Hush, Page 6

  “They’re nurses,” Tox said. “They’ve got a gentle touch. Plus, any stitches I popped, they’d just put them right back in.”

  “I see,” Whitt said.

  “So I’m not Doctor Bozer’s favorite person in the whole world, but we’ve got the papers on Tonya.” He got into the car and slapped the file on the dashboard.

  “I thought it seemed like it was more than all that stuff, though,” Whitt said, climbing in beside his partner. “More than you just being an arsehole patient. It seemed to me like it was personal.”

  “It wasn’t personal,” Tox said, barely getting the words out before a sharp rap on his window startled him. Chloe Bozer was standing outside the car, her hands on her hips. Tox left Whitt in the car and slid out. He shut the door and turned, only to receive the painful poke of Chloe’s finger in his chest.

  “Here’s how it works, dickhead,” she snapped. “You don’t ever, ever turn up at my office again. If you want an appointment with someone in the hospital’s records department, you call ahead first and bring a fucking warrant with you.”

  “Whoa.” Tox put his hands up. “Easy, tiger.”

  “It’s not ‘tiger,’” Chloe said, poking him again. “It’s not ‘Chloe.’ It’s not ‘honey.’ It’s Doctor. Bozer.”

  “Doctor Bozer,” Tox said carefully. “I was only—”

  “—doing your job?” she asked. “Right. That’s what I was doing when I saved your life. If I’d known you were such an annoying, disrespectful, arrogant twat I might have reconsidered. So don’t go waving the fact that I saved you around like it’s evidence that I’ll do you favors.”

  “Shame,” Tox said. “I’ve had some good favors done for me by the staff here. I was hoping one day you’d join in.”

  Chloe shook her head. The warm evening breeze and her fury had made rose-pink clouds creep up her pale neck into her cheeks. Tox was smiling. He couldn’t help himself.

  “Look, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to be a smart-arse. I’ve been a lot of trouble. Let me make it up to you. There’s a great bar around the corner called Jangling Jack’s.” He pointed. “Get in the car and we—”

  She was gone, storming off across the car park the way she had come. He shrugged to himself and slid back into the car.

  “Nothing personal, huh?” Whitt said.

  Chapter 23

  THE DOOR TO my cell opened. I struggled awake, having drifted off into a pain-filled haze, twisted dreams about Dolly and Doctor Goldman rolling through my skull as it rested on the cold concrete. There was no telling what time it was. The hall outside was a blazing red: night lights, to save the guards’ vision as they moved between the cell blocks. Two black masses shuffled into the tiny room. I heard handcuffs being removed, and then there was one form standing there, still and silent.

  Anna the Spanner took a step into a shard of red light. She stayed there, only her wide face illuminated. She was broad-shouldered and boxy-headed, a spray of freckles on her nose and cheeks cast black in the red light.

  A twisting, splintering feeling took hold in my chest. This woman was twice my size, and looked like she was all muscle. A guard had let her into my cell, which meant that she had sway with the prison staff. If she could get them to let her in to see me in the middle of the night, she could get them to look the other way while she strangled me. I couldn’t think of a reason Anna would want to kill me. But neither could I come up with one that might have justified her beating a kid to death with a spanner.

  “Well, this is a perk, the guards letting you take a tour of other cells,” I said, trying to sound non-threatening. “You think you could talk them in to ordering us some pizza?”

  “You didn’t get dinner,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “No.”

  Anna fumbled in the pocket of her prison tracksuit pants. I heard the crackle of a chocolate wrapper. Cherry Ripe, bent like a banana and warmed by her body. I wasn’t in a position to be picky, so I took the chocolate and ripped it open.

  “I didn’t kill Doctor Goldman,” Anna said. She was standing strangely in profile to me, one eye watching me in the red light, like a beaten dog trying to assess a threat. “I liked her.”

  “I liked her too,” I said. “Some people around here wonder if you two liked each other a bit more than usual.”

  “She was good to me,” Anna said. “Not a lot of people are.”

  “I know the feeling.”

