Hush Hush Page 24

  I was so close as she was hit that I felt specks of her blood hit my face as the vehicle passed me, dragging her body underneath it.

  Chapter 110

  TOX RAN TO the edge of the cliff, saw the Chrysler on its roof and sinking fast in the water fifty feet below. Then he ran back to the parking lot. The crowd was thick now.

  ‘Don’t do it, man!’ A young surfer with blond dreadlocks held Tox’s eyes. Tox ignored him, turned, and ran for the sheer drop.

  He hit the water feet-first beside the car, his head full of silent screaming prayers that he wasn’t about to be shattered on rocks beneath the waves. But he sank unscathed into white, swirling foam and pulled his way towards the surface, glimpsing people on the cliffs above looking down. Their cries were drowned out by the surf smashing on the rocks. He swam to where the car’s right rear wheel was just disappearing beneath the waves and filled his lungs with air, ducked down and dived deep.

  Four passengers. He was one man trying to rescue them all. Tox knew that if anyone was doomed, it was Louis and Shania Mallally, because he wasn’t going to go home that night without having got the children out of the car. If he had time, he’d try for the adults.

  Tox swam hard for the back of the car and grabbed at the hatchback door, trying to haul it open. An air bubble trapped at the roof of the car made it impossible to open the door, so he watched until the air was sucked away, leaving the two little girls wide-eyed and wide-mouthed, staring at him, panicking. When he pulled them out they latched onto him immediately, hard fingers and nails gripping his neck and shirt and hair, and he knew he was in trouble even before he turned for the surface and kicked off from the back of the car.

  Their panic was like electricity. Winding and turning around him like a hot wire. One was gripped around his head, the other latched to his side, making it impossible to swim. The movement of the car seemed to be taking them downwards, away from the light. Tox struggled with the girls, his heart smashing against his chest, water finally slipping in with frightening ease, filling his throat.

  Chapter 111

  THEY BROKE THE surface together, gasping and coughing, but the children didn’t calm, kicking and dragging him down. Tox pried one child from his head and pushed her away, burning with horror at having to let her go. He grabbed the other by the arms and ripped her from his side.

  ‘I’ve got you!’ He wound an arm around her tiny chest, dragging her backwards. ‘I’ve got you!’

  He swam, dragging one, and grabbed downwards for the other, who was sinking like a stone. A wave lifted them all, and he scooped up the other one.

  ‘My mummy!’ one of them cried. ‘My mummy! My mummy!’

  ‘I’m sorry, baby,’ Tox said. ‘I can’t help her.’ He would have to leave her behind, just as it seemed he would be unable to save Rebel Woods. His heart ached as he headed for the base of the cliffs, trying to find the spot where the waves were calmest and the rocks flattest. He knew that as he took the children further from the car, down there in the depths Louis Mallally was drowning, and with him any hope of knowing what had happened to Tonya’s child. He reached the rocks, exhausted, and shoved the kids up before him.

  Hard splashes behind him in the waves made him turn. He glimpsed two surfers, one of them the dreadlocked man who had told him not to jump, breathing hard and preparing to dive for the car. A little hope prickled in his chest as he dragged himself and the children to safety.

  Chapter 112

  THE MALLALLY HOUSE was surrounded by a ring of cops and journalists, local residents and people who had heard what had happened in the news and come to stare.

  Whitt saw a group of men in suits, probably lawyers, arguing with police at the edge of the cordon, trying to get information on what had happened to their friend. He worked his way into the house, and the worried glances of his colleagues seemed to direct him up the stairs to Mallally’s office, where someone was smashing and crashing through the items there.

  Tox Barnes was still dripping wet, his jeans and boots sloshing as he moved about the trashed room. Whitt watched him for a moment, until he flipped the desk with an enormous crash, running his hands over the base and drawers, searching.

  ‘Tox, you need to stop.’ Whitt put his hands up. ‘This is a crime sc–’

  ‘Don’t tell me it’s a crime scene,’ Tox snapped. ‘It’ll be a crime scene when I’m done with it. There must be something here that tells us where he’s put the kid. If she’s still alive we don’t have much time.’

