Blood River Read online

  But, after a while, I got to think that maybe my fuck-ups were bringing him too much contentment. He liked to save me. He liked it when I was lost. Or so I thought. Maybe I just needed to shut him out.

  We drifted. We all drift. I got serious, enrolled in TAFE and became a cop. He lost his buck teeth, became obsessed with String Theory and Schrödinger and went to Canada to study one of those courses that take a lifetime and none of your family or friends know what the fuck you’re talking about, although it’s got something to do with maths.

  And now he was back. Slotting into my mother’s idea of what a potential husband could be like. Anyone with a penis and a gold credit card. Preferably Anglo and tall. (Because Chinese men are unreliable and take concubines.) With a BMW and his own house.

  —

  ‘HEY, LARS,’ HE said as I walked into the restaurant, shaking my umbrella. He was sitting at the table and didn’t bother to get up as I approached him, but he reached up, bent me down and kissed my cheek. I could smell beer on his breath as he said, yet again: ‘Hey, Lars.’

  ‘Hi Damon.’

  ‘Hey.’ His hair had thinned and he’d obviously spent some time in the gym. He was buffed and would, a little alarmingly I thought, flex his hands as if gripping a tennis ball, every few minutes.

  ‘Been some time, yeah?’

  ‘Certainly has,’ I said as I sat, as the waiter took my wet umbrella with a scowl, glancing at the trail of drops I had left through the restaurant which was obviously, until quite recently, a Mexican cantina. The new owners hadn’t bothered to remove the sombreros from the walls or the paintings of desert cactus or even the blackboard listing the margaritas. Sitar music played and an elderly Indian lady wearing a purple sari sat behind the bar counting money. Young waiters scurried across the polished wooden floors with hot plates of tandoori meat.

  ‘You’re in Homicide?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘When was the last time we saw each other?’

  And on it went, as these things do. We laughed about the sombreros, ordered white wine, which was easy, fumbled over what to eat, which was awkward, full of ‘Whatever you feel like,’ and it got worse when I accidentally let slip that I was tending, in life, towards a vegetarian diet. We settled on North Indian style chickpeas and the cottage-cheese-and-spinach palak paneer and vegetable kofta dumplings and too much rice and a cheese-and-chilli naan, and I felt a mild wave of relief when that part of the night was over, had another mouthful of wine and wished Billy would call me with news of a third murder.

  I’m not really a social person.

  I had friends. Or I used to. The three aforementioned girlfriends. They would call to check up on me. I would tell them I’m in Homicide. Best excuse ever, much better than the headache or the crowded schedule.

  ‘You’re on a murder investigation now?’ he asked after the waiter took our order.

  I nodded.

  ‘The big one?’

  ‘Yeah, the big one,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah, I saw your name in the paper.’

  ‘I try to avoid that,’ I said with a self-effacing smile.

  ‘How’s it going? The investigation. Do you think you’ll find him?’

  I shrugged. Not eager to talk about work. Now that I was here, I wanted to eat and go. ‘Hope so,’ I replied, glancing again at my phone.

  ‘But it’s hard catching a serial killer, isn’t it? Like trying to find a ghost. Unless he trips up and makes a mistake.’

  I nodded and tried to look interested. ‘Tell me about you,’ I said.

  ‘Does it ever get too much for you?’

  I didn’t say anything. ‘I reckon I’d get completely stressed out. And you work twenty-four-seven, right?’

  I nodded. I didn’t. Work twenty-four-seven but I nodded.

  ‘You ever get time off? I mean, you must do a shift-rotation thing? Even if you’re on a murder case. How many are working the case? Is it just you and the other man, the old English guy?’

  There had been a very small side-bar article on us. The Old and the New: Billy, the oldest in Homicide; Lara, the youngest. It had been organised by Media Liaison; they always enjoy trotting out Ms Diversity. I never had a choice.

  ‘Yeah. We get time off and we have shifts and even though there’s a lot of us, I’m on call,’ I indicated my phone, sitting next to the wine glass, willing it to ring, ‘If ever something happens.’

  After a moment I could see a gear-shift in conversation as he frowned.

