Liar Liar Page 17

  Murder trials were filled with these violence-attracted girls. Rows of pretty young things in the front row of the gallery making eyes at the perp, trying to pass handwritten letters to the defense team. Tox didn’t get it.

  Didn’t matter. He didn’t need to get it. He just needed to make it right when he saw it, catch the pigs and put them out to slaughter.

  That’s what he was going to do now.

  Chapter 82

  TOX EXHALED CIGARETTE smoke, leaned over, and picked up Whitt’s phone from beside the bed.

  “Whitt?” Pops said.

  “Guess again,” Tox said.

  “Is that you, Tox?” Chief Morris said after a shocked pause.

  “None other.”

  “Well, for fuck’s sake,” Pops said. It sounded like he was driving. Tox could hear a blinker clicking. “I wish someone would tell me what is going on.”

  “I left the hospital.”

  “Yes, that’s one thing that I do know,” Pops said. “You gave my guy a concussion.”

  “He was in a hospital. Good place if you’re gonna get one.”

  “What are you doing on Whitt’s phone?”

  “Nobody paid my phone bill while I was down for the count.”

  “Where’s Whitt?”

  “He’s sick.” Tox glanced at the sleeping detective. “Cold. Headache. I dunno. Could be Spanish flu.”

  “It didn’t sound like a fucking cold when I spoke to him,” Pops said.

  “Your hearing goes when you get old.”

  “Tox,” Pops said, “I need you to take Whitt back to Sydney.”

  “No deal,” Tox said. “Once he’s had his beauty sleep, we’re getting on the road. You just gotta tell us where we’re heading. Whitt told me you might have dug up something on Banks.”

  “You’re not heading anywhere,” Pops said. “Deputy Commissioner Woods has deliberately denied me access to the Banks file and tried to convince me there wasn’t anything in it that might be a significant location to Banks. Well, that’s not true. Yes, I’ve found details about his childhood another way. And yes, I believe I know where he’s going. If Woods ever sees sense, he’s probably going to set up a trap for Regan and Harry at that location.”

  “Sounds plausible.” Tox stubbed his cigarette out on the edge of the bed and flicked the butt into the corner of the room.

  “Harry wanted to know, and I’m not telling her because Woods is convinced she’s dangerous. He’ll approve his officers for use of all necessary force. I know he will. She’ll get herself killed on this stupid revenge mission.”

  “Wouldn’t be a bad way to go,” Tox mused. “You don’t want to tell her, fine. Tell us. We’ll keep your secret.”

  “Yeah, bullshit,” Pops said. “Take Whitt back to Sydney right now and report to the hospital. That’s a direct order.”

  “Didn’t I hear you were suspended from this case?” Tox said. “Aren’t I working for Woods now?”

  “You’re not working for anyone!” Pops growled. “You’re on medical leave!”

  “I’m confused. You just gave me a direct order.”

  Tox heard a harsh exhalation on the end of the line. He smiled and hung up the phone. The next number he called he knew by heart. It was like that for many of his contacts—having a list of numbers saved in a phone seemed like asking for trouble. Al Cerullo answered with a grunt.

  “Oh, great.” The parole officer sighed when Tox greeted him. “What have I done now?”

  “I wonder if it’s ironic that you work in a prison and you’re the guiltiest man I know,” Tox said. “I’m calling about the Reskit woman.”

  Tox could hear the fat, thick-throated man shift in his worn leather desk chair, picture him in his little green box in the heart of Long Bay Correctional Complex. Last time Tox had come calling, he’d noticed that the parole officer’s workspace was just a converted old concrete cell, the small slit of a window still covered with clouded plexiglass. Depressing.

  “Every man and his dog has been calling about her,” Al said. “All day the phones all over the complex have been jammed up by press from every corner of the goddamn country. I just spoke to some guy from Kimba. Where the fuck is Kimba?”

  “South Australia,” Tox said. “They’ve got the Big Galah there.”

