RILEY WAS DRIVING Patel and O’Neil to the morgue for a briefing with the forensic pathologist and Farquhar when Bowman called. She hit the siren, turned across three lanes of traffic and headed back to the school. Bowman was waiting for them at the top of the drive to the maintenance block. He nodded at Patel and O’Neil. Riley didn’t bother with introductions.
‘Where is it?’ she said.
Bowman led her into the clearing and over to the wall and pointed. She bent. The end of a large roll of black plastic was just visible lying under a sheet of plasterboard.
‘That’ll do,’ she said. ‘Don’t want to tread all over it. Did you touch anything?’
‘No, I was careful.’
They walked back to Patel and O’Neil. The detectives stood in a triangle and watched him closely, three pairs of eyes. ‘What brought you down here?’ Riley said.
He wiped at his mouth. ‘I’m not really sure. After I wrote the story I wanted to keep moving. I felt someone was watching me.’
‘Did you see anyone?’ O’Neil said.
‘No … Well, I’d talked to Preston and Craig Spratt.’ Bowman recounted his morning, before and after his first call to Riley.
‘You think one of them followed you?’ O’Neil said.
Bowman looked up the drive. ‘I don’t know. I just felt someone watching, at the classrooms. I walked away but I couldn’t shake it. I found myself back here.’ He pointed to the kerb where Riley had picked him up. ‘The other day I saw Scott Green walking behind the block.’
‘When was this?’ O’Neil said.
‘Friday morning.’
‘How long was he here?’ O’Neil said.
‘I don’t know.’ Bowman looked at Riley. ‘I was going to follow him when I ran into you.’
A muggy silence fell. Riley watched as two of the vehicles from the Crime Scene section at the John Deere shed pulled up. She walked across the road to the gutter and stood staring up at Lynch’s block of flats. Patel followed her.
‘I don’t like it,’ Riley said.
Patel glanced back at Bowman speaking with O’Neil. ‘Lynch?’ she said. ‘Or the journalist?’
‘Lynch,’ Riley said. ‘Why, you don’t like the journalist?’
Patel shrugged. O’Neil went over to talk with the Crime Scene sergeant, leaving Bowman on his own. Riley had found him here two days ago and now here he was again, stumbling over a roll of black plastic. ‘You don’t think he’s telling the truth?’ she said.
‘No, he probably is.’ Patel paused. ‘Or he’s a good liar.’
Riley looked again at the flats. Where was Lynch?
‘Let’s go,’ O’Neil called. ‘We’ll give Ray Martin here a lift to his car.’
O’Neil took his seat in the rear of the Calais beside Bowman. Riley shook her head at Patel as they opened their doors: O’Neil was superstitious. If there were more than two people in a car, he liked to ride back right. No one spoke as Riley drove to the administration buildings and pulled up at Bowman’s Nissan.
‘That was good work,’ O’Neil said. ‘Thanks for the call.’
‘But—let me guess,’ Bowman said. ‘You’d prefer I didn’t write the story?’
‘Not yet. No plastic, no drones. Rose will talk to you later. Play the long game and it’s all yours.’
Bowman climbed out and Riley watched the reporter cross to his vehicle.
‘Priya,’ O’Neil said. ‘What do you think?’
‘Sir,’ Patel turned to face him as Riley reversed. ‘The John Deere among the gardening tools, the organic matter, and now a roll of black plastic on Lynch’s doorstep. Everything seems to say gardener.’
‘Yeah,’ O’Neil said. ‘Burke’s fucking Backyard.’
Riley raised a two-finger salute at the uniforms in the patrol car at the gate. ‘You think it’s too neat?’
O’Neil’s phone rang. Riley turned right onto Pennant Hills Road as O’Neil listened and hung up.
‘Pathologist’s been called out to a double shooting at Bonnyrigg,’ he said. ‘She’s briefed Farquhar on Marguerite. He’ll walk us through it in a slide show.’
Riley nodded. ‘Lynch,’ she said. ‘You think someone’s trying to frame him?’
