I was interrupted by a loud knock on the examination room door; it proved to be Vic Agnew beckoning furiously through the window. Because he couldn’t come into the lab and I didn’t want to have to change everything to go outside and talk to him, I held up my mobile and, seconds later, it rang.
‘We’re hopeful of a match,’ he said, turning away from the glass window, although I could still see him talking to me. This conversation was reminding me of Jacinta and Greg when they’d first bought their own mobiles, and how they used to ring each other up from inside and outside the house. Until their first phone bills arrived.
‘Match with what?’ I asked.
‘Jane found epithelial cells. In the saliva on that half-smoked joint you picked up under Tianna Richardson’s body. It’s been amped and it’s running through Mulder and Scully,’ he added, referring to the nickname given to the CE machine.
If the DNA on the profile matched Damien Henshaw, I doubted if he could extricate himself. We had his bootprint at the scene and, if his DNA turned up on the half-smoked joint and his semen in the scrambled sample Florence was trying to unpick, he might even decide to plead guilty and save everyone a hell of a lot of trouble. Brian would have what he wanted. Damien might even be able to tell us something about the death of Albert Vaughan, I thought.
I was impatient to get on with my examination. Surely Vic could have told me this later.
‘Gotta go now, Vic, I’m keen to get on with this,’ I said, pointing to the bag. ‘We dug it up from the animal pit out at the Ag Station.’
The door to the examination room opened and Vic walked in.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I said, angry about the intrusion. ‘What about my sterile zone?’
‘You don’t have to worry about that,’ he said, pointing to the black and white striped tape that had been sealing the neck of the heavy-duty plastic bag. ‘That’s the tie from this bag, right? Jack, you’re never going to get evidence from anything in that bag. Not when it’s tied like that.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said, feeling things were becoming surreal.
‘That tape. That black stripe on it means the bag’s been autoclaved. The tape changes colour and turns black during the process.’
Shit! I wouldn’t be getting any information from residues in the ELISA plate wells. I’d been wasting my time.
‘Sorry about that,’ said Vic, departing.
Nevertheless, I rolled the bag right over, tipped it gently and there they were, Claire Dimitriou’s faithful bunnies, very dead and very flattened by the pressure of their burial. For a moment all I could do was stare at the rabbits. If someone had killed them, thrown their bodies into the bag along with the laboratory glassware and ELISA plates, and then placed the whole lot in a bag to be autoclaved, the steaming heat and pressure would have sterilised everything.
I went to lift the first one up, but found I couldn’t separate it from the others. They were welded in a large clump. When I lifted the clump out, I saw they looked as if they’d been cooked whole, their large eyes opaque white like those of a baked snapper. I could see splits in the pelts in several places and the bodies felt stiff and lumpy, not floppy as I’d imagined they would. I gently prised the small bodies apart—all of them lay in the same stiff position. I straightened up and stared at the wall opposite, trying to make sense of this. I arranged the dead rabbits in a row along the fresh white paper lining the surface of the examination table and stood back, studying the small corpses. The obvious reason for why the animals had been cooked was that protein denatures at 80 degrees Celsius—it would be almost impossible to discover anything helpful from the tissue of these animals. Even so, I decided they must be examined. I wondered who in Veterinary Science at the university might be an expert in rabbit post-mortems.
With a sinking heart I pulled more layers of plastic away to reveal Claire Dimitriou’s autoclaved laptop. I lay it on the white paper and found I couldn’t open it because the lid and the latch had melted together, reminding me of Salvador Dali’s surreal, melting clock faces. I put my two hands on the edge of the table and bent my aching head, too pissed off even to swear. Nothing was going right. I dropped the distorted laptop into a sterile bag. Maybe, just maybe,
something
could be salvaged from the hard disk.
Right at the bottom of the bag, I found a flat parcel packaged up in layers of plastic film. I drew it out and lay it on the bench. From the weight and shape of the item, I’d guessed already what it might be and my excitement increased. All was not lost.
