RILEY STOOD APART from the scene.
An hour ago, before the triple zero, she’d been dog-tired, ground down by the investigation and ready to call it a night. Now she was switched on, wired, good to go.
Wrapped in black plastic. With that, the general duties who’d responded had known enough to bypass the detectives at Parramatta and call it straight into the strike force at Gladesville. Riley had driven while O’Neil had worked the phone, locking the school down and sealing the site.
‘Touch fucking nothing,’ O’Neil had said, and the uniforms had done well.
The victim lay on the raised hardwood floor of an old stone structure eight metres square and open to the elements like a bandstand. It had twelve columns, a pitched slate roof, a four-faced clock on top. Crime Scene had lit the body and got a tent around it.
It had gone eight, still some light in the sky. A hot wind over yellow grass. Riley hadn’t eaten—now she was glad. This one felt different. Gladesville had been two houses, both waterfront, both girls wrapped and dumped in the river, nails through the right foot to hold them to mooring piles. Riley took a moment, did her breathing, and snapped on the gloves. Something in the process took her back to the river on the low tide.
She walked to the platform in her paper boots. O’Neil, on his phone, watched her go. A Satyr constable logged her in and she took the five stairs up to the rough timber floor, crossed to the lit blue tent and squatted on her haunches inside to consider the black shroud. Builders’ film. No prints in the light coating of red dust. She peered through a cut forensics had made in the plastic to reveal the head. The girl was young, maybe eighteen, lying on her back. Eyes open, glassy and blue-green. A short laceration a couple of centimetres above and slightly forward of the left ear, blood dried around the wound. Blonde hair, shoulder length, loose, matted dark below the trauma. A red-purple colouration to the face, post-mortem lividity. That was different. There’d been no hypostasis in Gladesville. He’d carved them up and bled them out. This girl had been killed and left on her front, then moved onto her back after several hours.
Riley’s eyes went to the forehead. No calling card etched into the skin. No sign of tape on the face, no imprint of a gag—none of the savagery of Gladesville. Riley felt relief, yes, but there was something else and she worried at it until she had it. Disappointment.
Satyr investigators had set up a command centre fifty metres from the site. Riley came out of the tent and watched as the forensic psychiatrist Wayne Farquhar climbed from his Volvo and into a white Tyvek bunny suit. Homicide worked with forensic psychologists, but after the second attack at Gladesville, O’Neil had requested Farquhar. ‘Fuck the psychologists,’ O’Neil had said to the Super. ‘I want a real doctor.’
When they’d got to the scene, Riley and O’Neil had separated on instinct. O’Neil had gone straight to the victim while Riley had worked the edges, gleaning what she could from the teenager and adult male who had found the body and called it in.
Now, as Riley walked down the steps, O’Neil came up to her, lithe like a big cat.
‘You reckon he did her here?’ he said.
Riley bit her lip. ‘Bit out in the open.’
‘So he did her offsite, brought her in,’ O’Neil said. ‘Or there’s a secondary crime scene at the school.’
‘We’re looking. Place is big, lots of buildings.’
‘Lots of bush. I went to a bush school—wasn’t like this.’
‘Yeah, not exactly Dubbo High.’ Riley flicked at her notebook. ‘Church moved the school here in the sixties. Wealthy city kids and country boarders, all boys.’
‘Fucking squattocracy.’ O’Neil’s lips thinned.
Dusk gathered on the playing fields. Riley knew who the parents would be at a place like this. Bowral blowhards, bankers and born-to-rule QCs, airline executives who pocketed twenty million a year but couldn’t fly a kite.
She’d have to keep her prejudice in check—prejudice didn’t solve anything. But the wealth of the school was interesting. Money was the one theme in Gladesville. After a month of grunt work, the analysts were pretty much back where they had started. All they had to link the two victims was that they were both young white adult females, living at home with their parents, on different sides of the same street, on a peninsula that jutted into the river at Looking Glass Point. Neither family had been in the area long—the properties had been purchased from different real estate agencies in the past year. There was nothing else in the victimology: the girls didn’t know each other and had no friends in common. There was a couple of years’ age difference. Different schools, different universities, different hairdressers, different gyms. Satyr detectives had dug everywhere and turned up nothing—no thread tying them together, no netball club, no dating app, no links between their acquaintances or families. Nothing in the electronic trails: credit cards, phones, red-light cameras, number plates, CCTV. Nothing. Only the houses: both big, both waterfront. Rich people’s houses.
Passion, piss or money—the murder trinity. Any homicide veteran would tell you that that was where you looked for cause or motive, and that was where you always found them. Riley had added drugs to her list, a sub-clause between piss and money. She looked around. Talk about real estate, the school stank of money. Old money, new money, dirty money—big money. Money didn’t drive Riley, but she understood the urge for it in others.
O’Neil was quiet beside her. She’d made detective sergeant under him, and they were easy in each other’s silences. She rolled her neck to sneak a glance at his bald head. He had symmetrical scarring on both cheeks, which gave him a hint of spice, of danger—O’Neil would lop your head off with a scimitar if he had to. He was on full alert, everything heightened—he had another twenty-four hours in him, no question. He stood completely still, save for a throb in his neck above his white collar. The chase pumped in his veins. Another dead girl, wrapped and dumped on their watch. There was only one way to take it. You took it personally, you took it home.
