every tablet in her home, washed down with disinfectant from the laundry cupboard. It wasn't until the year before, however, that she'd disclosed that her father had been selling her to his mates for beer for as long as she could remember. Although she'd now made a police statement against him, the DPP was still struggling to gather sufficient evidence to bring him to trial. In the meantime, this man was at home while his daughter fought for her life in hospital.
Impotent rage engulfed Mercy as she flicked through the file. Suddenly something snagged at her consciousness, and she stopped. She turned back a page, then another. There. An address. The father's address. The place where he was probably even now sleeping drunkenly while his daughter was nourished through a nasogastric tube.
It wasn't far from here, actually. Windsor. She felt a thrill of surprise that she could drive to the house of a monster right now and knock on his door. She could see what such a man would look like, could speak to him; throw a brick through his window if she wanted to. She could tell this man what he had done to his child. Make him listen. Sit him down and force-feed him tales of the horror that she listened to every day. He wouldn't care; she knew that. He'd rationalise his way through what she was saying; he'd call the police, make her out to be the crazy one. He'd get away with it. They always did.
Windsor. She had his address. It had not been difficult to access the identities of her victims' attackers once she'd started looking. In the past, Mercy had skipped these people's names when she came across them. They had no meaning for her; they did not help her to assist her patients.
When she decided to pay attention, however, Mercy found it surprisingly easy to gather facts about the offenders. They were identified in police statements, court documents, Apprehended Violence Orders – many of these documents were in her patients' files. Often the perpetrators' addresses were right there, their pseudonyms, sometimes even the names of other accusers. Sometimes officials had gone through and blacked out such details, but this would most often happen with one document and not another. Mercy soon had profiles on several men.
She began to work on these files late at night, also incorporating information she'd gleaned from her patients during therapy. She'd found herself specifically asking questions during the sessions that would fill holes in her knowledge about the offenders. She'd jot the missing details in her work notes, and then transfer them to her offender files when she got home.
Mercy began to notice patterns. Carly Kaplan had said that her abuser had made her dress as a fairy and a princess. He'd made Carly and her friend Brianna touch each other, and had taken photographs. Kathy Lin, another patient, had been abused by her father, but one evening he'd entertained a friend who'd also had Kathy and her sister dress as princesses while he photographed them. Kathy's description of this man – when Mercy had asked during their last session – had been very similar to the one given of the offender in Carly's police statement.
Then there was John Jacobs. One of Mercy's most damaged patients, he was able to work on memories of his abuse maybe only once or twice a year. Otherwise he spent months on the acute psychosis ward of the hospital while doctors tried to stabilise his medication. Both of his arms, from fingertips to shoulders, were a mutilated mess. He would carve and burn them, trying to release the demons he believed lived inside his body. He'd also mutilated his genitals, sure that the devil had control of his sex organs, and once, after stabbing himself in the stomach to punish himself for becoming sexually aroused, emergency surgery had been necessary to save him from dying.
John's file told a harrowing story. Removed from his parents as a mute and unresponsive toddler, bruises covering his body, he'd been placed in a group home. Made a ward of the state because of his parents' neglect, he was eligible to be adopted, but staff waited until they could determine whether he would improve and what legacies he might have been left with. His DoCS case notes indicated he'd rapidly responded to care and attention, learning to talk and walk, and endearing himself to staff. He'd been adopted by a family who already had two sons, and no significant entries were made in the file for several years. At age ten, he'd been temporarily returned to the care of the state. His adoptive parents had complained that he was aggressive, wouldn't shower, and was non-compliant. One caseworker had labelled the adoptive father as 'controlling' and 'aggressive'. Another had said that John was 'attention-seeking' and had 'deliberately sabotaged his placement' because of 'an inferiority complex'. The same writer had noted and dismissed John's claims that his adoptive father had molested him.
Although repeatedly exposed to it, Mercy never ceased to be horrified by the ineptitude of some of the departmental carers these children were entrusted to. The department claimed to have lost the remainder of John Jacobs' file, but he'd told Mercy that he'd been repeatedly sent back to the same family until he ran away at the age of fourteen and lived on the streets.
John's account of his time with the family was disjointed and blurred by delusional thinking, but one theme predominated. He claimed he'd been a prize in a game played by a group of men. His adoptive father played the game and John had been a 'party favour', swapped around amongst members of the group. Because he also spoke of the Secret Service using his brain to create a supercomputer that would one day control the world, Mercy had always only half-listened to him, aware that his words were distorted by mental illness.
Now, however, she scavenged through his account, foraging for potential truths amongst the chaos that was this patient's reality.
Her files were growing daily.
9
'I don't see why we had to come out here this arvo,' grumbled Scotty, steering the car with one hand, nursing a Pepsi with the other. To accommodate his long legs, he had adjusted the seat back as far as it would go; he was practically sitting in the back seat.
Beside him, an open street directory lay on Jill's lap. Her feet were up on the dashboard.
'Are you serious?' she asked. 'Don't you think it's kind of significant that Mercy Merris has counselled victims of all three dead men? We've got to talk to her – she could be a link.'
'Yeah, but it's boiling. And we're going to Richmond, for God's sake. We could've just called her.'
Jill had called Mercy, and she knew they were coming.
They'd been driving west for just over an hour. The builtup shopping strips and unit-blocks had given way to huge, blank-faced factory estates as they made their way through the afternoon traffic. It seemed like half of Sydney was heading home to the western suburbs.
Reading the map while travelling left Jill feeling queasy. She pressed her forehead against the window. Parched bushland bordered the two-lane road. The scrub was broken every now and then by a ranch-style house, or a service station.
'Another friggin' speed camera! Can you believe this shit?' Scotty backed off the pedal a little. The car's dashboard display still registered 41 degrees outside, even though it was now after 3 p.m. Scotty had been bitching for the past thirty minutes.
Jill tuned out and thought about the last time she'd met Dr Mercy Merris. A psychodynamic psychotherapist in private practice, Dr Merris used to do some work for the New South Wales Police Service. She'd counselled cops who had problems at home, with the boss, or who, like Jill, had attended a fatal, or a shooting incident, and had been sent to a shrink for a mandatory debrief.
Like most cops, Jill hadn't wanted to go to counselling. In fact, having spent a year in therapy at fifteen, she was even more reluctant than most. So she'd been surprised when she found the obligatory three meetings helpful. She'd gone to the sessions determined to say as little as she could and get out as soon as possible, but had found it easy to talk to Mercy. Dr Merris had recommended more treatment; but hey, she didn't like itthat much.
An approaching intersection snapped her from her thoughts. 'Turn left here, Scotty.' 'Finally,' he grumbled five minutes later, steering the car into the drive of the private psychiatric hospital.
The wheels of the Subaru crunched gravel as they rolled down the two-kilometre, palm-lined private road. Hills of waving grass poured down to meet a river and in the distance were the mountains. In the foreground to their right, a few cattle grazed stupidly, sun-addled, tails swishing at flies; on the left four bored horses ambled. Jill wound the window down and took a long sip of the hot, clean air. A bellbird whistle-cracked.