  “I could have told you this was going to happen. All shrinks are nutjobs themselves, and you put them in with the psycho killers and they get converted. I’ve also been saying for decades they shouldn’t let women work in here,” Al said. “They get the crims all antsy. I remember when it was an all-male crew. Place was like a yoga camp.”

  “Sure. Except for that riot in ’81, of course,” Tox said. “And the one in ’87. And the cell block fire in 1990. And—”

  “You know what I mean, arsehole.”

  “I need you to get me access to Vada Reskit’s work email.”

  “Forget it. I’ve gotta tell you what I’ve been telling people all day: No comment. We’ve all been instructed not to cooperate with anyone on Reskit. The warden’s working with the police. If people call, we’re supposed to hang up.”

  “Why didn’t you hang up on me?” Tox asked.

  “Because…I like you?”

  “Really? Huh!” Tox said. “I thought maybe it was because you’re still scared of me after I slammed your head in the door of your own Camry. You remember that? It was just after I found out you were texting nudie pictures back and forth with that seventeen-year-old.”

  Al made an uncomfortable noise.

  “How is the divorce going, by the way?”

  “It’s fine,” Al murmured.

  “You’re going to get me into that email account, aren’t you?” Tox said.

  “Yes, I am,” Al said.

  “I thought you would.” Tox lit another cigarette.

  Chapter 83

  DARKNESS DESCENDED.

  I walked, my leg now worryingly numb, slowly working through the snacks Melina had put in the bag for me. Regan’s message came, and with it the place of our meeting. I still didn’t know when I would be able to find Regan there. He’d said I would realize soon enough. Was he leading me somewhere to wait hopelessly for him while he picked off more of the people I loved? When I thought about his attempt to target Whitt, my whole body burned. Edward Whittacker had given up his entire life on the other side of the country to help me try to save my brother. With Vada’s help, Regan had searched through my world to find someone who I held as evidence that I was not all bad. If someone as sweet and as wholesome as Whitt could accept me, I had hope. Regan wanted to strip away that layer of me. The rage rattled in my bones at the thought of what I had almost lost.

  At the corners of my mind, Regan’s plan was creeping, a shadow falling slowly. I considered that if he’d been successful in taking Whitt from me, Regan would have snuffed out a flame I’d tried to protect. Some people liked me. But take away those few deeply flawed individuals, and what was I left with? Only badness. A selfishness, callousness, aloofness that was inherent in my character, that was undeniably bad.

  Take away the few good moments from my childhood, and what was left there?

  Badness.

  Take away the work I did for the women who came to me in my job, battered and bruised and looking for justice, and…

  No.

  I wasn’t going to do this to myself. I wasn’t going to let Regan get into my head.

  I crossed the empty damp plains of Nungatta, the southward highway a gray streak in the distance to my left. Herds of goats lifted their heads as I approached, eyes luminescent in the dark, skittering away when I came near. My sneakers became clotted with mud and grass, which I shook off as the land became drier.

  I thought about Regan’s parents. The mother he had felt no love for, the “empty shell” she had been to him. I’d heard a lot of terrible stories in my time in foster care, both the sudden violent incidents that saw children confiscated from their parents and the long, slow, drawn-out situations that did the
same. I’d seen kids pockmarked with circular scars, spotted like leopards from parents who thought getting high and putting out their cigarette butts on their kids was a lark. I’d listened to the tales of kids left alone with an abusive grandparent, their parents returning to find their child completely changed, terrified, and bruised, the grandparent denying everything. I’d known kids who’d watched one parent murder the other; had listened to their whispers from across the dorm-room aisle in group homes.

  Whatever had happened to Regan, it was so bad that a judge had decided it should never be known to the public, lest Regan have to suffer the humiliation of the event being revealed in his adult life. I walked and wondered what a person could possibly to do a seven-year-old that warranted that. I had some ideas, and just considering them made me sick.

  I wondered if what happened to Regan had made him the monster he was deep down inside. Was he born bad, or was he taking me to the place where he had been made that way?

