‘Why?Why would he do that?’
‘Because he was teaching us a lesson.’
‘What lesson?’
‘That we should never love anything,’ I said.
The night swelled around us. The house was silent but for a clock ticking somewhere. I was trying to stop the words, feeling like my eyes were wild, like I needed to claw the story back out of my son’s precious, pure, innocent brain before it was too late. Because it was happening. I was poisoning him. I was letting Arthur’s venom get into my son.
‘What happened?’ Chris asked. His voice was tiny.
‘What do you think?’ I said. ‘Russell and I beat the shit out of each other. I broke his eye socket. He knocked me out cold. Dad took my dog away and shot it dead.’
‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ Chris said. His voice was a monotone. Delle’s mouth was hanging open.
‘Russell was so guilty about winning that he ran away with his dog the next morning,’ I said. ‘He told me years later that he took him all the way up to the Sunshine Coast. Hitchhiked. Wanted to get him into the hands of someone far, far away from Dad.’ The breath was finally coming back into me. I was trembling with shame. Rambling. ‘I was terrified for those three days that Russell was gone that he’d never come back and I’d be stuck alone with the old man forever. When he got home I was so happy I just … you know … I couldn’t grieve for the dog anymore. I was just so happy.’
My wife and child were silent.
‘This person isn’t someone who deserves my sympathy, or yours,’ I told Chris. ‘And you’re forbidden from being alone with him. If you were with him last night, you need to tell me right now.’
Chris just shook his head. I waited, but that’s all he did: shook his head, sat on the bed shaking it and staring at nothing. I walked out. Went to the bathroom and started stripping, and Delle came right in behind me and closed the door after herself.
‘What theactual fuck, Evan.’
‘He asked. I answered. We’re done now. It’s over. He wasn’t there. There’s nothing to worry about.’ I pulled my shoes off. ‘Now I’m going to shower and change and head back out. I’ll be up all night working on this Redbelly thing.’
‘We agreed you’d never bring that shit into this house.’ Delle’s eyes were wild. Wet. ‘It stays in the therapy room. It never comes near Chris.’
‘There’s not enough therapy sessions in the world to contain all that stuff, Delle,’ I said. ‘And I’m tired of paying thousands of dollars just so I can comfort my therapist about the crazy shit that I tell her. Also, trying to keep the stories out of the house is a little redundant, isn’t it? The actual man himself walks right in here whenever he damn well pleases.’
Delle was massaging her brow as I unbuttoned my shirt. ‘You never told me that story. About the dogs.’
‘Yeah, well, I’m sick of comforting you about it all, too.’
I showered, pulled on fresh clothes and left the house without saying goodbye to anyone. As I pulled away from the kerb, my phone rang, and I answered it on the hands-free.
‘I thought you said you were going to wait here for the results?’ The tech’s voice on the phone was unmistakable, thick and smug.
‘You got something?’
‘I’ve got a partial profile,’ he said. ‘Like I said, it’s only a piece. I’ll email it to you, you punch it into NCIDD and see if anything lines up.’
I pulled over right there, three streets away from my house, and dragged my laptop out of the backpack. I logged in to the National Criminal Investigation DNA Database and gave the tech my credentials so he could securely send me the coded profile of the DNA taken from Chloe Lutz’s body. I thanked him, asked him to deal with me and me alone going forward, and ended the call.I transferred the code into a new search of a system that contained more than 1.7 million DNA profiles from Australia’s criminals, suspects, cops, volunteers, missing persons and unidentified remains. The system started scrolling. I sat the laptop on the passenger seat beside me, pulled back onto the road and continued driving towards Redbelly.
As I crossed the bridge into town, the wooden boards drumming under the car’s tyres, I noticed the system had stopped scrolling. Thinking I’d lost internet, I pulled over again with a painful tightness in my chest. I was in sight of the pub where Chloe Lutz had been murdered. Her killer’s DNA profile popped up on the screen. Beneath it was a heading that readFamilial link.
Beneath that heading were two coded profiles. I clicked on the first one.
It was me.
RUSSELL
Islid into the kitchen nook beside Bridie and folded my arms, watched her as she filled in a report on the dead male kangaroo. Nobody had ever taught me to touch-type. It wasn’t a thing at my school. So, being a two-finger pecker myself, I always enjoyed seeing the magic of a young person’s fingers dancing over the keys. She kept writing as she spoke to me.
‘I’ll take you through what I’ve found in just a sec.’
‘Great.’
