Chapter 25

I SAT INbed all night on the computer after speaking to Sam, clicking around, looking for Claudia Burrows. She’d recently scrubbed her social media presence clean. There were suggestions that she’d once had a Facebook page and a Twitter account, but these were empty now, the links broken. I saw a couple of pictures of her on sites that must have belonged to her friends. She was a very different girl from the one whom I’d seen washed up on the shores of the Georges River. Her hair, which had been short and dark when she died, was long and bleach-blond, the roots dark and the ends scraggly. I learned that she sometimes went under the name Claudia Dee. Did multiple names mean multiple identities? Was it Claudia Dee who’d worn the skimpy clothes that filled most of her wardrobe, and Claudia Burrows who’d bought the more formal attire?

I didn’t like the idea that Claudia had been pretending to be someone else, and that she’d recently told her creditors that she was coming into money. Had she been conducting a scam? If so, who was the victim? Had she been planning a robbery? I put the laptop away, discouraged by all the dead ends, and tried to sleep. Ten minutes later I had it open again, doing different searches.

At midnight I called Chris Murray, the detective from the Surry Hills station.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?”

“Murray,” I said, “you’ve got connections in the records department, don’t you? I want you to help me out. I’m wandering aimlessly around the Internet looking for anything I can get on Tox Barnes. Maybe they changed his name after the crime? Is that why I can’t find any newspaper articles about him?”

“The fact that you’re carrying on working with that monster without looking for an out is exactly the reason I won’t help you,” he said. “You should be trying to get away from him, not trying to understand him. I’m hanging up, Harry.”

“Murray, don’t go! I need help here, man.”

“He murdered a woman and her kid,” Murray said. “He and a bunch of other kids stabbed them to death.”

“I thought they beat them to death.”

“Is how they did it very important?”

“I guess not. What exactly am I supposed to do, Murray? I’ve got a homicide on my hands. You know how often I get homicides in sex crimes? I can’t just walk out on this.”

“Feign sickness and leave the case to him,” he said. “He’s good at what he does. He’ll solve it himself in no time. Probably uses his killer instincts.”

“This is what people do?” I shook my head. “They just drop him?”

“He’s like a curse. You either find some way to drop him or shuffle him onto someone else. Otherwise you’ll look like you’re on his side, and you don’t want people thinking that, Harry.”

“This is insane.”

“He’s a disgrace to the force,” Murray said. “He’s a disgrace to what we stand for as police.”

“But wasn’t he only seven years old when the crime occurred?”

“I got a six-year-old,” Murray snapped. “She knows it’s wrong to kill people. Hell, my three-year-old knows that. I’m too busy for this shit, Harry. I got a couple of missing yachties from Queensland on my desk. I’m looking at hundreds of pictures of identical boats all day long. I’m seein’ boats in my fucking sleep.”

“What are you doing with a Queensland case?”

“Oh.” He sighed. The wind seemed to go out of him suddenly. “Long story. It’s bad. It’s just one of those ones that gives you the creeps.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. I hoped by listening kindly to his problems for a few minutes, he’d take his fury down a few notches. It seemed to work. When he spoke again, his voice was softer.

“A retired couple in their fifties was last seen on their yacht heading south out of Brisbane. They travel a lot, so the woman does her own kidney dialysis on the boat. She’s got some kidney problem, I don’t know what. But she hasn’t filled her prescription for the dialysate—the stuff she rinses her kidney with. By the family’s calculation, the couple should have dropped into Sydney a couple of days ago at the latest to fill the prescription. If they did drop in, they didn’t sign into the marina, and they haven’t filled the prescription. Nobody on the East Coast has seen them. They were selling the boat. It’s possible they swung in and picked up potential buyers. But we don’t know.”

“Jesus,” I said, as sympathetically as I could. “Sounds complex. Why haven’t I seen it getting much press?”

“It’s early days yet. And these yachties go missing all the time. Decide to change direction on a whim and don’t know their comms aren’t working. Everybody’s hoping they’ll just pop up again in Indonesia or something. I don’t know. I got a bad feeling about it. The coastguard is on the lookout.”

“Anything I can do?”

“No, Harry, there’s nothing you can do.” His tone sharpened again, as though he’d realized I was only listening because I wanted his help.

“Look, Murray, I want to understand what I’m dealing with here,” I pleaded. “What exactly is Tox supposed to have done? How many people were involved? I want to know exactly what he was charged with. I’ve got to find out what kind of man he is.”

“I don’t know, Harry, but I’m disgusted that you’re even interested,” Murray said. “We’re supposed to be the good guys. He’s an insult to us, and so are you right now.”

The phone clicked dead in my ear.