Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(74)

Whitt grabbed a roll of bandages from the shelf beside him and began winding them around and around his partner’s wrist, sealing the bag around his hand. ‘He’s got forensic evidence under his nails. I’m preserving that evidence until we can get it tested.’

‘How can you be so selfish?’ one of the medics snapped as the doors shut behind her and the engine roared to life. ‘This man is dying!’

‘Not without reason, he’s not,’ Whitt said.





Chapter 116


THERE WAS A whump sound, like a fist hitting a taut stomach, and Dez’s body bucked backwards in the chair, tipping it onto its hind legs. His head sprayed upwards, a mess of blood and skull and teeth and brain matter lost in a yellow ball of flame that vaporised as quickly as it had ballooned. The headless body rocked forwards, taking the chair with it, and collapsed onto the tiles. I hadn’t made a sound. I had no voice. The air was trapped in my lungs, and only when Dez fell did it ease out in a short, harsh yelp.

Blood was everywhere. On the ceiling. On the furniture. On my face.

I like to think I’m pretty tough. But nothing I’d ever experienced had hardened me enough to bear this as coldly and emotionlessly as Bella. I went from understanding and sympathising with her to suddenly being so terrified of her that I could scream. I’d thought I understood. I didn’t understand at all.

I watched, frozen with terror, as she took another plastic water bottle from the pile of things on the table.

‘Oh God, please. Please don’t. Bella, Jesus.’

I’d stood. But she had the gun again and was ushering me back down into the chair with the soothing motions of a mother. She took the roll of duct tape and tossed it at my feet.

‘Strap up,’ she said.





Chapter 117


WHITT STOOD IN the hospital hallway, motionless. To his left down the stairs was the triage unit where Tox had been taken. The man had died in the ambulance and been resuscitated right in front of him, a pulse lost, a pulse encouraged to return. Whitt supposed that was death. He wasn’t sure. A paramedic had clamped another mask over him and sat squeezing a rubber bag, forcing air into his lungs. Another had shone a torch in his eyes, stuck him with needles, strapped things to his limbs. All the while the hand with the evidence bag tied to it remained flopped down by Tox’s side, untouchable. Some silent understanding had come over everyone, after the panic of the first moments, that the hand held the evidence of who had done this. Whitt hadn’t said anything. He couldn’t find the words. But after an hour or so in the emergency room one of the nurses had come out and handed him a glass slide in a little pouch. Whitt had thanked her and run it up to a lab on the third floor. He’d commandeer the lab. Whatever it took. There was no time to waste getting the sample to a police forensic unit.

Now he was in between those two places, the lab where the nail scrapings had gone for testing and the triage department where Tox was fighting for life. He took out his phone and called Harry, but the call rang through.

‘Hi,’ he said after the message tone. He only noticed, at that moment, that his hands were covered in blood. In fact, his clothes were spattered all over with it. People were staring at him as they walked past, alarm in their eyes. ‘Um. Call me … uh … when you can. We got a DNA sample from the Georges River suspect. It’ll be three hours, they think, before they can give us a result. I’m, um, I’m not sure what to do now. Tox is … He’s … Just call me back.’

He sat down in a plastic chair beside a vending machine filled with high-sugar snacks. He had to focus now. There were units out there in the night searching for the killer, trying to track down the twelve men who’d been identified by their fingerprints at the abandoned hotel. They were now also checking emergency rooms and medical centres for anyone wounded, knowing Tox would have done at least some damage to his attacker. The killer wouldn’t have been expecting a man at Harry’s apartment. He must have seen the lights on, wondered if she might be there. What had he wanted with Harry? The same thing he wanted with the girls he had taken?

None of it made sense. No, it didn’t make sense if the theory was that this man was Sam Blue’s partner. Because if Sam Blue was his partner, his friend, he’d have no reason to want to hurt Harry. And why go around and break into Harry’s apartment if his intentions for her were good? Had he broken in? There was no way of telling. The door had been smashed down, and neighbours in the building were saying they thought the dead man in the hallway had done it. Had he got in another way?

Whitt needed to find this guy. Going to Harry’s apartment had been a bold act. Caitlyn McBeal had escaped him. His face had, presumably, been on the television – even if it was buried among the faces of other suspects. Now he was on the run, probably wounded. The killer must be in crisis mode. He would do now what killers in trouble always do. He would go home. Go to where it was safe. Not literally to his place of residence – the police would be covering the houses of the twelve men. He’d go where his heart lived. Where it had all begun.

But where on Earth was that?

Whitt stood. He had an idea.





Chapter 118


THE LIGHTS OF the town swirled in my vision, the black arms of the cliffs around us. The wind was making me shiver, but I knew it couldn’t possibly be as cold as I felt. I tried to walk slowly, to think. The bottle under my chin felt heavy. Bella had rolled the duct tape around and around my neck. It was pulling at my hair. Awkwardly tugging at the skin behind my ear. It was hard to walk with my hands behind my back. The tape there was too tight, jamming my unbroken wrist up against the cast on the other arm. When Bella had asked me to strap up, I’d been pleased with how awkward it was, taping my own hands behind my back. I had started the roll on my good wrist and given myself a little gap between my wrists, hoping she’d think I’d done it by accident. No luck. When Bella had taken over, she’d made sure the bind was nice and secure. My fingers tingled with numbness.