Arleen McKenzie lived in Fairfield, in one side of a rented white fibro house that had been split into two self- contained halves. The house seemed a small island amongst the large blocks of units that lined the streets roundabout. Arleen’s patch of ground looked half cared for. Junk mail littered the grass around the base of the mailbox while flowering red geraniums in weeded garden beds grew in a line under one of the windows. The front door was off to the side and reached through a small partially enclosed porch. Borghini knocked and then knocked again. There was no answer.
‘She was expecting us,’ Grace said.
He tried the door. It opened for him.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I don’t like this.’
He pushed the door open slowly. Grace followed him inside. They walked into a cheaply furnished lounge. There was a smell of old food and the house looked dirty.
‘Anyone here?’ Borghini called.
‘In the kitchen,’ Grace said.
Arleen was staring at them from a chair, her hands resting on the table. In front of her was a quantity of white crystals in a plastic packet and a pipe. It looked as if Arleen McKenzie had been about to smoke crystal methamphetamine when she died. There was blood on her shoulders, her clothes, the floor and the table. The back door, although closed, was directly behind her.
‘Shot in the back of the head,’ Grace said. ‘It would have taken a half-second. In through the back door and gone again.’
‘I rang her before we left the motel to confirm our appointment. Would she be smoking ice when she knew we were coming calling?’
‘As soon as we were gone, maybe. But I thought she was supposed to be clean. It’s more likely this is a setup.’
‘Whoever it was, they’re gone now,’ he said. ‘I’ll call the troops in.’
He took out his phone and began to call the people he needed to. Grace walked out of the kitchen through the living room to the front door. A concrete path continued past the door to the back of the house. There was no way to see this path from the kitchen; the laundry blocked the view. She walked around to the back of the house, a small concreted area enclosed by a high wooden fence, and saw the back door. From where she stood, the road was thirty seconds’ walk away.
She came back inside and looked around the living room. The woman’s dead wide-eyed gaze seemed to follow her while Borghini talked on his phone. Whoever, whatever, she had been as a person, Arleen hadn’t had much interest in house cleaning. It was fair to say the surroundings were filthy with ingrained dirt. Amongst the other odours was the smell of a dirty toilet.
Borghini had finished talking on his phone. ‘Rung your boss?’ he asked.
She shook her head, too filled with anger and disgust to speak.
‘My guess is you’d better,’ he said to her silence. ‘If you don’t, one of my superiors might ring him first. They don’t mind a bit of one-upmanship where Orion’s concerned.’
She looked at him with a half-smile and made the call. Clive’s first response was silence.
‘That makes your appointment with Kidd even more important,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to come down hard on him.’
‘Who’s going to run with Arleen McKenzie’s murder investigation?’ she asked.
‘The police can do the legwork. They can keep us informed. Come in when you’ve finished there.’
Grace turned and looked back into the kitchen. She could smell the blood now, above the other smells in the house. The pathologist, McMichael, came into her mind. Bizarrely, both for her work and the situation in which she now found herself, she was trying to get her mind around the idea of death, of not being. Death was cold, it was decay. And the dead were sticky; they held on to you, left a mark where their hands had touched you, a smell that said they’d been there. How could anyone spend their life dissecting them? What could you find amongst their remains except nothingness?
Grace couldn’t mourn for a woman she had never met but she could feel that same deep burn of anger for the fact of her death that she had felt for Jirawan. She took a breath. The dirt of the house and of the dead seemed to have contaminated her clothes and her skin.
‘The place hasn’t been searched. They weren’t looking for anything. They just wanted to shut her up,’ she said.
‘That’s the way it looks. Maybe you’d like to come clean with me,’ Borghini said. ‘What’s at stake here that’s worth all this? I know that passport’s valuable. But why go this far for it? That’s two deaths, not including the one we started with. And you’ve brought in a lot of firepower. Would you really do that if you didn’t think there was something a lot bigger in the offing? What aren’t you telling me?’
Nothing, she could reply, if only because this time she didn’t know herself. She was the bait but no one had told her what the prize was. She had walked open-eyed into this investigation knowing that to be the case, but she had never expected it to be this bloody.
‘This is a different MO,’ she said. ‘This is a contract killing. It’s cleaning up made to look like a drug-related murder. Lynette’s death was similar. Jirawan’s killing was something else.’
‘Maybe this killing was already organised. Maybe Arleen was too unreliable. With Sophie, you can say keep your mouth shut or your kids get hurt. Arleen was just an ex-junkie with no connections by the look of it,’ Borghini said. ‘With Lynette, we turn up at Life’s Pleasures and she panics. It creates a situation someone has to deal with quickly. Apart from that, you didn’t answer my question.’
‘You know just as much as we do. Everyone’s making sure we don’t get a chance to find out anything more.’
‘You mean what
The sound of sirens was growing louder. Soon the house would be overrun with other police, the crime scene people and whoever else was involved. Were there any relatives to notify, any friends? Arleen McKenzie was almost as anonymous to Grace as if she’d found her lying dead on the street.
‘Whatever’s going on, it’s vicious,’ she said to Borghini.
‘Hope your guard on Miss Narelle Wong and family is up to it,’ he replied.
‘So do I.’ And to herself: hope my backup’s working too.
Clive’s description for what was happening was desperation. Grace was beginning to see it as ruthless efficiency. There was a limit to how long she was going to keep walking into the dark like this. A limit to what she wanted to deal with without knowing more. If she talked to Clive, he’d draw her deeper into this strange dance where he was setting the pace, deciding the music, directing her movements. Cut her off even more. For her, the only possible next step was to see out the following few hours. She followed Borghini outside to meet the police.
12
Harrigan arrived with Ellie at Cotswold House, the facility on the water’s edge at Drummoyne where his son lived, mid-afternoon. Toby had no lectures that day and was in his room. Sitting in his wheelchair in front of his computer, he was using the mouse with his good hand. If Toby had been able to stand, his height might have matched Harrigan’s. In his face, his father could see a reflection of his own features. But his body was twisted; sometimes he drooled because he couldn’t help it. Often enough on meeting him people looked away repulsed.
Nothing about his physicality affected Ellie. Harrigan and Grace had taken her to visit Toby since she’d been born. She clambered up onto his lap where she could see the computer screen.
Toby couldn’t speak easily. He was a master of one-sided conversations typed out on monitors of all descriptions. An outsider listening to them would only have heard Harrigan speaking into silence. An outsider
