Violent Exposure (27 page)

He looked past her. Carly turned to see Mick helping the men climb out, and heard him asking were they okay, telling them they’d done their best. God, she loved working with him.

The worker nodded at the yeller, who was now sitting in the open door of an electrician’s van, his head in his hands. ‘Freaked Stevo right out cos the guy’s got these barbed-wire tatts like his son,
and he thought for a second it was him.’

‘Understandable,’ Carly said.

‘I said lots of guys have those, plus this guy’s hair’s too short, you know? But he still got all anxious.’

‘Lots of people do around bodies,’ Carly said. ‘Thanks.’

She went back to Mick, who was looking into the skip. ‘He was just found there this morning,’ she said.

Mick nodded. ‘He looks really young. Like teenaged.’

Carly looked over the side at the body. His face under the dust looked smooth. He wore runners and jeans and a stained blue T-shirt, and his arms below the sleeves looked firm. His hair was short and dark and dusty.

‘See any injuries?’ she asked.

‘Just the scabbed cut here.’ He pointed to the body’s arm.

‘This guy said he has tatts. That’ll help the cops at least. Assuming he has no ID.’

‘Those guys said they checked but there’s nothing in his pockets. Where are the tatts?’

‘There, on his right arm. Just poking out of his sleeve. One of those barbed-wire things.’

Saying it while looking at the body made Carly pause. She hoisted herself onto the lip to see better.

‘What is it?’ Mick said.

‘Oh my God.’

‘What?’

‘I think I know this kid.’ She started to scramble in but Mick grabbed
her arm. ‘I have to get in there and see.’

‘It might be a crime scene and they’ve already stomped around in it enough,’ he hissed.

‘Then what more damage can I do?’

‘If you do know him, you’ll do what’s in his best interests and stay out.’

Carly leaned in as far as she could, trying to get above the body and look down. The smell rose into her face and she held her breath.

Oh Jesus
.

She forced
down the lump in her throat and held back the tears that burned the back of her eyes. The workers were looking at her, Mick was looking at her and trying to help her off the skip edge, and now the cops were pulling up.

‘I think it’s him,’ she said in a low and breaking voice to Mick.

‘It’s okay.’

He went to speak to the cops, then they came across to peer into the skip.

‘You know him?’ one
asked.

‘I think his name’s Emil Page.’

The cops looked at each other, then one went back to the car. The other leaned over the edge to see the body again.

‘Emil’s got this tatt on his arm, it’s three rings of wire, I can’t see if there’s three rings there or not.’ Carly was babbling but couldn’t stop. ‘It looks like him but I can’t be completely sure without seeing that tatt, his face is so
dusty, and he’s on his back, plus there’s the time since he, you know, died . . .’ The cop from the car came back. ‘Homicide detectives need to speak to you. They asked if you can wait for them.’

‘No problem,’ Mick said. He picked up their gear and steered Carly back to the ambulance. ‘Hop in.’

‘I should stay with him.’

Mick looked at her.

She got in the passenger seat, knowing it was crazy
to think that he needed a friend nearby, but he’d been such a nice young guy, quiet but with a spark inside him that you knew would really fire up in the right circumstances – like when he’d told her he wouldn’t be at the acting class any more because he’d got a job, got a little flat and everything. She’d hugged him and felt the bones and muscles of his warm back. And now here he was, all his effort
at pulling himself together and building up hopes having come to nothing.

She pressed her fingernails into her palms.

An unmarked car pulled up and two detectives in smart casual clothes got out. Mick went over, and Carly watched them talk first to the uniformed officers, then to Mick, then the female detective came over to the driver’s door.

‘May I?’

Carly nodded.

The detective climbed up
behind the wheel and stuck out her hand. ‘Detective Ella Marconi.’

‘Carly Martens.’

Marconi looked out the windscreen. ‘These things are high.’

Carly nodded again. Marconi focused back on her. Carly remembered her name now – she’d been on the Phillips case, and was working on the murder of the woman Aidan had slept with.

