‘Is it... is it okay if I use my phone?’
‘For now, sure.’
Jack dialled Elsa’s number. He turned away slightly, a futile attempt at some small privacy. It was a wasted effort. Elsa didn’t answer. He tried a second time. Again the call rang out.
‘Problem?’ Jansen said.
‘She didn’t answer,’ Jack said. ‘I just... there’s one other person, okay?’
Jansen nodded. His face was blank, but he still managed to give the distinct impression that Jack was running out of time. Jack’s fingers were clumsy on his phone. Who should he call? He tried Noah’s dad. There was no answer. He tried Tom’s mum. She was the super organised type. But again there was no answer.
Jesus Christ! Where was everyone?
‘We can call child services,’ Jansen said. ‘They’re all set up to take care of kids in situations like this.
‘No,’ Jack said. No way. He fumbled with his phone again. He dialled the number Elsa’s au pair had given him. Please, please let her answer.
‘Hello?’
Jack was almost giddy with relief to hear Celine’s voice. He stumbled over his words.
‘This is Jack. I need a favour. I’m sorry to ask, but I tried Elsa and she’s tied up.’
‘How can I help?’
‘Can you come to my place and pick up Cam? I’m... I’m tied up with something.’ That was ridiculous. She’d see the cops when she got to the flat. There was no hiding what was happening, but he just couldn’t bring himself to say he was being arrested. ‘Can you come and pick up Cam and bring him to Elsa’s place? He’ll need to stay overnight.’
‘Okay, sure. No problem. I bring him to school in the morning?’
Jack hadn’t thought of that. ‘Uh. Maybe. I’ll call you later, if that’s okay. He’ll need to pack a uniform, and there’s sport, so we’d have to work out—’
Jansen held his hand out for Jack’s phone.
‘I have to go, Celine. I’m sorry.’
Jansen took his phone from his hand as Jack ended the call.
Chapter Fourteen
When Judith woke on Monday morning, she reached for her phone and found that she’d already missed four calls from Mike Russo. He hadn’t left a message, but she didn’t need to talk to him to know what he wanted. The word was out that Robert Walker was dead, and Russo felt that he was owed the inside track. Judith turned off her phone.
She got out of bed and went looking for workout gear. Eventually she fished her least grubby pair of leggings out of the laundry pile, and found a sports bra and an old knock-off AC/DC T-shirt at the back of her wardrobe. They’d have to do. She’d put off doing her laundry for too long, and she’d all but run out of clean clothes. Before she left the apartment she tried calling Hilary, the witness who’d come forward in the Walker case. There was no answer. She left a message.
Her run took her out along the banks of the Maribyrnong River. The weather was all right. It rained a bit, a light drizzle only, at about the half-hour point but Judith didn’t mind rain. It cooled her down. She needed the time by herself, needed to push her body, despite the nagging pain in her ribs and her cheek. She wasn’t sleeping well, and when she did sleep, she dreamed. Every time she fell asleep, she found herself climbing through the window of Robert Walker’s study and pulling the trigger. Again and again she brought the golf club down on her stepfather’s head. Judith opened and closed her hands as she ran. She shook them out. She could almost feel the reverberation of the golf club in her hands as it made contact.
Judith wasn’t sorry that Walker was dead—that was the truth of it. She hadn’t been sorry in the aftermath of Gerry’s death either. The fact that her mother had been so obviously distraught, that she’d made such a public display of her grief, all of it had made Judith want to run away, but it hadn’t made her sorry. How could it, when the alternative would have been her mother’s dead body on that kitchen floor?
Judith increased her pace, ignoring the pain in her ribs. Her breathing came faster.
In the two decades she’d been a cop, there’d been a number of occasions when she could have taken a short cut, and no one would have known. She’d once tracked a serial rapist to a dark alley and he’d pulled a knife. She could have shot him then and there, and the entire force would have been behind her. A year later, a drug dealer had jumped her, and she’d gone for her taser when she could have gone for her gun. In real life, when she was under pressure, she was never tempted to break the rules. But in her dreams, she was a vigilante. Robert Walker wasn’t the first suspect she’d dreamed about killing. The dream recurred with distressing frequency and she didn’t understand why. Did some deep down part of her want to kill? Doing things by the book was difficult. It meant long months of investigation, the painstaking gathering of evidence, the risky transfer of a file to prosecutors who could easily fumble the pass, the wait for a judge’s ruling, and far too often all of that resulted in a shitty outcome. But she understood that, and accepted it.
Didn’t she?
She did. Her conscious self never fantasised about having the power to make the judgement call—yes, this man is guilty—and then just take the bastard out. She couldn’t, wouldn’t do that. But someonehadshot Walker. Someone who either had the thing Judith was missing, or was missing the thing Judith had. The burning question now, was who?
Judith slowed her pace. The pain from her ribs was intense, and the run wasn’t doing much to clear her mind. Rocky and the team were now investigating Robert Walker’s murder, and she would be firmly shut out of it. The complaint Walker made against her before his death had seen to that, and that complaint would hopefully die with him. Her sexual assault case was certainly dead in the water. With Walker dead, she had nothing left to investigate and no one to prosecute. All she was left with was the sense, the absolute conviction, that she was missing something.
The note. That damning note.
