'Poor Scotty,' she said, as he squinted up at her, grinning. 'Can't get any, so you have to get off checking out your partner's arse. Bet you did the same when you were working with Elvis.'
Jill left Scotty to the bikini girls beginning to arrive at the beach and wheeled her bike in the direction of home. When they'd first met, and were trying to work together, ten bikini babes trying to sit in his lap wouldn't have distracted Scotty from Jill. Unexpectedly, she'd felt the attraction too. Typically around men she had to fight her first urges to run or attack. Their smell, voice, maleness, usually triggered a threat alarm.
Scotty was different. For some frustrating reason, her body would draw closer to his any time he was near. Standing next to him and trying to think during a work meeting had been maddening. Jill noticed the baleful glances of a couple of her female colleagues and the knowing smirks of the men in the squad room. She hated it. She'd promised herself while still in the academy that there'd be no romance with her peers and she'd never found herself tempted. On her rise through the ranks, she'd watched others trying to work with people they'd slept with and now hated. And conquests were always fair game for lunchroom conversation. Dumped, broken-hearted, ashamed or disgusted, if you slept with another cop, for the rest of your career you could expect to be periodically reminded of it over your ham sandwich.
Jill's rule had always been easy for her to stick to. Until she was assigned to Maroubra. Until Scotty. Within a week of working together, she'd been more conscious of the sound of his breath than his voice. Her breathing had seemed to slip into the same rhythm. Passing him a pen caused a pulse to thrum in her ears. She'd never been much good at making small talk, but there'd been no uncomfortable silences with him. When she'd caught herself swapping outfits three times before work one morning, she knew she had to do something.
It wasn't until her third week as his partner, however, that things came to a head. They'd just interviewed the victim of an armed robbery. The Coogee fish and chip shop owner wouldn't leave his cafe to come in, so they'd gone to him to take his statement. Scotty had taken him up – of course – on his offer of battered calamari, fish cocktails and chips. Jill denied herself the pleasure – of course – and smirked at him over her Pepsi Max as he hoovered them down.
Their footsteps were in sync as they walked back to their car. He smelled delicious.
'Good thing you're not worried about that double chin,' she smiled up at him as they waited at the lights. The bright Sydney day faded around her as he stroked a strong finger slowly from her forehead down her nose. It stopped under her chin.
'And that you're not worried about your scrawny…' He trailed off, speaking to her lips, raising her face with his finger. She broke away just before his mouth touched her own. Her heart scudded in her chest as she realised how close they'd come to ruining their partnership.
By the time they reached the car, her walls were back up. The numbness had taken over.
'Just to let you know,' she told him, her hand on the door before she got in, 'nothing will happen between us. I just want to work with you. That's all.' Even to her ears, her voice sounded dead.
Scotty had seemed hurt and confused for a couple of weeks, but, to her relief, had allowed their relationship to become comfortably platonic. Except when they were working out together, in which case each tried like hell to thrash the other.
Right now, Jill was looking forward to her day off, and on the way home she picked up the newspaper, a mango, and half a litre of skim milk from the corner shop near her apartment. She locked her bike in the garage under the units and jogged up the stairs, grimacing as her thighs protested. Her two-bedroom flat would be cool and quiet. She planned to use the day to work on a couple of reports.
She swung her shopping up onto the granite of her kitchen benchtop and surveyed the room critically; nothing caught her eye to cause concern. All the surfaces were clear and clean. Regardless, with a small sigh she walked through her flat to check.
I have to stop these rituals, she thought, entering each room, pushing the doors flat against the walls when she opened them, leaving nowhere anyone could hide. Logic told her that there could be no-one else in here – her building was a high-security block and the wall facing the ocean was unscaleable. Her front door and the doorframe were steel reinforced, with three two-inch steel rods simultaneously interlocking when the handle was activated with the key. She'd caught the men who'd installed the $3000 door laughing when they thought she was out of earshot. They were used to putting in doors like this for jewellery shops and mansions on the North Shore. What was in this two-bedroom flat in Maroubra that was so special, one had asked. His mate, with a lewd laugh, had obviously made some crass comment she was glad she didn't hear.
A single petal, fallen from a bunch of roses her mum had brought over yesterday, marred the blonde beech of the dresser in her bedroom. She absently picked it up and palmed it, continuing her reconnaissance. Her moves were perfunctory, the path familiar. She let her thoughts roam as she padded through her flat. Scotty's advice regarding Elvis was uppermost in her mind.
'Jill, the more you react, the worse he gets. He sets you up, and you bite every time,' Scotty had told her. 'He's a splitter – he's gathering his crew around him, telling them how you're going to respond, and when you overreact, exactly as he predicted, he looks good and you look like a dickhead.'
Jill knew he was right, but there was something about the macho posturing of Elvis that she couldn't fail to respond to. It wasn't just his set-ups and put-downs; she felt he was too close to the Wollongong bikies they had taken down. Her investigations had led to his little brother, Luca Calabrese, at almost every turn. Calabrese Junior was a made member of One Percent, the outlaw motorcycle group that ran amok on the South Coast. Witnesses had told her they'd made police statements about assaults, rapes, drug deals, all related to the gang, but nothing had ever eventuated; for the most part, police had not contacted them again. Elvis and his brother had grown up in the area and still knew everyone in town. A couple of their local mates had also joined the service. They knew her bust had made them look bad, and she felt their knives poised at her back.
She hadn't told Scotty about the dildo left on her desk last week, but he'd seen the crude phallus inked onto her locker in black marker. She knew that formal complaints were just what Elvis wanted – to make her look overly sensitive, a whinger who couldn't take a joke, who might put in a complaint about any member of the team. Scotty had offered to back her up with a complaint to their commander, but she'd seen his relief when she'd brushed the suggestion aside. They'd stayed late one afternoon, cleaning the locker door with solvent.
Tour complete, Jill walked back to the kitchen. She poured the carton of cold milk into the blender and then peeled the fat mango, dropping globs of it into the milk. She planned to drink the smoothie, tidy the mess and catch a shower before settling down to the reports.
Her mobile pealed. 'Shit.' Sucking mango juice from her fingers, she flicked open the phone with one hand.
It was Scotty. 'Yo, J. Dead one. We're up.' Scotty was running, she could hear him breathing hard.
2
Jill let herself smile, watching Scotty striding up the sand-hills, sunglasses on, joking with the uniformed cops who were almost running in their attempts to keep up with him. He was on his way to a murder scene, but for Scotty this was still a trip to the beach.
Her mask slipped back into place when she reached the cordoned-off homicide site, regaining her breath quickly after the hike up the hot beach track. She took in the scene around her. The colours were exaggerated – opal blues of the ocean and sky, blinding white sand dunes, the wet red and purple smashed face of the man lying in the dirt. An ill-looking couple of kids stood a few metres away, looking everywhere but at the body.