  “It’s because of what I did.” Anna looked me up and down out of the corner of her eye. “Most people just ignore me. Or they tell me I’m a monster.”

  I waited, munching the Cherry Ripe.

  “My nephew,” she said. “He was only small. I crushed his skull.”

  I swallowed hard. It was clear to me that I was not dealing with a lot of intelligence here, but I wondered how attached Anna was to reality. Whether coming to talk to me had any significance in her mind other than amusement. I’d wondered, when she walked in, if she was here to convince me of her innocence. But now it seemed like she just wanted to shoot the breeze, and if that meant chatting about taking the life of a small child, I had other ways I wanted to spend my night—like shivering on the concrete and worrying myself sick.

  “Doctor Goldman said I wasn’t a monster,” Anna said. “So I guess people thought she must have been in love with me.”

  “But she wasn’t?”

  “No.” She laughed a little sheepishly. “I don’t think so.”

  I fell into thought, watching Anna, waiting for her to move. She was unnaturally still, watching me.

  “I was here when she was killed,” Anna said. “In my cell.”

  “I guess the records will show that,” I said.

  It didn’t seem safe to mention that the suggestion Nanna had made wasn’t that Anna had killed Goldman herself, but that she might have hired someone to do it after their relationship went sour. I couldn’t rely on Anna’s word, but it was something just to have it. I felt my muscles relaxing. I’d had little to do with child-killers in my career in Sex Crimes. That was usually the territory of the Homicide division. I wondered what Anna’s life was like down here in the dungeon, a freak who was now without a single friend in the world. Or maybe I was wrong about that.

  “If everyone hates you so much,” I ventured, thinking as I spoke, “how did you get the guards to let you come and see me just now? Where’d you get the Cherry Ripe?”

  Anna seemed distracted. Her hearing was obviously better than mine, because within seconds the guard banged on the door. A warning that time was almost up.

  “Doctor Goldman,” Anna said, circling back dreamily to the point of her visit. “She had a lot of people who might have been angry with her. She was beautiful, and kind and nice to everyone—even people like me. My dad always said being nice can get you into trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Anna shrugged.

  “Did she speak to you about anyone pursuing her? Romantically or otherwise?”

  “We talked about a lot of things.” Anna nodded to herself. “Mostly she said I didn’t belong here. That I belonged at the Bay. It’s been a long while, and lots of paperwork, but Doctor Goldman got me a transfer there. I’m going in a few days. I’m excited. I’ve heard they do swim therapy there. I like to swim.”

  Long Bay Correctional Complex was a sprawling prison south of Sydney that generally housed male inmates, but which had a psychiatric facility that held female inmates in maximum security. The psych facility was still a prison, but it went the extra mile in trying to rehabilitate its inmates rather than simply warehousing them. The conditions were better, and the outlook was brighter.

  I wasn’t surprised Goldman had won Anna a transfer to a psych ward. She seemed the type who probably believed Anna could be treated for whatever mental illness she was suffering from, that she had hope of her one day walking free and beginning again, not a danger to herself or society. Goldman had been a believer. Anna was, unlike
so many people at Johnsonborough, heading somewhere good, and it was due to Goldman’s efforts. I assumed Goldman’s care and consideration for the child-killer was what sparked the romance rumors.

  The guard banged again, and Anna left me alone in the dark, the Cherry Ripe clanging around my empty belly and my thoughts clouded with images of psych wards and dead children. In the empty room I held Dolly and Doctor Goldman in my mind, and the file Woods had given me in my hands.

  Then I made a decision.

  Chapter 24

  THE LAST TIME I had seen Chief Trevor “Pops” Morris, he had been in a hospital bed recovering from a heart attack.

  Now the squat old man was sitting sideways in the driver’s seat of his car, his legs out of the door in the morning sunshine, reading a newspaper. He was clean-shaven, his shirt ironed. I’d been allowed to leave the remand center through the loading dock as the front car park was crowded with press covering Doctor Goldman’s murder.

