Jill needed to stand up. Pins and needles throbbed in her fingertips. This cold is ridiculous, she thought. She stared at the ceiling above her terminal. A half-metre air-conditioning vent was positioned directly above her chair. She imagined she could see the frigid air streaming from the vent, drenching her desk. She cupped the tip of her nose in her palm to try to get some feeling back. The back of her throat felt scratchy, and she wished she could be doing this work from home. Or at Gabriel's. She bet his computers would have access to these databases.
She walked to one of the windows of the squadroom, hugging her arms around her body, and stared down into the street below. A camera flashed. She stepped sideways, back against the wall, and angled her head to peek out without showing her face. Two media trucks occupied the parking spots in front of the courthouse below. She saw a third in the Spotlight carpark across the road. A news camera was now angled up at her, two men and a woman sidestepping, heads weaving, trying to see behind the window. Anything at all to do with this case was big news. Not since the 'Bodies in the Barrels' homicides in Adelaide had Australia been as deliciously terrified. People in the immediate area, however, got no thrill at all from it. Counsellors had been brought into local schools because children had been producing artwork depicting their fathers and pets dismembered.
Jill wondered what Gabriel would be able to get out of the dead man's daughter, Donna Moser. He planned to interview her sometime today. She was well enough to have been moved to a private psychiatric hospital in Burwood, so she should be up to talking, they'd figured.
On her way to the coffee machine, Jill passed another woman, head down over a computer. Muriel? Marilyn? Lawrence Last had introduced them a couple of days ago. Marion? Yep, that's it, she thought. The woman raised her head briefly and nodded at Jill. She looks comfortable enough, thought Jill, starting to shiver. The extra twenty kilos Marion had on her would be helping. She slid a mug under the expensive espresso maker and added two heaped teaspoons of sugar. Wrapping her hands around the cup, she held its warmth to her body as she walked back to her desk.
Next step: known associates of Henry Nguyen. There had been no mention in the meeting yesterday of any known past connection between Nguyen and Dang Huynh – the suspect forensics had identified as having vomited at the Capitol Hill crime scene. Jill thought about Gabriel's rapid conclusion that the vomit indicated that at least one member of the gang didn't have the same bloodlust as the killer. Huynh hadn't been able to keep his dinner down, so there was little chance he was the one doing the butchery.
Jill wondered how long Huynh had known Cutter as she typed and underlined his name in her notes. She entered his nickname, 'Mouse', and called up his sheet. Car theft, aggravated robbery. She kept digging. Well, well. At age seventeen, Dang Huynh had gone up on an assault charge in company with Henry Nguyen. They'd bashed a boy and a teacher at Bonnyrigg High during school hours. Neither attacker had been a student at the school. Jill remembered the case from Nguyen's criminal records. The school's vice-principal had lost an eye when Nguyen had smashed a bottle into his face; the teacher had been trying to break up the attack. Nguyen had been sent to Mt Penang that time. She read on. Yep, there it was, Mouse had also been remanded at Mt Penang after the assault.
So at least these two members of the home invasion gang went back a long way. The thought gave Jill an idea. She pushed her already cooling coffee aside and bent back over the computer.
Cutter tucked his lucky socks into a drawer inside his wardrobe. Head on an angle, he peered into his black eyes in the mirror stuck inside the wardrobe door. He closed it and lowered himself onto his carefully made single bed. It and the wardrobe were the only furniture he'd moved over from Cabramatta. Same bed he'd had since he was a boy. In fact, his grandfather used to sit just about there, as he taught him the needle lessons. Cutter's orange towelling bedspread was so worn it was transparent in patches. So soft. He smoothed it over and over under his palm.
He felt very pleased with this basement room. The door was heavy, made of metal for some reason, and when he closed it, the small window, and the curtain covering it, he could hear nothing at all from outside. He felt certain that no one outside could hear him in here, either. The walls were double brick, coated in thick white paint, and he sniffed in the dirt-tang of mildew that bubbled underneath. He loved that smell. His grandmother had not. No, she had told him, you cannot live here! The water is stagnant. Your luck cannot flow. Your cold will be worse! Come home with us where you belong, she'd entreated in Vietnamese as he signed the simple, single-page contract that his new landlord, Mrs Miceh, had produced.
Karen Miceh. So sweet. He'd had to almost pull the piece of paper from her grip, as though she'd changed her mind at the last minute. Face to face when he'd handed it back again, he'd quickened his breathing to match her own, his chest rising and falling in rhythm with hers, listening for the sound of her pulse, hypnotised.
The sound of a dog barking blew in with the breeze from his open window. He frowned, rose from the bed and stepped into some slippers. He walked around the clothesline and the wading pool, passing the squat lemon tree, thick with bees sipping at its blossoms.
Just past three p.m. in Baulkham Hills. He loved this hour. On weekdays at this time, mums, dads and nanas would wait at bus stops and pedestrian crossings outside the schools, lined up in Taragos and four-wheel drives. When the weather warmed up, it would be straight to the local pool and then to pick up a barbecued chook on the way home. Today, it would be softball tryouts and piano lessons, maths tutoring or karate class. When living here as a child, he'd seen these routines as a pantomime just for him – a whole cast of humans playing sugar and spice, frantically ignoring the rot and disease that was born within all of them, that was feasting away as they grew older.
He had reached the back of the large suburban garden. Behind the huge, netted fig tree, a low wire fence hid behind feral camellia bushes, marking the boundary between Karen Miceh's home and her neighbour's. The barking stopped with Cutter's last footstep and was replaced by a pleading whine, a snuffling whimper. The dog wanted a pat. Cutter manoeuvred through the scented bushes and a wet, yellow nose pushed through the mesh of the wire barrier.
'Good doggie,' Cutter crooned, hand outstretched. The golden Labrador thumped the lawn behind the fence in delight, strained to get closer for a good scratch.
'That's a good boy,' said Cutter softly, reaching over the fence.
Jill absently wiped the back of her hand across her nose. Ugh. She reached for a tissue, and then picked up the phone on the desk.
'Gabe, where are you?' she said into the handset.
'At the hospital,' he said.
'Have you interviewed her yet?'
'Nope. Three o'clock.'
'I'll meet you out there.'
She printed out a single page and shut down the computer. She'd finished earlier than she'd thought, and was glad to have the opportunity to watch Gabriel interviewing another victim. She gathered up her bag and the case- file, and stood to leave the squadroom. At the last moment, she grabbed the phone again and left a message for Lawrence Last to let him know her movements.
She jogged down four flights of stairs to the basement carpark and threw her bag in the backseat of her issued Commodore. It wasn't until the M5 on-ramp that she pushed the dashboard vents away from her face and turned the heater down, realising she was now stifling hot. Nudging the bumper of her vehicle into the near- stationary traffic, she waved to pretend that she was grateful to the driver behind for letting her in. She knew she'd be still sitting waiting to merge if that motorist had had anything to do with it. It was dog-eat-dog on this motorway.
Too late, she realised that it would've been far quicker to take the Hume Highway to Burwood. She thumped the steering wheel with the heel of her hand and settled in to wait in the traffic.
Her hot nose throbbed.
'So, guess who used to hang with Henry Nguyen back in the day?' she said to Gabriel in greeting when they met in the foyer of the hospital. There were still twenty minutes before they were due to meet with Donna Moser.
'Joss Preston-Jones,' he said.
'Well, yeah,' she said. 'Good guess. Also, Mr Chew and Spew – Dang Huynh.'
