Chapter 30

TOX AND Isettled in a bar on the strip in Kings Cross, sitting at the open window, watching the pimps and prostitutes wander up and down in the light rain. It seemed appropriate to head into Sydney’s red-light district. What we’d learned of Claudia’s life made me gravitate here, where the liars, cheats, and criminals came to play. The homeless crowding into corners to escape the wind and the hopeless slouching around the bars, tired from weeks of endlessly drinking away reality. Kings Cross was also just around the corner from my apartment. I hoped to wander back after a quick drink and get some much-needed sleep.

My phone calls and e-mails were ceasing to have any effect as word spread throughout the police force that I was working with Tox. When I called to see if the full autopsy on Claudia’s body had come in, an officer at my station put me on hold for half an hour, and then hung up. I only got the report by calling back and pretending to be someone else. I couldn’t get hold of the secondary detectives I’d tasked to look after the Burrowses, so I called their lawyer and asked if everyone was okay. I stared at Tox while I waited on the phone, trying to decide how the man himself ever got anything done without fabricating multiple identities and ringing around the world every time he wanted anything.

While I watched, I found myself trying to imagine him as a small child in a wild pack of other kids, pulling and grabbing and yanking an adult mother to the ground, stabbing her in a hurried rush, blood soaking their tiny clothes. I imagined him cornering her son, a boy his age maybe, holding the knife to the kid’s throat. Why had they done it? Tox had a mean look to him, particularly with the bruised nose and double black eyes, the leather jacket that reeked of smoke. But I knew there was no “killer look.” I’d known baby-faced preteen boys in school blazers and caps who’d assaulted girls so viciously they’d broken their victims’ spirits for life.

Maybe it was all just a rumor and Tox was innocent. But if it was, why didn’t he do anything to change the black mark against his name?

I was just starting to imagine him as a kind and gentle man wrapped in the shell of a dangerous one when he put his whiskey glass down, got up, and strode across the room with violent intent. I watched him take a pool cue from the rack, snap it over his knee, and roll the heavy end in his fist like a batter coming up to the plate.

“All right, buddy,” he said, “let’s go.”

His target was a heavier, taller man who’d been playing a game of pool by the back doors of the bar. The heavy man and Tox lunged at each other.