Carefully I opened the plastic to reveal the lab book, a substantial bound journal. The lettering on the front of the imitation leather cover had almost disappeared but I could just make out the names of the two scientists involved and the date the project had commenced two years earlier. ‘Do not remove from lab’ was also still recognisable, punched out in plastic embossed letters. I went to carefully open it and, again, my heart sank for heat and steam and fluids from the rabbits’ bodies had stained it and the whole damn thing had fused together, baked and steamed into a papier-mâché block. I tried to unpeel one page and it almost dissolved in my fingers so I stopped immediately. This killer was expert in covering his tracks.
I needed a break, I thought, as I left the examination room with the laptop, plate and the lab book, hoping that Sarah, with her drying cupboard, might be able to get something from this mess.
On the way out, I ran into Vic again.
‘You look terrible, boss,’ he said. ‘Go home.’
‘Good idea,’ I said, glancing at my watch. It
was
time to go home.
He walked with me to the door of his office. ‘You’ll be dead way too early if you don’t lighten up,’ he announced before disappearing inside.
I continued on to my office and hastily wrote up the latest events, then sat at my desk and mentally listed what I needed to do, starting with the Ag Station and continuing with what seemed like countless tasks. Underneath my workload, like the undermining of a low-grade virus, the problems I was having in relating to Iona troubled me constantly.
After making an appointment to visit the Ag Station, I rang the university and was given the run-around of just about every animal scientist on campus before finally being put through to Patrick Eadie, the expert on leporid mammals. He wasn’t at all happy to be asked to post-mortem six autoclaved rabbits, but considering this was a murder investigation he’d somehow find the time. I rang off, knowing how hard-pressed for time lecturers and academics were these days. The old idea of a community of scholars had been replaced with something more like a production line turning out corporate units.
I packed up the melted laptop ready to go to our technical people and the fused lab book for Sarah. I looked at the plates, irritated. Why was I kidding myself? The great heat and pressure of autoclaving would have wiped everything. I’d find nothing on those plates.
My cold seemed to have stepped up another notch. I fished around in my pocket for a tissue, blew my nose and tried to call Brian, but went straight to voicemail and left a message telling him that everything we’d so painfully retrieved from the animal pit was probably useless. And that I intended to go out to the Ag Station and check out the autoclave. Maybe there was a logging system that might yield something. Then, hungry for information, I called the detectives at Heronvale and the young bloke, Mark, answered.
‘Brian’s in an interview right now,’ he said. ‘Can’t say how long he’ll be.’
‘Tell him to ring me the minute he’s free,’ I instructed. ‘Is Debbie there?’
‘No. She’s out. The general store at Braddon Vale was held up,’ he said. ‘Debbie’s cruising around looking for a giant chicken with ninety dollars in cash.’
So much for her boyfriend arriving from Sydney. I was silent, the sense of unreality I’d experienced in the lab when talking to Vic washing over me again in an unbalancing wave. I hoped I wasn’t going the same way as Peter Yu.
‘Some dickhead dressed up in a chicken suit,’ the detective explained. ‘He got away on foot, according to our eyewitnesses. Great big orange feet.’
In a state where three murders had occurred in the same twenty-four-hour period, Debbie, the only other trained crime scene person apart from Brian, had been sent out after someone in a chicken suit and ninety dollars. I rang off. No wonder they say the job’s fucked.
I was just turning the corner on my way to Sarah’s office with the fused lab book when Sarah herself appeared and almost collided with me.
‘I’m sorry. I trod on your foot. Are you okay?’ I asked.
‘What’ve you got there?’ she said, eyeing the bagged lab book.
I explained.
Sarah took it from me and held it up in its bag. ‘It’s a real mess but I might be able to dry it for you. Depends on what sort of paper it is. Looks like a good production.’ She turned it over in its bag. ‘Many lab books use archival quality paper. Just might be possible to separate those pages again. Other times .
.
.’ Her voice trailed off.
‘Whatever you can find,’ I said, heading back to my office where I collected the soil samples taken from the Kincaid Street property. I needed to talk to Sofia Verstoek about some comparison work.
