, and even harder to converse with once the connection was made. His already-poor people skills seemed halved by the distance. My heart sank. ‘What’s happened?’

‘We found Caitlyn McBeal,’ he said.

I reeled, absurdly looking to Kash to see if he’d heard the news. My skin was tingling all over, and not just from the burns.

‘Is she –’

‘She’s alive.’

‘Jesus.’ I sat bolt upright in my seat. ‘Jesus! What’s she saying?’

‘Don’t get excited. She’s not saying much at all, and what she is saying doesn’t sound good for you. She says a guy has been keeping her in a cellar for the last few months. Practically starving her to death. She thinks he’s connected to Sam. A partner, maybe.’

‘What do you mean, she thinks that?’

‘I mean that’s what she thinks.’

‘Christ, Tox! Explain what you mean!’ I tried not to yell. Every fibre of my being was telling me to scream. ‘What exactly did she say?’

‘She says he didn’t touch her the whole time,’ he grumbled. ‘Didn’t rape her. Didn’t torture her. Hardly looked at her. Just seemed to go on standby mode, almost like he didn’t know what to do with her. Caitlyn thinks it’s because Sam was arrested. She thinks they were a double act, and once Sam was gone, the guy who kept her lost interest.’

I shivered in my seat. The drugs were still in my system, making my mind fragmented, twitchy. Again I felt that magnetic pull towards my home. I needed to get back there. Speak to Caitlyn. Convince her that she was wrong. Three days. I’d go to her hospital room. Look her in the eyes.

‘How … I mean, what did he …’

‘I haven’t got time to relate it all to you play by play,’ Tox said. ‘We’re standing outside Caitlyn’s hospital room, waiting to go in. Detective Nigel Fuckface is giving us fifteen minutes with her.’

‘Who’s the guy?’ I gripped the phone tight. ‘The guy who abducted Caitlyn. Did you catch him?’

‘No, he slipped away,’ Tox said. ‘You’ll see the sketch on the news in a couple of hours, I reckon.’

‘But –’

The line went dead.

‘Fuck!’ I screamed long and loud, looking at the phone screen, Tox’s number and the ‘Call ended’ message. He’d hung up on me. ‘Fuck! FUCK!’





Chapter 76


WHITT AND TOX stood side by side, leaning against the wall outside Caitlyn McBeal’s hospital room. A few metres down the hall from them, a group of detectives lingered, people from Sex Crimes and Major Crimes, some trauma-trained officers Whitt recognised from the Parramatta headquarters. Beyond them, at the nurses’ station, a group of journalists had already assembled, arguing with three beat cops who held them back from the hall.