POPS WALKED TOWARD the judge’s house, caught glimpses of the sparkling harbor between the mansions, the golden bridge yawning across the shores. After he was admitted through the gates of the Boscke residence, Pops stood watching a marble water feature bubbling by the front door for an inordinate amount of time. Judge Boscke answered the door himself, wearing black slacks and a T-shirt pulled down over a belly rounded by wealth.
The library was on the second floor. It wasn’t often that Pops felt young these days, but he did following the judge up the stairs, pausing to give him a better lead every three steps or so. They sat in leather armchairs, and no drink was offered, though there was an elaborate drinks table by the windows. It was a bad sign.
“Joe Woods’s father was a great man,” Boscke said by way of beginning. “I spoke at his funeral.”
Pops felt the air leave his lungs heavily, pressed out by a new, great weight.
“I’m not trying to make waves here.” Pops put his hands up in surrender. “Obviously, Joe and I have our differences. We’re not on the same page about running this investigation, and that’s fine. But disarming me so that he can go ahead and do things his way? That was wrong.”
“He shouldn’t have suspended you,” the judge reasoned. “From what I know of Joe, he was probably just trying to be the big man in town. He’s a hothead. It works for him. Sometimes you need the swift, heavy-handed players in this game and sometimes you need the slow, methodical types, like yourself. But the two types shouldn’t interfere with each other.”
“I’m not going to obey the suspension,” Pops said.
“Nor should you,” the judge said. “This Banks fellow is a runaway train and we’re all his terrified passengers. We need everyone we’ve got on this.”
Pops shifted, preparing to begin his request.
“I know why you’re here,” Boscke said before he could speak. “The sealed report. I can’t help you with that.”
Pops slumped in his chair.
“In accessing the sealed files on Banks, he’s inadvertently cut you out,” the judge said. “Even if I wanted to tell you what those records say, I couldn’t. I don’t have them here, and the approval was for Woods only. I rushed it through because I know the man. If you want to see them, you’ll have to have Joe show you or you’ll have to make an application to the court yourself, which will take time.”
“Woods isn’t going to let me see the file.”
“What’s your interest in it, exactly?” Boscke asked.
Pops explained his theory that something in Regan’s early childhood might be calling him, that maybe he was heading south, leading Harriet toward a place that was meaningful to him.
“If there was some clue in the files, why would Joe keep that from you?”
Because he’s an arsehole, Pops thought.
“Maybe he’s missed something in there.” Pops sighed. “He doesn’t see the file’s significance. He’s very focused on finding Harriet. He doesn’t trust her.”
“I think we can both understand why that is,” the judge reasoned. Pops hadn’t considered it before, but perhaps part of Woods’s hyper-focus on Harriet was to do with his own daughter’s troubles. At seventeen years old, Tonya Woods had been in the back of a vehicle full of her less-than-reputable friends when a pair of patrol officers pulled them over in Blacktown, in Sydney’s Western suburbs. The officers had made the car as identical to one described driving by a house only minutes earlier and opening fire on the front of a property. The house that was fired upon had seven people in it. A man had been killed, and a six-year-old boy had taken a bullet in the arm as he slept in the front bedroom.
The papers had loved the story. Joe Woods had been an up-and-coming Homicide star not yet faded from the national news, the head of a team who had solved a serial-rapist case a month earlier. He’d caught a whiff of celebrity, of the promotions and power that would come with being a police poster boy, and then suddenly his own daughter was on trial for murder. Tonya had escaped with good lawyers and convincing stories about not having any knowledge of what her friends had planned to do. But she had been in and out of the newspapers in the years since; drunk, high, on the periphery of violent crimes.
“Whatever daddy-daughter issues Joe has with his child, they can’t come into this investigation,” Pops said. “He can’t punish Harry because he doesn’t have the balls to rein in his kid.”
“What can I say?” Judge Boscke held up his hands. “You’ve got an impasse, the two of you.”
Pops leaned forward, clasped his hands as though in prayer.
“I know you’ve tried thousands of cases in the family court,” he said. “And Regan was taken into state care more than thirty years ago. You couldn’t possibly remember the details of every single case. But is there anything at all that you can remember from the Banks case? Do you remember what happened with his parents? Why you sealed the file? Did you look at the file before you approved for it to be released to Woods?”
“Morris.” The judge shook his head slowly. “These days I struggle to remember my own damn phone number. I didn’t look at the file when I signed the release.”
Pops hung his head.
“All you could do,” Boscke carried on, “is have a look at my notes from the year Banks entered the system. I always kept a journal, especially when I was in the Family Courts. Some of those hearings went on for years.”
The judge stood and went to a set of shelves nearby. He selected a red leather book from a vast collection, opened it, and leafed through the pages idly.
“I might have written about sealing the Regan Banks file. I might not. If there’s anything about it, it’ll be in here somewhere.”
Pops found he’d risen from the chair without meaning to, his fists clenched in anticipation. He could hardly wait to launch into the books as the old man left the room. He took down the one the old man had picked out, but it was the wrong year. He fumbled through the books, sliding them out and dumping them on the little desk, flipping pages and staring at dates. The sections were uneven, the judge’s handwriting almost indecipherable.
Regan had gone into care in 1982 at seven years old. But when had the state decided they would pursue full custody of Regan? Had Regan’s custody automatically been handed over to the foster-care system after the incident that got him removed from his parents, or had there been a hearing? Had his parents fought to have him back? Pops needed to know exactly when the decision to seal the file had been handed down in all the proceedings after the incident, and he didn’t even know exactly when the incident, whatever it was, had occurred. Pops found his head was pounding. He sat down at the desk, slightly woozy, and forced himself to advance more slowly through the yellowed, scrawled pages.