‘You went to the Crawfords’ house for the domestic with Aidan Simpson,’
Marconi said.

‘Yes.’

‘How do you know Emil Page?’

‘I do some volunteer work with a group called Streetlights,’ Carly said. ‘I teach them acting. Emil was one of the kids I worked with, until a couple of months ago when he got a job and left. I haven’t seen him since then.’

‘He ever tell you he’d had an affair with Suzanne Crawford?’ Marconi said.

Carly was stunned. ‘Are you serious?’

‘You
didn’t overhear the kids talking about it, anything like that?’

‘No way.’

The detective nodded. ‘Do you know Brooke Hayes?’

‘Yep. She takes the acting class.’

‘Have you seen her or talked to her in the last few days?’

‘Yesterday.’

‘Did she say anything about Emil or Suzanne Crawford?’

‘Not about Emil, but she did ask me about Suzanne,’ Carly said. ‘She wanted to know what somebody looked
like who’d died like that, and whether it was true that an image of the person somebody looked at as they died stayed on their eyes.’

Marconi’s gaze sharpened. ‘Really.’

‘She seemed a bit upset about it but wouldn’t say anything else and then I thought perhaps I’d imagined it.’

‘Did she say how well she knew Suzanne?’

‘She said she’d met her at the nursery.’

Marconi looked across at the other
detective who was talking to the worker who’d found Emil. ‘Did you notice any injuries?’

‘One cut on his forearm,’ Carly said. ‘We couldn’t see anything else.’ She told Marconi about the tattoos Emil had, and that she thought the body had too.

Marconi looked up and down the street, then up at the light poles. Carly wondered what she was looking for – CCTV cameras perhaps. ‘You haven’t seen Brooke
since yesterday?’

‘No.’

‘Neither have we,’ Marconi said.

‘Are you going to check the tatts now? Like, get in there and look at him?’ Another unmarked car parked at the curb and a tall woman got out.

Marconi nodded at her. ‘We will now that the doctor’s here.’

Carly followed Marconi across the footpath. The doctor pulled on gloves then climbed into the skip. She balanced on the cut lumber
scraps and crouched. Carly watched her look into the mouth, check the eyes, press the skin. She held the hands and turned the arms outward, brushing dirt from the antecubital fossae.

‘Trackmarks,’ she said.

Marconi looked at Carly. ‘Did he use?’

‘I’d seen old scars there but never anything new,’ Carly said.

‘We’ve got old ones,’ the doctor said, ‘and some recent, including a couple here shortly
before death.’

‘Can you tell whether he injected himself or someone did it to him?’ the other detective asked.

‘No way of knowing,’ the doctor said. ‘The other person could be a user too, or have some training in it, like as a nurse.’ She looked at the body again. ‘These look like bloodstains on his shirt.’

‘Can we see that tatt?’ Marconi said.

The doctor slid the T-shirt sleeve up. ‘Three
rings of barbed wire.’

Carly stumbled away from the skip. Mick grabbed her arm. ‘I’m okay,’ she said. ‘Just let me get in the truck.’

She sat in the passenger side with her forehead in her hand, feeling shaky and dazed. She saw bodies every week and often didn’t think much of it. Knowing the person made it worse than she could’ve ever imagined.

Mick finished up with the cops then got behind
the wheel. ‘You want to sign off? Go home?’

‘He was in my acting class for the homeless kids.’

Mick put his hand on her arm. ‘I’m sorry, Carls.’

‘He was one of the good ones too.’ Tears pricked her eyes. ‘What a fucking waste. And to be chucked in a bin. Who would do something like that?’

‘I guess if it’s linked to their case maybe they think it was the husband of the stabbed woman.’

‘Why?’
It was a pointless question and she knew it. People got murdered for next to no reason every day of the week. She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. ‘Fuck.’ She pressed her face into her hands for a moment, then sat up, put on her sunglasses and clipped in her seatbelt. ‘Life sucks.’

Mick started the ambulance. ‘And then you die.’