No answer. In her rear-view mirror, she could see O’Neil looking out the window. She merged off James Ruse Drive onto the M4, traffic heading to town from the Blue Mountains. She cut south for Lidcombe, into the valley of death—the coroner had moved from Glebe to the new complex abutting Rookwood cemetery. The morgue and the necropolis … some planning bureaucrat had really thought things through. Riley was still getting used to it.
She drove in and parked in an emergency bay. New Year’s Day, a Sunday—the place was on skeleton staff.
Farquhar met them at the main entrance and they followed him down a white hallway to a conference room, where he brought up an image of Marguerite Dunlop’s body on a screen. It was as the forensic pathologist had said at the scene—the girl had been hit over the temple with something smooth and heavy and died of a brain bleed. There were no defensive wounds, nothing under her fingernails. There had been no rape and there was no semen in the vagina, anus or mouth.
The psychiatrist held a baton and his shoes squeaked on the vinyl as he moved closer to the screen to indicate the side of the girl’s head. ‘Extradural bleeding around the brain,’ he pointed. ‘Not within the brain, but on the surface, between the dura membrane and the inner part of the skull. There’s a fracture in the temple location. The trauma has torn the meningeal artery.’
‘How long did she take to die?’ O’Neil said.
‘Hard to say exactly. But minutes. She’s haemorrhaging. The blood’s got nowhere to go, it causes pressure. Her brain swells and then it shifts from left to right. That’s what killed her.’
‘What about the blood on her carpet?’ O’Neil said.
Farquhar pointed at the laceration at the temple, where the blow had breached the skin.
‘She lost some blood from the cut?’ Riley said.
‘Correct, but not much. The wound bleeds a little, oozes and then stops. She lost around 150 millilitres.’
‘How much was in her hair?’ O’Neil said.
‘About sixty millilitres.’
‘And on the carpet?’
‘You’ve seen it, the size of a fifty-cent piece. The pathologist says twenty mils.’
‘So we’re missing seventy mils of blood?’ O’Neil said.
‘Correct.’
‘And you think it’s on his clothes?’
‘Not me, the pathologist. She says since it’s not in Marguerite’s room and not throughout the house as he moved her, then it’s been absorbed on the killer’s clothes—or on Marguerite’s.’
‘If she was dressed when he killed her,’ Patel said.
‘Correct,’ Farquhar said. ‘She was left in her underwear. If she was dressed, it means he stripped her and took what she was wearing. That might indicate the blood was on her clothes.’
‘What about on the murder weapon?’ Riley said.
‘Perhaps. They can’t say exactly what it is, only that it’s something smooth and heavy. Not jagged or rough or sharp. It hasn’t punctured her.’
‘The pathologist said she had been dead twenty-four hours when we got to her,’ O’Neil said. ‘We’re still saying killed Wednesday?’
Farquhar pressed a button on his laptop and brought a new picture onto the screen. He pointed with his baton. ‘This greenish discolouration on the abdomen, here, above the pubic line, is a clear sign of decomposition. In technical speak, she’s on the turn. The deterioration is on her right side, which is where it usually begins, above the caecum. She was wrapped in plastic and it was close to forty degrees at the site on Thursday. But the point is the deterioration hadn’t spread. See?’
He brought up another slide.
‘Now, she was under a roof, so not in direct sun, but, still, she can’t have been there for too long, no more than twenty-four hours, or she’d be green across her abdomen, even up her chest. If you look here, you can see some marbling in the upper chest and arms. This dark streakiness of the blood vessels and veins, that’s consistent with the timeframe.’
He paused and looked at Patel. ‘You’re not Homicide, I recall?’
‘No,’ Patel said. ‘Parramatta.’
‘Right,’ Farquhar said. ‘Well, rigor mortis. By the time they got to her at the scene she had been through it. Or it was on the wane. The muscles stiffen in death, but that change was giving way to flaccidity. They can’t be precise with the timing, but they can be quite accurate. Again, it points to twenty-four hours, maybe a little longer.’
