Her tone shot up, harder and louder, a ferocity coming into her eyes that I was deeply familiar with. ‘Detective Inspector Powder, you just killed a fucking civilian! You’re stood down from duty, effective immediately, for a period of at least ninety days! That’s protocol! I’m not negotiating this with you!’
‘I’m not negotiating this withyou!’ I shot back. Natural instinct. Gail and I having fired shots at each other for years. ‘Fuck your “protocol”! I don’t need to be signed on to keep chasing this thing! I’ll do it on my own time!’
‘I’ll have my officers watch over you, Rus, if I have to.’
‘They’d better be fast on their feet.’
‘This is so you,’ Gail sneered. ‘I have to shove you as hard as I can just to get you to come out here in the first place, and now you’re going to give me hell getting you to leave. You’re like afucking toddler who won’t take a shower and then throws a tantrum when the water’s turned off.’
‘Good thing I’m cute then, huh?’ I winked. The cops nearby who had been listening to our little exchange of fire snickered. Gail went over to roast them about standing around. I went to my car with a smile.
EVAN
Delle knocked on the shower door and scared the life out of me. It was 2 a.m. I’d parked in the street and snuck into the house the back way, hoping to preserve her and Chris’s sleep, and to get the blood and the smell of gunshots rinsed off me before she noticed. But the water at my feet was pink and there was debris in my hair, and she opened the door and looked at it all like she knew exactly how close I’d come to dying that night. The wives of cops just know when you’ve come close to that ragged edge. You never get away with it. So, I watched her pull her robe off, and she got in under the hot fount with me, and I kissed her and held her and gave her the bare details, while she pulled thorns out of my hair. My murmured voice bounced off the bathroom walls and the mirror clouded up with steam.
‘Is he the guy?’ she asked.
‘He’s got to be,’ I said, smiling. She smiled back. My wife probably thought the light in my face was relief that a murder investigation had been wrapped up so quickly and neatly, and that the whole ordeal was going to do for my career exactly what we both had hoped it would do. Get us out of Mangrove Mountain, where she couldn’t put petrol in the car or stand in the grocery aisle without feeling eyes on her.
Really, it was relief that Chris was out of the lion’s den now. No, I didn’t know how his DNA had ended up on Chloe Lutz’s body. But it seemed safe to assume it was an innocent case of DNA transfer, where he’d brushed up against her or touched something that she’dthen touched. I’d seen that happen. Two people grip the same doorknob. Two people brush shoulders in a tight hallway. There’d been a case I’d run into in my early years on the beat. I’d been in court for the day, killing time waiting to give evidence on a traffic case, so I’d sat in. A husband had departed from his mistress, kissing her on the lips, unknowingly then carrying that saliva-based DNA home to his wife, who he then slept with and immediately murdered. Making a case about how the mistress’s DNA ended up on the wife’s lips and breasts at the crime scene had the mistress’s defence lawyer pouring sweat so bad he had to dab his face every few minutes with a towel.
There was a way out. Reasonable doubt. That was enough.
And yes, okay: from what I’d seen in Stephen Branch’s house, and what I knew of his criminal history, Branch didn’texactlyfit the behaviour profile of Chloe’s killer. But he was a hell of a lot better as a suspect than my Chris. It all seemed so safe. I’d meant what I said to Delle, in those exact terms: Stephen Branch had to be Chloe’s killer. Hehadto be.
I basked in the relief, the quiet, thinking about how I’d probably never have to explain to authorities why Chris had been in Redbelly that night, or why he’d lied about it, or why his DNA was on the dead woman. It would be a footnote in the coroner’s court inquiry, which would happen five years from now, and would be so focused on Stephen Branch’s weird house, his past behaviours, the shooting, all of that stuff, that Chris would get lost in the wash. He probably wouldn’t even be called to appear.
I pushed my wife against the shower wall and slicked her hair over her shoulder and entered her slowly, the way I knew she liked. Thought about something other than murder for a few minutes. The water pooled in the shapes we made, my chest against hers, our bellies together, our lips. When we were finished, I went to bed with her and lay against the pillows and listened to her fall asleep beside me while I stared at the ceiling.
An hour later, I was still staring at the ceiling.
And an hour after that.
I got up and went to the kitchen, sat at the cold marble benchtop and took out my phone. I tapped through the pages in ChloeLutz’s notebook. After the Ford Capri section, there came a new page entitledCOLD CASE FILES, SERIES FIVE: WANDERER.
A list ran down the page.
Ep 1: Runaway Bay, setting, Diana’s life etc. Crime stats. Leading to morning of.
Ep 2: ‘Morning of’ timeline. Husband reaction. Neighbour reaction. Initial clues.
Ep 3: Major police theories. Interview lead detective, career profile. Newspaper coverage, including editorials.
Ep 4: Diana-centric episode: major suspects, her behaviour, her diary.
Ep 5: Red herring guy. Intro, then unpicking.
I squinted at the page. Closed the photo app and opened Google. I typed in ‘Runaway Bay Cold Case Files Diana’.
The first hit was the website of a podcast calledCold Case Files. I opened it up. On the home screen, a black-and-white photograph of a slender woman standing at the edge of what looked like a cropped school photograph. Children at her side, arranged in rows, their faces blurred. I read the text beneath the picture.
The Guardian’s award-winning podcast series COLD CASE FILES continues in its fifth season, WANDERER: a deep examination of the unsolved murder of Gold Coast school teacher Diana Summerton. Subscribe now!
I clicked through the show’s credits. Chloe wasn’t the writer, or any other kind of contributor. I went back to Chloe Lutz’s notebook. I scrolled forward through the pages. There was a more detailed breakdown of each of the episodes in theCOLD CASE FILES: WANDERERseries, including topics, the times they were discussed in the episode, and key lines in quotation marks. I scrolled forward through the diary, flipping fast, supposing the detailed deconstruction of an existing podcast must have been a project for university that Chloe was working on. A new podcastseries deconstruction began. I googled the show.MURDER BEHIND THE MIC: SERIES THREEdealt with the unsolved death of a teenage girl in Picton in Sydney’s west. In her notes for episode two Chloe had scribbled in the marginReal audio from scene/atmosphere—will need good mic.
Okay. So, she was going to start a podcast, I realised. The understanding clicked into place like gears engaging in my tired brain, a heavy clunk. I flipped back to the first pages of the notebook. The Ford Capri—that car, and the possibility that it was ‘mistaken’ for another car—must have been a clue Chloe had picked up. I went back to Google and punched in ‘Ford Capri clue unsolved Redbelly’. A link came up to a historical news site. A tiny article arose, highlighted in a faded, scanned image of an old-style newspaper. I zoomed out and found that the paper was the now defunctHawkesbury Journal, and the issue was from September 1976.
POLICE SEEK WITNESSES IN ATTACK ON MINOR
