‘How was your meeting with your new best friend?’
‘I am actually trying really, really hard not to like Senior Sergeant Dodge,’ I said. ‘But I’m struggling.’
Bridie stopped typing and looked at me, a smile playing about the corners of her mouth. ‘Really?’
‘He’s a good, solid cop.’ I nodded. ‘Got some backbone to him. He called me an “A-grade dickhead”.’
‘To your face?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I love that.’ She laughed. ‘Imagine how many people in the world are liked by you, without ever knowing it.’
‘Hundreds, probably.’
‘You could be friends with Dodge if you just loosened up.’
‘Friends are for the weak.’
Bridie’s fingers stroked the mousepad as she left the kangaroo report and went to Chloe Lutz’s Instagram page. What must havebeen an obligatory shot for all writers—the pretty coffee and a slice of a laptop, a modern cafe filled with light, which Chloe had filtered in sepia. ‘Back at it!’. The dead woman I’d just seen laid out on a slab at the Wisemans Ferry medical centre was full of life here, doing things she’d never do again. Smiling. Writing. Wearing sunglasses. Posing for selfies with friends. Patting a dog.
‘So I started with her Instagram page,’ Bridie said. ‘And I went through all her other social accounts. I looked for anything that involved Redbelly Crossing. Because that’s what we’re really trying to do here, right? Figure out why she came out here and whether it was to meet someone, or whatever. So, some of these photos are geotagged, and some are not. For the ones that have tags, the most rural she gets is Noosa. There are bush-y or forest-y shots sometimes, but nothing that says Redbelly Crossing specifically, or rural pub or anything like that. There’s nothing from the hotel room she died in, nothing from the trip out here. Her last post about anything at all was last Tuesday, about how bad the queue was at her local post office.’
‘Okay.’ I nodded, following the photographs and unplayed videos as they travelled up the screen.
‘I started looking at the profiles that commented most frequently on Chloe’s posts, and they’re all sort of harmless people. Her old boss at a magazine she used to work at is in there a bunch just saying, like, “Wow, pretty” on some of the artsy shots. People say, like, “Great read” about her articles. Her mother, Jill, is there, and a handful of girlfriends. She had a big break-up mid last year, so some posts from before then are missing. And there are a few things around that time, like, “Keep your chin up” and “His loss”. Did you know about the break-up?’
‘The guy’s in Italy, apparently,’ I said. I’d fielded a text from Larry Lutz just after my briefing. A screen of details about a kid named Cameron Tosh. I’d seen the Tosh boy standing in Piazza San Marco. Bleached hair and a septum piercing. ‘It looks like that might be true.’
‘Chloe had accounts on X and Threads.’ She showed me each window. Mostly shared content replicated over and over. ‘No TikTok, though, and no Facebook, at least not under her own name.Everything she’s got in terms of social media is publicly accessible. Nothing’s set to private. And across those sites, there’s nothing from her saying, like, “I’m going to Redbelly Crossing,” or “I’m working on this or that right now.” I guess her phone and email will tell you more. How long until you can get that access?’
I glanced at my watch. ‘I’ve been harassing my boss.’
‘It’d be a lot easier if you had her actual devices.’
‘A lot of things would make my life easier.’ I sighed. ‘So, whoever knew Chloe was out here didn’t get it off a publicly accessible social media site. That tells me something. But not much. Where are you getting this idea that Chloe pissed off a serial killer? That’s a big statement, Birds.’
‘Well, so, let me explain my theory.’ Bridie kept clicking. ‘After I’d checked out everyone who was interacting with Chloe’s pages, I started looking at whoshewas interacting with. I looked at what she liked and commented on. And a couple of months ago, her interests took a big swing into true crime. Look at this list of follows … here. See? These are in chronological order. Like, she literally followed all these pages one after the other.’
Bridie pulled up a new screen full of listed accounts. Podcasts with titles likeUnsolved,Casefile,Forgotten,Lost,Missing. They were all focused on Australian stories, or produced by Australian companies. I saw images of lighthouses, bushland, outback roads. There were podcast collections by the ABC,The Age, theHerald, theGuardian. Some of them seemed to be covering active court cases. Summaries of trials I knew were unfolding in Sydney at that very moment. I rubbed my eyes. I could see where Bridie was heading with this. ‘Okay, so you think she might have been chasing up a true crime mystery out here?’
‘Well …’ Bridie’s face twitched. Her confidence faltering. She opened a page full of old newspaper articles. An online library collection. ‘There are actually plenty of cases to choose from out here, if that’s what she was up to. Look at this. These two guys went into the woods just up the road from here. Like, literally three hundred metres from where we’re sitting right now. It was in the 1950s. They were never seen again.’
I read the article, aware that Bridie’s eyes were on my face. A real estate agent and a prospective land buyer had met to inspect a property on the edge of town, only to vanish into thin air. The vehicles were found still parked at the roadside. One of the men’s jackets was left hanging on a barbed-wire fence. Baffled-looking police officers were pictured in the article, standing on the dirt track leading to the property, heads together, talking. Another was on horseback. The pull quote was from one of the missing men’s distraught wife. ‘I packed his lunch to take with him. The police said it was still there on the front seat of his car.’
‘Creepy, huh?’ Bridie asked.
‘Sure.’
‘What if, like, whoever killed those two guys back then knew, somehow, that Chloe was going to come out here and start poking around about it? And then he came back. He was like,I’ll kill her before she finds anything out.’
‘It’s a very creative theory, Bridie,’ I said, carefully. ‘But whatever happened to those guys in the woods happened seventy years ago. It’s notimpossiblethat whoever did it is still around. Maybe … I dunno. A couple of kids were playing with a rifle on the property. They accidentally shot one of the men, panicked and shot the other one, too. Dragged their bodies into the river. But those kids would have to be eighty-five now? Ninety?’
‘Oh. Okay.’
‘Yeah.’
‘But it is possible …?’
