Kiara

As Kiara crosses the street, she looks at the spot on the asphalt where Anton Rabbek died a month ago. She was never able to charge anyone for the hit-and-run. Unsolved killings are nothing new, but this one haunts her, because she was there in Anton’s final moments.

She’s just gotten off the phone with the deputy commissioner. Apparently her dismal performance at the press conference—discriminating against swingers and implying that murder wasn’t shocking—was strike two. He wants this case wrapped up, fast. It would be easier to do that without him breathing down her neck, but Kiara was smart enough not to say so.

She approaches the real estate agency, carrying her notebook under one arm. By now it has six profiles. Dominic, the financial adviser. His wife, Felicity, the stand-up comic. Clementine, the fitness model, married to Cole, the gym owner. Isla, the full-time mum, and her husband, Oscar, the real estate agent. Dominic, Clementine, Cole and Isla were all on the athletics team at Warrigal High School. Felicity grew up in Warrigal too, but she’s a few years younger than the others and went to school across the river at St Clare’s. Oscar is the outsider: a little older than the rest of them and not a local; he moved here seven years ago.

Kiara has gone through their social media profiles, search histories, emails, bank records. She knows Dominic paid Cole and Clementine ten thousand dollars a few months ago. She knows Cole’s gym is struggling, that the IVF is costing a fortune, and that Clementine hadn’t mentioned their financial problems to Isla, even though they exchanged memes and messages almost daily. She knows Isla, Clementine and Cole often visited porn sites on their phones. She knows Oscar often tapped ‘like’ on Felicity’s Instagram photos. But she can’t turn any of that into a coherent motive for murder.

When Kiara pushes the door open, the agency is dark inside, the listings stuck to the windows blotting out the daylight.

‘Detective Lui,’ the agent says. He’s stout and balding, with watery eyes and a pinstripe suit that has seen better days.

Kiara is surprised. ‘Have we met?’

‘Rick Basking. I knew your dad.’ The agent extends a hand.

Kiara shakes it, warily. Her father, a Wiradjuri man, took personal pride in protecting land from developers. She doubts he was popular among real estate agents.

‘Are you here about the murder house?’ Basking asks, sounding oddly hopeful.

‘Right,’ Kiara says.

‘That listing has been a pain since I got it. No one ever wants to stay for more than a couple of nights, and it takes me almost two hours each way to drive out and inspect the place afterwards. Costs a fortune in heating and cooling too, so the owner’s always pushing to charge more than people will pay. I’ve told him to just put some insulation in the walls and the roof cavity, but he’s a tight old fart. You want a cuppa?’

‘No, thank you.’

Basking eases down into a chair that sighs under his weight. His desk is covered with merch—coffee mugs, pens and fridge-magnet calendars that all say Basking Real Estate. On the calendars, Kiara can see Basking grinning from ear to ear, alongside several other agents, including Oscar.

‘I already talked to some of your colleagues,’ Basking says.

‘I know.’ Kiara sits opposite him. ‘Got a minute to go over some things again with me?’

He gestures ruefully at the empty office. ‘Shoot. But if the phone rings, I can’t afford not to answer, not with the market being what it is right now.’

He opens a folder to reveal photos of the house on the mountain. When it’s not full of corpses, the place looks luxurious. King parrots sit in the lush garden. Sunlight falls through huge windows onto soft-looking carpet in spacious bedrooms. In one photo, a leather ottoman is set up in front of the fireplace, waiting for some weary rich person to put their feet up. The text boasts that there are two bathrooms, a barbecue and a self-cleaning oven.

‘Who rented the house?’ Kiara asks.

‘Bloke named Dominic,’ Basking says. ‘Nice guy. Bought a place from me a few years back. I tried to convince him to buy another one, but he didn’t seem interested in getting on the ladder.’

‘How much was it?’

‘The seller wanted seven ninety, but I told them—’

Kiara stops him. ‘Not the house you tried to sell him. The one he rented.’

