'Yeah, that's right,' she said. 'Isobel Rymill and Joss Preston-Jones. That was the Wu case, right?' She didn't really expect an answer and got none. 'Poor bastard, they couldn't save one of his legs, you know. Surgery didn't take.'
'Are you gonna eat that?'
Jill looked down at the banana on her desk. Morning tea. What the hell. She slid it over. He grinned, more at the fruit than at her. He peeled it with his thick fingers and ate it in three huge bites.
'So are you ready to head over there?' He arced the banana skin through the air, and it dropped into a garbage bin on the other side of the room. Reid's bin.
'Yeah, I guess.' Jill thought about the long drive to Balmain, the trip back here to Liverpool afterwards, and then at five or six tonight, the trip back to her unit on the beach. She took a deep breath and stood. God I miss working at Maroubra, she thought.
When they got down to the carpark, Gabriel walked straight to the passenger side and got in, still reading from one of the files he held in his hand.
'So, I guess I'm driving again,' she said to the roof of the car before she climbed behind the wheel.
'You know, these first interviews on the home invasions aren't that great.' Gabriel hadn't heard her. He spoke with his head down, still reading from the case files.
She didn't respond, trying to picture the best route from Liverpool to Balmain. 'Do you know a better way to get to Balmain than the M5?' she asked, tired already.
'Huh? Nuh.'
'So, we'll just take the M5 back into the city, and double back to Balmain?' I could use a little help here, she thought. New girl, remember?
'Okay,' he said.
'Off we go then,' Jill said dryly, making her way back into the traffic she'd sat through not an hour before to get there.
It wasn't until they were at tollbooths that he spoke again. Jill had already worked her way through half a litre of water from a bottle by her side.
'Reid and Tran did most of these victims' interviews,' he said.
Jill waited for his point. Finally, she said, 'Yeah, so?'
'There just seems to be a lot of information lacking. Like Rice and Temple. It didn't take us long to get more information, extra evidence from them. Some of the most important evidence in the case so far.'
Jill thought about the two kids, Justine and Ryan, and wondered how they were doing today. She wondered how Narelle Rice was coping with having her home trashed again by crime scene. In the group meeting this morning, Superintendent Last had told them that the analysis of the towel Justine had kept would be back tomorrow at the latest. She frowned; it was pretty sloppy that Reid and Tran had not discovered the sexual assault. Still…
'Maybe Justine just couldn't tell two men about the sexual violence,' she said. 'Maybe they interviewed her while Ryan or her mum was there with her. It's not easy to talk about that stuff you know.' God, she knew.
'Exactly.'
'What, exactly?'
'Well, that's Interview 101, isn't it? There just seem to be a lot of holes in all of the statements. Maybe we should tell Last that we'll reinterview all of them?'
Jill choked on a sip of water. 'Are you serious?' She could just imagine what the rest of the detectives would say: Yeah, she's been here less than a week, and already she thinks she can do it all better than us. 'It would take forever for just you and me to interview all the witnesses. There's other stuff to be done on this case, Gabriel.'
'Yeah, but the single most important determinant in successfully resolving a case is the quality of information gathered from the interviews with victims and witnesses.'
She looked over at him. His trucker cap hid most of his eyes.
'Anyway,' she said, changing the subject, hoping that he wouldn't try to insist on this, 'what do you think of that anonymous call that came though yesterday afternoon?'
Lawrence Last had mentioned the call in the morning meeting. It was from a woman, identifying a male who might be involved. It had been just one of many calls from the public since their work on the case had started. None of them to date had thrown up anything useful.
'What do I think?' he said. 'I think someone's feeling guilty.'
'Why do you say that? It's not like she was confessing to anything.'
Gabriel kept reading. Jill was getting used to these one-sided conversations. At the moment, she just felt bored and sleepy. The sun beamed in through the windscreen and her cheeks felt hot. She cracked the window a little. The exhaust fumes from the motorway blew in with the breeze. She had found it difficult to sleep last night, waking from a blood-soaked dream in which huge, biting spiders chased her. She'd lain in her bed for an hour afterwards thinking about Eugene Moser's final moments and Justine Rice's horrific confession. Who was this lunatic? It was horrible to imagine him out there somewhere, planning another attack. What could he be capable of next time?
'What was the guy's name?' Jill asked. 'The guy from the phone call? Henry someone? Asian name.'
'Nguyen, Henry. AKA Cutter.'
'That's it. Cutter.' Jill made a scoffing noise. 'Must've been real hard for her to come up with a name like that, given the stories all over the media,' she said sarcastically. 'The call's probably bullshit. Just someone who wants attention, knows nothing about the case at all.' She didn't know whether she believed that, exactly, but she was curious to know more of Gabriel's thoughts about it.
He grunted and kept reading.
Jill high-beamed a car doing eighty in the right-hand lane. It was a hundred zone, and she didn't feel like sitting on this motorway any longer than she had to. The Ford Laser stayed right where it was.
'What's in the file that's so fascinating, anyway?' she said, starting to seriously tailgate the guy in front of her. 'You've read the interview before.'
'It's not what's in here,' said Gabriel. 'It's what's not. You wouldn't believe the questions they forgot to ask this couple from Balmain.'
The truck in the lane next to her was too close to consider overtaking from the left, but the Laser could easily have moved over by now. Jill was considering putting the siren up on the dash and ruining this guy's day.
'So what did they miss out on?' She tried to curb her impatience. Scotty had hated driving with her when she was in this mood. Gabriel seemed not to notice at all.
'Well, a detailed narration of events, for one.'
'Yeah,' she said. 'I read through the interviews yesterday. They did seem a bit sketchy.'
'A bit? Reid did the Preston-Jones interview. He didn't get a description of any of the voices. He didn't ask about incidental sounds from the other room. For God's sake, there wasn't even a word-for-word account of the exact words the witness heard from each offender.'
'Mmm. Pretty sloppy, especially given they had few physical features to go on because of the balaclavas.'
'Don't start me,' he said. 'There's plenty bloody more they could have asked about physical characteristics.'
The Laser finally moved over. A young bloke in dark sunnies. He flipped her the finger before he took the River-wood exit. Dickhead. He probably thought she and Gabriel were a married couple out for a drive. She'd known how to spot an unmarked cop car from age thirteen. This fool had no idea how close he'd come to a five-hundred- dollar headache. He was lucky that Gabriel had finally started to talk and distract her.
'What questions would you have asked to get more from the witnesses about the physical details?' Jill was genuinely interested. All detectives had a different interview technique, and most tended to stick to the questions they had learned from their first supervisor. She'd always been open to learning more sophisticated methods of getting at facts.
'I always teach the witness to use their memory like a video-recording,' he said, suddenly animated. 'I tell them they can fast-forward scenes, or slow the action down. They can take it frame by frame, or just view still- shots. On any given shot they can zoom the camera in, or widen the lens to take in details at the corners of their vision.'
