Hush Page 5

  Chapter 18

  “A BAR?” WHITT stopped between the tables on the way to the dance floor. He had been so swept up by Tox and the case, being practically abducted from his yoga session and thrown into Tox’s filthy, reeking Monaro, that he hadn’t taken much notice of his surroundings. “You’re interrupting my rehab to take me to a bar?”

  “Get this guy a Shirley Temple,” Tox said to a woman who approached them. He fell into a seat near the dance floor with all the familiarity of a man who hardly left it. The woman, wearing only transparent plastic heels and a fluorescent pink G-string, didn’t ask what Tox wanted.

  “I can’t be here,” Whitt breathed, trying not to look at the bottles behind the bar in the far corner. “I can smell the beer in the carpet.”

  “Well, this is my office.” Tox gestured to the chair across from him. “Deal with it.”

  On the painted black catwalk, a very tanned woman in a bright yellow G-string was twirling lazily around a chrome pole. Two men were talking at a table on the other side of the catwalk, and against the far wall three men were waiting in chairs to go into private rooms. Whitt sat and put his hands on the table between him and Tox, then immediately regretted it. The surface was covered with rings from the bottoms of glasses, as sticky as honey. “What the hell do you do here?”

  “This,” Tox said, gesturing to his seat. “I’m the doorman.”

  “The door’s all the way over there.” Whitt pointed with his thumb across the huge, empty space. “Shouldn’t you stand by it and stop the riffraff coming in?”

  “It’s all riffraff here,” Tox said. “They come in. After a while I put ’em back out.”

  A waitress brought Whitt’s pink drink and a glass of whiskey for Tox. Whitt could taste the whiskey from the other side of the table. Particles of it in the air mixed in with the sweat-beer-vomit-sex perfume that covered everything. He suddenly noticed that his shirt was sticking to his chest with sweat.

  “Tell me what you know so we can get out of here,” Whitt said.

  “Tonya Woods.” Tox put a picture of the girl on the table between them, probably adhering it to the surface forever. “Twenty-two. Baby bad-girl. She started getting naughty at thirteen when her mother died of ovarian cancer. Climbing out the windows of the house. Riding in cars with boys. Yelling at teachers, throwing stuff. Woods yanks her out of her posh private school before she can embarrass him in front of all his lawyer and judge friends and stuffs her in a specialist program where she can cool her heels until she’s seventeen. It’s one of those places where the kids choose what they want to learn and light candles and tend to baby chickens. So there’s no violence, but she comes out of it knowing how to make macaroni necklaces and not much else. Drops out early, sixteen.”

  Whitt looked at the picture. The girl didn’t resemble big, broad, square-jawed Woods at all. She was lean and pretty, with a heart-shaped face and long dark hair. The picture was a police mugshot, but it must have been early in the girl’s downward slide. She was smiling a little. They always smile in the beginning, when they don’t know the system—don’t know that they’re about to be taken out of the photography session and dumped into a cold, featureless holding cell that smells of urine while bail is arranged.

  “Right after school Woods helps get her a job making coffee and being the mail girl in an office full of ambulance chasers, but she gets bored. Starts turning up late, taking long lunches, coming in hungover and scrappy,” Tox said. “The legal firm puts up with her until she takes a company credit card and goes on a shopping spree with it. Five-thousand-dollar weekend at the Four Seasons with all her scumbag friends. Fine champagne and hotel-room damages were the major expenses. One of the guests put an armchair through the window of the sixteenth-floor suite.”

  “Wow,” Whitt said. He reflected on how this all would have looked to the New South Wales Police Force. Having come from Perth, he knew nothing of the Woods family’s troubles.

  “Off the back of that performance, she does her first disappearing act,” Tox said. “Six days off the radar. She turns up in jail, being questioned about a drive-by shooting. She was in the back seat when some thugs sprayed a house and killed a guy, injured a kid. She’s seventeen, and the papers aren’t supposed to name her but it leaks online. First big media appearance. Very embarrassing for Woods.”