  Whitt knew there was no chance Rebel Woods was still alive. From what he had learned from his fellow officers at the scene at Ed Romtus’s apartment, and from radio chatter on his way to the Mallally house, he believed wholeheartedly that the little girl was dead.

  Nigel Spader had told him that Tox Barnes and a group of his less-than-law-abiding friends had entered the Mallally home, conducted an illegal search and obtained a phone that held messages between Mallally and Tonya Woods. Their relationship, as well as their arrangement, had become clear. Mallally had begun his affair with Tonya Woods, and quickly turned her out to work for him, using her to listen in on the private conversations of clients in bars and restaurants, or to strike up conversations and flirt with prosecution lawyers to gain the upper hand on his cases.

  Then he had come to her with a major proposition. A very dangerous, but potentially lucrative mission. Mallally had asked Tonya to seduce and sleep with Drew Bortfield, CEO of Sydney Airport. He wanted her to report to the police after the liaison that she had been raped by Bortfield. The scandal would delay the corruption lawsuit against Mallally’s client, Antonio Santarelli, and throw doubt over the legitimacy of Bortfield’s claim that Santarelli had bribed him. Mallally was offering ten thousand dollars for Tonya’s services. She was a prostitute and a drug addict. She was a practised liar. It was a mission that wouldn’t stretch her skills or her moral boundaries. All she had to do was have sex with a man and lie to police – a piece of cake for a girl like her.

  But Tonya Woods didn’t want ten thousand dollars. She wanted $1.2 million. She asked for the money as she sat before Mallally in his home office, after playing him a recording of a conversation between the two of them in which Mallally asked Tonya to commit acts that would not only have Mallally dis-barred but thrown in jail.

  Mallally had been backed into a corner. He needed Tonya to go away. He’d tried to hire a hitman, then put the bikies onto the job. When Jax Gotten and his crew in the Silver Aces Motorcycle Club refused his call, Mallally had gone to Tonya’s motel room himself, killed her, and torn the place apart looking for the tape she had made of their negotiations.

  There had been little Rebel, sitting, watching him through terrified tears. The man who had strangled her mother right before her eyes. Rebel knew Mallally. The tiny child had seen him a number of times. Was she too young to finger him when the police asked who had killed Mummy? Mallally had found himself looking down at Rebel and asking himself if he could kill her, something men far nastier than him had refused to do.

  It only made sense to Whitt that a man so determined to save his own skin would have completed the job to its fullest. He’d killed Tonya. He’d hired Blenk to start violently steering Harry and her team away from the investigation. He’d have surely killed little Rebel Woods. Whitt watched Tox searching Mallally’s office, swearing and throwing things, and felt hopeless.

  Harry came up the stairs beside him, wet, like Tox was, parts of her streaked with blood. Whitt frowned at his exhausted friend.

  ‘You went into the sea as well?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ Harry said.

  ‘Tox just pulled the Mallally kids out of the ocean,’ Whitt said. ‘Some surfers got the mother out of a sinking car. They’re fine. The lawyer didn’t make it.’

  ‘There has to be something here.’ Tox leaned against the windowsill, breathless, watching the street. ‘This can’t be it.’

  Whitt and Harry followed him through the mess to the window. A tow tru
ck was trying to ease its way through the crowd. Whitt looked down and saw that the Mallally’s yellow Maserati was outside one of the double garage doors. It would be taken away to be forensically examined for traces of Tonya and Rebel Woods.

  Whitt felt Tox snap to attention beside him. The big man put a damp hand on the glass before him, his eyes fixed on the yellow Maserati in the driveway.

  ‘Three cars,’ Tox said.

  ‘Huh?’ Whitt said.

  ‘The Mallallys have three cars,’ Tox said quickly. ‘A yellow Maserati, a red Chrysler and the silver BMW.’

  ‘So what?’ Whitt asked. He saw Harry’s eyes widening as she caught on.

  ‘So they only have a double garage.’ She grabbed Tox’s shoulder.

  ‘Where do they keep the third car when two of them are at home?’ Tox asked.

  No one answered. Tox grabbed his car keys from the desk.

