Fifty Fifty (Detective Harriet Blue #2)(59)

It had been an apprenticeship in pain. Years learning how to take it, how to experience pain in so many unique and creative ways. When they’d come for him on his last days, Regan had looked at the man in the mirror on the wall of his cell. A master of suffering.

As he’d left the cell block that had been his home, Regan had felt his muscles tightening, hardening. He’d walked through the administration block to collect his belongings and felt his fingers lengthen to talons. Through the transition cages, he’d felt black wings unfurling from his shoulderblades. In the car park where they left him, free to go wherever he pleased, his eyes had begun to burn with bloody, furious tears.

Regan realised that all along, he’d been designed to evolve into the thing he was now, this monster. His time in prison had been a natural steeling process. An incubation period. A thing as hard as him needed to be forged. All goodness needed to be squeezed from it. Empathy. Passion. Weakness. Standing there in the parking lot in the dark, the distant sounds of the waves crashing against the cliffs beyond the prison, he closed his eyes and remembered Sam Blue. All the time he’d been locked away, Regan hadn’t dared call his friend’s face to his mind. He’d been afraid of the fury that would come. The bloody memories. He remembered Sam, and knew only that he needed to find him.

Regan stood looking at his own face on the television screen now. Inevitably, the news story shifted and there he was. Beautiful Sam, with his downcast eyes and hollow cheeks.

Regan put a hand on the window and bent low, focused on the tiny pixels that made up the man’s face.

Sam. His soulmate.





Chapter 91


KASH AND I drove back down the main street after our surveillance on the Robit property. There were patrol officers in the town, borrowed from towns all around, talking to people at their fences. Mick the bartender was leaving his house with an armful of towels, watching us roll by, his big belly making a single circle of sweat on his T-shirt where the flesh dipped inwards at his navel.

I pulled Kash’s arm, gesturing for him to stop. From the street outside the little house across from Victoria Snale’s property, I could hear children playing inside. As I went to the door, the young mother I’d seen the night Zac Taby lost his life shouted from somewhere towards the rear of the building.

I knocked and two young ones, maybe three and four years old, ran to the screen door and stared expectantly up at me. I’d seen these golden-haired children that night in their pyjamas. The mother was tired when she came to the door, uncomposed, expecting someone else. She remembered me.

‘ I’m Harriet Blue,’ I said. ‘This is my partner, Elliot Kash.’ She opened the door. The kids tumbled out, seemingly very impressed with Kash, a thickly muscled superhero towering above them. There was no sign of a dad here.

‘Mary Skinner,’ the mother said, smiling. ‘You two, get back in here.’

The kids giggled and ran into the cool, dark hall. I followed Mary past a wall of framed photographs, backpacks hanging on hooks, a wooden rack inadequately small for the dozens of dusty shoes piled onto it. We went to the kitchen and she didn’t offer us coffee. She was uncomfortable. Picking at fingernails split from nibbling.

‘You probably know why I’m here,’ I said.

‘The bombings.’ She glanced towards the door as something crashed in one of the bedrooms. ‘It’s terrifying. Have you got a suspect yet?’

‘We’ve got some leads,’ I said. ‘But I think maybe you could lengthen them for me. I don’t know if you remember what you said to me two nights ago when I was out there on your porch.’

Mary had tucked one arm into her ribs, the other tight against her chest. She opened the fridge to give herself somewhere to look.

‘I don’t remember anything much except the blast,’ she said. ‘I was watching out the window when it happened. I saw you fall. Are you OK? I mean,’ – she examined my broken arm – ‘nothing permanent?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘You told me that it was “all gonna come out”. You said, “It’s all coming to an end.”’

Mary looked horrified. Kash was sitting on a stool by the kitchen bench quite near her, measuring the response on her face. She took a bottle of water from the fridge and set it on the counter, turned away from us both.

‘I didn’t say that,’ she said quietly.

‘Yes, you did.’

‘Look, I’m alone here.’ She threw me a hard look, on the edge of snapping. ‘I lost a child. I lost a husband. I say weird things sometimes that I don’t necessarily mean.’

The silence that fell was heavy. I could hear the children whispering beyond the door. I looked at them and they squealed and ran away.

‘What happened?’ I asked.

‘My husband left. He’s up north. Cairns.’

‘I mean to your child,’ I said. ‘You said you –’

‘Brandon overdosed.’ Mary’s gaze was locked on me. ‘It was an accident. He and his friends had been messing around with stuff brought in by the truckers. He was seventeen, child of my first marriage.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘I don’t have anything else for you.’ Mary shut the fridge door hard, made jars rattle inside it. ‘That’s it. Now, I’ve got things to do here.’