Blood River Page 3

  I had a shower after I threw my clothes in the washing machine. Well, not all of them because my black jeans were drenched in sticky crimson. Dead fear’s blood congealing with bits of gristle from inside the stem of his neck. The jeans I wrapped in plastic and dumped in a wheelie bin around the corner, on my way back to the place.

  To watch and admire. To admire me. I did this. This is my work. Me and Him. My body sculpture. The head fold. In His honour. He watches me. I will reach Him. I will get to Him. I am on the journey. Through the skies.

  I returned to the crime scene also to watch the police. And to learn. I have killed before, but this is new.

  I am standing deep in the shadows. I’m sweating. After midnight and it feels fucking hot with off-the-charts humidity. And what was drizzle is now turning into rain.

  —

  IN ONE HAND he carried a bow and in the other, a club.

  He was dark-skinned. A gold chain pierced his tongue and behind him were his followers. Each of them staggering to keep up, the gold chain piercing their ears, a chain connected by their ears to his tongue.

  They had listened to Him and had chosen to be led by Him, across the rocky height where the Dragon soared and the Phoenix flew aloft. They were searching for the god of thunder who lived in the skies. He was waiting for them. He could hear the footsteps of their slow trek up the mountain path.

  The followers gave Him their ears willingly, allowing them to be sliced off with a golden blade so sharp that the softest touch on flesh would cause a deep and fatal wound. Each ear was folded back, hanging to the side of the head by a mere thread, but now part of the chain.

  He was malevolent but wore a smile.

  I was with Him. Ascending to where the waters joined the sky. His name was Ogmios and we were searching for the god of thunder.

  Taranis.

  The First Circle

  BEFORE WE ALLOW A BODY TO BE REMOVED AND TAKEN INTO the custody of the Coroner, we create a circle, one of many, and the first circle was around the victim. This was, for want of a better phrase, ground zero. Where the killer might have left hairs or a footprint or a fingerprint, where he had interacted with the victim, where he had taken away their life. Collapse, black, darkness falling and fallen. He had been there and we needed to find a trace, any trace, of who he was.

  The first circle was three metres wide. We laid it out and no-one, unless they had jurisdiction and were gloved and suited up, could enter. That first circle was hallowed ground because the trace of a hair might lead us to the killer.

  The killer hadn’t just nose-dived onto the victim, from the sky. He had walked along the jogging track. He had come from somewhere and he had left a trail – maybe a cigarette butt, spit, dandruff – and so we were going to spread out in concentric circles, spiralling out into the streets and suburbs beyond, closing off the area, our people searching with careful eyes.

  Forensics was there. Another crew from Homicide was there. Crime-scene support teams were there. Crowd-control constables were there; a small crowd had gathered. The entire crime scene, in the first circle, was under a tarpaulin. It was the formal management of a killing, after the emergency services had arrived, working to an established set of rules.

  The body was photographed in situ. Floodlights had been brought in, the white light beamed into our concentric circles, and there was a man screaming through the wind and rain: ‘This is really dangerous! Electricity and rain do not mix! I gotta turn these lights off or my men are going to get fried!’

  There was thunder to the west and the east; all around us, closing in as lightning ripped across the night, charging across a brutal sky.

  We all knew the river was rising. We all knew the city was going to flood, but when? How long could the dam hold its banks before they were breached, before a wave engulfed the city? We could hear the banshee sound of wind coming up the river from the ocean mouth, a harbinger sound of the arrival, the deluge of approaching water.

  And then we found something.

  Splash

  AS WE HUDDLED UNDER THE TARP ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF-FACE overlooking the Brisbane River, the forensics team scoured the crime scene. Among the McDonald’s wrappers and used condoms and bits of plastic, was an unusual-looking flower which was caught between shards of grass, flapping in the breeze, as if eager to fly away.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked one of the forensic guys who was on all fours in the first circle.

