along the corkboard, a glossy snakeskin depicting huge and random destruction. As she moved from sheet to sheet, she asked herself: if this is your game plan, what’s your starting point?
How do you get there?
Ian appeared at her elbow, startling her a little.
‘What are you going to do for the end of the world, Gracie?’ he said to her, smiling.
‘I don’t know. What do you have to do to get to the pearly gates?
Scrub your teeth with bath cleaner? I’d like to look my best, I guess.’
‘You wouldn’t need to do that to look your best,’ he replied. ‘I’d sink a few golden ambers first. There’s no beer in the afterlife.’
Grace watched over his shoulder as Jeffo slipped another photograph into the array of pictures. Several people standing nearby glanced at it and then at each other, raising their eyebrows. She held her breath. They did not look in her direction and they did not laugh.
She relaxed and smiled at Ian.
‘You don’t know, it could be flowing in the streets up there. It’s got to have something going for it,’ she said.
‘I wish,’ he said.
‘If you two really want to know,’ Harrigan grumbled, passing them by, ‘why don’t you ask our woman up there on the board. She can tell you. She’s already made it to the afterlife. The only thing flowing for her is her own blood.’
‘Good morning to you too,’ Grace said, softly.
‘What’s up with him this morning?’ Ian said.
They looked at each other, and then at the corkboard. Louise had pinned up a second reproduction of the picture of the unknown woman lying dead across a set of steps with the words ‘You can run but you can’t hide’ scrawled across her. This time, the reproduction came from an Internet news service and carried the headline: AVENGING ANGELS’ DEADLY STRIKE. POLICE FAIL TO MAKE ARREST AFTER
DOCTOR SHOT BY EXTREME ANTI-ABORTION GROUP.
Harrigan’s arrival called them all to silence. He settled his papers on the table, taking a few seconds to dispel his irritation. Whenever the Tooth tormented him like this, some other scheme was usually in progress elsewhere, and for Harrigan the true questions were twofold.
Were all their backs, his included, protected? And where were the real land mines buried? Time was ticking on, like the clock on his murdering girl’s website. Not so many days had passed since he had first located the website but the pressures for a result were growing more intense by the hour. The Firewall was still out there, his superiors were still leaning on him, the politicians were leaning on them, and the media was baying for blood. He glanced briefly at the mosaic of diverse pictures on the corkboard without taking them in. They shone in the reflection of the overhead lights, the images lost in the glitter.
‘We know who this is now.’ Louise’s voice was already coarsened by alcohol even though it was only late morning. She was tapping the picture of the dead woman with a slightly shaking hand. ‘Dr Laura Di-Cuollo, obstetrician, Long Beach, California. She was shot dead on her own front doorstep sixteen months ago. That case is still open. The people who shot her call themselves the Avenging Angels. They took this piccie as soon as they’d done it and then they sent it out to every news service that wanted to print it. That’s who they are. They don’t believe in hiding what they do.’
‘But our colleagues in the US of A do,’ Harrigan said. ‘We’ve been trying to open up the lines of communication with them on this but all we get is the cold shoulder. They hang up the phone on me as soon as they can; we email or fax them urgently and they lose the message. We’re going to keep trying but we have to chase this our end as well if we’re going to get anywhere with it. So — what we know about our killer.
She’s armed and dangerous. She’s prepared to use her gun again. She’s unpredictable. She’s “stuck back home” wherever that is. What we don’t know. Is our girl one of these Avenging Angels, so-called? People involved with this kind of organisation are inclined to firebomb clinics as well as shooting the staff. There are five Whole Life Health Centre clinics in the Sydney metropolitan area. I am trying to get a watch on them all but Marvin…’ Harrigan paused, weighing his words ‘… is still considering the options, so he’s told me. He’ll let me know once he’s checked over our budget. So consider this in your deliberations: are we dealing with a single killer? Or a member of an organisation which has its own resources to draw on, possibly from more than one country?’
‘Why don’t you tell us that yourself, mate? Maybe your boy knows.
Why don’t you ask him instead of us?’ Jeffo muttered poisonously.
How far the words were intended to carry, Grace could not be sure.
She was standing in the orbit of his voice and several other people close to her had smiled. Jeffo was giving voice to certain exclusions that had rankled badly with some. Toby Harrigan’s relationship with the Firewall, all that side of the investigation, had been siphoned off to a small team working to Louise, with instructions to talk to no one other than Harrigan concerning anything they found. Grace had heard the sour rumblings of gossip. How the boss was favouring a burnt-out alcoholic, compromising the possibility of their results. A whispered heresy — ‘Harrigan’s losing it, he should take himself off the job’ -
had started to do the rounds.
‘I’m going to ask each of you to exercise your mind on those questions,’ Harrigan said, looking around at them all, speaking with an acerbic edge that implied he had picked up on the undercurrents.
‘Every one of you, because there are no answers yet and it’s time we had some. But right now we’ve got a picture of her, Grace tells me.
Why don’t you show us?’
‘A picture of sorts,’ Grace replied, taking the photograph out of her file and walking forward. ‘This came out of Greg Smith’s file at Juvenile Justice. It’s a magazine photograph published about a year ago when someone was doing an expose on what happens to state wards. It’s too bad their research didn’t go much past this picture.’
There was limited space left on the board, occupied as it was by the Firewall’s website. Searching for room, Grace found herself looking at Toby Harrigan in his wheelchair, the photograph that welcomed viewers once they had surfed into his website. No other pictures of Harrigan’s son had made it to the board, he had not allowed it. His son existed there only as part of the Firewall’s ferocious world.
Harrigan, standing close by, saw it at the same moment that she did.
They glanced at each other but neither reacted. Harrigan, turning, searched through the assembled team until he located Jeffo and eyeballed him. The man looked away at once.
‘Matthew Liu is certain this is her. He was sure from the moment I showed it to him and I believe him,’ Grace said, taking the only available space, next to Harrigan’s son. ‘She’s the right height, 156
centimetres. Tiny, in other words. She’s thin and she could get into the clothes the shooter wore. You put her beside the website and there are similarities with the Firewall as well. It’s not much to go on, but it is something to connect her to Greg Smith.’
‘That’s useful, isn’t it?’ Jeffo said, this time meaning to be heard.
‘We can all go round checking the backs of people’s heads.’
There was some laughter. Grace did not waste her time even glancing in Jeffo’s direction.
‘I look forward to you doing better, mate,’ Harrigan snapped, with just enough venom to make sure everyone knew what his feelings towards Jeffo were. He spoke to Trevor, ‘It’s enough for a description.
Get it written up and get it circulated, the photo as well. Yeah, what is it, Dea?’
His administrative assistant, a small and tough-looking woman with dyed blonde hair, had appeared in the doorway.
‘Marvin’s on the phone again,’ she announced.
Oh joy, Harrigan thought irritably. He nodded to Trevor to take over and left the room. Trevor was cynically cheerful as he handed out the jobs for the day.
‘You finally get to go and chat up young Greggie this arvo, Gracie.
The shrink says it’s okay. They’re expecting you at three thirty,’ he said to her. ‘Tough luck, mate. It’s a dirty job but someone’s got to do it.’
‘I’ll cope,’ she said, faking a blithe indifference.
Dirty jobs done dirt cheap a speciality, Trev, Grace improvised from a well-known song, reflecting on her present conditions of employment.
