‘It’s possible, but it’s a real stretch.’
‘There’s plenty more to choose from, though.’ Bridie clicked around. ‘Look at this one. This is from the seventies. I think this one makes more sense.’
I saw a flash of a headline.Lone women to lock doors: killer house-caller still at large. A young woman in a bridal veil. Police on a cottage verandah. I nodded along, trying to open my rigidly closed mind. ‘This is more like it.’
I read the articles, got the usual fluttering of anger in my chest at any story about a male predator attacking women in their homes.Nothing as strong as the fury I felt at whoever had taken Chloe Lutz, but an echo of it. Linda Special had been home alone with her newborn baby in their small house in Redbelly Crossing in July 1973, while her husband worked on an oil rig, trying to get the family set up with a quick burst of high-paying work. She’d been discovered stabbed to death in a hallway inside the house, the baby wailing in the next room, no signs of forced entry. Almost a year later, Marian Richley, a student and bartender living in the flat lands between Wisemans Ferry and Redbelly, had been found the same way. Both women had been sexually assaulted and left to bleed out on the floor.
There was a cup lying smashed on the kitchen floor of Linda’s home, just inside the door. The phone in Marian’s kitchen had been left hanging off the hook. I thought about the chain on Chloe Lutz’s hotel-room door—why she’d taken it off, only to be attacked right there in the doorway. Whoever had committed the atrocities at the rural homes in these articles, presuming they’d at least reached puberty, would be at least in their mid-sixties now. I tossed the theory around a little. Tapped the table and tried to envision it.
‘What else have you got here?’ I asked, trying to delay expressing my doubts. I clicked over to the last window. Bridie’s hands shot forward for the laptop.
‘Oh, uh …’ I looked at the image of my father on the screen. I’d seen the article plenty of times before, but not for twenty years or so.Hero cop injured in shootout with killer husband. Bridie was shrivelled up beside me, one leg pulled against her chest, her chin resting on it, eyes restless. ‘It just popped up while I was searching.’
‘It’s okay, Bridie.’
‘Sorry. I was curious.’
‘Don’t be sorry,’ I said, as casually as I could. ‘You’re allowed to be curious,’
‘It says Pop went around there to question the guy about his wife’s murder,’ Bridie said. ‘And the dude just shot him?’
‘From the way Dad tells it, there were a few shots fired,’ I said. ‘The wife was missing. Dominique Fine was her name. She’d beengone for a good while. Husband said he was at the pub when she just up and disappeared. Left the back door swinging open and potatoes cooking on the stove. He didn’t report her gone until the next morning. Dad went around there maybe six months later. The Wisemans Ferry boys hadn’t been able to close the case, so he thought he’d give it a crack.’
Bridie listened, her lips pursed.
‘He shouldn’t have been there alone,’ I said. ‘And he should have left when the questioning got heated. But, being who he was, Dad wanted to run a one-man interrogation right there in the guy’s house. He got a bullet for his troubles. And so did the husband. Dad survived and the guy didn’t.’
‘Do you remember it?’
‘No. I would only have been three or four.’
‘How bad was he injured?’
‘Bad enough to remind everybody about it every ten minutes for the next fifty years.’ I shifted in my seat, stretched my back. It popped loudly. ‘He took it in the meat of the shoulder. Stopped being able to raise his arm all the way. Apparently. He held out for a while, but it got worse as he got older, and they took him off the force and gave him a pension.’
‘Wow.’ Bridie’s eyes wandered over the screen. We sat in silence for a while, Bridie thinking whatever she was thinking, me trying not to say terrible things about my father. Eventually she said, ‘So, anyway, going back to this sort of stuff …’ She clicked away from Dad’s picture, back to the murdered women, Linda and Marian. I felt like a collar had been loosened from around my throat. ‘What do you think about my theory? There are so many other good cases. I only just started digging. The more I dig, the more I find.’
‘It’s a very imaginative theory, honey.’ I smiled.
‘But?’
‘But it’s just … weak,’ I said. ‘That’s all.’
Bridie deflated beside me. Physically slumped a good couple of inches. I felt my stomach sink with her, then turned to her, tried to lighten my tone. ‘I mean, it’s a good idea! It is, Bridie. It just needsto be so much stronger than this for it to be an avenue worth going down.’
‘Why, though?’ She shrugged sharply. ‘You know she’s come out here to write something. Something worth being killed over. What else would you kill someone over?’
‘Oh, Bridie,’ I said, ‘I’ve seen people kill each other over who gets the last slice of pizza.’
‘But they stole her laptop and her phone. So, they must have been trying to cover something up.’
‘Where’d you hear that?’
‘It’s all over town.’
I wasn’t surprised. ‘Not only that, but he stuck around looking for something else. A notebook, probably.’
‘So, my theory makes sense.’ Bridie put her hands up. ‘It makes perfect sense, Dad.’