  ‘It looks like a daisy,’ said his partner, ‘but not like any daisy I’ve ever seen,’ he said, pulling out his tweezers to bag it.

  —

  WE CALLED FOR an expert from the Botanic Gardens, and got a woman who called herself Splash. She arrived at the crime scene in the early hours of the morning in lime-green overalls and pink hair with a dog called Bling – she happily told us – which she tied up under a tree about a hundred metres away, well away from the first circle, and strolled towards us holding an umbrella.

  She held the evidence bag with the flower close, staring at it for several seconds. With its pale yellow circle at the centre and long thin white fronds, each one a distance from the next, it resembled blades of a fan.

  Surrounded by an audience of intrigued cops and forensic cops, Splash said, ‘It’s olearia hygrophila. A swamp daisy. It doesn’t belong here, in Brisbane. In fact, it only grows in one place in the world: North Stradbroke Island.’

  Which didn’t mean the killer had come from the island or had even visited it. The rare flower might have had nothing to do with the murder; maybe it was dropped by a passing jogger or maybe it drifted on the wind to this resting place. But it was our first potential lead.

  We had to check out every person who lived on the sleepy little island just off the mainland, and log everyone who might have visited it over the past few days – an almost impossible task because the only way to get there was by ferry, and while CCTV had been used as a crime tool since the late sixties, there weren’t too many cameras in Queensland and I knew there wouldn’t be any at the two ferry ports on the mainland or on the island. Nor would there be any record of who had travelled there or of number plates; you just rolled up, paid for the ticket and drove on board. Checking out the residents would be the easy bit. Checking out the visitors and tourists would be tricky.

  —

  BILLY HAD WANDERED away and was on the edge of the cliffs. Once part of an old stonemason’s quarry, they were about twenty metres high and ran alongside the river’s edge below. At night they were lit up from below creating an eerie bright yellow wall to this side of the city. Billy was gazing across the fast-flowing river. He’d left the cover of the tarpaulins over the crime scene and the body, crossed the closed-off street and stood in wet grass while rain fell on him. I joined him, followed his look upstream.

  ‘You would have been a kid,’ he said.

  ‘I was sixteen,’ I replied, knowing exactly what he was referring to. ‘She scared the crap out of me.’

  ‘You and all else. Especially us blokes in Homicide. Shivered us right out. At least she confessed. Saved the poor geezer’s family all the details.’

  Tracey Wigginton. She was twenty-five, close to the same age as me when, in a demented, drunken rage, she killed a middle-aged man she had picked up along with three other girls, in their car, cruising, looking for a target. Tracey stabbed him twenty-seven times and almost severed his head. She was later accused of drinking his blood. She was called the Lesbian Vampire Killer. It was 1989, on the other side of the river, in a West End park. The judge sentenced her to Life.

  ‘Do you think it’s a copy-cat?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘Anything is possible. No conclusions until we gather what we can.’

  Like any teenage girl, Tracey’s vampire killing had an indelible effect on me. One night, twenty-seven stabbings. She brought fear to the city. A fear that took a long time to dissipate.

  Walk on the Wild Side

  LARA’S FIRST MEMORY IS HARD TO FIND.

  Was
it when she and her dickhead brother and her mum and dad went to the beach? When she might have been four or five and they all lolled by the edge of the water, as baby waves washed on to the sand, before dad cooked chops on his barbecue, which he would proudly load and unload from the back of their sky-blue Holden station wagon as her mum floated in the shallows like a starfish, slowly drifting away from shore, carried by a gentle swell, her eyes closed, arms outstretched and fingers dappling into the surface of the warm water, no-one really paying much attention to her until Lara noticed she was being swept, slowly, away, as if lured to an unimaginable doom on the other side of the horizon.

  Imagining wraith-like sea monsters, submerged, trailing along the ocean floor, carrying her mother to oblivion.

