The house has a rustic look, with a weathered brick exterior and dark wood trim. There’s a low-maintenance garden out the front, typical of short-term rentals: no lawn to mow, no veggie patch to water, just rose bushes herding visitors onto the path with their thorns.
The building is two storeys high, which is unusual way out here, where land is plentiful and it’s cheaper to build out than up. Kiara supposes that if you’re going to put a house on a mountaintop, you may as well go a couple of metres higher so the upper windows have a view over the tree canopy. Part of the roof has been damaged, perhaps by hail. A brown tarpaulin covers the hole, billowing in the breeze.
If anyone has been in the upstairs bedroom over the past several minutes, they might have seen the Tactical Response Group driving up the hill. If so, they’ve had some time to prepare for the raid.
Kiara adjusts her stab vest. She’s gained some weight since she was fitted for it, creating gaps in front of her armpits. She’s also very aware that it doesn’t protect her arms or throat.
‘I’m going to knock on the front door,’ she says.
The commander looks at her like that’s the dumbest idea he’s ever heard. He’s dressed more like a soldier than a police officer, with knee and elbow pads, and various tools dangling from a chest rig. Behind the visor of his riot helmet, his nose is crooked and his grey-flecked beard is patchy.
Kiara first met him at a critical incident eight years ago. A terrified teenage girl had called triple zero because her drugged-up boyfriend was threatening her with a samurai sword, which he’d duct-taped to his own hand so he couldn’t be disarmed. When the response group broke into the townhouse, the boy whirled to face them, and the squad commander blasted him with a shotgun. He died, never having to explain his actions or reveal who’d sold him the meth and the sword. The group commander didn’t care about any of that, but Kiara did.
She hasn’t met the rest of the team: three other men and one woman, huddled around the commander. He says, ‘You want to give them even more warning?’
‘I want to give them the chance to surrender peacefully,’ Kiara says.
‘According to your witness, they’re armed and dangerous.’
Early this morning, a woman stumbled down the mountain in a dressing-gown, and was nearly hit by a car on the highway. The driver took her to hospital, where she babbled about knives and killers but also about God and falling branches. She’s still recovering from hypothermia.
‘My witness is barely coherent,’ Kiara says. ‘Let me try to talk them down before you go in, guns blazing.’
‘Listen to me. You’ve been a detective for what, a month?’
It’s actually been less than three weeks. This is Kiara’s first case since her promotion, and she’s only leading because it’s a public holiday, and Rohan, her sergeant, is visiting his parents in Queensland. If he’d been the one to interview Ms Dubois, she’s sure he would have sent a more senior officer.
‘What’s your point?’ she asks.
‘They might kill you.’
Usually this idea wouldn’t rattle Kiara. It’s a risk every time she puts on the uniform—and even when she doesn’t. She once spent four nights hanging around a Wagga Wagga car park in fishnets, trying to catch a rapist who’d targeted sex workers in the area.
But Elise is already fragile. What will happen to her if Kiara doesn’t come home?
Kiara swallows the thought. ‘I’m more concerned about you killing them,’ she says.
The commander jabs a stubby finger at her chest. ‘You’re making this operation unnecessarily difficult and dangerous for me and my men.’
Kiara’s gaze flicks to the only woman on his team, who doesn’t seem offended. She looks like she’s in her fifties, with cracks around her mouth and greying curls. Kiara is thirty-three and has learned not to expect support from older women in the job. Having put up with worse sexism in decades past, they expect her to suck it up, princess.
‘Noted,’ Kiara says, and walks towards the front door, hands up.
It’s finally stopped sprinkling, but the cobblestones are still slick. The afternoon sun isn’t warm enough to dry them. Ahead of her, a wind-chime dangles from a rain gutter, wooden tubes clacking in the breeze.
Kiara edges around the front veranda, with its bench seat on the left, a door on the right, and muddy footprints everywhere. The boards squeak under her feet. The doormat is printed with banksia flowers and a slogan: bless this mess!
After knocking on the door, she steps to one side out of habit, even though Ms Dubois told her no one in the house had a gun. ‘My name’s Kiara,’ she calls. ‘I’m a police officer. You okay in there?’
No answer.
‘I just want to make sure everyone’s safe. Do you need first aid? Water? Something to eat, maybe?’
The classic siege strategy is to offer pizza, but the nearest pizza place is in Warrigal, more than an hour away. Kiara is pretty sure she has a banana in her patrol car, though; it wasn’t too spotty last time she looked.
‘You know what always helps me get some perspective? Fruit.’
Still no sound from inside. She pulls on a pair of latex gloves and tries the handle. It turns—Ms Dubois must not have locked it when she fled.
Kiara looks back at the commander. He glares at her, warning her not to do what she’s thinking about doing.
She calls out, ‘I’m coming in, okay?’ Then she opens the door and steps inside.
Kiara finds herself in a narrow hallway. There’s a window on her right, along with some coat hooks and a spot to hang skis, even though Kiara thinks there’s not enough snow and too many trees for skiing. A few suitcases and saggy backpacks are lined up against the opposite wall, open as if their owners only got halfway through packing them.
