WHEN THE BRIEFING was done, Whitt walked across the busy bullpen to his desk, coffee in hand. The desk was new, a delay in his official transfer from Perth, meaning he had spent his first couple of weeks at the department working out of his car or a briefing room. A group of detectives was gathered nearby, watching the large glass window of Chief Morris’s office with interest.
Whitt looked over to see what they were all focused on.
“It’s him,” a detective said, his arms folded, leaning on Whitt’s desk. “It’s Big Joe Woods.”
“That’s the guy who caught Elizabeth Crassbord’s killer?”
“And Reece Smart, the Farmhouse Killer,” another detective said, nodding. “Dude’s a big-case bandit. Swoops in after all the hard work is done, trying to get the press. He’s got a lot to prove. You hear about his daughter?”
Whitt scoured his desk for his folder. He thought he’d just put it down on the desk when he passed to get his coffee, but now it was gone. He straightened and turned to the group of men beside him still focused on the office across the room.
“Did someone take my…?”
The detectives turned toward him and smiled. Whitt sighed. One of the woes of being associated with Tox Barnes was that other detectives in the department were given license to harass, belittle, and prank any detective partnered with him. It was a tradition dating back to Tox’s entry into the force. Rumors spread, almost as soon as he was badged, about violent killings in his childhood. Tox had been responsible for the death of a mother and son, but it was a freak accident that got the pair killed. The police didn’t want a murderer in their midst and punished anyone who aligned themselves with Detective Barnes. Tox might have cleared up the rumors about his past, but he wasn’t the world’s most social guy. He liked to work alone, and his reputation, however false, kept people away.
Even with Tox holed up in hospital, out of sight and out of mind, Whitt was still being messed with for befriending the department’s most hated detective.
“Seriously? That’s my only copy of the Banks case file in its entirety,” he said.
“Well, then!” the nearest detective said cheerfully. “We know how you’ll be spending your morning.”
Whitt appreciated the prank for its subtlety and effectiveness. He would have to go down to “the dungeon,” the records department in the bowels of the building, and print himself a whole new file. He took his coffee to the sink and poured it out without drinking it. He knew by the time he returned, it would be unsafe to drink.
He rode the clunking, shuddering elevator down to the darkened car park and traversed the concrete floor lined with police vehicles to another elevator down to the lowest floor of the building. Records was housed where the command center held its armory, and it had the added benefit of being a suitably dark, damp, and cold place for insubordinate officers to be sent as punishment. Officers who stepped out of line were sent to do time either in records, where they could wither away filing paperwork, or in the armory, where cleaning and servicing the weapons would allow them sufficient time to think about what they had done.
Whitt knew who was in the records department now—a young patrol officer named Karmichael, who had been filmed dancing suggestively in uniform with a couple of ladies in a nightclub in Kings Cross. Constable Karmichael’s movie had made it onto YouTube and, inevitably, to the top brass’s e-mail in-box. And then there was a long-term inmate of the dungeon, Inspector Mia Fables. Fables was in her fifties and had clawed her way to inspector through decades of shoddy police work and bad attitude.
Whitt exited the elevator and pushed open the door of the long hall leading to the lowest floor of the building.
The lights were off. It was his first clue that something was amiss.