  ‘Someone get on to the team down at the water,’ he said. ‘I want to talk to the wife.’

  Chapter 113

  NIGEL SPADER’S TEAM was the first to arrive at the storage facility Shania Mallally had told us about. I gripped the frame of Tox’s filthy, smoke-choked Monaro as he bumped into the car park at a crazy speed, pulling up just centimetres behind Nigel’s squad car. Seven people, my team and Nigel’s, burst into the front office of the facility and barked at the frightened young woman behind the counter for the keys to Mallally’s lock-up.

  The primary name on the account was Shania Parker. The traumatised, near-hysterical woman had assured us that she’d wanted to tell Nigel’s detectives about the lock-up, but her husband had forbidden it. Tox had hung up on her. It took some minutes for the office attendant to find the right keys. In the room, which was boiling with tension, Whitt and Nigel turned towards each other, the pair standing right in front of me.

  ‘So do I get your badge now or later?’ Whitt said. He wasn’t smiling.

  ‘Fuck off, arsehole,’ Nigel sneered.

  The two teams marched to the garage marked with Mallally’s number. Tox snatched the keys off Nigel and fitted them shakily into the lock. The big man thrust open the door, revealing the silver BMW parked, cold and silent, in the space.

  There was only one other thing in the garage. A pedestal fan plugged into the wall, turning slowly. Tox stormed in and did a lap of the car, tore open the passenger side door and grabbed the keys from the ignition. He opened the boot and slammed it, growling with frustration.

  ‘What’s that smell?’ Whitt asked. The men and women around me all looked at Whitt, sniffed. There was an odour in the air. Whitt pointed to the fan. ‘Turn that off.’

  The smell thickened. Then I heard a shuffling sound. I put a hand on the wall beside me. Cold concrete. I ran my hand across the wall at the back of the garage.

  Painted gyprock.

  Chapter 114

  TOX AND ONE of Nigel’s guys kicked a hole in the false wall at the back of the garage. I tore at the gyprock as it splintered and crumbled away, slapping big sheets of it on the concrete. The space was no wider than Rebel’s shoulders. The tiny child had no choice but to sit in the corner of the space, dripping with sweat, peering out at us. The ground was soaked in faeces and urine, scattered with the wrappers of sandwiches or snack bars.

  Tox reached into the space and grabbed the filthy girl by her arm, pulled her carefully out. When he finally squeezed her to his chest, I felt a sob escape me.

  ‘I knew he couldn’t do it,’ Tox laughed, clutching the child hard, his eyes wet and cheeks bright with relief or rage, I didn’t know. ‘The fucking bastard couldn’t do it.’

  Chapter 115

  TOX BARNES PUSHED through the doors of the emergency room at St Vincent’s Hospital for what seemed like the thousandth time. Only this time he was doing it with one hand, the other wrapped around a tiny, pale form held to his chest. It seemed like fate that Doctor Chloe Bozer was there, standing over the nearest bed with a patient chart in her hands, though he hadn’t come there looking for her. The hospital was simply the closest to the storage facility he had just come from.

  Chloe was so startled by Tox crashing into the room with Whitt and Harry at his side that she backed into a drip stand and knocked it over.

  ‘This child has been living in captivity for two weeks,’ Tox said loudly as nurses gathered around them. ‘She’s breathing but her heartbeat is weak. She fell asleep in the car and hasn’t responded in about twenty minutes. I don’t know how long it’s been since she had water.’

  ‘Give her to me.’ Chloe took the child from him. For a moment he caught her familiar smell, the feel of her hands on his, and the heavy ache he’d felt since they’d parted broke through his panic for the child’s survival. She looked back at him as she disappeared with the child down the ward, a crowd of nurses following her.

  The three detectives stood, trying to recover mentally from the past few frantic hours, while the emergency room swirled and shifted around them with activity. The urgency and horror that had hit them all as they pulled away the false wall and spied Rebel Woods’s small body at the rear of the concrete room had been palpable. It had not been easy in the car on the way to the hospital, and it hung like a shroud over them now.

  Tox put a hand on Harry’s shoulder and said, ‘I’ll stay with her. You two go before the press get here.’