  Whitt leaned over and examined Tonya’s face. Now that he was studying it more closely he could see her eyes were tired. Not merely physically exhausted, but the kind of weariness that comes with a long, constant trampling of the soul. Whitt felt like he was looking at a snapshot of his past. He could see a thousand days begun in hope and ended in failure. Small dreams born and crushed. This will be the morning I get up and go to work, do my job properly. This will be the day I don’t drink. This will be the person I can trust. This will be the time I make my father proud. Whitt knew exactly what was wrong with Tonya Woods. She’d tried and failed at life too many times to wake up believing anymore.

  “And here’s the daughter.” Tox put another photograph on the tabletop, crumpled a little at the edges from being in his pocket. “Two years old. Not only is the baby gone, but Tonya’s not supposed to have her in the first place.”

  Chapter 19

  WHITT PICKED UP the photo of the infant, which made a shlucking sound as it came unstuck from the tabletop. The picture had been taken at one of those child photography places. The chubby girl smiled at something just above the camera. Four teeth in her bottom jaw, lights in her eyes, her mother’s dark, rich hair. Too much hair for a baby, Whitt thought. Funny spikes of it sticking out from behind a little pink hair band.

  “The kid looks healthy,” Whitt said. “So Tonya hasn’t had custody?”

  “Not so far,” Tox said, tapping a cigarette out of a box. “Woods raised the kid.”

  “Jesus.” Whitt put the pictures side by side. “Woods and a little baby all alone? He storms around being the police department’s biggest arsehole by day and goes home and warms up bottles of milk for his baby at night?”

  Tox shrugged. “I guess some people have softer sides. Not me.”

  “Why did Tonya lose custody?”

  “She never really had it to begin with. She was high when she had the baby. Social workers took it right off her in the delivery room because she tested positive for narcotics. They’d had their eye on her for a while. Woods sat by the humidicrib for two weeks while the baby went through withdrawals. Tonya did another disappearing act. Three weeks this time.”

  “Who’s the daddy?”

  “Anyone’s guess. No name on the birth certificate. And she’d been hopping in and out of cars to feed her drug habit.”

  “So Tonya has been having visits with the kid recently?”

  “She was having supervised visits, and then unsupervised as she got clean,” Tox said. “Woods would have her over to the house to play with the child, stay over. Sometimes, when she was sober for decent stretches, Woods would let her take the kid back to her place just for the night. That’s what happened this time. He said she’s been trying to get straight, be a good parent. Some bozos I ran into at the Oceanside Motel confirmed that—they said she had borrowed money from them to buy baby things.”

  “Why not borrow the money from Woods?”

  “Pride, maybe.”

  “So what’s your theory? She tried to get clean but she slipped, and she’s on a binge somewhere with the kid?” Whitt asked.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But why not? If Tonya’s an addict and she disappears all the time, what’s different about this occasion? We’re only on day eight, right? She might have taken the kid overnight, fallen off the wagon and got high, and she and the baby are in a crack house somewhere waiting to be found.”

  “Woods thinks it’s different this time,” Tox said. “And I think so, too.” He lay his phone on the table and opened the photo app, flipped through some pictures of a trashed motel room. “Someone fixed the place to make it look like
there was a struggle. Did all the obvious things. Knocked over a bookcase. Smashed a mirror. Threw some glasses and shit on the floor. But see here? The cord running from the television to the wall was two feet off the ground, stretched tight so the woman could watch TV in bed without having to get up to change the channels. The TV remote would have disappeared ages ago. So the cord runs right across the space between the side of the bed and the doorway.”

  Whitt looked.

  “OK. So?”

  “Parts of the room suggest the struggle went on there, or started there.” Tox pointed. “Glass knocked off the bedside table. Table knocked over, bed all messed up. But if there really was a struggle in that room, how did they manage not to pull the TV plug from the wall? Even if the abductor came around the other side of the bed to grab Tonya, she’s supposed to have resisted capture, or at least we’re meant to think so from the state of the room. But the cord is just sitting there like a giant trip-wire. Surely someone would have accidentally pulled it from the wall. And then there’s the bathroom mirror.”