Kiara walks to the end of the hall, where there’s a framed poster with a collage of comforting words—holiday, family, home, love, happy, et cetera—and turns left.
In the living and dining area, two cream couches sit near a modern-looking fireplace. A glass dining table is surrounded by high-backed chairs. Big windows look out into the bush, and there’s a giant TV for those who don’t like the view. Only two Blu-rays occupy the shelf: The Silver Brumby and The Man from Snowy River.
A copperish scent lingers in the air. Blood and urine.
Still turning left, Kiara takes in the kitchen, separated from the dining area by an island bench made of white granite, dirty plates stacked on one corner. Wineglasses are everywhere, puddles of red at the bottom. There’s a brushed-steel fridge with a built-in ice machine, an oven big enough to roast a whole pig in, and a body on the floor. Face up, throat slit.
Kiara says into her lapel mic, ‘Got a body here.’
The commander comes on the radio immediately. ‘Time to go.’
He’s right. She’s confirmed the house is a crime scene—now it’s her job to walk back out the door without touching anything, then summon forensics. But there could still be someone alive in here, meaning the Tactical Response Group will have to clear the building first. They’ll trample all over the bloody footprints around the body, and probably shoot any witnesses they find. Then Kiara will never figure out what happened.
‘In a minute,’ she says.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ the commander mutters.
The lake of blood around the corpse is dark red, almost black. A long smear leads to a nearby hall—it looks like the man was dragged from there to here. The volume suggests his heart kept pumping for a while. There’s more on his upturned hands, like he clamped them to his throat, trying to save his own life. The medical examiner will confirm.
Kiara isn’t deceived by his peaceful expression. The facial muscles have slackened after death, but his last moments would have been horrifying.
She gets as close as she can without stepping in the blood. The man has a wedding band. A dress shirt, once salmon-coloured, now dirty and torn. Leather shoes with formal uppers and running soles: sales-assistant footwear. He’s white, medium build, and about thirty, give or take five years.
Kiara looks around for signs of the murder weapon. Nothing on the floor. A silicone spatula and a wooden spoon are drying next to the sink. When Kiara spots the knife block, she sees not one empty hole but four.
She remembers Ms Dubois in the hospital bed, fingering the crucifix. Her croaking voice: ‘Don’t go in the house. He nearly killed me. He’ll kill you.’ It sounded paranoid, insane—less so, now that Kiara is standing over a man with his throat cut.
She swallows. ‘Can we talk?’ she calls. ‘I’m here to help.’
Her voice echoes through the house. No response.
She has a Taser on her belt but doesn’t draw it. In her experience, suspects are more likely to attack an armed officer than an unarmed one.
She follows some bloody footprints to a sliding glass door, and opens it without touching the handle. There’s an expansive back deck, with a gas barbecue, another dining table and a hot tub shaded by an umbrella. No prints out here, probably washed away by the rain. She approaches the safety rail and peers over. The house is built on a slope, so even though the front door is at ground level, there’s a five-metre drop from the back deck to the forest floor, where there’s a garden bed, an axe next to a woodpile and a mud-spattered bicycle. The landscape is better suited to mountain biking than to skiing.
Before leaving the deck, Kiara lifts the lid of the hot tub and dips a finger into the water: still warm.
Back in the house, she finds another hallway. Three doors, all on the left-hand side. The first door leads to a bedroom, and another corpse. This man is tucked into the blankets of a queen-size bed, arms out, chest in. He’s also about thirty, but he’s wearing a suit and tie. There’s an ostentatious watch on his wrist, the type men wear to indicate that their time is valuable. The hands have stopped moving, so it’s probably an automatic watch, powered by the movement of the wearer. The guy’s been dead at least twenty-four hours. His suit is wet, leaving a dark grey stain on the mattress around his body.
There’s a halo of blood on the pillowcase. Kiara circles around the bed and sees that the right-hand side of his head has been caved in. Baseball bat, maybe.
This man, too, is wearing a wedding band.
Two dead husbands, Kiara thinks. A long centipede of unease crawls up her spine. If these men were married to each other, this could be a hate crime. She knows all too well how common those are in Warrigal—but way out here?
‘Got another body,’ she says into the radio. After checking that no one is hiding under the bed or in the closet, she leaves the bedroom.
The second door along the hall leads to a bathroom tiled in grey stone, veined with black. Four toothbrushes are on the sink: three electric, one manual. Four travel bags hang from towel rails; two overflow with lotions and hair products, while the others are smaller, containing only deodorant and razors. There’s a double shower, the drain in the middle clogged with hair: not like someone has been shaving—more like they were running a salon. Kiara opens a cupboard to reveal a large washer-dryer and some laundry baskets.
The third door leads to another bedroom, identical to the first except the bed is empty, and there’s a sliding door for easy access to the back deck. No curtains. There’s more uninspiring art on the walls: a print of a mermaid singing for a ship on the horizon.