  —

  MY MOTHER, WANG Ouyang, originally came from Beijing, growing up in a hutong near the Drum Tower. She and her family left mainland China in 1949, for Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, the small island off the south-east coast of China and the subject of an identity crisis ever since, when the Nationalists, fighting Mao and the sweep of Communism, fled the mainland, slaughtered many of the island locals and set up a rebel country or, as they say, a new and free country.

  Mum was twenty when her version of China collapsed, when Mao took over and her mum, in her forties, took flight from Beijing to Taiwan, to escape, among almost two million other fleeing Chinese. One suitcase, hurriedly packed, for a family of seven.

  Soon after, mum went to Hong Kong, where she got a job as a police officer working in Missing Persons, which she didn’t enjoy because most of the missing they searched for were rarely found and if they were, they were usually found dead and then Fraud, which she did enjoy because the crooks were charming, most of them anyway. While holidaying in Queensland she met a guy called Richard, who was a vet; they clicked, went on hikes together, fell in love and mum made another ocean crossing, this time from her beloved Hong Kong to Cairns, a quiet town in the far north of the state, where they lived in a tumble-down wooden Queenslander not far from the beach. There were palm trees in the back yard and a slow, warm breeze every afternoon.

  Dad was a Catholic so, to mum’s bemusement, every Friday night they would go to the local (dreadful) seafood restaurant overlooking the water and she would say: I hate it here. And he would say: I love it here.

  And they would laugh, she told me, and she would lean across the table, she told me, as he also leaned across the table, careful not to spill his beer and they would kiss, she told me, and through all of this I was born.

  —

  I WAS NINETEEN when I made the application to join the police force; the wild years of running away, tatts, drugs, booze and bad boyfriends had ebbed into the not-so-distant past. Another country.

  Being a cop was like a series of hills. You climb to the top of one and right in front of you, is another. And another. And on it went. As I figured out early on, and as I had been told by mum, after she had come to terms with my choice of career, it was hard for any woman who wanted to break into an historically masculine society.

  You have to be alert, observant, smart, you have to follow the rules and be a ‘team player’. That last bit was not my forte; I often whacked out my basketball teammates if they got in my way and would be reprimanded by the coach whose name was Lizzie, for being selfish, which I was and, according to my mum, still am and occasionally I trampled on those same teammates if they fell to the floor, my foot on their head or arm or leg, whatever, with a: ‘Fuck you bitch,’ which, afterwards, late at night, as I contemplated my actions, I would regret and, even though I was not religious, I would look out into the sky through the bedroom window, the dark, the stars and ask Him for atonement. It never came.

  It never will. That’s me, seeking a place of contentment, asking the Lord and the Stars for a place to be at one with the universe, knowing with every slice of the ask, that it is futile.

  This, the ever-present threat of collapsing into futility, is one of the dangerous potholes I remind myself to avoid. In the dark, when it’s just me. Me alone. After my two brutally destructive relationships, one after the other, an erasure of self-esteem and too many dark thoughts, I work on staying afloat.

  —

  ANOTHER BURDEN: SHE was, is, pretty. Part Asian, almost-black eyes with dyed platinum-blonde hair and, to make the statement just a little more strident, with a thin strip of original jet black in her part, tied back in a pony-tail, her hair colour being the last outward display from the rebel-yell of the past. She was, is, the type of woman who makes guys pause for a beat and do the stare. But you know, a long time ago, she thought to herself: that’s their problem, not mine. I am who I am. Should I scar my face with acid? Would that make it easier? Her beauty made her self-conscious. Until she became a cop, she was downcast, her head bowed. Nils and Guido didn’t help that journey. As she expected, putting on the uniform for the first time helped. Call it a disguise, call it a badge, call it a whatever.

  Another burden: she was, is, tall. Lara stands over most men and, as she learned at the time, the lack of self-esteem kicks in like a horse, that most men or boys do not like to look up to a woman, a girl. Subsequently she did the hunched-shoulder thing, as if to compensate for her height. A walking apology, she would angrily berate herself at times of dark night. Putting on the uniform for the first time helped. Call it a disguise, call it a badge, call it a whatever.