As I continued along the corridor, it became more difficult for me to keep my mind on the investigations. Sofia Verstoek worked just around the next corner and the closer I came to her domain, the more frequent and more powerful became the images from the night before.
As I approached the fresh, new dedicated palynology lab, images of the fair young woman clumping around in her shapeless spacesuit suddenly morphed into the vision I’d had last night of Blue and her fantastic arse and thighs and the Brazilian they’d contained between them. I had to turn back to the staff lounge just to clear my head and get my thoughts together for the questions I was silently rehearsing. I made myself a coffee at the automatic station, and, distracted, took a mouthful far too early, burning my tongue painfully. Slow down, Jack, I told myself.
I started rehearsing yet another approach as I added milk to the coffee. Then I threw the whole lot down the sink, took a deep breath and stormed towards her office door, bracing myself again as I paused just outside, sensing rather than seeing her presence.
Peering through the half-open door I could see Sofia sitting sideways at her desk, tailored slacks and pale-pink jumper visible under her white coat. She seemed completely absorbed in the notes she was making. I reminded myself I was a professional man of science, took a deep breath and knocked firmly. She jumped and turned around, her mouth pale with a pearly lipstick.
The impact when our gazes connected made me feel as if I’d been bounced off a hard surface. Perhaps I’d touched her unguarded self, hard as obsidian. She composed her face in its impassive mask again and stood up, walked over to the door and opened it further.
I hesitated until she gestured me inside.
‘You didn’t stay very long last night,’ she said, and closed the door behind me. ‘Didn’t you like what you saw?’ She leaned with her back against the door in a pose I’d only ever seen in Hollywood movies.
‘I’m not here to talk about last night, Miss Verstoek.’
‘
Miss
Verstoek today, is it?’ she said, raising a downy eyebrow. ‘I’m not surprised you don’t want to talk about last night. After all, you completely failed to keep up your end of the deal,’ she added, deadpan. With her hair pulled straight back from her face and the slight grey circles around her eyes, she looked older than I’d noticed before. Maybe centrifuging pollen assemblages by day and being Blue by night was taking it out of her.
‘As far as I’m concerned, discussion of last night’s incident is closed. I was acting on information received. I knocked on a door. It was the wrong door. End of story.’
She moved back to her desk and kneeled one leg on her chair, the other stretched out to the floor. It was the second pose she’d adopted in the last minute and I was sure that the half smile on her pearly pink lips was also part of the theatre.
I opened the large manila envelope I was carrying and pulled out the two containers with the reference samples I’d cut from the material taken from Kincaid Street. ‘I’d like you to retest these, please,’ I said, ‘against any samples or lifts you might have from Ginnindera Road—and not just for palynomorphs. I want every particle of sand, clay and mineral accounted for. I want to know every trace of every component of the soils around those two houses. If those coarse sandy grains can’t be accounted for from either crime scene, they could be vital in identifying the offender. I know soil profiles are not exactly your field,’ I said, putting the containers down on a table near the door, ‘but Florence and Vic are snowed under at the moment, Nigel’s away in Indonesia and I’m taken up with administration as you know. With the way we’re all stretched at the moment, everyone is having to do things that are a little outside their usual boundaries—if they have the capability.’
She jumped up almost to attention, her face hardening in anger.
‘Capability? I hope these are better than the first batch! Do you know what’s happened? The samples I took from Kincaid Street are absolutely useless!’
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘Contamination! And it’s not the first time! That first time we met,’ she continued, ‘when you
strolled
over at the Blackspot—what the hell did you think I was doing? Smelling the roses?’
I went to say something but couldn’t as Sofia Verstoek raced on angrily.
‘The hell I was! I was getting my
own
samples first, before it was too late. Like this time. Whoever’s been on the door at the Richardson house has allowed grieving relatives to put floral tributes all around the place! The pollen assemblage is completely useless! I thought I’d found a rare indicator species—the native orchid—that pointed to a crime scene. Now a defence team could argue that it probably came from some florist’s shop!’
