Crystal Coffin (12 page)

Locklin saddled Jack in the moonlight and took his beach towel from behind the seat in the Bedford. He pushed it gently into his saddlebag and fastened the straps loosely so his treasure wouldn't be crushed. Then he slid up into the saddle.

He kept his horse off the gravel, but the stallion was full of himself to be home and pranced and snorted, begging for wind in his mane. Locklin stroked Jack's neck and eased him into the trees on the east side of the house, furthest from Thorna's bedroom. Then he clicked his tongue once and they were off, settling into an easy gallop for the boathouse.

It had been a long night.

At midnight Sydney time, Senior Detective Parry pulled his reading glasses from his chest pocket and looked at the two photos again. The first was of a girl, who Underwood told him was nearly seventeen. She didn't have the eyes of a killer, which was the other thing the sergeant was trying to convince him of.

The second photo was more detailed. Parry pushed his glasses higher onto his nose, flicked on Burkett's desk lamp and stooped under it to study the image closely. What he saw made his stomach churn, even after a lifetime of looking at murder scenes.

It wasn't the amount of blood that made him sick or the sight of a body curled up in the foetal position after rigor mortis had set in but the woman's eyes, glazed and lifeless now. Only hours before the photo they'd looked at the world from a living, breathing, beautiful woman who had a daughter, a husband and a successful career. She had eaten breakfast the day she died, talked with her family — just like his own beautiful daughter had done on the day that she'd been murdered.

And the victim liked to cook and to paint, so the file said. She wasn't very good at it, but it helped her think. That's all she was now. Recordings in a police file, memories for those who knew her, and a fresh mound of earth somewhere in a cemetery plot. So alive one minute, and so dead the next.

No. It wasn't the gore that made his gut feel hollow, he realised. Or even the smell of death that always clung so heavily to everything it touched that he could almost smell it in the photograph. It was having to reconstruct the crime, to relive every murder through the eyes of the victim in order to solve it. Trying to see what they saw, think what they thought, and all the while trying not to be affected by it.

There were questions about his daughter's death that he could not answer. Her body had been lost in the fire that took the meaning from his life when it took hers. If he could have known that she died quickly without pain or fear, it might have been easier. But as there had been no body, there was no closure to his constant wondering. She was just gone, and the drug dealers responsible — the three who had torched his home in payback for a case he'd been working on — had only two more years left to serve in jail.

Parry stared at the photo again and saw another innocent life that had been stolen — an innocent life like his daughter's, which he had sworn to avenge.

There had been seventy-four innocent victims between his daughter's death and this one — seventy-four innocents who would rest in peace because he'd put their killers behind bars. And still, he couldn't sleep at night.

This particular woman he remembered seeing on the news about a week earlier — some literary award or something that she'd been presenting in her role as Minister for the Arts. But now, in the photo, he saw her in the only way he would ever remember her, as a corpse lying in a crimson tide of blood and shattered crystal.

Her fingers gripped a tiny silver angel attached to a necklace. And behind her, low on the wall, was scrawled some kind of symbol, much like a triangle on a stick, perhaps a knife, or a sketch of the murder weapon, followed by four jagged but very legible letters in the victim's blood. They were the first four letters of her daughter's name. And as far as Sergeant Underwood was concerned, the intent of the message was clear.

‘An open and shut,' he told Parry. ‘The daughter did it. I don't see why either CIB or the Fraud Squad would be interested. No offence, sirs,' Underwood said, looking from Parry to Burkett with every indication that he was the one who had taken offence.

‘The murder case is still yours, Sergeant,' Parry said. ‘That's as much as I can tell you right now.'

‘What about this necklace?' Burkett asked. ‘Can I see it?'

Underwood shook his head. ‘It's missing,' he said. ‘It disappeared from the crime scene at the same time as the girl did. That's another point against her,' he added, handing Burkett the next photo while Parry was still looking at the first.

Burkett slumped against a wall and took his time with it.