  “What about it?”

  “The point of impact on the mirror was high.” He put a hand up. “Maybe eight feet off the ground. The bathroom’s real small and the mirror’s real big. I can see the mirror being smashed at shoulder height by someone falling into it. But someone had to stand inside the bathroom and raise their arm up and break it with something extended from their arm. A hammer or a piece of brick or whatever. Why would you do that when you’re struggling with a petite woman in a tiny bathroom? Your hands would be down here.” He put his hands right out from his chest. “But if you went into the bathroom with the intention of smashing the mirror, you’d smash it up high, right? No point smashing it in the center and having the top half collapse over on top of you.”

  “If you’re right, and the struggle was staged, why has someone gone to all that effort?” Whitt asked. “You’re thinking Tonya wanted to run off with the kid, so she’s trying to make it look like someone took her? That doesn’t make any sense. Woods would be plenty worried if you run off with his grandchild, a child you don’t have custody of. But he’ll be even more worried if it looks like someone took you both. Something like that will make him bring in all the police he can spare.”

  “Even suspended ones.” Tox raised his whiskey glass.

  Chapter 20

  HE WAS BACK. Her very worst patient.

  When the nurse who informed Chloe Bozer of the man’s imminent arrival walked away, the trauma surgeon put her head in her hands, her elbows on the desk. Her tiny fifth-floor office at St. Vincent’s Hospital had been dead silent, but now it was filled with a heavy, throbbing dread. She had thought she would never see him again. In the darkness behind her palms, there was no hiding from the images that swirled of the man whose life she had saved six months earlier.

  He had come into the hospital in a rush of redness, the way they all did, ambulance lights blazing in the parking bay, blood on the spotless tiles and all over the gloved hands of the paramedics. It had been a rare quiet night in the emergency room, a couple of bumps and scrapes and the usual smattering of overdoses from Kings Cross. So when the alert came, she and her staff had rushed to the doors to greet the patient. She knew it was bad from the faces of the men accompanying him. Male, early forties, multiple severe puncture wounds. A stabbing. The paramedics informed her that he had flatlined twice in the ambulance on the way there, and he was crashing again as they wheeled him into surgery.

  She knew who he was as soon as she saw him stretched out before her in the operating theater. The name the paramedics had been yelling, trying to bring him back, hadn’t reached her ears at first. His face had been a bloody mask, but a nurse wiped his cheeks and brow clean as she prepared him for anesthesia. His eyes fluttered open and rolled toward her, wet and confused, examining the people frantically working on him. He seemed to know she was in charge of all the people there who would, or wouldn’t, save him. His eyes questioned her silently, asking about his chances, perhaps, trying to read the fear on her face before unconsciousness took him again.

  She knew those eyes. Then she heard the name.

  Detective Tate Barnes, the man who had destroyed her life.

  Chapter 21

  HE CAME IN without knocking, just walked around the corner of her open door and pulled out the guest chair like he owned the place. Another man came in with him, more muscular and neater, less confident about just marching into her office.

  “Chloe,” Tox said by way of greeting, sinking into the chair beside her.

  “It’s Doctor Bozer,” Chloe said, resisting the urge to hide her face in her hands again. “It’s always been Doctor Bozer to you. Detective Barnes, what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Let me introduce my friend, Edward Whittacker.” Tox gestured to the man leaning awkwardly against the wall by the door. “Whitt, this is Chloe. She was the head surgeon who worked on me. She saved my life. Whitt is—”

  “Your partner.” Chloe nodded coldly. “Detective Whittacker, we’ve met before. You charged into the emergency room on the night Detective Barnes was injured, demanding my staff stop trying to save his life to scrape some DNA evidence from under his fingernails so you could have it tested. That’s if I recall correctly?”

