Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(9)

‘Elliot Kash, Counter-Terrorism Task Force, Islamic Fundamentalism Division, ASIO.’

‘Of course.’ I nodded. I understood all the dramatics now. This guy was in national security. I’d come across his type before. ‘Of course you are.’

‘ You’ve heard of me then? Good. That’ll save time. Let’s secure the entry to the blast zone, erect a checkpoint on the road. We’ll do hourly sweeps of the search grid to see if the suspect comes back. They often return to film their work for their online campaigns.’

I noticed Kash hadn’t asked me for my name, or a long-winded explanation of my position within the police. I let it go.

‘Who exactly are you talking about?’ I asked. ‘We’ve got a dead guy and a bomb. How do you know who else was involved?’

‘You’ve seen the diary?’

‘Barely,’ I said.

‘Well, you’re behind,’ Kash sighed. ‘You can get a debriefing once we’ve established a secure boundary. We need to act now and ask questions later. Get going. I’ll take charge here.’

I suffered the same verbal slap to the head, the phenomenon of compliance sweeping over me like a spell. I found myself walking back towards the road, thinking I’d move Snale’s truck, put lights on the road, see if she had some traffic cones in the back to guide any passers-by onto the shoulder so we could question them. I didn’t further analyse Kash’s resolve that a dangerous suspect was behind this, and that it was possible he or she was somewhere around here.

The spell wore off before I hit the roadside. I stopped, frowned, tried to get my thoughts in order. Snale bumped into me from behind. She’d been jogging up the path behind me.

‘Sorry,’ she sniffed. ‘I’ve got to get to the radio and call in the team from the next town over. We need more people. This is bad. This is really bad.’

‘ It’s OK.’ I jogged alongside her. This was probably the most terrible crime to ever happen in Last Chance Valley. Maybe the only serious crime they’d ever had. ‘Agent Dickhead’s got it all under control.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘I just found the victim’s head. I know who he is. He’s my chief.’





Chapter 13


HE CAME EVERY second night when the temperature began to sink, at what Caitlyn assumed was sunset outside her concrete room. The first few times, she tried to brace herself for what was about to happen. She visualised it for hours on end, her skin crawling and stomach turning, trying to decide how she would endure the rape or torture or prolonged death he had planned for her. But after a week, when none of those things had happened, a deep, sickening confusion set in. And then there was the rage. Caitlyn sat on the mattress in the dark and boiled with a quiet, dangerous rage.

The man with the shaved head came and unlocked the door, walked down the steps and put her supplies on the floor. Two packaged sandwiches, one chicken and one roast beef, the kind a person buys at the service station. Two bottles of water. Two chocolate bars. One roll of toilet paper for the bucket in the corner. He wouldn’t look at her. The ritual was always the same. He came, he dropped the supplies, he changed the bucket and he left, locking the door securely behind him.

Caitlyn had tried everything she could think of. She’d waited by the door and swung a wine bottle she’d found in the crates at his head, missed her target by centimetres. The wine was expired and tasted foul, but after breaking a couple of bottles she’d come up with a good, shiny dagger that she came at him with the next time, again to no avail. He’d shoved her hard down the stairs, and she’d lain crying, the back of her head bleeding on the cold stone floor.

The next time, she’d been a bit trickier. Caitlyn had pulled lengths of fabric from the old mattress and woven them into a strong trip-wire, pulled this across the doorway. He’d tripped, and she’d launched herself at him, clubbed him hard in the back of the skull with a lump of wood broken from one of the crates. She’d got through the doorway and looked down the dark hall that led to wherever she was before he’d grabbed her ankle and dragged her back into her prison room. Down the hall she’d seen a long concrete walkway, stairs to the upper levels, and plenty more heavy trash that he dragged in front of the door after he locked it. Caitlyn glimpsed flyers on the ground, warped and yellowed, a box of moulded brass numbers, the kind a person would screw to a door or the front of a house. An old hotel? The power must still be turned on for her television to work. Why couldn’t anyone hear her cries? Was she underground?

Caitlyn didn’t know if her captor was just unusually strong or if the rations and the lack of sleep had left her weak. She was no match for him. As the days passed, it became harder for her to wake. Harder to think. Harder to cry. In the daytime, she screamed for help. At night she sat and watched the television in the corner, pulling at strands of her hair.

Caitlyn recognised this for what it was. A holding pattern. Something had gone wrong with his plan, whatever it had been. Now he was simply keeping her alive. Uninterested. Out of ideas. If he didn’t want sex from her, and he didn’t want to torture her, and he didn’t want to talk to her, why the hell was he doing this?

When the news came on, it was more often than not about the Georges River Killer’s arrest. Sam Blue had featured in the media for months.