Chapter 15

TOX SMOKED INmy car. As I drove, I tried to think of one thing about him that didn’t annoy me. I decided I didn’t mind Tox’s leather jacket. I had a similar one. We stopped for coffee outside the station and then headed west toward Claudia Burrows’s apartment on Parramatta Road.

“When you arrived at the crime scene last night, I saw you unwrapping your knuckles in your car,” Tox said, putting one of his boots on the dashboard. “You box?”

“I box, yes.”

“Who’d you beat up?”

“I didn’t beat anyone up.”

“Boxers spar. There’s very little blood involved. Looked to me like you pounded on someone outside the ring, using your boxing skills to get the upper hand.”

“See, this is what you do,” I said. “You make microscopic observations and you blow them out into wild theories that make no sense.”

“Like the tits.”

“Stop saying ‘tits’! Christ, you sound like a fat, sleazy truck driver in a highway bar.” I imitated his quiet, gravelly voice, grabbed my crotch: “Look at those tits! I love tits! Urgghh!”

“Was that supposed to be me?”

“Yes.”

“You want to know why I sound like this?” he rasped. I glanced over, and he pulled at the collar of his shirt, revealing a long pink scar at the base of his throat. “Drug dealer stabbed me in the neck during a raid. Went right through the windpipe and out the other side.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun.”

He stared at me. “What kind of a horrible person makes fun of someone with a physical disabil—”

“Shut up!” I shoved him into the car door. “Goddamnit!”

“All right, so. Mom and Dad claimed Claudia was a part-time waitress,” Tox said. “She wasn’t paying for those knockers on a waitress’s salary, and even if she was, you don’t get them that size unless you’re in the sex industry.”

“Maybe she got a loan,” I said. “And maybe she got them that size because she liked them that size. Look, I work in sex crimes, okay? So I’m going to need you to get your brain out of the Dark Ages and stop making misogynistic assumptions about our victim.”

“Meh.” He sat back and flicked his cigarette ash out the window. “What does your girlfriend think about you working in sex crimes?”

“My girlfriend?” I looked at him. “I’m not gay.”

“Oh, right.”

“What made you think I was gay?”

He waved his cigarette at my head. “Your hair.”

We pulled into an old apartment block in Auburn and parked in the visitors’ space. I didn’t talk to Tox on the way up the damp concrete steps. If he was going to make me this mad every time we spoke, I was going to have a brain aneurysm before we actually discovered what had happened to Claudia Burrows.

Tox’s sexism wasn’t helped by Nigel Spader and his team rebuffing me from the Georges River Killer case. The Australian police force had always been full of boys’ club antics, what Sam called the “ancient brotherhood bullshit.” I was disappointed to see it creeping into my own station. Pops was a good chief, and didn’t let even the most minor sexual harassment or favoritism play down between his staff. But I had the feeling Nigel and his boys didn’t want me on the task force because I was a woman, and that even if Claudia did turn out to be one of the Georges River victims, they’d take the case off me completely. This was going to be a history-making case. There would be books about it. Nigel wanted his face on one of those books. He oozed heroic smugness.

Tox opened Claudia’s door with the keys her parents had given us. He’d only prized it open a crack when it slammed back against him.

And someone inside yelled, “Go! Go!”