  In the movies, the grudge between prisoners and guards seems to dissolve on release day. Hands are shaken and promises never to return are made. That morning, a guard I didn’t recognize had wordlessly handed me back my street clothes and some forms to sign, and I was then led to a room to change. No one watched me undress. I sat in the room alone for a minute, just enjoying the sensation of not being surveilled by a camera or a human.

  “You look terrible.” Pops smiled as I went to him.

  “You look good. Retirement suits you.”

  I received my first hug in four months. I’m not a hugger, and there was no swell of emotion. No urge to burst into tears of relief. But his arms were warm and strong, and he smelled the way that old men smell, of carefully laundered clothes and aftershave. He thumped my back and laughed to himself, like a guy who sees a battered and bruised pet cat wander in the back door of his home after a few weeks in the wild. I had to pull away only because my jeans were slipping off my hips from the weight I’d lost on the inside.

  I got in the car and we drove out of the prison complex. He glanced frequently at me, familiarizing himself with my new form.

  “What’s all that?” he asked, eyeing a clear plastic bag I’d brought with me.

  “Just some stuff I can’t get anywhere else.” I brought the bag to my lap and opened it, showed him the items as I spoke. “This strawberry jam from the commissary is the best. The toothbrushes are hard as wire, which I like. This deodorant?” I showed him the small aerosol can.

  “Yeah?”

  “You could spray this on a yak and have it smelling like roses.” I shook the can. “One of the worst things about prison is the smell of hundreds of bodies living all together. I bet you can’t get this stuff on the outside.”

  “It probably gives you cancer.”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “I wish you’d taken visitors,” Pops said. “I feel like I haven’t seen you in a million years.”

  “You know it would have been harder that way,” I said.

  “Not for me.”

  “Yes for you,” I said.

  “You could have taken phone calls at least.”

  “What would I have said?” I asked. “Good morning. There’s been another breakout of body lice in the prison. My arms are like Swiss cheese today. I’m really worried about hepatitis. But how are you?”

  “I get it,” he said. “I just missed you.”

  “I missed you too, Pops.” I put a hand on his leg. He took it and squeezed it.

  “So where to?” he asked. “A bar? A steakhouse? Want to drive out and see the ocean?”

  “Take me home,” I said.

  Chapter 25

  HIS LITTLE HOUSE in Drummoyne was very much a man’s house. The front yard was neatly mown but featureless. There was a pair of slippers on the porch next to a mismatched table and a single chair, placed for enjoying morning coffee and watching the street. I’d been here before, but infrequently. The double garage at the back of Pops’s house had been converted into a boxing gym for local youths, and I’d turned up there a couple of times in the early days of our friendship to train.

  As we approached the front door, I heard a clicking and jingling sound. I widened my eyes at him as he unlocked the house.

  Three small, fluffy dogs burst across the threshold and swarmed us, barking and panting happily, snuffling, wagging tufted tails. Tags clinked on their collars.

  “What…is…”

  “I know, I know.” Pops rolled his eyes and walked in ahead of me. “I’ve been fostering dogs. You don’t get to pick them—you just turn up at the rescue place and they give you whatever they need to get rid of at that moment. I’ve been hoping something big and manly would come along. Pit bull or a Doberman maybe. But they keep giving me these little fluffers.”

  The trio of raggedy, mop-like dogs followed us into the neat, cozy house. I stood in the midst of them as they circled and sniffed me, hairy mittens for paws scraping hopefully at my legs, black eyes shining. Pops leaned against the kitchen counter and watched me.

  I burst out laughing.

  He shrugged. “What do you want me to say?”

  “Why don’t you just go get a Doberman, if you want a Doberman?”

  “Because it’s nice to foster.” He gestured at the dogs. “They’d be put down, otherwise. The last one they gave me was a white Pomeranian someone had dyed pink. It was like a ball of fairy floss.”

  I laughed hard. It felt good.

  “Yeah. The women at the shelter thought it was pretty funny, too.”