  ‘I thought we could go to the movies. Go see The Sixth Sense. It’s meant to have the most amazing ending. What do you think? You know, any time you’re free.’

  ‘Maybe after this case is over. If it’s still on,’ I replied diplomatically, wondering if, now in our late-twenties, Damon actually had feelings for me. A few steps up from the kid in the caravan with the kiss on the cheek. Not that he knew me. Not now. He knew the dark girl who’d told him about Nils and Guido, but she had died about eight years ago.

  ‘Even though we don’t know each other that well these days, not since we used to hang out together, perhaps, you know, we could spend some together. Maybe you get a bit lonely.’

  I must have looked horrified because he quickly followed up with:

  ‘I don’t mean to freak you out or anything. I’m not good at this.’ He laughed. ‘Better with my mathematical formulas. I’m having a paper published in Science magazine next month.’

  ‘I’m gay, I’ve got a girlfriend,’ I blurted, without thinking. Anything to halt the flow of talking about me and my feelings. But as soon as I said it, I regretted it. So childish. Wasn’t it easier to just tell him you’re not looking for a partner and if you were, it wouldn’t be you, Damon. You’re sweet and nice and we grew up together, but I cannot and do not want to imagine you in my bed, waking up to you in the morning. Any morning.

  But thanks, Damon, thanks, for wanting to save me again. From what? I’m not sure; from Homicide? From being alone and independent? From being me?

  ‘Oh,’ he said with a smile. ‘Really?’ he added in a slightly disbelieving tone. Flexing his hands again.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, starting to feel that dinner was as much a mistake as I knew it would be. But Damon was beginning to creep me out.

  ‘How does your mum feel about that?’ he asked.

  Jesus Christ, Lara, what have you gone and done, you stupid girl. ‘No,’ I said back to him. ‘She doesn’t know.’

  ‘What’s her name?’ he asked.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your girlfriend.’

  ‘Splash.’ The first name that came to mind. ‘Funny name, huh?’ The food came and I moved the subject away from me, to him. And then we talked about the kids we had gone to school with and what they might be doing now and who still lived in the suburb; all the things that normal people talk about when they get together after a time apart.

  I felt an outsider, peering in through a window to a real world.

  As he kept talking, now about our school friend Jo who was last heard from trying to save trees in the Cape Tribulation wilderness, I felt I was being dragged out through the window, from the real world of the Indian-restaurant which was a Mexican cantina, to my other world. The past.

  Which, I have come to realise, is not going away.

  —

  NILS: THE MOMENT I saw Taranis etched into the body of our first victim, it was you I thought of. I’ve been unable to entirely forget you – how can anyone forget the first love who broke their heart – but now, now you are walking alongside me with every step I take.

  Broke your heart. What a stupid phrase. You fucking hurt me and crushed me, made me doubt myself, my worth, my sense of being. Before I crawled back to reclaim a girl named Lara who still, even as a Homicide detective in control of her life, remains a little broken. You did that; I let you.

  Your smile, your charm, your dance moves. When you were good, you were so good. So loving. Remember when you danced naked in the caravan, swinging you
r dick like a flag as you cooked up a triumph for the both of us to eat outside, later, under the moon, as you played Miles Davis, whom I’d never heard of, and me thinking you were only into that crazy Celtic Goth-inspired dark metal music I secretly hated but said I loved because I loved you and what was it, that night, that you cooked?

  Chicken tikka masala.

  —

  AND AT THAT point I was swept back, as if in a reversing tornado, through the window, back to the cantina. Damon was laughing about the time he had kissed me in the caravan as he sprayed 4711 onto my neck.

  ‘So, anyway, I think your killer will strike again, don’t you?’

  I didn’t say anything. Why was he bringing up the killer again?

  ‘Part of his thing is to taunt you, don’t you think? I bet he’s convinced he’s cleverer than you and the entire police department.’ He laughed again. ‘Maybe he is,’ he said with a grin.

  It Bit Me Back

  YOU SPEND MORE TIME SLEEPING WITH YOUR PHONE THAN you do with a lover.

  It went off at 4.13 a.m.