‘What do you think?’ Riley said. ‘Changed his MO?’
‘Still got the plastic.’ O’Neil paused and then jerked his head. ‘And a creek over there?’
‘Tributary of the river.’
‘He’s at the start of the river, but he doesn’t use it?’
Riley looked towards the command centre. A man in blue work clothes was sitting on a canvas chair outside the police gazebo, talking into his phone. ‘Kid found the body and old mate over there called it in.’ She went back to her notebook. ‘Name’s Craig Spratt. Calls himself the property manager. He’s shaking the trees, getting us access to all the buildings, staff and student lists, data.’
‘How many staff?’
‘About two hundred, when it’s up and running. But it’s mothballed for the holidays. Spratt says there’s no one around, save a few stragglers.’
‘And who would they be?’
‘Him and his wife, the headmaster, the family of the boy who found the body. A gardener. That’s it, he reckons.’
‘They all live onsite?’
‘Yeah, there’s about thirty houses round the place. Most are empty, people away for the summer.’
‘CCTV?’
‘All over the joint. Fifty-three cameras.’
O’Neil looked up. ‘Where’s the closest?’
‘Couple of hundred metres either side.’
‘Make sure we get everything. From the company, not just what old mate wants us to see.’ O’Neil rubbed his scalp. ‘Let’s have a chat to Wayne.’
Riley handed him fresh gloves and booties. He pulled them on and she followed suit and trailed him back up the steps. He moved like a boxer, light on his feet, a bit of swagger, a bit of bounce. He was battle hardened, with a density to him, but he carried it with ease.
The constable logged them back in. A forensic pathologist and six forensic investigators were working in and around the structure. Sketches, photos, video. Wayne Farquhar was hunched over the dead girl. The black plastic had been sliced open further, revealing her torso and limbs. She was dressed only in her underwear. Her bra, still fastened, had been hoicked up over her breasts, her undies pushed down halfway to her knees. Apart from the wound on her temple, her body was unmarked. No ligature marks at the wrists, and her feet were smooth and white.
Farquhar—stocky, sixty, grey-bearded—straightened and moved to the door of the tent. ‘You can smell the spinifex in that breeze,’ he said.
‘Jesus wept,’ O’Neil said. ‘It’s Henry Lawson.’
‘There’s the full moon again,’ Farquhar said.
‘Are you for real?’
‘I told you.’ Farquhar looked over his glasses. ‘Sadist on a lunar cycle.’
‘You’re not here to parrot the media.’
‘I said it before they did.’
O’Neil stared down at the dead girl. ‘You think this is our boy?’
‘That’s where my theory falls over.’
‘Go on.’
‘Gladesville—pure psychopathy with paraphilic disorders, really quite something. This …’ The psychiatrist looked down.
Riley knew: it didn’t compare.
‘Nothing inflicted on her after death,’ Farquhar said. ‘We’ll have to wait for the autopsy, but it’s obvious. The pathologist says clocked on the temple with something solid and smooth. Extradural or subdural haemorrhage. Guessing extradural. Torn the middle meningeal artery. Lucid for a time, then goodnight Josephine.’
‘Could he be toying with us?’ Riley said.
Farquhar went for his beard with a gloved hand and thought better of it. ‘No knife wounds. Plus look at the wrists, the mouth. She hasn’t been bound, she hasn’t been gagged. Those are big changes. Gladesville likes his cable ties.’ The psychiatrist met her eye. ‘And he likes his privacy.’
‘What about the plastic?’ O’Neil said.
‘The black plastic, the river—that’s all you’ve released about Gladesville? That and the rapes?’
O’Neil blinked acknowledgement.
‘I think he was aiming to put her in the creek,’ Farquhar said, ‘trying to mimic Gladesville and the river, but something spooked him. Whoever did this wants us to think it’s Gladesville. He’s had a fumble with the underwear, he’s wrapped her in black plastic.’
O’Neil sniffed. Riley waited.
‘She’s surprised someone, or annoyed them,’ the psychiatrist said. ‘They’ve lashed out and killed her. There are no defensive wounds. No staging, no calling card. Likely domestic, or at least someone who knows her.’
O’Neil folded his arms and Riley read the gesture: it was only a copycat in retrospect, the offender was seeking cover after he killed. The plastic was the only piece of physical evidence linking the scene to Gladesville. There was the fact that this victim was another young white female but, after that, Farquhar was right: logically, it didn’t connect with Gladesville. But there was no logic to Gladesville—and O’Neil had taught her not to impose logic on sick fucks. Start with it, but know it could be a trap—you had to be able to put it aside and think past it. Gladesville had killed twice, so his patterns may not yet be dependable. It was easy to misinterpret a crime scene.
She left the tent. One detail had jumped out at the Gladesville sites: the offender had enjoyed it. He had taken a lot of time with the victims, he’d felt comfortable seeking his pleasure. It was possible the same thing had been happening here until circumstances changed. She looked back in at O’Neil.
‘Maybe he was disturbed,’ she said.