  I had turned back toward the highway, half formulating a plan to catch a ride to the nearest town with a car-trouble story, when I spied the stone building on the edge of the next paddock. An old house with darkened windows, a car parked, still shimmering with rain. My ride to the meeting that I knew would end a life.

  Regan’s or mine.

  Chapter 84

  THE FIRST INDICATION that they were in the right place might have been missed by a careless onlooker. Tox hadn’t been entirely sure he was on the right track but had set out with Whitt on a half-theory, unable to stand the motel room any longer.

  Al Cerullo had been more helpful than he’d anticipated. Instead of simply giving Tox the password to Vada’s email account, Al had unlocked her whole work profile for him, giving him the woman’s login to the prison’s intranet. There wasn’t much in the email account to drive Tox’s search, but he had discovered that the prison recorded each employee’s Google search history to ensure staff didn’t get up to any unsavory online behavior during work hours. There, between searches for academic articles on antisocial personality disorder and the relative benefits of Clozaril as an antipsychotic medication, he’d spotted a Google Maps search. The land was in a place called Bellbird Valley.

  Now as Tox slowed the Monaro before the row of roadworks signs, he felt his curiosity piquing at the apparently ordinary scene before him. A dusty yellow digger had been parked by the side of the highway, three men standing around it, not doing much of anything, their high-vis vests painfully bright in the light of the lamps rigged around the roadblock. Tox was behind two other cars. He eased off the brake and let the car roll as he was directed west by a large “detour” sign and another man with flashing handheld pointers.

  “This is it,” he told Whitt.

  Whitt shuffled upward in his seat, having been resting against the window.

  “How do you know?” he asked, squinting into the dark.

  “They’re not using that crawler excavator to pull up the road,” Tox said as they drove away from the roadblock. “It’s built for muddy earth. Probably borrowed it from a local farm for show. Those three goons standing leaning on their shovels didn’t look like they’d ever done a day’s manual labor in their lives, and they’ve got bulges under their jackets which I’d hazard are too big for radios. They’ll be undercovers making sure a couple of country bumpkins on their way home from the local rodeo don’t drive through the middle of the country’s biggest manhunt.”

  Tox parked the car not far from the detour and got out. He walked to the back, popped the boot. Whitt marveled at the array of weaponry that was lit by the flickering red interior bulb. A pile of guns, haphazardly dumped in the trunk, barrels and stocks poking at odd angles, shoulder straps tangled across magazines. Tox took a hunting blade the size of his forearm from the edge of the pile and attached it to his belt. He handed Whitt a similar knife and then put a foot on the bumper, extracted a sawed-off shotgun from the collection, and started fitting it with shells.

  “Is this overkill?” Whitt asked, picking up a huge magnum revolver from the pile of guns heaped on the carpet before him.

  “The Kalashnikov would probably be overkill,” Tox said. Whitt hadn’t even noticed the huge semiautomatic rifle lying at the bottom of the pile until he spotted its camouflaged stock. Tox took the revolver from Whitt’s hand and tossed it back into the pile, handing him a Glock instead. “Take this. You don’t want to be fumbling around in the dark with a cylinder.”

  They shut the trunk, and Tox snapped the shotgun closed. Without so much as a glance at each other, the two men turned and started walking back toward the detour on the highway. They came within a hundred meters of the men pretending to be road workers, then turned and walked into the darkened bush.

  “Try not to shoot me,” Tox warned his partner. “I’ve had enough of hospitals for one year.”

  Chapter 85

  THE HELICOPTER WARNED ME.

  I spotted the chopper tracking along the mountain range in the distance, a tiny moving star among a thousand others, drifting slowly east toward the coast. The chopper might have represented anything—the coast guard surveying the beaches for signs of trouble, a pair of pilots taking a night ride, a traffic crew scanning the general area for their evening report. But as I walked toward Bellbird Valley, having hidden my stolen car in the bush off the side of the highway, I saw the chopper stop and track back the way it had come. It was a police chopper, holding off until it was called. I stood on the side of the road and watched it pass between the tops of two trees.

  They were waiting.

