Liar Liar Read online

  “Here’s another one,” he said. He was having fun with this now. “A couple of teenage boys accused of raping a girl at a high-school party. You did your best, but there was not enough evidence to convict. Three weeks after the charges were dropped, the two were found naked, bound to a tree on the school grounds. Neither would identify their attacker.”

  I gathered up the wad of paper on Regan and shoved it into my backpack. The phone was sweaty against my ear. I turned back into the hall and saw through the glass doors that the FACS woman was nearly finished securing the new tire on her car.

  “Seems to me,” Regan said, “you like your scores settled. You like vengeance. You see yourself as a powerful being, sometimes the only person powerful enough to bring down justice.”

  “Oh, please.” I went to the glass door. “Give me a fucking break. Don’t do this. Don’t try to relate to me, Banks. I’m not going to be the one to finally understand you. We’re not going to cry on each other’s shoulders about our sucky lives and how we’re justified in being violent because the world owes us something. You want to hold up a mirror to someone? Do it to yourself. If you have any sense at all, you’re not going to like what you see.” I grabbed the doorhandle. “You’re a monster,” I told him. “I am nothing like you.”

  I could almost see his smile, heard it lingering in his warm voice.

  “You sure?” he asked.

  I hung up, jabbing the phone screen too hard in my fury.

  I jogged on my toes out into the car park, making a wide circle so that I didn’t alert Maria to my presence. I snuck to the car, chucked her keys back into her bag, then took off into the night.

  The night air was unseasonably cold. However, a part of me wondered whether the trembling in my bones was not from the cold but from Regan’s final question. You sure?

  The realization hit me, crushing, becoming heavier and heavier with every step.

  I wasn’t sure at all.

  Chapter 17

  WHITT KNEW HE was in dangerous territory, wandering along the line he’d drawn in the sand, from the moment he sat down at the bar beside her. The whole situation was seductive. In the corner, an old-style jukebox was playing Miles Davis, just the kind of soft, rolling jazz that usually loosened Whitt right up. The lights were low, and the place was almost exclusively theirs. Burgundy leather armrests on the bar top, Vada’s deep-red hair glossy, shimmering. She smelled good. Expensive perfume. They ordered a couple of wines, and Whitt was drawn out of his fantasies when the bartender drained the end of a bottle into his glass. Whitt didn’t say anything, but even from where he sat, he could see the sediment at the bottom of his glass. Disappointing.

  “How are you coping?” Vada said without warning, fixing her eyes upon him. “You want to talk about it?”

  “Uh. I’m not sure.” Whitt was startled as he realized that his glass was already a quarter empty. “It’s just hard not to blame myself for it all.”

  “Blame yourself for what?” she asked.

  Whitt drew a deep breath, doubting he could possibly explain it. And then suddenly it was all flowing out of him, beginning right back at the start, when he’d sabotaged an investigation into a child’s murder. Vada watched him, coaxed him gently with occasional questions. Whitt didn’t speak to people like this. He didn’t dump all his problems on strangers in bars without asking them a single question about themselves. But the words went on and on. He spoke about seeing his friend Tox Barnes near dead on a hospital stretcher. About having to tell Harriet her brother had been killed.

  When the words finally dried up, Whitt felt his face had grown hot. He scratched the back of his neck, embarrassed.

  “Edward,” she began.

  “Most people call me Whitt,” he said, and cringed. It was Harriet who had branded him “Whitt,” against his will. Vada was not “the new Harry” in his life. He had to remember that. “Sorry. I interrupted you.”

  “It’s fine.” She put a gentle hand on his. “Whitt, I feel like what you might be experiencing is something called survivor’s guilt.”

  “Oh, I haven’t survived anything,” Whitt said. “It was Tox who got himself stabbed. And now Harry’s out there, running around, putting herself right in harm’s way. I’ve never been in the middle of the danger.”