  Lara now holds herself with shoulders erect, walks as if the first footfall carries the purpose of her journey. The second carrying the remnants of self-doubt, the not-so-distant past. One step, two step, a cycle. Lara, in her moments of dark, wondering with which footfall the journey will end.

  —

  YET AGAIN LOOKING down at the grinning face, frozen on the dead body of a man in his fifties whose head has almost been sawn off.

  By what? she wondered. A machete? A long carving knife?

  And why?

  Let’s start with the why. Why do you want to kill this middle-aged man? In this way? Why, killer, did you do this? Questions.

  —

  TO WHICH:

  The answer would remain frustratingly elusive for almost two decades.

  To which:

  Motivation, the cornerstone of almost every murder conviction, would be deemed of secondary importance in the case of The Slayer.

  To which:

  A journey of twenty years would be like a snap of a millisecond, a thousandth of a second, through time, guilt, remorse and revenge.

  To which:

  Lara, at the age of seventeen, adrift on a sea-green lake, surrounded by mists of doubt and uncertainty, would coalesce with another girl, also seventeen, also lost; one finding an anchor, one not, instead being dragged under the surface of the lake, as if tentacles had reached up to claim her, to take her into a morass of dark.

  To which:

  A killer was laughing.

  Hi, Look, We Just

  Need to Come Inside

  and Talk to You

  I DROVE. BILLY WAS NOT A BIG DRIVING GUY. HE WAS BIG ON directions, though.

  He had said, all swagger and chest: ‘I’ve done this a million times, so let me lead it, all right girlie?’ Totally. Because I had only done it once; this was my second time and it scared me.

  The haunting part of the job, was what mum would say from her memories of Hong Kong. The moment you are indelibly memorised, your face, your demeanour, your clothes, your choice of words, by the person you’re breaking the news to, as their lives come apart in a sudden wreckage of grief.

  You have destroyed their life and they will have forever freeze-framed you and every detail of you, down to a dimple on your cheek and the smell of your breath and the crease of your furrowed brow, forever. Right through, mum would say, right through to their last dying beat, as they clasped the journey to that loved one who died before them, as they recall, as they have done every day since you turned up on the doorstep, remembered, in way-too exquisite detail, your face. Face of doom. />
  Mum, the Missing Persons’ messenger of death, before she fled to Fraud.

  Billy, however, seemed to relish passing on tragedy, as if it emboldened him. I saw it the first time I accompanied him to an apartment in the Valley, where we had to inform a young woman that her gang boyfriend had just been killed.

  Billy told me, though I’m not sure I believe him, that the first time he broke the news of a death to a family member was at the age of nine, back in the East End of London, where he grew up in squalor, grime and blood. ‘I bang-shot a geezer by the name of Cricket McKinty and went around to his mum’s place and said, “Your son is dead.” And I walked off, leaving her on the door stoop, all boo-hoo in tears.’

  Like I said, I wasn’t sure I believed him.

  —

  WE CROSSED OVER the Story Bridge as the rain intensified, sheeting the car from my side. I glanced out through the window as we cruised through the Valley. The neon was off, the bars and strip joints closed, some deadbeats slumbering in door stoops. Then over the river at Breakfast Creek, the creek itself looking about to burst its banks, and up the hill.

  Ascot: a wealthy suburb of quiet streets lined with jacarandas of purple riot and poinsettias with their leaves of vibrant red clinging to the edge of roads, tree trunks, old and gnarled, pulling up chunks of footpath. Massive old Queenslanders, houses built of wood and raised off the ground with thick round wooden poles painted white, had stood in these streets since the previous century, and it was in front of one of these we pulled up. A two-storey with a Lexus parked in the driveway and two bikes tossed easily by the front door.