Meaning that most police officers were male, and many believed at least partly that the victims of sexual assault brought it upon themselves in some way. The conversation drifted on to other things, Challis watching his liquidambar-what Ellen called his star treemerge with the greater darkness all around it. A car crawled past at the end of his driveway, headlights probing the pines, bracken, blackberry canes and pittosporums lining the road. He knew it was a local car. Newcomers went faster, somehow failing to take into account that the road was narrow, the dirt and gravel surface treacherous, the bends blind.
He said, ‘Thought I might do a bit more work to your house during the week, if I can find the time.’
Fix the home invasion damage, in fact. There was an awkward silence, and Ellen said, ‘Look-’
‘Larrayne’s been staying there,’ he said, in an attempt to tease out what Ellen had or hadn’t been told.
‘So I understand. Look, Hal, you don’t have to fix my house up, though I am grateful, honestly.’
‘Honestly.’ One of those tricky words.
31
On Monday morning Jeannie Schiff tossed Pam Murphy the keys to the silver Holden and said, ‘You drive.’
Great, a city trip in peak hour. One of these days, Murphy thought, we’ll have autopsy facilities here on the Peninsula.
They were barely north of the town, stuck behind a Woodleigh school bus, when Schiff said, ‘We’re not going to have a problem today, are we?’
Pam darted her a glance: she didn’t want to plough into the rear of the bus. ‘Problem?’
‘You and me. Sulks, the silent treatment.’
Pam burned. Sure, she knew she was being a little guarded, but she wasn’t sulking. ‘No, Sarge.’
‘There’s no need to use my rank, not when we’re alone. We have been intimate, after all.’ Heavy quotation marks around ‘intimate’. Pam said nothing. She felt nothing, really. Her feelings weren’t hurt, she wasn’t in love, she didn’t feel betrayed…
Felt a little used, though. Maybe. She had gone into this with her eyes open, after all.
And so what if Jeannie hadn’t wanted to walk on the beach yesterday?
The school bus slowed, pulled onto the verge, where a couple of teenagers slouched, waiting, bags at their feet. They climbed onto the bus as if dazed, and Pam took the opportunity to spurt past. Now she was behind a line of cars. She glanced at the dash clock: 8 a.m. The autopsy was slated for 10.
Then she felt Jeannie Schiff’s pretty right hand on her leg.
Challis drove Ellen Destry’s Corolla to work and found Scobie Sutton waiting in his office, looking tense in a funereal suit coat and pants, the jacket flapping around him.
‘Scobie.’
‘Morning, boss.’
Challis waited. Sutton said, ‘I was wondering if you’ve seen this.’
A press release from police headquarters. Challis liked to kid that he had a special gift: he could tell if any printed or electronic document was worth reading merely by scanning the title, subtitle and first line. E-mails had a short life in his in-box. The contents of his pigeonhole had been transformed into a million egg cartons. ‘New crime scene unit,’ he said. ‘What about it?’
‘You suggested I should shift sideways.’
Challis paused. He shrugged off his jacket, pegged it and sat behind his desk. ‘Sit,’ he said, staring through the window as Sutton folded his bones again. ‘You’d need training.’
‘Yes.’
The role of the new unit was to collect crime scene information in the first instance-fingerprints, fibres, DNA, photographs and video recordings-and pass it on to the relevant division for analysis. The results would then be passed to CIU detectives, like Challis and his team, for action. Challis had mixed feelings about the new system. It would free CIU and uniformed police to concentrate on targeted operations, bringing increased speed and efficiency. But he liked standing in the middle of a crime scene, feeling his way into the who, what and why.
‘You’ll work out of Frankston.’
‘I don’t mind. It’s only a twenty minute drive for me.’
Challis made a decision. The work-collecting evidence for someone else to analyse-would suit Scobie. Less need for intuitive leaps. Less call for speculating about the needs, moods, impulses and motives that drove other human beings.
‘I can put in a good word if you like.’
Sutton blinked as if to say, Whoa, not so fast, then ventured to say, ‘If you could, boss, that would be great.’
Challis stood, grabbed his jacket again. ‘No problem. Meanwhile we need another word with Delia Rice’s parents. Something’s not quite right about the timeline.’
Schiff squeezed Pam’s leg in a way that was chummy yet undershot with desire. ‘It was good, you and me. But not…’
‘I know,’ Pam said very distinctly, hands fixed on the steering wheel. ‘Not going anywhere. I know that. I wanted to have some fun, that’s all, same as you.’
As if she’d not heard a word, Schiff said, ‘I could sense a kind of reserve in you, as if you liked it okay but it wasn’t really your thing. I think, deep down, you prefer men.’
I prefer to do without the bullshit, Pam thought.
A final squeeze and Schiff removed her hand. ‘No regrets, okay? Put it down to experience.’
Fine. Pam could insist until the cows came home that she didn’t have regrets, wouldn’t have them, but Schiff had a kind of worldly, older-woman thing going. She wasn’t listening.
Well, I do have one regret, Pam thought. I regret that Sergeant Jeannie Schiff is as big an arsehole as some of the men I’ve encountered. Live and learn.
‘Where was he going with Delia Rice’s body?’ she said. ‘He’d have known he couldn’t dump her in the reserve, so he must have been looking for another location. Wonder how well he knows the Peninsula?’
‘What?’ said Schiff, busy on the keypad of her phone. ‘Look, save it for a briefing.’
Delia Rice’s parents lived in a low, pale-brick 1970s house set on three hectares of muddy yard near the Moorooduc primary school. Bill Rice was an all-purpose landscaping and excavation contractor, so the yard was crammed with tip trucks, bobcats, backhoes, excavators and dozers. Challis and Sutton were shown into a dark, chilly sitting room and, moments later, learned that a crucial piece of their briefing information was incorrect.
‘Let’s get this straight, Mr Rice,’ Challis said. ‘You didn’t drive her to the Frankston station?’
‘No. Like I said, I was going to take her there, but in the end I had a dentist’s appointment.’
Challis kept his voice mild and even. ‘So she didn’t catch a train, didn’t go to the city?’
‘She did, but from Somerville,’ Rice said, as if explaining to a dummy. ‘Where my dentist is.’
Challis nodded in understanding. Somerville was on a small branch line that served the south-eastern Peninsula towns: city-bound passengers changed at Frankston.
‘I had a 3.30 appointment,’ Bill Rice explained, ‘and the plan was Delia would sit in the waiting room till I was finished, only the dentist was running late, so she said she’d catch the Somerville train.’
He was ravaged with grief, eyes raw, wispy hair limp and uncombed, grey stubble on his cheeks, jaw and neck. Erin Rice said nothing but sat beside her husband, holding one of his huge, sausage-fingered hands in her plump lap. She was combed and tidy, but more stunned than her husband.
Challis thought through the cock-up. Between the Rices’ initial missing persons’ statement and the homicide investigation, a key first impression had gone unchecked. Bill Rice had told someone what the intended plan was, and by the time it reached Challis’s team it had become fact.
‘You don’t know for certain that she caught any train?’ he said gently.
In a small voice, Rice said, ‘I assumed she did. I mean, what else did she do?’
Dr Berg began the autopsy at ten o’clock, Murphy and Schiff watching from the raised viewing bay, Berg’s voice crackling from the wall-mounted speakers as she worked. The autopsy suite was large, square and brightly lit by skylights and neon tubes. The floor and two walls were of small, gleaming tiles, with banks of refrigerated stainless steel drawers set into the other walls. The pathologist worked at one of the long, broad zinc tables, the surface cleansed by a constant stream of cold water that ran from the slightly elevated top end to a chrome drainage pipe at the bottom.