  “Exactly,” Vada said. “Your friend was stabbed. Harriet’s brother was killed. But what have you actually suffered? The guilt comes from not participating in the pain. Feeling like you haven’t taken your share.”

  Whitt thought about it. He felt the stirrings of relief in his chest. Vada’s hand was still on his.

  “How are you sleeping?” she asked.

  “Terribly.”

  “And you feel anxious?”

  “All of the time.”

  She sat back, folded her arms, her theory confirmed. Whitt chanced a tiny smile and played with his wineglass.

  “You need a support system.” Vada returned the smile. “You’ve got me now. I may not be the most experienced detective around, but I’ll be right by your side from now on.”

  “How new to the rank are you?”

  “I just got the promotion a few weeks ago. I’m out of North Sydney metro. This will be my first major case.”

  “Oh, wow.” His eyes widened. “That is new.”

  “I’m the rookie,” she said. “But I feel like I’m going to be an asset to this case. I did a bachelor of psychology at the University of Sydney before I joined the force. My thesis was in personality disorders. I think the key to catching Regan will be to get into his head. Understand the way he thinks.”

  Whitt couldn’t help but like her. Vada was sitting upright on her bar stool, gesturing with one hand as she explained the various aspects of her degree. She had a lot of confidence. Whitt tried to guess her age. Early thirties. She’d made detective long before he had. He was broken from his reverie by her hand, slipping a wineglass into his.

  “Oh, no.” He pushed the glass away. “I only ever have one. I’m not a drinker.”

  “Come on.” Vada rubbed his arm. “You look like you need it. It’s okay to take a break every now and then, Whitt. It’s called self-care. You need to be kinder to yourself.”

  She excused herself and went to the bathroom. Whitt turned the glass on the bar before him. His first glass had been soured by sediment, the dregs of the bottle. A waste, really, of his one and only daily treat. He’d had a hard day. He deserved an extra reward. Perhaps he could have one more. Only one more. He didn’t want to be rude.

  He lifted the glass to his lips.

  Chapter 18

  I STOOD IN the queue at the soup truck, hoodie pulled up around my face, the gathered homeless men and women grinding the heels of their battered shoes into the dirt. With my face downcast and hands in my pockets, I was, I hoped, no more remarkable than the gaggle of down-on-their-luck prostitutes standing nearby—freelance girls banned from the glittering red-light district only streets away, park dwellers who stood on corners and took rides in dark cars. Kings Cross’s parks were full of young women like these, girls who had come from the country to make their fortune and instead found themselves on a waiting list for overcrowded brothels.

  The roller door on the side of the van went up, and a young man with lip piercings began handing out trays of food, no questions asked. A styrofoam cup of steaming brown soup topped with floating cubed pieces of ham and potato, two slices of toast, and a coffee. I took my tray and moved off toward a low sandstone wall in the middle of the park. A decent dinner that wouldn’t eat into my already substantially diminished funds. I ate as I spread Regan’s papers out before me, reading them for the third time.

  Regan had my police personnel file. In it, details of every promotion, every infraction, every unusual occurrence during my eighteen years in the police. He had my medical records, my yearly physical results, and details of every case I’d ever worked on. He also had a duplicate of my Department of Community Services file, which the police had dragged out to ques
tion me about when I applied to join the force. I was a state-care baby. They’d been concerned about my time “in the system.”

  I didn’t have nearly as much on Regan. But I had his childhood in my hands. It was clear to me that there had been something wrong with Regan from the moment he entered foster care.

  At his first institution, a group home for children in Blacktown, a seven-year-old Regan Banks had set fire to a young girl’s dress. The girl’s injuries had been cataloged in the report—second- and third-degree burns to her legs and torso. The institution’s manager had put the incident down to a young boy’s curiosity, a mischievousness he didn’t think warranted isolating the boy from the other children. Three weeks later, Regan had dropped a full can of house paint on a toddler’s head, fracturing her cheekbone. He’d been shipped out immediately to a foster home.