  ‘Another,’ was all he said.

  I scrambled out of bed and doused my face with cold water – no time for a shower – and threw on a T-shirt and my jeans and boots, which I leave by the side of my bed for times like this. Within minutes I was out of the house and in the car, windscreen wipers flicked on.

  I drove as fast as I could, too fast, towards the city, rain lashing the side of my car and gutters overflowing into the middle of the streets.

  Fuck. Was dinner with Damon last night? It felt like a year ago. It had thrown me, not just Damon being all weird, but stepping out of the murder-world. Into the other world, the so-called real world.

  ‘We chose this life,’ Billy had said to me one day as we were driving. ‘Civilians, they go to the office, to the supermarket or to the mall and have a latte and walk footpaths, and think about their issues – rent, mortgage, girl or boy, affairs, kids and what fucking school to send ’em to, bullying, smashers and grabbers, it goes on. We all know it, you know it, I know it, and when we have to rise to the surface we gotta pretend that we are part of their life. Normal life, life that most people go through. The footpath part of life. But we ain’t. And we never will be, not even after we retire. Seen too much chaos, too much darkness. That’s what Homicide does to you, girlie.’

  I had, after last night with Damon, touched the outer life, the footpath, and it bit me back. Time, Lara, to refocus: on murderers. That’s what keeps you sane and centred, the person you are now. Not then. Not the time of harm and hate.

  I am, I have to admit, an impatient person. So, when I pulled up behind a Lexus and the guy was texting at the wheel as the light turned from red to green and he didn’t move, I leaned out the front window and shouted: ‘It doesn’t get any fucking greener!’

  When was Brian? Two nights ago. James, five nights ago. This was becoming rampant, out of control. Our forensics and science teams were stretched; they still haven’t finished up from the first crime scene, let alone the second and now we had a third. The press was screaming and the city was already wrapped in fear, just to add to the endless rain and skies of grey and black.

  —

  IN 1974, BEFORE they built the Wivenhoe Dam, it took three weeks of rainfall until the river broke its banks and submerged parts of the city. Sixteen people killed. Three hundred injured and taken to hospital. Eight thousand homes destroyed. Water in the main streets of the CBD. Deluge. Twenty-five years ago. Now the city had a dam to hold back a flood and it had been raining for almost five weeks.

  Our third victim was Fabio. Mid-thirties, like the other two. He’d been out to dinner at a restaurant near the Quay West, a five-star hotel across the road from the Botanic Gardens and, according to the waiter who served him, he ate alone while reading a book (Tony Robbins, self-help). Then, apparently, he decided to take a stroll through the park on his way home.

  The press were on to it. All five networks had choppers in the air, buzzing us with beams of light and I could see, in circle number three, about a hundred metres away, uniformed policemen and women holding back a horde, even in the rain. I closed my eyes to see tomorrow’s headlines: HOW MANY MORE MURDERS? CAN WE TRUST OUR POLICE?

  Fabio’s almost-decapitated body was lying under a massive strangler fig tree in the Gardens, by the edge of the river, the tree branches reaching far and down to the ground, so old and heavy, some had come to rest on the grass. Fabio was lying about eighty metres away from Brian’s crime scene. And directly across the river from James’s crime scene.

  Brian’s body had the Taranis carving on his chest and I was sure that Fabio’s would too. Same killer, same sculptured work.

  I kept my gaze firmly on the river as Billy finally arrived, panting from having jogged through the Gardens. ‘Fucking traffic, even at this hour,’ he muttered as he stepped under the cover of the tarpaulins stretched over the first three circles of the crime scene. He saw my look.

  He didn’t even bother to glance at our third victim with the grinning face and missing tooth. He followed my gaze, across the river, to the rusting hulk of Miles’ yacht, moored about forty metres away from us.

  Inside, down below, in the cabin, was a light

  Someone was home.

  L-Plater

  ‘HELLO MILES. THANKS FOR COMING IN.’

  ‘As if I had a choice. What’s this all about?’