‘Oh, right. Sorry.’ A nervous chuckle. ‘He took the luxury package—sixteen fifty for three nights, with food and drinks included. Now that it’s a murder house, I’ll have to slash that price by half.’ He winces, possibly regretting the choice of words. Kiara remembers the throat of the first corpse, burst like a cheap sausage.

‘Dominic paid for it all himself?’ she asks.

‘Yup. He may have split the cost with his mates after the fact, I don’t know, but the booking was in his name, and it was his credit card. His wife picked up the keys—pretty young thing. Foul-mouthed, though.’

Kiara writes this down. ‘Really? What did she say?’

‘Nothing, at the time. But Dominic gave me a ticket to one of her shows. I took the missus, not realising it would be so full-on.’ He sipped thoughtfully from one of the mugs. ‘She loved it, but.’

Kiara spots Oscar’s desk—it has a Toblerone-shaped sign with his name on it. She goes over to take a look. No personal touches, not even a photo of Isla and Noah, just a computer and a jar of pens. She takes one with a gloved hand, for an extra fingerprint comparison.

‘Dominic didn’t mention Oscar would be at the house with him?’ she asks.

Basking looks uneasy. ‘No.’

‘Seems odd. If I was mates with a real estate agent, and I was going on holiday with that agent, and I was renting a house for the holiday from the agency he worked at, I’d ask him to handle it. Wouldn’t you?’

She can tell this has occurred to Basking, but he just shrugs. ‘What can I say? I’m not Dom Pérignon—’ Basking cringes, embarrassed. ‘Sorry. Oscar called him that once, and the name caught on around the office.’

Kiara writes that down.

Basking adds, ‘Because of his money, you see.’

‘Yeah, I get it.’

She sees something on the other side of the street. It’s just a split second of movement, glimpsed between the listings on the window, but that’s enough for Kiara to recognise her partner’s silhouette. Elise was an athlete once, and she still has a runner’s body. She also favours one leg after getting kicked in the knee during her ordeal last year.

Paramedics often suffer from occupational burnout, particularly if they’ve been assaulted, as Elise has. The symptoms include anxiety, irritability, trouble sleeping, exhaustion—check, check, check and check. But something more sinister is going on. Elise told Kiara she’d be at work today, not out and about. Kiara thinks again of how withdrawn her partner has seemed lately; of the way she leaves the room to answer the phone. Someone must be harassing her, but she refuses to talk about it …

Kiara’s gaze falls on the photos of the house: the fireplace, the hot tub, the double shower, the king-size bed. ‘No phone reception up there, right?’

‘That’s right. For some people that’s a deal breaker, but others seem to like it. You know, these days people feel obliged to answer emails after hours unless—’

‘Can I rent the house this weekend?’

Basking’s eyebrows shoot up. ‘The murder house?’

‘Yeah,’ Kiara says. ‘Unless someone else has already booked it?’

‘No, I haven’t re-listed it. I only got the keys back yesterday, and passed them straight on to Chantelle.’

Kiara has already interviewed Chantelle Slattery, Basking’s harried cleaner. She hadn’t known anything useful, and had been in a rush to get to her next job.

‘If you want to take a look around, you don’t have to rent the place,’ Basking says. ‘I can just—’

‘I’d like to spend a couple of nights there. It’ll help me get inside the heads of the suspects, and the victims. And you never know, I might spot something forensics missed.’

This is particularly likely, knowing Jennings, but it’s not the real reason Kiara wants to go. Elise needs a break from work, and from the town in general. This luxurious house, with its beautiful surroundings, would be perfect.

‘Well, okay,’ Basking says.

‘How much?’

‘On the house.’ He chortles nervously.

Kiara reluctantly shakes her head. ‘I can’t accept that. Against the code of conduct.’

He looks relieved. ‘In that case, five fifty for two nights. That’s the discounted rate—not discounted because you’re a police officer,’ he adds hastily. ‘Discounted because of the bad publicity. That’s the price I was going to re-list it at.’

‘Thanks.’ She gets out her wallet.

Basking digs a payment terminal out of a drawer and switches it on.

