Cold Justice
Authors: Katherine Howell
Tags: #Fiction, #Women Sleuths, #Mystery & Detective, #General
For Benette
CONTENTS
ONE
‘T
here’s not much to it,’ Station Officer Ken Butterworth said. ‘Plant room, muster room, lounge through there, little kitchen off the side. Locker room and bathrooms along this way, and here’s your locker key.’
Paramedic Georgie Riley folded her sweaty palm around it. ‘Thanks.’
‘So. Welcome to The Rocks.’ Butterworth glanced at his watch. ‘I don’t know where she is.’
‘You don’t have to stay,’ Georgie said.
‘If a case comes in I’ll go out with you.’
‘I’ll find my way around.’
‘But what sort of a start to a first day is that?’
She smiled. ‘How was your night?’
‘Eighteen jobs, including a SIDS, a cardiac arrest on a bus, and a nightclub brawl with five stabbed.’ He covered a yawn.
‘Go home,’ she said. ‘Really, I’ll be fine.’
‘It’s no problem.’ He checked his watch again. ‘I’m sure she won’t be long.’
And in the meantime there’s no way you’re going to leave me alone.
Georgie looked at the board where the keys hung. ‘Which one will we be in?’
‘Thirty-three,’ Butterworth said.
She took the keys down. ‘May as well begin checking.’
‘Sure, sure,’ he said. ‘That’s good.’
The traffic coming off the Harbour Bridge overhead filled the plant room with a continuous hum. Georgie unlocked the ambulance and shoved her bag between the front seats, then opened the side door into the back and climbed up. Through the tinted window she saw Butterworth frowning in the muster room doorway. Matt would tell her he was frowning because her partner was late, and that she was paranoid to be thinking what she was thinking, and would then remind her about the discussion they’d had about being reasonable – but Matt hadn’t been bullied and shafted and betrayed.
She flopped into the seat beside the stretcher and yanked open one of the drug drawers. Cannulas lay rubber-banded together in size groupings, and syringes in their sealed plastic packets were jammed into two narrow compartments. She tidied the stack of alcohol swabs, straightened the boxes of adrenaline and dextrose and atropine, and checked the expiry dates of the six ampoules of local anaesthetic lined up against the side.
She was neither surprised nor startled when Butterworth popped his head through the door.
‘Is it the same layout as you had?’ he asked.
The ambulance service was one big network of who you’d trained with, who you’d worked with, who you knew. Butterworth looked a similar age to her Woolford boss, Ross Oakes.
‘You’ve never been out there?’ Georgie replied.
‘I have.’ He scratched at a boot scuff low down on the wall. ‘But I’ve never looked closely in the drug drawers. Pass me an alky-wipe?’
She handed over a swab and watched him scrub at the black mark. She should ask him if he knew Ross. It was an innocent question, and, as they were talking about the region, it would be a natural one as well. She cleared her throat, but just then there was a flash of movement beyond the windscreen and the driver’s door was yanked open.
‘Sorry, Ken,’ a woman said. ‘Bloody trains.’ A workbag sailed in and landed on Georgie’s.
Georgie took a deep breath.
If she’s a mate of Ross’s, I’ll never pass this assessment
.
Ken said, ‘Freya, this is your new partner, Georgina Riley. Georgina, this is Freya Craig.’
The woman looked into the back and Georgie’s heart skipped a beat. The hair was longer and darker, the face had filled out a little, but it was definitely her. In the same instant she saw surprise and dismay cross the woman’s face.
Dismay?
‘Hi,’ Georgie said.
‘George!’ Freya squeezed between the front seats into the back of the ambulance and grabbed Georgie in a hug. ‘How the hell have you been?’
Georgie resisted the urge to push her away. ‘Good.’
Dismay?
Freya pointed back and forth between them and said to Butterworth, ‘Schoolfriends.’ She crossed her first and second fingers. ‘Like this.’
For a while
, Georgie thought.
Until you disappeared without even saying goodbye and had me thinking you’d been murdered too
.
‘Enjoy your reunion.’ Butterworth stepped down from the truck.
Freya said, ‘I didn’t know you were in the job. How long?’
‘Nine years.’
‘Eleven for me.’ She came in for a hug again but Georgie leaned back. She wanted to see her eyes. She wanted to be looking straight at her when she asked the question that had festered in her mind for nineteen years.
‘Freya –’
Freya cut in. ‘Talk about coincidences, hey?’ She grinned, a wild look. ‘All that time and here we are.’
The station phone rang and Butterworth answered.
‘That’ll be us.’ Freya scrambled into the driver’s seat.
After this job
, Georgie thought. Another hour wouldn’t kill her. She closed the back and went to get the details from their boss.
‘Person fallen into the harbour,’ he said.
Georgie’s skin prickled.
‘Sure you’ll be okay with it?’
He knows.
She took the scrap of paper from his hand. ‘Of course.’
‘The past haunts the present,’ said Detective Sergeant Paul Galea.
Like I need reminding of that
. Just sitting there in Galea’s office, Detective Ella Marconi could feel the effects of her own recent past. She’d passed all the physical and psych tests and was fine, though she’d lost muscle mass and her shirt sat differently across her back. But once shot, she’d realised, you were never the same again, especially when you’d thought you were going to die. Things got clearer. You saw for certain what was important.
‘Time passes,’ Galea went on, arms resting on a closed file on his desk, a newspaper folded at his elbow, ‘but the unsolved homicide never goes away. Unsolved, mind you, not cold. How can it be cold when the victim’s family still lives it every day?’