There’s blood on the thick grey carpet. Maybe more footprints.
‘Ground floor clear,’ Kiara says, then hears a scuffle upstairs. ‘Hello?’ she calls.
No response.
She exits the bedroom and walks to the staircase at the end of the hall. ‘Let’s get out of here, shall we?’ she says, as she climbs the stairs. ‘We can go somewhere safe—and warm! The forecast is for eighteen degrees back in town.’
She reaches the narrow landing at the top of the stairs and tries the door with a gloved hand. It’s locked.
‘Can you let me in?’ she says. ‘I promise I’m just here to help.’
She presses her ear to the door. Silence.
Kiara goes to touch her lucky ring, the one her mother smuggled here from Vietnam. But her finger is bare, because she couldn’t find the ring this morning: a bad omen.
‘I’m coming in, okay?’ she says. ‘Stand back.’
She’s not quite tall enough for this. Ideally, you want to kick down on a door, not up at it. Kiara braces her hands against the walls, plants one foot and channels her inner cheerleader. Her heel slams into the wood next to the handle.
An external door wouldn’t have budged, but internal doors aren’t built with security in mind. The locking mechanism snaps out of the soft wood, leaving a fist-sized hole, and the door opens—but only a centimetre. Whoever’s inside, they haven’t just locked the door. They’ve barricaded it.
Kiara puts her shoulder to the door and pushes. A heavy object grinds along the floor inside. When the gap is wide enough, she squeezes through.
The master bedroom has no carpet, just twin rugs on either side of the king-size bed. A lacquered chest of drawers has been dragged in front of the door. A bedside table has an open bottle of sparkling wine on top. There’s a small hole in the ceiling, maybe from the cork. No glasses anywhere, though. Another door looks like it leads to an ensuite.
A man is backed up against one wall, palms flat against it, as if he’s on a ledge over a long drop. A woman is standing a couple of metres away, pointing a paring knife at him.
‘Hi.’ Kiara puts a hand on her chest. ‘I’m Kiara.’
The occupants of the bedroom ignore her, staring at each other. The woman’s knuckles are white around her weapon.
Despite the cold, the man is in running shorts and a muscle shirt. He looks just like the corpses downstairs—same athletic body type, same short hair. There’s blood on his hands. The woman is in leggings and a figure-hugging long-sleeve top, with flecks of vomit around her mouth. Both of them are pallid and trembling.
The man has a wedding band, and Kiara has the sudden superstitious feeling he’s doomed unless he takes it off.
Kiara eases deeper into the room. ‘I’ll be honest,’ she says, ‘I have no idea what’s going on here. Maybe one of you could explain …?’
The woman’s gaze flicks over to her. Her expression is serene. Maybe she’s in shock.
‘Those two blokes downstairs are in a bad way.’ Kiara edges closer. She can’t use the Taser—the woman is likely to stab herself when she falls. ‘And Ms Dubois is in hospital, scared out of her wits. I think it’s time to …’ she stops herself from saying end this ‘… take a break.’
She steps between the two of them. Now the blade is pointed at her.
‘How about you put that down?’ she suggests.
The woman doesn’t lower the blade.
Have it your way, Kiara thinks.
She punches the back of the woman’s hand and, at the same moment, slams a palm against the inside of the woman’s wrist. The woman’s fingers pop open and the knife goes flying sideways. It lands with a soft plop on the rug. Kiara keeps a firm hold on the woman’s wrist with one hand and whips the other back to parry any oncoming blows.
The woman just stares dumbly at her empty hand, like she can see the ghost of the knife.
‘Don’t hurt her,’ the man says softly, from right behind Kiara’s ear. ‘She’s fragile.’
‘No one’s going to hurt anybody.’ Kiara reaches for her lapel radio with her free hand. ‘Tactical, you can come in now. I’m upstairs with two unarmed suspects—I repeat, unarmed suspects. They need to be escorted from the building ASAP so forensics can come in. Don’t touch anything.’
The woman suddenly grips Kiara’s collar. Her eyes are wild; her breath foul. ‘You can’t trust him,’ she whispers.
Now that both suspects are talking, Kiara has plenty of questions. But before she can ask any of them, the emergency squad bursts in.
They clear the room and check the ensuite, which Kiara realises she should have done. Then they drag the suspects out the door, handling them more roughly than they need to, perhaps to compensate for being forced to wait outside.
‘I have serious blue balls,’ mutters a male officer, looking forlornly at his unfired gun.
‘You must be used to that, though, right?’ the female officer says, with a smirk.
Kiara peeks into the ensuite: a bathtub this time, and two more toothbrushes on the vanity. She unbuckles her stab vest and inhales deeply, like a diver who’s just surfaced.
The squad commander is behind her. ‘The building’s clear,’ he says. ‘All suspects in custody.’
‘Wrong,’ Kiara says. ‘Two dead, two in custody, one in hospital. That’s five people.’ She points at the vanity. ‘But I’ve seen six toothbrushes.’