As they wait for the machine to load, Kiara says, ‘Oscar never mentioned he was going on holiday with Dom?’

‘No.’

‘Was he there when Felicity turned up to collect the house keys?’

‘No. Wait …’ Basking puts a finger to his nose and wiggles it from left to right. ‘He was there, actually. I remember him looking at her.’

‘Looking how?’

Basking winces. ‘I shouldn’t speak out of turn. And I could be wrong.’

‘Noted. How did he look?’

‘He was—what’s the word? Lascivious. You know how a man will sometimes glance down at a woman’s cleavage, then back up at her eyes real quick so she doesn’t notice?’

‘We always notice,’ Kiara says.

Basking reddens. ‘Well, anyway, he didn’t do that. He didn’t seem to care if she saw him looking.’

‘Like they were having an affair?’

‘No, that’s the thing. He acted like they were having an affair. But she ignored him, and left as fast as she could—practically ran out the door.’

When Kiara emerges from the agency, house keys in hand, the light is already fading. Elise and her little Suzuki Swift are nowhere to be seen, just dark windows and papers blowing along the deep gutters. The street looks like the set of an old Western, waiting for a new sheriff or a group of bandits to ride in. Kiara had intended to visit her mother, who owns a Vietnamese bakery a block away, but she will have gone home by now. Kiara tries not to feel relieved.

A woman is staring at the window display of the jewellery store next door. It’s Ms Dubois, the one who fled down the mountain. She must see Kiara’s reflection in the glass as she approaches, but the woman doesn’t turn. ‘Detective Lui.’

‘Hi,’ Kiara says. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘My feet are still sore,’ the woman says. In the police interview room she was all dressed up, but now she wears tracksuit pants and Ugg boots, no makeup. Her hair is a tangled mess. Even her silver crucifix looks greasy.

Kiara tries to sound casual. ‘Must make it hard to run your errands …?’

Dubois ignores the What-are-you-doing-here? subtext, looking in the shopfront window. ‘My husband bought my engagement ring from this shop.’

‘I’ve been asking around,’ Kiara says. ‘Sounds like he was a good bloke.’

Dubois nods solemnly. ‘You know how they make a ring smaller?’

‘No. How?’

‘I watched the jeweller do it. He cut a little chunk out of the band, then bent the rest of it into shape and soldered the join. It’s just like getting married. You lose a bit of yourself, but that’s okay. Because you get a comfortable fit.’ A tear rolls down her cheek. ‘But now I’ve lost the thing I fit with.’

‘I’m very sorry.’ Kiara doesn’t remember saying this earlier; she wishes it didn’t sound so trite.

‘Yeah.’ Dubois wipes her eyes with the heel of her palm. ‘Me too.’ She starts walking up the street.

‘Need a lift anywhere?’ Kiara calls.

The woman doesn’t seem to hear, shuffling away with her head bowed. Kiara guesses she’s going to the pub, but a minute later she plods past it—on her way home, perhaps. She lives only five or six blocks away.

Kiara gets back in her patrol car but doesn’t start the engine. She looks down at her notepad, thinking. Then she calls her sergeant.

He answers on the second ring. ‘Rohan.’

‘Do you know Rick Basking?’ Kiara asks, without preamble.

‘The real estate agent? Sure. Why?’

‘He doesn’t have a record.’ Kiara already checked this. ‘But I was wondering if you’d heard anything that might not have been reported.’

‘Well, I remember a friend of Jodie’s rented a house from him and had various complaints. A missing keyring … There were supposed to be two sets of keys, but he only provided one. And the house hadn’t been cleaned properly—rubbish left behind, or something. That help?’

‘Not really. When he asked if I was there to talk about the murders, he sounded … hopeful. Like he was worried I’d come to ask about something else.’

‘Oh.’ Rohan’s chair squeaks. ‘That’d be his son, Seb.’

Kiara writes down the name. ‘How old?’

‘Fifteen. Never charged with anything, but a bit of a troublemaker. Been caught skipping school, shoplifting, drinking, smoking—’

‘Tobacco?’

