Because Russell sent me to Sydney, I almost said. To keep me out of the way like a troublesome toddler given an iPad to play with so his parents can get through dinner in peace. ‘It will be. In ten minutes. I’m just coming into town. I’ve got to go, Dad.’
I ended the call, used the hands-free in the car to text Dodge.Who have you got on traffic cams?
Dodge got back right away.I was just about to put my guy Knowles on that. He was door-knocking with my other two, but he’s completed his grid.
Leave the cams to me, I said.I’ll want something to do while I’m sitting around at Pemulwuy.
Righto, Knowlesy can do the phone calls to the past hotel patrons.
I pulled into the car park of Pemulwuy Forensic and Technical Services, a wide, almost empty lot behind a boom gate that was manned by a single security guard, who had to pause whatever he was watching on his phone to lean out the door to see to me. I showed my badge and he waved me through. White, hard sunshine hit my face as I exited my vehicle and walked to the sign-indesk of the lab; a cool, grey, featureless box of a room behind glass doors. The kid at the desk was in his twenties and dressed in a patrol uniform, hammering away at the computer like he was writing the next great Australian novel. He had almost certainly been relegated to fronting the forensics lab’s sign-in desk on a weekend for screwing up somehow on the job. We were just two toddlers in timeout, he and I.
‘Powder,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to hand in some samples.’
Something shot through the young man at the sound of the name. He stood up from his desk chair so fast it kicked out from behind him and rolled away. ‘Oh, Detective Powder. We spoke just a moment ago.’
‘That would have been my brother.’ I put the bags on the counter. ‘I’m Senior Sergeant Powder, not Detective Inspector.’
‘Right, okay.’ The guy, whose name badge said Yang, softened a bit. ‘No worries. Well, I’ve been …advised… about the urgency of getting these samples tested.’
Threatened, I thought.
‘So, come in, sir, and we’ll get everything started.’
I was buzzed through a security door, led around to the counter and directed to sign in on an electronic panel set into the desktop. A lab tech arrived and walked me through to a receiving area, where we set the bags on a large steel bench. The heavy-set tech took a pair of gloves from his back pocket and upturned the three paper bags onto the counter, one at a time, spilling a stack of plastic vials and packets from one and the ziplocked clothes from the other. He turned the bagged clothes, looking at them from either side, like a pawn-shop owner inspecting old leather wares for hock. He lifted the handbag out and set it on the steel tabletop so that it sat upright, then unzipped it.
‘I’ll get all this unpacked,’ he said gruffly, lumping Chloe’s tampons and make-up pieces onto the tabletop with all the ceremony of someone clearing junk out of the bottom of their car. ‘Then we’ll take a photo of all the items. You can sign off on that, and then you’ll be free to go.’
‘I’ve been instructed to wait for the results.’
The tech was lining up the vials and packets, recording the numbers of each on a sheet of paper beside him. ‘Oh, Jesus. Don’t tell me. Russell Powder sent you.’
I smiled and nodded. He gave an aggrieved sigh. ‘There goes my break.’
‘That’s all it’s going to take?’ I asked. ‘Your usual work break?’
‘I can get you something in maybe a couple of hours,’ the tech said. ‘Get Detective Powder off your back. But it wouldn’t be anything complex. You’ve got two sets of data here.’ He gestured to the items before him. ‘Stuff that needs extraction, and stuff that’s already extracted.’
‘You’re losing me.’
‘These.’ He pointed to the little baggies and vials the forensic techs in Wisemans had created. Cotton buds and slides of what they had wiped, peeled and scraped from Chloe Lutz’s body. ‘These are skin scrapings and fluids. I can put them in solution and run them right away. I don’t need to analyse them or do any chemical extractions. The bag and the clothes, though, I’ll have to conduct procedures to pull the DNA and skin cells out of those items, so I can isolate them for testing. That could take days.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll also start with a simple Y-STR DNA test. It’s what we use for female rape kits. Designed to get the male DNA out from where it’s surrounded by female DNA. It won’t give you a complete genetic picture of this guy but it’ll give you something to start with.’
‘Having something in just a couple of hours would be really great. I appreciate it.’
‘I saidmaybea couple of hours,’ the tech grunted. ‘And I’m putting aside every other case in the state of New South Wales to do it, I hope you know.’
‘It’s a murder,’ I said, in case it helped.
‘Uh-huh. I could tell that from the amount of blood on the clothes.’
The tech lifted the handbag. Seemed to weigh it. Put it back down. Opened it up again and fiddled with the fabric divider thatran between the two halves of the handbag. ‘Oh, here we go. Left something behind.’
I watched in astonishment as he caught the tiny end of a zipper in his big, gloved fingers, one I hadn’t noticed when I looked in the handbag at Wisemans. He drew the zipper open, dividing the divider itself in half, reached in and slid out a slim black notebook.
‘Holy shit.’