Patel nodded and the doctor turned to O’Neil. ‘Did you want me to go through the lividity?’
O’Neil shook his head. ‘She was left lying on her front for several hours after she was killed and then moved? And found a day later?’
‘Correct,’ Farquhar said. ‘Wednesday breakfast was the last thing she ate. She was killed between early morning and early afternoon and dumped sometime between Wednesday afternoon and late Thursday morning. Best guess is Wednesday night.’
O’Neil sat in the unmarked Prado in the back lane of the Redfern unit block and waited for the secure door of the underground garage. As he drove through he checked in his mirrors that nothing slipped in under the steel barrier as it came back down. This ritual was recent, and it was due to more than superstition.
It was two p.m. and he needed a combat nap. He’d trained himself to go down into deep sleep for ten minutes and then come back up, no alarm needed. He parked, took the lift to the fourth floor and walked the spartan corridor to the empty flat. The agent had described it as a one-bedder, but there was no getting around it—it was a one-roomer. The bed was up three steps on a ‘mezzanine’, but it was still in the kitchen. The whole place was in the kitchen. He opened the fridge. Everything was in the kitchen, except food.
He put his laptop bag on the table, pulled the Glock from the back of his trousers and loosened his tie. Rubbing the back of his neck, he moved down the room to the windows and looked out at the grimy balcony above Regent Street and the view across to the university. It had been interesting to clap eyes on Bowman. There was an expediency about the reporter that O’Neil hadn’t liked. But then, O’Neil didn’t like journalists on principle—smarmy fuckers, always seeking advantage and then needy for approval.
O’Neil went over the morning in his mind, knowing his subconscious would work while he slept. He was heading for the mezzanine when his phone buzzed. Riley.
‘I emailed you a photo,’ she said. ‘Because of the resolution you need to look on your laptop.’
O’Neil cradled the phone to his ear and pulled out his MacBook. ‘What is it?’
She didn’t answer and he could hear the noise of the strike force room in the background. He put the phone on speaker beside the computer and opened the attachment. It took him a moment to orient himself. It was a crime scene picture, an unfamiliar room shot from above. Pieces of women’s underwear on the floor.
‘You got it?’ Riley said. ‘You’ll need to zoom out a bit to see it.’
O’Neil ran his fingers over the pad and then his hand froze. He looked at the phone. ‘Where?’
‘Tennyson Point, on the river. One bay up from Gladesville.’
‘When?’
‘Two years ago.’
‘They investigated?’
‘Sort of.’
‘How sort of?’
‘Went through the motions, treated it as a burglary—except nothing was taken. They thought it was kids.’
He winced. ‘They get forensics on it?’
‘No.’
O’Neil sat back and stared at the screen. The bras, underpants, slips, stockings, all different colours, had been arranged in the t-shape with the undulating crossbar. Farquhar had said it would be out there and now they’d found it: the forensic psychiatrist’s fabled fetish burglary.
He got the address from Riley and hung up, put the laptop in his bag and the Glock in his trousers, and headed for the car. Fuck the nanna nap, he was feeling better already.
The owners of the Tennyson Point house were in their mid-forties and still cleaning up after New Year’s Eve when the knock came on the door. It took about twenty seconds for their post-party bleariness to curdle into horror. O’Neil withheld the words Strike Force Satyr as he made the introductions, but it didn’t matter. The couple had seen him on the news—they knew what they were looking at.
They stood in their lounge room, jittery as they glanced from O’Neil to Riley and Farquhar and Patel. Riley nodded reassurance as O’Neil talked. They needed these people calm and contained. Word of this could not get out, not even to the couple’s two boys, both in their late teens and out for the day.
‘It’s a routine visit,’ O’Neil said. ‘We’re looking at all old break and enters in the neighbourhood.’
The couple weren’t buying it. The Gladesville scenes were eight hundred metres downstream from their house. The woman, breathing shallow, looked aghast at her husband, who jerked his head towards the yard, towards the river.
‘This is about that,’ the man said. ‘You think BMK came to our house first?’