  ‘Just for the record, if you could lean into the microphone … Yeah, actually that’s a bit too close, we’ll get distortion. Just back a bit. Okay, perfect. Thanks Miles. Don’t move. I’m Detective Inspector William Waterson and this is Detective Constable Lara Ocean. And we’re here on Wednesday, the twenty-fourth of November, nineteen ninety-nine, in the offices of the Brisbane Homicide department. Correct?’

  He said nothing. We were in one of the three interview rooms in a corridor on our floor. On the other side was the Officer-In-Charge’s glass-booth office alongside the rest of the crews in an open-plan space, four to each desk, which were actually two desks pushed together to make one.

  ‘You have to respond, Miles. Just say yes. If you believe you are here with Detective Constable Ocean and me in this interview room.’

  ‘What if I say no?’

  ‘Well, you are here. We are video recording this interview and it will be clear to one and all who watch this, that you are here.’

  ‘But, Detective Inspector, what is here? You see, I did a philosophy course through TAFE last year and one of the things they talk about is meaning. Am I really here? Are you real? I can touch you but does that mean you exist? For instance, is this a table? You call it a table, I call it a table, we all call it a table. But why? Why can’t it be a clarinet? Who says it’s a table?’

  To his credit, Billy just rolled back and took a few deep breaths. Me, I wanted to lean across the table and throttle him.

  Billy leaned back in. Gave Miles some hard-core dead eye.

  ‘It’s a table, Miles, with four legs and a surface, which defines it as a fucking table and I am a Homicide detective, as is my partner here. As are the dead vics with throats cut, as are you – our person of interest. Miles, we know you leave your yacht at night on the Brisbane River, that you take your tinnie to Kangaroo Point, that you moor it at the Botanic Gardens and go off to get supplies or to get a pint or to fuck a nice young Malaysian bird on the thirty-third floor of that building across from the casino. There ain’t much we don’t know about you, Miles – except for what you might do in the Gardens deep at night. Like maybe killin’ some folk. Because, Miles, we know you like a little bit of slashing.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ he asked as he casually leant back in his chair and crossed his arms.

  ‘We got the records, Miles. You might recall I interviewed you a few years back. That was before you cut up the geezer in the Gold Coast pub, yeah?’

  Miles froze.

  ‘Yeah?’ repeated Billy.

  No response.

  ‘
Yeah,’ said Billy with finality. ‘Yeah, because you’re a bit of a monster. And now here you are, in front of me and Detective Constable Ocean from the Homicide Squad because we think you might have somethin’ to answer for with some dead gents who have been found with their throats cut in your patch. What were you doing last night?’

  —

  MILES WAS OUT walking last night, as he was the nights that Brian and James were killed. Occasionally dropping into a bar for a drink and a dance. But the night of the first murder, he was busy having a one-night stand with a hair stylist called Pamela from one of the salons on Eagle Street. They met at a pub in West End, a few kilometres away from his mooring on the river, where there was, as she told us yesterday afternoon, a loud and lazy New York punk band with the bassist leaning against the bar and staring into space as he twanged.

  —

  AND MILES COMES up to me and he said, Hey, who are you? And I said: I’m okay. And he said: What do you do? with a gentle and not unpleasant thrust of his body into mine as I felt his abs and his cock and I said, I work in the city as a hair stylist and what do you do? And he said, I live on the river, on a yacht and I do a bit of this and bit of that but I own the boat and what do you say, you wanna come back with me and have a look? With another thrust, gentle, not aggressive because if it was aggro I would have told him to get fucked but it was subtle and I’d been out all night and wouldn’t mind some sex and he was hot and smelt okay and he wasn’t drunk, he was standing tall, so I said: Yeah, let’s do it and he said: Okay, take my hand and come with me, which I did, took his hand as I let him lead me out of the bar into the night, with a bit of rain and he talked to me about stuff I can’t remember as we caught a cab around the corner, to the river and he helped me on to a little boat, a tinnie he called it, and put-putted across the river, which was pretty hairy, I can tell you, because of the rain, to his dodgy yacht and we went aboard and I swayed a bit with the swell but he caught me and led me down below and I took off his clothes and he took off my clothes and we made some precious love, all night.