  Chapter 116

  WHITT AND I sat in a booth at Jangling Jack’s, a couple of streets away from St Vincent’s hospital. The walk to the bar had been numb, silent. I ordered two tequilas and the waitress brought them swiftly. The sun was setting outside, casting the streets red. Before Whitt could remind me that he was a recovering alcoholic, I downed the two tequilas.

  We sat for a long time in silence. Seeing a child that has survived in a crawl space, living in its own filth for two weeks, will do that to you. Watching a woman throw herself under a fire truck after the failed escape of her murderous lover will do that to you.

  My joints ached and my mind could only grasp at fragments of thoughts. Whitt had slid down into his chair, the ice in his Coke melting slowly before him. A bunch of kids came and sat in the next booth and watched the footage of Tox jumping off the cliff at Clovelly together, huddled over one phone screen.

  ‘What do you think he was going to do to her? To Rebel? What was the plan in keeping her?’ I asked Whitt. He lolled his head towards me.

  ‘I don’t think there was a plan,’ Whitt said. ‘He was probably just working up the courage to end it.’

  ‘He might have been thinking the problem would take care of itself,’ I said. ‘He gave her food but no water. Walled the crawl space off completely.’

  We sat thinking about that. I ordered a wine and sat sipping it.

  ‘The hero of the hour is here,’ Whitt said. I turned and saw Tox at the street end of the bar, looking at his phone. ‘I’ll go get him.’

  As soon as Whitt left me, my phone rang. I didn’t even get a moment to say hello.

  ‘Blue, I’m sorry,’ Woods said. He sounded out of breath. ‘I’m just sorry. OK? All of this has … I just can’t …’

  ‘Take a breath, big man.’ I felt a small smile creeping to the corners of my lips. ‘Is the baby OK or what?’

  ‘She’s fine.’ He gasped a breath. ‘She’s doing great. I got here about twenty minutes ago. They let me see her. Oh. I just can’t believe she’s alive, Detective Blue. I’m … I’m so sorry for the way I’ve acted, and I …’

  ‘Save it, boss,’ I said. ‘I don’t need it. It was Tox Barnes who found your kid. Anything I did was just part of my job.’

  ‘Yes, well, you’ll be doing your job in an official capacity again from this moment on,’ he said. ‘I’m reinstating you. Whittacker and Barnes, too. I’m making the call. I’ll speak to the prosecutor in your case right away.’

  ‘Don’t make any calls,’ I said. ‘Don’t speak to anyone. Just go and be with your grandchild.’

  I hung up on the Deputy Commissioner, and watched Tox and Whit
t slide into the booth with me.

  It was an hour before she appeared. Darkness had fallen outside the bar, and the light above us was making gold flecks in our drinks. Tox saw her and straightened in his chair, his eyes locked on her as she stepped over the threshold. Whitt and I looked. Doctor Chloe Bozer was looking uncertainly back at us.

  Tox left us. I shifted to the seat beside Whitt so I could watch. It was clear Tox and the doctor had experienced some hard, heavy shift in their relationship, a devastating fight perhaps. There was fear and apprehension on both of their faces. As we watched, Tox and Chloe took stools at the counter, talking quietly, their heads together.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Whitt said. ‘But it’s dead serious.’

  He felt me looking at him and glanced at me, blushed.

  I turned my wineglass on the tabletop before us.

  ‘You don’t want me, Whitt,’ I said.

  Chapter 117

  HE WAS QUIET. I drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. I had no plan. The words simply came, spilling out dangerously one after the other. Whitt took his drink coaster and held it like a life preserver as I spoke.

  ‘You see that doctor with Tox?’ I asked. Whitt looked over at Chloe Bozer.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  ‘That’s the kind of woman for you,’ I told him. I nodded at the doctor. ‘She’s brilliant. Measured. Normal. She probably grew up in a great family. Has a mother and father who love her to bits and think her being a surgeon is just the best thing in the world. She was probably popular in high school, and she fell into being a doctor because she cares about people and she works hard. She has a nice apartment with a balcony in the city. Every winter she goes down to the snowfields with a group of friends.’