  “Oh.” Whitt scratched the back of his neck. “Uh, yes. That was me.”

  “Detective Barnes, I asked you a question.” Chloe turned back to Tox, her jaw clicking and eyes blazing. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m on a case and I need your help.”

  “You should have made an appointment.”

  “I don’t make appointments.”

  “What the hell do you need me for?”

  Tox put a photograph of a young, dark-haired woman on the table between them like a poker player setting down a trump card. Chloe stared impassively at it.

  “Girl’s missing.”

  Chloe glanced at the picture, then took up a pen, hoping that if she went back to work Tox and his partner would just go away. Tox set down another picture, a small child. “This one, too.”

  “I’ve never seen them before.”

  “The mother’s picture’s old. You have seen her,” Tox said. “She comes in for ODs fairly regularly.”

  “This is the nearest hospital to Kings Cross.” Chloe made some meaningless notes on her desk calendar. “We get about three ODs a day. I don’t usually take in faces.”

  “I want to look at her medical records, and those of the child, if the child’s ever been treated here. Any reports hospital staff made to the Department of Family Services. Any people mentioned who accompanied the girl here.”

  “You got a warrant?”

  “No.”

  Chloe said nothing.

  “Paging Doctor Bozer,” Tox said. “Did you hear me?”

  “I heard you. You said a bunch of things that you wanted and gave me no legal incentive to give them to you. So I’m saying no.”

  “Honey.” Tox shifted closer in his chair, put an elbow on her desk, right by the corner of her calendar. She could hear the smile in his voice, though she refused to look up. “I could get those papers from the nurses. You know I could. But I don’t want to get those ladies in any more trouble.”

  “If you don’t take your elbow off my desk in the next ten seconds…” Chloe eased the words through her teeth. There was no threat that came to mind. She was not accustomed to threatening people, to the anger that was burning around her throat like a steel ring. She could smell him. Cigarettes, leather, a metallic smell that was probably gunshot residue or something. The others that had come as he lay clinging to the edge of life in the days after his surgery had smelled of it, too. Big, bruising men with gold chains. Eerie, strangely cold men in suits. There had been women, but they were all the same: a smattering of doe-eyed things in skimpy outfits, smoking and chewing their fake nails. Three of the men on different occasions had taken her aside, tried to press envelopes of cash into her hand, making vague
but dangerous-sounding promises.

  Just keep him alive. Do whatever you have to.

  Tox took his elbow off the desk, but he didn’t leave. She knew there was only one way to get rid of him.

  Chloe sent a request for the documents through to the reception desk of the emergency room.

  Chapter 22

  THE TWO DETECTIVES walked to Tox’s car, the wind warm, pressing their clothes to their bodies. Tox hugged the folder of printed records to his chest to stop the pages fluttering.

  “I’m not going back there with you,” Tox said. “Not while you’re looking like that. I saw those nurses checking out your new Terminator bod. You’re shaming me on my own turf.”

  “Seems to me like you’re shooting yourself in the foot,” Whitt said. “That surgeon lady hates your guts.”

  “I wasn’t the best patient,” Tox said. “While I was in the coma, a few unsavory types I’ve come to know over the years came and hassled her about taking care of me. I’m popular among the bottom-dwellers, I guess. Doctor Bozer didn’t like all the low-lifes stinking up the hospital halls and following her to her car. But I don’t know how that’s my fault; I was unconscious.”

  “That’s all it was, then?”

  Tox thought. “Well, when I woke up, I smuggled in cigarettes and booze and outside food. She didn’t like that, either.”

  Whitt waited.

  Tox sighed. “And then, yeah, OK—some of the nurses thought I was worth bending the physical contact rules for, and I didn’t discourage them. Doctor Bozer walked in on me and a couple of them having a party between the sheets one time.”

  “A couple of them? At once?”

  “They were good friends, I think.”

  “How the hell were you sleeping with the nurses when you’d been stabbed twice in the guts?”