‘Among other things. He’s got one of those zippy electric bikes, so he can bother people all over town. If you’ve ever seen eight equals D spray-painted on any fences, that’s him.’

Kiara wonders if Basking was trying to bribe her with the free house rental after all. ‘Is his mum in the picture?’

‘Died of breast cancer, Christmas before last.’

‘Hmm.’ Kiara chews her lip. That explained why Seb had never been charged. Anyone in a position to report anything probably felt sorry for him. She changed the subject: ‘Basking made it sound like something was going on between Oscar and Felicity, but I’ve been through their phones, and they didn’t exchange any calls or texts.’

‘None at all? That’s suspicious.’

‘Exactly my thinking. Can you get someone from cybercrime to look at the phones? See if anything’s been deleted?’

‘Sure.’ She hears Rohan scribble a note.

‘Thanks,’ she says. ‘Anything from search and rescue?’

‘No sign of Ms Madden. They’ve cleared a thirty-kilometre radius around the LKP, but the further out they get, the slower they go. You know how it is.’

Kiara does. Partly it’s basic geometry—each concentric ring around the Last Known Point is much, much bigger than the one inside it—but there are other factors. The longer the search takes, the more volunteers drop out, and the more likely they’re looking for someone who doesn’t want to be found, which is almost impossible—or for a body, which isn’t much easier. The Australian bush swallows people and doesn’t always spit them back out.

‘By the way.’ She tries to sound casual. ‘I rented the house for the weekend.’

‘You did?’ Rohan’s voice is hard to read.

‘Yeah. Elise needs a break. It’s a great house, and Basking discounted it—not because I’m a cop, just because of the bad publicity. You reckon that’s okay?’

‘Usually I’d discourage my officers from going on holiday in the middle of a case,’ Rohan says sternly. After a beat he adds, ‘But I guess staying at the house overnight might help you spot inconsistencies in the statements of the suspects … It’s just for the weekend?’

‘Two nights. I don’t need any time off.’

‘You’ll be back at work on Monday?’

‘Nine a.m. sharp.’

‘All right. Elise won’t mind staying at a crime scene?’

Kiara hesitates. She’d wondered if it was ethical, but not how Elise might take it. ‘I … I don’t think so, she says hesitantly. ‘I mean, every hotel room in the world has been a crime scene at one point or another. Elise knows that.’

‘Well, I wish I’d thought of it. Jodie would love a minibreak.’

Kiara shrugs. ‘I’ll give you first dibs at the next murder house.’

‘I hear you’ve been kink-shaming swingers,’ Elise says, coming in the front door of the granny flat. Guppy barks and runs up to her, claws skittering on the tiles.

Kiara sighs and rolls over in bed, squinting at the giant glow-in-the-dark hands of her father’s clock. It’s almost 3 a.m. ‘I was not.’

Elise’s bag rattles as she puts it on the counter. She enters the bedroom, Guppy prancing around her legs. ‘They aren’t normal people, apparently.’

Kiara and Elise moved into the granny flat a few weeks ago so the house could be fumigated, and then never moved back in—Elise seems more comfortable in a building that isn’t visible from the street, and Kiara doesn’t mind staying. Her father spent his last few years out here, and she can still feel a comforting presence. Sometimes she turns a corner and gets a faintly bitter whiff of his aftershave.

When she came out as gay in her mid-teens, her strict Catholic mother advised her not to tell anyone else, because she’d probably change her mind—then immediately got on the phone tree to Kiara’s aunties and grandparents. The betrayal still stings, and Kiara keeps that half of her family at a distance.

When she said she wanted to become a police officer, she lost the other half. Dad’s siblings and cousins and parents, people who’d been friendly her whole life, started speaking to her stiffly, or not at all. To them, police meant danger, not safety.

But Dad himself didn’t bat an eyelid at either revelation. ‘Brave girl,’ he said, both times, and hugged her.

He died last September. She misses him terribly.

‘I was trying to say that actual swingers have rules, practices and social norms around communication and consent,’ she says now. ‘They’re not just people who get drunk and fuck each other’s spouses.’