  When Regan was nine he’d been moved out of a foster home after a girl of similar age complained he’d choked her. When he was ten he’d been moved again after cutting all his foster mother’s clothes to shreds with a pair of scissors.

  He was not only violent, it seemed, but also manipulative. There were a host of mysterious nonviolent explanations for Regan being moved from one foster home to the next. One report read, “Foster mother reports Regan coming between her and husband, creating marital problems.” Another read, “Regan’s nighttime activities scaring foster parents.” Yet another, “Foster father fears Regan’s influence on young sons.”

  I flipped all the way through the reports to the back stack of pages, looking for the report that would explain why Regan had come into the care of the state in the first place. I’d seen my own Care Initiation Report, the accompanying photographs of my brother and me, our undernourished, bruised bodies, the filthy drug den where the police had found us. But in place of Regan’s CIR, I found a scan of a yellow sheet of paper signed with a flourish by a Judge Edgar Boscke.

  The report on Regan’s parents was missing.

  Chapter 19

  MY PHONE RANG. Some of the girls in the posse of prostitutes nearby gave a whoop of excitement out of habit, thinking one of their own had been summoned for a job. I answered the call, trying to swallow the white-hot rage that immediately rose.

  “Good evening, Harry,” he said.

  “Good evening, Mr. Sick Fuck,” I sneered. “Set any little girls on fire today?”

  “Not yet,” he said. “How are you enjoying my files? Find anything surprising?”

  “No.” I gathered the files against my chest, as though he could see them. “Nothing at all. I knew from what you did to those women that you weren’t right in the head. I just don’t see where my brother comes into all this.”

  He didn’t answer. My stomach dropped. I hadn’t seen any mention of Sam in the paperwork, but his silence made me feel as though I was missing something obvious. Regan had spent plenty of time in the suburbs of Sydney, moving from house to house as foster parents gave up on him. Had he been in care with my brother? And if so—what did that mean? I realized I was bracing for Regan to reveal what I’d dreaded all along: that I had been wrong about Sam. That they had indeed killed together. That my brother was the monster everyone thought he was.

  “Were you in care together?” I asked. “Did you meet him then?”

  “It’s hard for me to talk about Sam,” he said.

  I was lost for words. Some homeless men were watching me from a picnic table nearby, one with his beard in tiny braids.

  “I’d rather talk about you,” Regan said. “Did you note that we were in the same Risk Category?”

  I looked at the papers in my hands. Regan’s RC across his time in foster care had come down to 5 out of a possible 5. The assessment indicated how volatile he was—how much of a threat he was to other children, how many infractions he had in group homes, how many homes had outright rejected him as too difficult to deal with after only a short period. My score had been the same.

  “There’s a big difference between what you did in foster care and what I did, Regan,” I said.

  “Is there?” I heard him shift. “You’ve got a total of twelve assault reports. Fourteen failed short-term placements. Says here you stabbed one of your foster fathers in the leg with a corkscrew.”

  “Does it mention he was climbing into my bed at the time?” I snapped.

  “You were defending yourself.” Regan’s sarcasm was gentle. “All those times.”

  I said nothing. I wasn’t going to let him feel like he knew me, even though he was right. Most of the time when I’d been violent as a kid, I’d been defending myself against predatory men or boys, or girls my age who wanted to steal my stuff or recruit me into a gang of bullies. But yes, some of the time I’d just plain had enough. I’d been angry. I’d picked on other kids. Caused trouble to get attention.

  I’d been a bad kid. But didn’t I deserve to be?

  “What happened to your parents?” I shoved the papers into my backpack. “Your file was sealed when you were seven years old by a court order. They must have done something really bad to you. Is that why you go after girls? You got mummy issues?” I made a sooky baby voice as I stood and paced before the wall. “Did Mummy spank her Reegsie-Weegsie too hard and give him a big nasty boo-boo?”

