‘I don’t know yet. It was Lee calling. She said they’re both unhurt, but just to get there quick.’ Evan slid into the back seat behind me. I felt a prickle of anger as Dodge started the car.
‘Evan, no one invited you. Hold down operations at the pub until I get back.’
‘Fuck that.’ My brother tapped Dodge on the shoulder, urging him to go. ‘I want to be where the action is.’
‘It’s probably “Fuck that,sir,” isn’t it?’ Dodge asked. He started driving reluctantly.
‘Tell me what’s going on.’ I turned back to the front.
‘Look, we’re getting plenty of gossip from the fishing expedition at the pub.’ Dodge made a right at the main intersection of town and passed the darkened cafe, heading for a solid wall of bushland with a dirt road cutting through. ‘A lot of it has focused on Branchy. Rumour has been spreading, as you intended it to, that he spoke to her on the night she was killed. So that’s caused some … other stuff … to come to light.’
‘What other stuff?’
‘Well …’ Dodge struggled. And I sensed immediately he was trying to back-pedal on the team’s obvious affection for ‘Branchy’ earlier that day. ‘I knew he was a little odd. But everyone out here is odd. Okay? That’swhyyou live here in the first place. Because your eccentricities don’t necessarily slot into suburban life. And as the local cop, people don’t always tell me things.’
‘Would you just spit it out, Dodge?’
‘There’s some behaviour that’s been talked about,’ Dodge said. ‘Someone was saying Branchy had the contract to remove a woman’s water tank at a property just up the road. He was tasked with installing a new one. But the relationship with the customer went south.’
‘I thought he was the local pest inspector.’
‘It pays to be multi-talented out here. You go to a property for one job, try to scoop four or five more jobs while you’re there.’
‘Okay.’
‘Anyway, the woman got impatient with him. He kept saying the land was too soft to get the digger in, because of all the rain. It rains here a lot. He kept pushing the job back. Long story short, she’s cancelled him and flicked the job to someone else. There’s talk down at the pub that once the new guy had the tank up and running for the woman, Branchy’s gone and put entrails in it.’
‘Entrails?’ I turned and looked back at Evan.
‘Guts,’ Evan said.
‘I know what entrails are, you fucking numpty!’ I barked. ‘I was expressing surprise and dismay!’
Evan sighed.
Dodge continued. ‘They dunno what animal they came from. But there was enough of them to say,Oh, this isn’t just some creature who’s climbed in the outlet pipe and drowned. A possum or a snake will do that, on occasion, you know. This was … there wasan amount. Enough for the water to taste funny.’
I pinched the bridge of my nose. ‘Jesus. And you didn’t hear anything about this?’
‘Nope. Not my people, either. Not until tonight. Folks like to handle things themselves out here. And with something like that,the woman might have figured she’d make things worse by involving the local jackos.’
‘It’s the wild west,’ I said. ‘It really is.’
‘There’s more,’ Dodge said. ‘There have also been a couple of snafus with Branchy and women down at the pub. Miscommunications, rebuffed advances, inappropriate jokes. Nothing violent.’
‘Kalowski said she thought he was a creep,’ I said.
‘Yes, well. It might have been more than just one woman’s intuition.’
‘Any official charges?’
‘He was cautioned by my predecessor about showing a pornographic image to a teenager. Said he thought she was older than she actually was.’
‘You didn’t know about that until now?’
‘Oh—I mean, I did,’ Dodge said sheepishly. ‘But it just slipped my mind. It wasn’t an on-the-books thing.’
‘What’s his charge sheet say?’