  I pressed my palm against my forehead and groaned.

  Pops. He must have been right, that Regan had decided to take me to the place where whatever had happened to him as a kid had occurred. This is about me, Regan had said. He wanted me to know what had happened to him.

  My body heavy with fatigue and disappointment, I paused and tried to decide what I would do. With the state’s best specialist officers lying in wait for Regan, there was no way he would come tonight. No way I would be able to take him down on my own, even if he did. I sank onto the ground at the roadside and tried to draw some remaining strength from deep inside my body.

  We were nowhere near a lighthouse. A quick scan of Bellbird Valley on the car’s GPS had told me I was miles from the sea.

  I thought about walking into the forest, making myself known, letting the team pounce on me and drag me into custody. I needed medical attention, and fast. I hadn’t felt any sensation in the toes of my wounded leg for an hour. I was dehydrated, exhausted, and covered in the various cuts and scrapes that come with living rough. I was hungry, dangerously on edge. Here was the perfect opportunity for me to surrender before I crossed the line I’d been steadily approaching over the past weeks, the one that would change my life.

  But I didn’t.

  Regan had said he thought we might have “company” in the valley. He was right. But I knew there was a chance this was the night he had chosen for me, and that he wouldn’t spot the trap waiting for him. That he would come, and they would pounce, and someone I cared for, maybe Whitt, maybe Pops, might be hurt. And I also knew there was a chance I could get to him before my colleagues put cuffs on the monster in their midst and wrapped him safely in the protective arms of the justice system. I had come too far to give up all hope now.

  I kept walking, using the land beneath me as a guide. I knew I was adjacent to a narrow, deep valley. I turned off the road and walked quietly into the bush, fitting my feet carefully between large branches and sticks, trying to be as silent as I could.

  The forest stretched around me, ringing with quiet. It was so dark, I brushed against huge tree trunks I didn’t know were around me, my hands out and wandering in blackness. Tall ghost gums marked my way, smooth and cold as I passed, silent sentries watching my progress. In time, I noticed a flicker of red light to my left and froze.

  Through the trees, a long army truck emerged in my vision, its square outline barely discernible in th
e blackness. They had draped the mobile-command center in camouflage netting and nestled it at the base of a small incline. The red flicker I had seen was the night-vision torch of a man heading toward the door of the truck. As he pushed through the black flaps on the doorway, I glimpsed the crimson-lit interior, crammed with people.

  The operation was bigger than I had anticipated. The tactical vehicle was one I recognized from a tour I’d taken as a teenager, when I’d flirted with the idea of joining the army rather than the police. It was the kind that housed submachine guns and racks of rifles, night-vision gear and sniper scopes the size of baseball bats. They’d pulled out all the stops to find Regan, and it didn’t look like they were going to make his capture a priority. They were going to shoot to kill.

  This was not Pops’s style. My chief was not a “blast them out of the water” type but the kind of man who favored small, smart teams and maximum safety for all officers involved. Knowing that I was out here looking for Regan, Pops would never have authorized a crew of special-ops guys running around in the dark shooting at anything that moved. It was probably Deputy Commissioner Joe Woods in charge, and he’d no doubt authorized necessary-force protocols for both Regan and me.

  Okay. New tactic. I crouched in the dark and thought. The only way I was going to get to Regan and avoid capture by the specialist team was to be on an even playing field with them. I needed the same equipment they had. And there was only one way to obtain that.

  By force.

  Chapter 86

  TOX WASN’T FEELING GOOD. Every muscle in his body had been completely inactive during his two-week coma, the carefully built tissue slowly draining away, not helped by the three weeks he had then spent lying around after he had woken. He figured he’d worked those muscles to their limit just getting to where he was now, creeping through the darkened woods. He’d probably also torn or stretched something in the pit of his guts, which had barely been given time to heal after being severed by a kitchen knife. And yet it was Whitt who was lagging behind him, stopping every fifty meters and leaning against a tree. Tox went back to his partner. The two stood in the dark until Whitt had caught his breath.