  He led me to his bedroom. Perfectly made bed, gray and white checkered bedspread. Lee Child books on the dresser in a stack, reading glasses.

  “Your room,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Your room. Thanks, but I’ll take the fold-out couch in the gym.”

  “No you won’t. You’ve been on a prison cot for four months. That shit is bad for your spine. You take the bed.”

  “Nope.”

  “You take the bed, Harry.”

  “No thanks.”

  “You’ve been released into my custody.” Pops pointed at me. “That means you have to do what I say. While you’re here, you eat. Look at you, you’re muscle and bone. You look sick. I’ll have you sleeping in a proper bed, and that’s that.”

  “I’ll take the food but I’m sleeping in the gym, Pops,” I said. “I’ll feel more comfortable there.”

  We both folded our arms. The trio of dogs watched us, tongues flapping from panting mouths.

  “If you were my daughter…” he said. He made a flat hand, like he was threatening to smack me. He walked beside me toward the gym at the back of the house. I followed. The fold-out couch was already made up. It looked strange on the rubber-matted floors, under a chalkboard listing sparring partnerships between teenagers. In the middle of the big space was a boxing gym. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and leather. This was my place. I lay on the bed and the three dogs all climbed up with me.

  “Hey! No, no, no. Get down. Get—”

  “Yeah, they’re cuddly.” He hefted a bag onto the bed beside me. “I got you some clothes. Ladies’ things. Shampoo and stuff. Figured you would need that. I wash my hair with axle grease and my body I just scrub down with steel wool.”

  I put my head on the pillow and watched the old man arranging the things. Thought about what it might have been like if I was his daughter, like he’d said. The small dogs positioned themselves along the sides of my body, one curled behind my knees, another collapsing against my back, warm and shuddering as it breathed. I relented and let the littlest one crawl up under my arm. The clock on the wall said it was nine in the morning.

  “When are the guys getting here?” I asked.

  “Soon,” he said. “Have a nap. I’ll wake you when they arrive so we can talk about the case.”

  “Both cases.” I yawned.

  “Huh?”

  “I’ll tell you later,” I said.

  Chapter 26

  I DIDN’T SO much
nap as fall into blackness, thick and smothering like ink. When I woke it was to the sound of familiar voices muffled by the brick walls of the garage. I extracted myself from the hot, hairy groove the dogs had made around me and went to the shower. My body was bruised and aching all over. The dogs watched me from behind the glass, sitting in a row, waiting for something. They tried to lick my calves and feet as I stood on the mat and pulled on new jeans and a shirt that were both a size too big.

  I led the dogs out into the kitchen, where Whitt and Tox were sitting with Pops at the small round table under the windows. It was dark outside. Whitt grabbed me before he was really out of his chair, knocked the thing over, squeezed me too hard.

  “Oh, Harry,” he said. He laughed and rubbed my back, smoothed my hair. Swung us in a funny rocking motion. “You’re back. You’re back. You’re back.”

  “Leave her alone, would you?” Tox picked up Whitt’s chair. “You’ll break her.”

  Whitt didn’t let me go. I looked at Tox over his shoulder, put a hand out. Tox put his palm to mine, a soft high five. His hand was hard and dry and smooth, like a sun-warmed brick.

  “Look at you!” I held Whitt at arm’s length. “You’re a man mountain!”

  “I’ve started lifting a bit.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose, embarrassed.

  I sat at the table with my crew. They had all certainly improved from when I had seen them last—Whitt had been high and drunk, and still reeling from almost being shot in the forest by a woman he’d thought he could trust. Tox had been bleeding and broken, having come out of his recovery from being stabbed far too early to assist me on the Regan Banks case. My beloved Pops had been sitting in a hospital bed, miserable, knowing I was going to jail and there was nothing he could do about it, and staring his own mortality in the face after a heart attack. We were a scarred and beaten group, war-torn and wary of further conflict, but we were hard. There were no flickers of uncertainty in the eyes of the men sitting down around me. They knew we had all survived because we belonged together, at this moment, and whatever was to come we would stare it down as one.