Chapter 11

MY HEAD WASa mess by the time I arrived at Surry Hills police headquarters. It was 6 a.m. and the sun was rising. I’d stayed at the crime scene and orchestrated the evidence collection, got rid of the press, and sent out a couple of detectives to bring the parents in. Within an hour we had preliminary identification. Until we could get the parents to ID the body, we weren’t sure. But it looked as though the girl was Claudia Burrows: her description linked up with a missing persons report that had been issued a day earlier. She had a tattoo of a rabbit in a waistcoat on her hip that matched the report exactly.

I didn’t like where this was all going, mainly because it was heading in the very opposite direction of the Georges River Killer. The killer we’d been hunting didn’t drown his victims—he didn’t put them in the water at all, but left them stripped to their panties, face down on the beach. His victims showed signs of physical and sexual abuse, while Claudia hadn’t looked in any way battered. I’d checked her wrists and ankles for ligature marks but there were none, except for a rough sort of rubbing on one foot. For all I knew, she might have fallen into Botany Bay drunk and drowned there, the waves stripping her clothes off as she floated toward the mouth of the river.

Though it didn’t look good for my entry onto the Georges River Killer task force, I wasn’t going to let go. It was possible the killer had changed his methods to confuse us. He was a wily creature, as far as I could tell, and he might have recognized that he was being tracked. I went right to the door of the task force’s case room and knocked, trying to shove my way in when no one answered. I came up against the thin and wiry Detective Nigel Spader just inside the door.

“You’re not allowed in here.” He pushed me back out the door before I could get a glimpse of their case board. “This is the last time I’m going to tell you, Blue.”

“I’m allowed in,” I said. “Chief Morris put me on a Georges River body last night. You’ll need to debrief me and get me up to speed so we can start making connections.”

“Your case is not connected to ours.” He tried to shut the door on me.

“How the fuck would you know something like that? It’s a dark-haired girl almost naked on the banks of the Georges. I’m ticking all the boxes. If I knew what other boxes I could tick, maybe the link would be even stronger. You’re putting me on this task force, Nigel, before I kick you in the face.”

“It’s not the GRK.” Nigel sighed. “Now piss off.”

He slammed the door on my boot. I shoved forward, slid an arm into the gap, and tried to grab him. Pops’s voice sent a bolt of electricity through me.

“Detective Blue!”

“I’m just helping, Chief.” I pulled the door shut, gave the knob a jiggle. “Making sure the case room is secure.”

“You’ve got the dead girl’s parents in interrogation room six.” He carried his coffee toward me. “I’ve put the paperwork in. You’ll share the case with Detective Barnes.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“He was the first responder,” the old man said. “He’s got some good theories. The media has got hold of the case already, so it’ll be all over the news. And she’s a bright, pretty university student. I want to have something meaningful to say at the press conference.”

“University student?” My mouth fell open.

“She’d just applied and been accepted. Her parents told the patrol cops who picked them up,” the Chief said. “Applied, studied—in the media’s eyes, it’s the same thing. She was full of prospects. We need to get something quickly.”

“Well, you can tell them this is a Georges River Killer case, then.” I counted off on my fingers: “Dark hair, Georges River, semi-naked, university student…”

“It’s not,” Pops said, and walked away.

I stood in the middle of the bullpen and looked at the officers all around me, some of them answering phones, some of them clicking away at computers. Had the whole world gone crazy? I felt as if I were speaking a foreign language, and everyone I talked to was pretending to understand and then brushing me off. I was concerned I was getting so frustrated I might be tempted to cry. I generally cry about once a year, so I wasn’t going to waste it on this bureaucratic bullshit.

“This is a Georges River Killer case!” I roared. The men and women on their phones turned to look at me. “I need to be on the task force!”

“It’s not,” Pops said calmly as he closed the door to his office.