No point now in asking her about possible places to search for the native orchid, I thought angrily. On top of all the frustration of the animal pit search proving fruitless, the stress of being acting chief, plus the way I was stuffing up my relationship with Iona, came this provocation. I was furious. Marshalling every scrap of self-control I owned, I seized the extra chair and pulled it to me. Then I pointed to her chair. ‘Please sit down, Miss Verstoek.’
She didn’t move.
‘Sit down!
Now
!’ I boomed, my voice sharper and louder than I’d intended.
She threw me a filthy look, then plonked down on her chair, pushing it as far away from me as the walls of her office permitted and twisting her body to the side as if signalling she was only here because I was forcing her but it didn’t mean she’d listen.
‘You may not realise or care about this,’ I began, ‘but I have to write a report at the end of the month on all new staff members. Your job here could depend on what I say in that report.’
She jumped up again and stared at me, fury in her eyes. ‘Are you trying to blackmail me?’
‘Sit down!’
‘You are! You’re using your position to threaten me! I’m going to make a complaint about you.’
‘Join the fucking queue, Sofia,’ I said. ‘Now sit down, shut up
and listen
!’
Whether it was the swearing or the anger in my voice, I couldn’t tell, but slowly, still holding my gaze, lips compressed in a tight line, Sofia reseated herself.
‘Thank you,’ I said curtly.
‘Don’t thank
me
,’ she said.
‘Now let’s talk like two human beings.’
She remained silent, angrily pushing back a tendril of fair hair that had caught at the corner of her mouth.
‘I’m sorry to hear the Richardson house at Kincaid Street has been contaminated. But the samples I’ve got were taken before any other traffic and they should give you a clean reading. These sorts of mistakes happen and we have to deal with them. Okay?’
She sneered.
‘I’ve already had complaints about your manner from a senior staff member,’ I said.
‘Who complained about me?’ she demanded.
‘And I’ve seen enough of your behaviour to know that the complaint is well-grounded. I’ve seen better behaviour in maximum security line-ups.’
‘What’s the matter with my work? Who’s complained?’
Fortunately, I’d had years of practice dealing with paranoid, aggressive attitudes of injured innocence from Genevieve.
‘A large part of the job here is teamwork. We have to cooperate with each other. We’re
all
overworked. We
all
have too many urgent jobs demanding immediate attention. Extra stress is something we don’t need. And the way you talk to people—your attitude—creates unnecessary pressures on people who are already carrying an unfair workload.’
‘How do you expect me to behave?’ she snapped, her question like a blow across the face with a glove, inviting further hostilities.
‘I expect you to do your job. And while I’m the last person to tell anyone they should be available for socialising, at least please be civil to your colleagues. You don’t have to like them.’
Her face remained expressionless, reminding me of the blank, impassive glare I’d perfected myself in childhood to keep the enemy adults out.
‘There’s something else I need to talk to you about. It concerns an incident in which you were seen having a meeting with a man parked outside our security fence.’
The blood drained from her face and she slid off the chair, walked over to her desk and started to busy herself with shuffling papers. The defiance had dropped away and I’d made a palpable hit.
‘That’s my business,’ she said. ‘Bloody spies round here!’
‘You were also observed giving this man money.’
She whirled around, fear in her eyes. ‘So it’s a crime now? Lending money to a friend?’
‘Lending money isn’t a crime,’ I said, keeping cool. ‘Being compromised might be. At the end of the day, you work for the prosecution.’
‘What is this? A lecture on my scientific responsibilities?’ she said, hand on hip, the defiance back in place, before sitting back down at her desk. ‘Whatever incident your nosey-parker saw has nothing to do with my work here!’
I searched my mind for a softer way to express my next thought, but couldn’t find it. ‘The sort of behaviour I’ve witnessed in you, not just now, but on other occasions, Sofia, raised questions in my mind whether you might need help—that you may have some sort of .
.
.’ I groped for a phrase that wouldn’t be too offensive ‘.
.
. emotional or psychological disorder.’
‘How
dare
you!’ she shrieked, jumping up from the chair.