  He laughed. “I like it when you do that voice. Do it again.”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “I like the way your mouth pouts,” he continued. “You’ve got good lips, Harry.”

  I stopped in my tracks. The prostitutes were looking over their shoulders at me, their cigarettes leaking smoke.

  “Are you watching me?” I asked.

  He didn’t say a word.

  Chapter 20

  I WENT TO my bag, drew out my gun, and stuffed it into the pocket of my hoodie. But I was sloppy, too busy scanning the street for a tall man with a shaved head and a phone to his ear. One of the girls saw my gun and stepped out of the circle.

  “Aww, shit!” She pointed at me. “We got a narco over here!”

  She thought I was one of the undercover cops who regularly patrolled Kings Cross in hoodies and jeans, doing hand-to-hand buys and busting dealers, or simply hanging around, listening, trying to keep a finger on the pulse. The girls were all looking at me now.

  “Hey, bitch!” one of them shouted. “We know you’re five-o!”

  “Fuck the po-lice!”

  Regan said something in my ear. I couldn’t hear it over the group of girls all now pointing, shouting, throwing threats. A fire-engine siren started up at the nearby station.

  “Get out of here, bitch.” One girl shoved my shoulder. “Go back to the fucking pigpen, narco piece of shit.”

  “Hey!” I returned the shove, squeezing the phone to my ear. “Back the fuck up.”

  She pushed me again, encouraged by her friends, who now surrounded me. But they weren’t important. Regan was here. These people were in danger. A phone rang nearby. I thought I heard it on the other end of the call. Had I heard the siren through the phone, too? Was he that close?

  “Where are you?” I said into the phone. “Come on. Come out, you bastard.”

  “Look at them,” Regan said. “These are the people you spend your life protecting.”

  A hand on my shoulder. I whirled around. The girl who’d noticed the gun, a round, pasty creature squeezed into a short skirt, knocked the phone from my hand and came at me again, her chest against mine.

  “I said get moving, bitch!”

  I bent and picked up the phone, used the distance between the ground and her face to build momentum in the swing. I punched her hard in the jaw, heard crunching teeth. She staggered backward, head wobbling. They all backed up.

  “Anyone else?” I asked, setting my feet. “Anyone else wanna go?”

  No one did. I swung my bag onto my back, was about to run when I spotted one of the girls from the circle. She was across the park, impossibly far away, arm in arm with a big man. A big man with a shaved head. They were just heading through the doorway of
the female public toilet. I tried to run, but someone was holding the handle of my backpack.

  “He’s here!” I cried. “Let go of me!”

  But they yanked me down onto the ground.

  “I got her,” the homeless man with the plaited beard said.

  I didn’t have time for this. I’d seen Regan, seen him with his next victim.

  I rolled, tried to kick out from underneath him, but someone else had my legs.

  I looked up through the forest of legs around me and saw the young man in the food truck trying to see what was happening over heads of the crowd. I did the only thing I could think of—I screamed as pathetically as I could.

  “Help! Help! He’s got me! Please!”

  The young man burst out of the side of the truck, trying to shove his way toward me. The distraction was enough. I freed my hand from where it had been trapped under me, took the gun from my pocket, and fired it into the air above my head.

  I was free, instantly, the crowd falling away in terror. I got up and bolted for the other side of the park, my phone still in one hand, my gun in the other. The door to the toilets seemed miles away, over pathways, behind bushes.

  I ran for my life. For her life. The phone clattered from my fingers as I lifted the gun with both hands and skidded to a halt through the doorway.

  “Police!” I roared. “Hands up!”

  Chapter 21

  THE DOOR TO the cubicle was open. His jeans were pooled around his boots, his white arse clenching as the tremors pulsed through him. The girl leaned out from her position in front of his crotch, shock in her eyes, standing and putting her hands up with a wail.

  It was not him. Just some tradesman getting a blow job on his way home from work. He turned and I cringed. He, too, put his hands in the air.