Chapter 35

MY MAJOR brEAKcame at midnight, but I ignored it. I was trudging up the stairs to my apartment block, scratching dried glitter and blood off my neck and trying to remember which key unlocked my front door. I’d lost my phone, but upstairs in my apartment I could hear the sound of my laptop jangling with a phone call. The ringing was finished by the time I reached the apartment. I ignored it and fell face down onto the couch.

I’d walked away from Tox in the dark of the industrial area without saying anything about the trouble he’d gotten us into. In truth, I was more horrified by his admission in the back of the van than I was by the roughhousing those idiot patrol cops had given us. It had taken fifteen minutes to find my wallet in the dark, up against the side of one of the warehouses where the officer had thrown it, and an hour to walk back to a major road. I’d stood there waiting for a cab for another half an hour, then had slept all the way home in it.

The laptop jangled again. I didn’t know how long I’d been out. I crawled to the screen and tapped.

“What?”

“Harry? Vicky.”

“Yep.”

“I was telling someone here what happened to Claudia and I might have a lead for you,” she said. I fumbled blindly in the dark across the cluttered coffee table for a pen. “One of the other girls said Claudia had been hanging around a prostitute from the Cross named Hope.”

“Huh.” I laughed. My instincts about Kings Cross and its connection to this case were right. The Cross was where dreams, lives, and promises failed. Claudia had been cooking up some kind of dream, and it had gotten her drowned at the bottom of the ocean.

“‘Hope,’” I said. “That’s all you got?”

“That’s all I got.”

“I’ll take it. Thanks.”

Almost immediately, an instant chat message popped up on the screen from my brother, wondering why I hadn’t been answering my phone all night. I gave him a brief rundown of my experience out in the sticks, my fingers dancing over the keys.

SamBluDesigner77: Are you OK? Should you go to a hospital?

BlueHarry: I’m fine. It was just a roughhousing. No worse than the guys used to give each other at the academy.

SamBluDesigner77: You should report those cops! Not only is it assault, but if they didn’t arrest you, dragging you out there against your will was probably abduction, right?

BlueHarry: You don’t rat on your colleagues in this business, Sam. No matter what they do. We deal with our problems in-house.

SamBlueDesigner77: God, it’s all so pathetic.

BlueHarry: Speaking of abductions, how’d the second interview on the Georges River Killer thing go? What did they ask you?

I watched the screen for an indication that Sam was writing back to me. He started, and then mysteriously the speech bubble he was writing in disappeared. I waited for whatever was distracting him to go away, but he didn’t start typing again. I had a strange urge to call him. My sisterly senses were in overdrive, but I told myself it was just fatigue.