I rose too, unsure of what her next act might be, keeping an eye on her hands, remembering a couple of times how I’d nearly come to grief during interviews back in the old days. ‘I’m not saying all this to hurt your feelings,’ I said, keeping my voice calm and quiet.
Sofia was heading towards the door.
‘Stay and talk about this!’ I roared.
She came to a sudden standstill, then swung around on me. ‘It is
critically
important that I take my own samples!’ she cried. ‘I tried to do the same at Kincaid Street. I can’t rely on the lifts and sweepings that people like Brian Kruger might eventually get round to giving me. And now I find it’s too late. There are exotics all through the grounds now. It’s a bloody circus! You think I was rude to you at the Blackspot? How do you think I felt when I saw this guy in black jeans and Hells Angels belt buckle walking all over my critical ground? Destroying the integrity of my crime scene?’
Even with the Brazilian still hovering in my memory, several thoughts were emerging. The first being that, despite her unfortunate nature, there was no doubting Sofia Verstoek’s professionalism where her work was concerned. And the second was that when seductive overtures hadn’t elicited the right response from me, she’d reverted to aggression. The third thought? Well, I didn’t much like admitting it.
‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I apologise. I had no business doing that. I’ve had this head cold and I wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘So, Dr McCain, if you haven’t got anything else to say to me, I’d like to get back to my work. I’m already in the process of doing a full assay of all the pollen
and
soil components.’ She picked up a folder and thrust it at me. ‘Take this. There’s the first analysis from the area around the house in Kincaid Street, complete with exotic contaminations.’ She paused, jabbing a finger at another folder. ‘And you can expect a full environmental profile of that case from out along the Ginnindera Road the moment I’m finished compiling the statistics from that area. I also went round to Damien Henshaw’s place as well as the address of the painting job he’s currently doing, just as you asked me to. So you’ll have all that very soon, if there are no more interruptions.’
I took the completed folder from her and again she threw her hand to her hip, her stance now insulting. You’ve wasted enough of my time already, it conveyed. I’m working way past capacity. Just get out of here.
‘Sofia,’ I began, ‘there’s something else I need to know.’
The wary eyes flickered.
‘Dallas Baxter informed me about the colour coding of the partner-swapping group.’
She gave me an ambiguous glance, sideways. ‘I thought you said you didn’t want to discuss last night.’
‘This is not about last night. This is about the investigation into Dr Claire Dimitriou’s murder.’
The wariness relaxed a little.
‘And Dr Dimitriou was overheard saying something about Blue.’
The wariness returned in full force.
‘In the partner-swapping group—’ I continued.
‘That you’re not talking about,’ she interrupted.
‘I believe you’re coded as Blue?’
‘You know I am. What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘It means you could be connected to that case.’
‘Give me a break! Now I’m part of a murder case?’
‘I need to know about number sixteen,’ I continued, ignoring her outburst. ‘What venue is that?’
The large brown eyes glared at me.
‘This is not a trick question,’ I added. ‘It could be very important.’
‘It mightn’t be a trick question,’ she said, ‘but it’s a meaningless one. What do you mean? There
is
no number sixteen.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
She raised an I-should-know eyebrow. ‘We only use a dozen places. Nothing like sixteen. What was said to make you think that?’
‘Why? Is something worrying you?’
She shook her head. ‘Why should anything be worrying me about that case? I don’t even
know
—didn’t know—Claire Dimitriou. It’s just a job to me. I did the pollen assemblage on her clothes. In the unlikely event that Brian Kruger and his lot ever find a suspect.’
‘No number sixteen at all?’ I insisted.
‘Absolutely not. I
can
count. You can check what I’m saying with some of the others.’
‘You can be sure I will.’
It was time for me to go. The vision of the night before was starting to loom again. I needed to attempt the restoration of usual relations—not that they were cordial. But now that we’d both let off steam, it was worth the attempt. ‘You’re a good worker, Sofia.’
That comment brought about a seismic shift in the atmosphere between us, but not the one I’d been hoping for. Now the room was charged with dangerous energy, like that of a predator about to pounce, and my skin prickled.