More like a postcard from a museum, it obviously hadn't been developed in a police lab. This one was the size of a holiday snap, but it was of a glass-like church statue sitting on a sheet of purple velvet for contrast. Beside the statue was a gold plaque inscribed with dimensions of the artifact and contact details of the craftsman, which were top small to read from the photograph.

‘We'll need this enlarged,' Burkett said, flipping it over to read the captions on the back. The first was a valuation and he whistled at the number of zeros after the dollar sign. The second said ‘murder weapon, before' with a date only two weeks earlier. ‘Where did this come from?' he asked Underwood.

‘Aaron Fletcher took them for insurance purposes the day his wife died. Coincidence, though. He said he bought it as an anniversary gift for her and needed to forward a photograph to the insurance company so they could underwrite the policy. That writing on the back's mine.'

‘This Belgian artist,' Burkett said, reading it again, ‘the guy who crafted it. He might have another set. Have you contacted him to verify authenticity of the valuation?'

‘No,' Underwood said. ‘I didn't see the point. We've got a copy of the original valuation certificate.'

‘Is that how much it cost?' Burkett said, pointing to the number with all the zeros. ‘A hundred and twenty thousand?'

‘Yes, but it's worth more than that. The craftsman cut a deal expecting to get more work for the gallery.'

‘Or a cut from the insurance money,' Burkett said, crossing his arms.

‘Don't go there,' Parry suggested. ‘The Commissioner may still have coals hot for you after the mess with the misplaced paintings.'

‘Oh, well what am I supposed to think?' Burkett said, unhappy with his new partner behaving like a mother. ‘The guy pulls the same trick last month over a few stolen paintings, and we're not supposed to investigate a perfectly logical conclusion? Come on!'

Underwood's temple throbbed while Parry tried not to smile. He was thinking the same thing.

‘I've heard of churches,' Burkett said, ‘being held responsible for a lot of terrible things in my time, but this is the first time I've ever heard of an actual church being the murder weapon in a murder case. Where is it now, in forensics?'

Underwood took a step back before answering. ‘What's left of it, yes. The lab technicians picked up most of the fragments at the murder scene. A few more they had to get from the morgue after they were fished out of the Minister's chest. The others, well …'

‘I need it reconstructed,' Parry interrupted.

‘Sir?'

‘A whole piece of evidence usually tells more tales than a fragment, sergeant.'

‘Yes, sir, but … I mean … Have you ever dropped a drinking glass on a tiled floor?'

‘No, but my little girl was an expert.' Parry didn't add it was before she was murdered. He looked at Burkett, wondering if he knew what it was like to be family man. The boy wasn't wearing a wedding ring, but that didn't count for much these days. He still could be paying maintenance somewhere and Parry made a mental note to check on that later. He wouldn't put a kid's father in the line of fire if he could avoid it, no matter which side Burkett was playing. Which meant he might have to change his plans a bit. ‘Crystal doesn't just shatter,' he added. ‘It's more like a spectacular explosion. But I still want them to try to reconstruct it.'

‘Yes sir,' Underwood said, still complaining. ‘But as I was trying to tell you, there's quite a few chips missing, so it will take a while.'

‘Have you learned anything from it in the meantime?' Burkett asked.

‘Yes, plenty,' Underwood said. ‘Angle of attack, force, vector and so on. It's all in my report. More to the point, as the spire penetrated the woman's ribs, it broke into three main shards, one of which gave us a number of good prints. I matched prints from the shard with prints taken from the girl's bedroom door, her hairbrush and dresser. That's all in my report too.'

‘Three shards?' Parry said. ‘So the killer may have spilled blood too.'

‘She did,' Underwood said, reinforcing his assumption strongly. ‘A few drops anyway.'

‘She?' Burkett interrupted. ‘Sounds like you're staking a lot by your theory.'

Underwood's bald spot started sweating. ‘Well, I had one of the lab techs administer first aid to the teenager on the scene and we kept a cotton swab to lift a blood sample from her for testing.'