‘Rules, practices and social norms,’ Elise repeats. ‘You seem to know a lot about this.’

‘Ha, ha.’ Kiara doesn’t admit that she spent the evening googling swinger lifestyle facts to avoid another faux pas at the next media briefing.

She watches as Elise pulls off the ambulance scrubs in the semi-darkness. She loves Elise’s body. Muscular legs, narrow hips, taut stomach. A long neck that Kiara loves to kiss. She can’t imagine sharing Elise with anybody.

‘How was your shift?’ she asks.

‘Not too bad.’ Elise disappears into the bathroom and turns on the shower. She shouts: ‘There was a dad who was worried that his kid had meningococcal, so they got a ride to Emergency. I reckon it was the flu. A car was T-boned on Flinders Avenue, but everyone’s okay, though one woman will be in a neck brace for a while. I picked up an old guy with an inguinal hernia, which was a bit interesting.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s when your intestines bulge into your groin, and—’

‘Stop! I don’t want to know. But will he be okay?’

‘Yep. Embarrassed, mostly.’

When the water stops hissing, Kiara says, ‘Guess what?’

‘What?’

‘I booked a holiday for us.’

Elise comes out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around her torso and another around her hair. She looks puzzled but pleased. ‘A holiday?’

Kiara smiles. ‘I visited a real estate agent today and rented a house. It’s beautiful—you’ll love it. And I called Rafa to get the weekend off for you.’

Elise pauses halfway through pulling on her pyjamas. ‘How expensive is this house? If you cancelled my shifts, I don’t think we can afford—’

‘Don’t worry. The house is really cheap. I got a great deal.’

Elise laughs. ‘Why is it so cheap? It’s not a crime scene, is it?’

Kiara coughs.

Elise’s eyes widen. ‘It is?’

‘Well, it was, but—’

‘Wait, were you visiting the real estate agent in a professional capacity?’ Elise is starting to sound shrill. ‘Is this the murder house from last weekend?’

This isn’t going as well as Kiara had hoped. Elise is a paramedic—surely she’s not afraid of an empty building …?

‘It’s been cleaned,’ Kiara says. ‘Don’t you think it would be nice to leave town for a bit?’

‘I don’t know about you, but the main thing I dislike about Warrigal is the violence. You want to take a break by going to a place where there was a very recent double homicide?’

Kiara tries to make a joke of it. ‘What are the odds of that happening two weekends in a row?’

Elise doesn’t laugh. In the shadows of the bedroom, her eyes are black wells from which nothing escapes. ‘What are you hoping to get out of this?’

‘I thought you needed a break.’ From whoever is making those phone calls, Kiara doesn’t say.

‘You can’t fix me, K.’

‘I’m not trying to.’

Guppy watches them, puzzled by Kiara’s tone and body language. Her dad’s clock ticks too loudly on the wall.

‘Where did you go today?’ she hears herself ask.

‘What?’

‘When I was with the real estate agent,’ says Kiara, trying to sound natural, not suspicious, ‘I saw you through the window.’

Elise hesitates a beat too long. ‘Oh. I just went to the cafe next door. Before my shift.’

Just stop, Kiara tells herself, but she can’t. ‘With anyone?’

‘For fuck’s sake.’ Elise leaves the room, satin pyjama shorts flapping.

‘Elise, wait.’ Kiara rolls out of bed and reaches for her dressing-gown.

But Elise is already back from the kitchenette. She’s holding a disposable coffee cup smudged with Vegemite—she must have retrieved it from the bin. She reads the scrawl on the side: ‘Takeaway for Elise. Cappuccino, no sugar.’ In her other hand, she holds up a receipt. ‘Medium coffee times one. Four dollars fifty. Subtotal: four dollars fifty. Total: four dollars fifty.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Kiara says, though she thinks Elise is overreacting. Kiara didn’t accuse her of anything, just asked if she was with anyone. That’s a normal question to ask your partner, isn’t it?

There’s always an undercurrent of anger with Elise. Kiara secretly likes it—she doesn’t want to be in a relationship with a dishrag. But this is something else. She barely recognises the jittery, furious woman in front of her.