The wife went green, about to hit the deck. Patel got her seated and gave her a warm smile.
Riley smiled too, at the husband. ‘It wasn’t established at the time how the burglar got in, is that correct?’ she said. ‘There was no sign of forced entry?’
‘No,’ the man said, ‘except a key was missing.’
It wasn’t in the police report. ‘A key?’ Riley said.
‘We didn’t notice it was gone for a few days. By then, the cops had moved on. Nothing was stolen so they didn’t seem interested. They were just kids in uniform.’ He looked from O’Neil to Farquhar, bearded and silent in the corner. ‘Not like you guys.’
‘What was the key to?’ Riley said.
‘A sliding door on the ground floor.’
Riley’s eyes met O’Neil’s.
Patel and Farquhar stayed with the wife while the husband took Riley and O’Neil down. An open kitchen and family room on the bottom floor led out through glass doors to a patio and terraced garden and then a bay dotted with yachts, branched off the river. Absolute waterfront.
‘Would you give us a moment?’ O’Neil said to the man.
He nodded and they left him and walked to the low sandstone sea wall. The tide was lapping, almost in the yard. Riley checked the angles, how the shoreline was screened from the neighbours. A facsimile of the Gladesville houses. Total privacy.
‘Living the dream,’ O’Neil said.
They walked back to the owner and O’Neil indicated the sliding doors on the patio. ‘The key was to these?’
‘That’s right.’
‘The key lives in the lock when you’re home?’ O’Neil said. ‘You can secure the door from inside without the key?’
‘That’s why we didn’t miss it at first. You can’t get in from the outside, but when the door isn’t deadlocked you can open it from inside without the key. Louise and I both assumed the other had moved it, or one of the kids.’
Riley looked over the bay. He’d come up the river and watched the family at home, seen them moving in and out of the house, the sliding doors open. He’d lifted the key and then come back when no one was home. Back then, the uniforms had canvassed the neighbours, no one had seen a thing. Satyr would canvass again.
‘You change the locks?’ O’Neil said.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Keep things deadlocked and put the alarm on. You might want to install some sensor lights in the garden.’
The man’s brow glistened. ‘You think he’s coming back.’
‘No,’ O’Neil said. ‘Even if it was him, I don’t think he’s coming back.’
The man locked the sliding doors and took the key.
‘How long have you been here?’ O’Neil said.
‘Nearly ten years.’
‘And you own, right? The house hasn’t been on the market in the past, say, five years?’
‘No.’
‘You had anyone housesit while you’ve been away?’
He frowned, thinking. ‘No.’
In the entry hall, Patel and Farquhar and the wife joined them from the bedrooms.
‘Look, I know it’s been two years,’ O’Neil said, ‘but I’d like to send a couple of officers around tomorrow to ask some detailed questions.’
‘Oh god,’ the woman said.
‘What type of questions?’ the man said.
‘Just about anyone who may have been at the house,’ O’Neil said. ‘Tradesmen, gardeners, anyone at all. If you could please have a think about that.’
The wife dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. Riley handed the couple a card each. ‘If you think of anything, or if you need anything—give me a call.’
‘One other thing,’ O’Neil said. ‘And this is important.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘Please, don’t tell anyone we were here looking at this. Not the neighbours, not your colleagues or siblings or parents. Not even your boys. Not a word, okay?’
The woman gave a gasp and her husband put his arm around her.
‘It’s alright,’ O’Neil said. ‘As I said, we’re just going back over old cases. There will be detectives door-knocking the street over the next few days. They’ll talk to your neighbours but they won’t mention you or the break-in. If the neighbours ask, say, yes, you were door-knocked too. Everything is routine, so don’t be alarmed.’
The woman wiped her nose, nodding, as her husband reached for the door.
‘Thank you,’ Riley said. ‘We’ll keep in touch.’
The four of them walked up the drive to the vehicles. O’Neil called Annie Tran. ‘I want to see the whole of Satyr in the room in twenty minutes,’ he said. ‘Everyone.’