‘You can't do that!' Parry and Burkett sang together. ‘It won't hold up in court.'

‘It wasn't meant to,' Underwood said. ‘I find it's just easier to pin the crime on the right donkey, if you know which direction to look first'

Burkett grinned, surprised that a horse's ass could be poetic. ‘Her blood type was on the shard?'

‘Oh yes,' Underwood said. ‘There are two blood types on the shard. AB negative and O. The mother was AB negative, and Nikola Dumakis is now confirmed as O. Surprise, surprise.'

‘O is very common, sergeant,' Burkett said. ‘You'll need an authorised DNA sample — and you'll have to find her first.'

‘What?' Parry said, his head snapping up. ‘Where is she?'

Underwood chewed on his lip. The clock ticked loudly on the wall. And a drunk and disorderly swore at a fine defaulter in the foyer. Nothing could stop the ringing of that question in his ears.

‘Queensland,' he said, as if he'd just been asked to swallow a suicide pill. ‘Last sighting of her was on a platform at Roma Street Station in Brisbane this morning.'

‘Getting on or getting off?' Burkett said, keen to get as much out of the sergeant while Parry still had him cornered.

‘Off,' he said, almost gulping. ‘Third carriage from the front. Interstate Platform One.'

Parry nodded, dismissing Underwood, who left so quickly, he didn't take any of his reports with him. Parry picked out a clear photo of the Dumakis girl and handed it to Burkett.

‘Grab your sunglasses, Detective,' he said. ‘We're going to Queensland.'

The ride along the lake gave Locklin time to think. He needed the headspace but he hated the silence that encouraged memories he'd rather forget.

He tried to concentrate on the puzzle of his father's murder, of the earrings and the necklace that matched it, but his thoughts kept returning to Nikki Fletcher. She'd been so worried about hiding a few scratches on her wrists and hands, scrapes that could have happened in many ways, that she didn't realise he'd seen the bruises on her shoulder, shaped like fingers trying to grip a girl who'd been struggling to get away.

Her surname and necklace told him whose side she'd once been on, but her injuries and behaviour made him question which side she'd be loyal to now.

Locklin urged Jack out into the dark waters of the lake to swim around the end of the boundary fence. He looked back to the shoreline, seeing the two sides laid out on the shore with a line drawn between them by four strands of rusted barbed wire.

To the left was Freeman, the property he'd been raised on, with its broad green acres, elegant home and thriving cattle. To the right was Scrubhaven, an overgrown forest with a ramshackle house amidst the trees and a small boathouse down by the water. Eric Maitland was running both of them now.

Locklin shook his head, refusing to accept that Maitland had a right to Freeman. The property had never felt more like his. Along the shore, small ripples waved to him and the trees cheered, stretching their leaves towards the heavens like pompoms shaking in the breeze.

Feeling an affinity like this with the land on. which he'd been raised reminded him of his Aboriginal heritage. But he was unable to think of himself as Aboriginal. His mother's blood had been less than half of half of half and at her funeral, he and his sisters had been among the palest in the congregation. His skin was little more than suntanned, his face and body sculptured in the mould of his German forefathers, and the spirit that dwelled in him had no knowledge of any bushcraft that wasn't common to any other farmers son.

He didn't understand his father's sudden obsession with earning his right to his surname and his manhood through deeds. That had been tradition in his mother's family only. But since her death, his father had urged him to the point of obsession to respect her heritage and carry on as her family would have wished. But Locklin didn't feel that way. He was just Australian, or Aus-euro-asian as Helen had once said. Seventh generation in the country with a mix of half the races on the planet in his blood.

All he wanted to do was get a job and race dirt bikes. He'd been state champion at sixteen. Was that wasting his life? But his father had always won the arguments.

‘You
will
be a man! It's university or the army,' Locklin had been told. But after seeing what he'd seen, and doing what he'd done in East Timor, he now regretted not having a third choice.