Elise and Kiara hardly ever fight, at least not compared to the straight couples they know. Kiara often thinks those people try too hard to imitate the relationships they see on TV. There is no obvious template for what she and Elise have, so they’re free to do what’s best for themselves and each other. But now Kiara can feel the foundations sinking.

She changes tack. ‘Look, I need your help.’

This takes Elise by surprise. ‘With what?’

‘The case,’ Kiara says, like it’s obvious. ‘I can’t get inside the heads of the suspects, or figure out their relationships to the victims.’

‘I don’t know them.’

‘Four of the six were on the same high school athletics team—that’s what brought them together. They’re all sporty types, like you. I was hoping you could …’

Elise glares at her. ‘You’re patronising me.’

‘Am I? Sorry.’ Kiara smiles sheepishly.

Elise takes a deep breath, then sits beside Kiara on the bed. Kiara squeezes her hand, and Elise squeezes back. Finally she says, ‘The house has been cleaned, right?’

Kiara is a bit offended. ‘Of course.’

‘There won’t be little yellow evidence tags everywhere? Blood on the ceiling …?’

‘It will be spotless.’

‘Okay,’ Elise says. ‘We’ll go.’

Kiara wraps her arms around her. ‘Yay,’ she whispers.

They lie down together. Guppy leaps up onto the bed and curls up on Kiara’s feet. Elise strokes her hair. Kiara closes her eyes, wondering if Elise washed her hands after going through the bin.

The mechanic is a small, bearded man with matted hair and thick glasses. He wipes his hands on a rag, balls it up, then tosses it towards a bucket four or five metres away. The rag goes in without touching the sides.

‘Bill shoots, he scores,’ Kiara says.

‘Detective Lui! I am not worthy.’ The mechanic makes a little bow. ‘What can I do for you?’

Bill trained alongside Kiara at the police academy in Goulburn. He’d signed up to get away from his aggressive stepfather, and was an enthusiastic recruit. But once he was a probationary constable, it became evident that he had no real passion for justice. He lasted only four months and now seems much happier wielding a spanner than a badge.

The dimly lit garage smells of sugar soap. A poster bolted to the corrugated wall reminds all staff to use protective gloves at all times, even though the only employee is Bill, who isn’t wearing them. A Jaguar, gleaming but dented, is raised up on a steel platform. Even the undercarriage is shiny—maybe Bill’s washed it.

‘Hoping to book in a service,’ Kiara says.

‘For one of the police cruisers, or your Navara?’

She points back over her shoulder at her ute.

Bill leans sideways, eyeing the vehicle. ‘What’s wrong with it?’

‘Nothing, I hope. But I thought it would be a good idea to get it checked before I go up the mountain.’

‘Taking Elise for a drive?’ Bill sounds a bit too interested.

‘Yep. Can you fit me in?’

He squints. ‘Dunno—I’m pretty busy.’

Kiara looks around at the garage. There are no other customers and no vehicles other than the Jaguar. ‘Doing what?’

‘I’ll have you know that my schedule fills up weeks in advance these days,’ Bill says, affronted. ‘This little beauty was booked in a month ago.’ He gestures to the car on the platform.

Kiara finds this very unlikely. Bill may be the only mechanic in town, but there’s not much demand. Warrigal is full of old people who can service their own equally old cars. So can Kiara, but she needs to spend the day printing out evidence photos for her case file.

Bill is still talking about the Jaguar. ‘She’ll take me the rest of the day, easy.’

‘How about tomorrow?’

He scratches his chin. ‘I’ve got a bit on.’

Kiara doubts this. ‘Okay. Thanks anyway.’ She sighs theatrically. ‘Elise was really looking forward to a romantic getaway, you know?’

Bill’s too-interested look returns. ‘Well … I suppose I could rearrange some things. Let me check the calendar.’

Kiara can see it from here: the plate number from the Jaguar is scribbled on a square representing last Monday; the rest of the month is blank. ‘You do that,’ she says.