Ella nodded.
‘The good thing is that people with knowledge still live it too, and these people sometimes get religion, get divorced, get off drugs. They lose someone close and get an inkling of how it might feel. Their knowledge becomes a burden. Sometimes they tip us off; sometimes you knock on their door and they spill their guts.’
‘I understand.’
‘At the same time, however, the bad guys too have grown older. Their lives are settled; they have jobs, families – more to lose.’ Galea’s gaze became intense. ‘Investigations into old cases open up old wounds, and sometimes people are driven to commit new crimes to protect what they now have.’
Just give me the file.
‘In 1990, seventeen-year-old Tim Pieters was found dead in Pennant Hills.’ Galea finally handed the file over. ‘Pieters’s cousin is in state parliament now, and had a bit of a chin-wag with the minister last week. There’s this too.’ He slid over the newspaper and Ella saw the article next to Pieters’s photo above the fold – the cousin was opening a sports hall at Tim Pieters’s old school that afternoon. ‘Wander along there and see what strikes you. Just take it easy getting back onto the horse.’
Ella looked down at the photos in the file. Pieters, smiling in a high school photo. Then dead on the ground, leaves on his face.
I’ll get back onto the horse all right.
Ella made a coffee and sat at a vacant desk in the empty Unsolved office. Everyone else was out on their own cases. The air was cool and still. Computers hummed, and Galea talked with someone down the corridor. She’d heard about his welcome speech:
The past haunts the present.
It was a wonder he didn’t have it framed on the wall. Of course the past haunted the bloody present. Police work revolved around that fact. So did life itself.
She opened the file to Tim Pieters’s school photo again. He’d had short brown hair, tanned skin and a wide smile. His grey school shirt was buttoned to the neck under a darker grey tie with gold diagonal stripes and the emblem of Macquarie Secondary College. They had a moment, looking into each other’s eyes.
I’ve been to the brink
, she told him.
You went over and I can’t help that, but I can find who is to blame. I know what’s important, and it’s you
.
She put her cup aside and got out an A4 pad. The first pages of the file were a bald summary of the facts. Early in the morning on Sunday, 21 October 1990, a girl walking her dog in the bush near Pennant Hills Park had stumbled across Tim Pieters’s body. She’d run to the nearest house, five hundred metres away, and the occupant had called the ambulance. They’d arrived and requested police. General Duties attended first, then asked for detectives and Crime Scene.
A search of his clothing and the area produced no wallet or other identification, and he went into the system as ‘unknown male’.
Just after eight o’clock Tamara Pieters looked into her son’s room and found it empty. She and her husband John called Tim’s friends, who admitted being out with him the night before but didn’t know where he was now. The Pieters worried for an hour before calling the police. Officers went to their house and asked to see a photo, then broke the news. Formal identification was done at Westmead Morgue by both parents.
Tim was the middle of three children. His older sister, Haydee, had been in her second year at university and still living at home. His younger brother, Josh, was eleven. John Pieters worked as an architect with a city firm and Tamara Pieters did bookkeeping from an office at home. They described Tim as a good student, a social boy with a large circle of friends, keen to get his P plates and first car. They denied problems with alcohol or drugs. Tim had talked about going to uni when he finished school, though wavered between science and IT as course choices.
Ella turned to the scene photographs. The initial shots showed Tim Pieters lying face down in the undergrowth, dressed in blue jeans, grey sneakers and a white short-sleeved shirt. Various angles illustrated how far he was from the road and how well hidden the body was by the long grass and shrubbery. The girl who’d found him had stated that her dog had been off his leash and had run off into the bushes, and it was when she was trying to catch him that she’d found Pieters. Ella wondered what effect that moment had had on the girl’s life.
A series of pictures showed Pieters being rolled onto his back, dead leaves stuck to his face. Ella wondered about the time his body had been dumped there, if it was after the dew had fallen, but reading on she found that the original detectives had noted the morning was dry but that there had been rain in the previous twenty-four hours and the undergrowth was still damp.
The autopsy reported the stomach contents were little more than the dark liquid of gastric juices mixed with alcohol, and stated that the dinner of meat and salad he was known to have eaten at the family barbecue at about six thirty that evening was probably vomited up due to his drinking. He’d been last seen by his friends in the pub at about eleven thirty, and the pathologist estimated time of death between midnight and 2 am.
Blood had pooled in parts of the front of the body not pressed against the ground. As livor mortis could begin within twenty minutes of death and was fixed in a couple of hours, it was believed that Tim had been killed somewhere else then dumped there. Tyre tracks were difficult to ascertain in the loose gravel, but photographs showed marks in the dusty edge between the gravel and the asphalt. One tyre was identified as a Bridgestone, another a Goodyear, both sold in the hundreds of thousands across the country. With neither tyre having distinctive damaged areas or wear patterns, they weren’t much help as leads.
There were no injuries to Tim’s body except petechial haemorrhages in his eyes; due to this and congestion in his lungs, the cause of death was determined to be suffocation. To kill a healthy young man in that manner with no signs of a struggle suggested incapacitation of some form, and she checked the toxicology screen. His blood alcohol reading was 0.09 per cent; a lot for anyone, but particularly an underage boy. The report estimated that such a level would have caused him to have moderate cognitive and motor-skill impairment, making him a vulnerable target, particularly if he’d passed out in the street. His friends had admitted using false IDs to buy beer and spirits at the Highway Hotel in Hornsby that night, as well as at other hotels on different dates.