‘It’s Rus.’
I expected Dad to laugh, too. Or come out with some shockingly homophobic slur. Instead, he was silent. I waited, fighting traffic down the hill towards the city. ‘Dad?’
‘You need to get rid of him.’
‘Look, you’re not going to run into him,’ I said. ‘He’ll be head down on the case and won’t come up for air. If you’re worried, just stay out of Redbelly.’
‘I don’t care about running into him,’ Dad growled. ‘I care about him taking the case off you and leaving you—and by way ofyou,me—in the dirt. He would do that. You know what he’s like. He’s vengeful as all hell.’
‘This from the guy who checks the obituaries every week for a funeral notice about someone you had a fight with at workforty years ago,’ I said.
‘Yeah, so what? That prick Bernie Carrera is going to die one of these days, and I’ll be right there with my shovel to help them bury him.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘If Russell solves this, he’ll make sure you don’t get any credit. And if he cocks it up he’ll blame it on you.’
‘He’s not going to cock it up. Russell is an absolute weapon these days. The guy listens to a crime scene like a fucking maestro listens to the orchestra, trying to find out which tuba is out of tune.’
‘Do you hear yourself? What do you think you are, a poet?’
‘I’m not going to try to get him removed. Gail Caplan owes me zero favours, for one thing, and even if I did ask her to pull him off, he’d find out and hammer me into the ground like a tent peg. I’m just going to try to do my best here.’
‘Your best isn’t going to cut it.’
‘Well, what do you want me to do?’
‘Tell me what you’ve got,’ he said. ‘Maybe I can help you. Although you may be the very definition of “beyond help”.’
Russell’s voice was in my brain, doing that stupid high-pitched baby impression.I’m a good little boy, aren’t I, Daddy?
‘I’m not going to get an assist from my father on this,’ I said. ‘You’re not a cop anymore, and you’re not my mentor, and—’
‘Did you just say “I’m not gonna get an assist from my father”?’ Now he laughed. Hard.
I wrung the steering wheel. ‘I needed your help thatone time, Dad. Which makes it all the more important that I don’t take it now.’
He left an uncomfortable silence, one designed to make me break and back down. When I didn’t, he said, ‘From what I know, it’s a girl stabbed in her room. No sexual assault. Full pub downstairs. That’s a snap decision.’
‘What did I just say about not wanting your help?’
‘A case this simple, you shouldn’t need it. The girl’s pissed off the local loony and he’s gone up there and taught her a lesson.’
‘That’s exactly what Russell is saying it isn’t. He thinks it was a carefully executed, targeted thing.’
‘Well, he’s wrong. Nobody with any sense of risk or forward planning would do this.’
I thought about Chris, lifting a paintball gun to a girl’s head, pulling the trigger.Die, bitch.
‘What do the traffic cams say?’
‘The cams.’ I wiped my hands on my trousers. They’d been sweating on the wheel. ‘I forgot about those.’
If Chris was at the pub, his car would be on the traffic cams coming and going from town, I thought. Again, a whump of guilt in my stomach, that I didn’t believe my own son’s word over a grainy image on a cheap pub camera.
‘Dodge’s people are working on the cams, I think,’ I said.
‘Why isn’t that your job?’