*

Ella watched the ambulance leave. ‘Though Connor only
used pot with Bridges, maybe he was into harder stuff too. Maybe that’s what’s in his past.’

‘But why the fake background?’ Dennis said. ‘What’s he covering up?’

‘Jail time? Or hiding from ripped-off dealers? It could be anything.’

Dennis stared at the body.

Dr Sam Fielding stood up. ‘No ID. He’s been dead about twenty-four hours. There’s a cut on the inside of his arm, with healing barely
begun, so he died soon after it was made. The dust that’s thicker around his wrists is stuck to his skin, on some kind of adhesive.’

‘Like if he’d been bound with tape that someone removed before dumping him?’ Ella said.

‘Could be. It’s certainly in bands.’ Sam started to climb out.

Ella faced Dennis. ‘We need to get his prints and check if they match anything found in the house, and see if
it’s his blood spotted on the floor. See whose blood is on his shirt, too.’

Dennis was still staring into the skip. ‘So what are we thinking? Emil went there and tried to – what? See Suzanne again?’

‘And Connor flipped out and killed Suzanne and abducted Emil and tortured him?’ Ella said. ‘He doesn’t look tortured.’

‘Just threatened him then,’ she said. ‘Or tortured him with drugs.’

‘I guess
we’re going to have to warn Aidan Simpson again.’ Dennis looked at his watch. ‘But first, meeting time.’

They reached the office ten minutes late. The meeting room was packed with restless detectives, some of them waiting to go home to bed, some keen to get on with their day.

‘New development,’ Ella began loudly. ‘This morning Emil Page was found dead in a rubbish skip in Pyrmont. There are
signs of intravenous drug use, but the doctor couldn’t say whether he’d self-administered or had it given to him by someone who knew at least a little about what he was doing. He’d been dead about twenty-four hours.’

‘Maybe Connor was once a nurse or something?’ Daniel Farley said.

‘Or even a user himself,’ Jen Katzen said. ‘Maybe that’s part of what he’s hiding.’

Ella said, ‘Uniform has started
canvassing the area but we need to get more people out there soon. We’d also like to talk to Brooke Hayes, another teenager involved with Streetlights, who intimated to a paramedic that she knew something more than she’s letting on. You have her photo and details from last night. Nightshift guys, how’d you go with her friends?’

Detectives Allan Cregan and Tess Jacobs shook their heads. ‘They
haven’t seen or heard from her in at least a week. We went past the shelters too but she wasn’t in any of them either.’

‘If she knows something, she might’ve gone to ground completely,’ Jen Katzen said. ‘Unless Connor has decided he needs to deal with her too, and took her off the street.’

Ella glanced at Dennis.
Exactly what I’d always feared
.

‘For the moment there’s no evidence of that,’
he said to the group. ‘The other issue is that if Connor killed Emil for revenge, the paramedic Aidan Simpson might be in danger too. We’re going to speak to him shortly.’

Worse luck
, Ella thought.

Dennis said, ‘Nightshift?’

‘Stewart Bridges was apparently telling the truth,’ Detective Wilson Turnbull said. ‘After some initial reluctance Panozzo confirmed everything he said, from the time they
spent at his house, to the trip to see Suzanne Crawford, to finding her body and then their whispered argument on the street. It was him crossing the street outside the convenience store too, he said, and it took him so long to reach that point because he felt faint and had to sit down for five minutes. His description of the scene matches what we found. He admitted to calling Bridges when you
two were at his house and telling him to say nothing as well.’ Turnbull grinned. ‘Once he got talking he could hardly stop: claimed that Bridges got him into smoking pot, that he was his supplier and that if anyone should get in trouble for anything it’s him for that, and that the only reason he went there was because Bridges had led him to think that Suzanne might be willing to sleep with somebody
famous like him.’

Ella couldn’t imagine Bridges so much as hinting something like that, not with the torch he was carrying. It sounded like the desperate arse-covering of an egotistical man.

She said to Detective Charlie Sharp, ‘How’d you go with your search for fires?’

‘Still nothing that’s fitting the frame of two parents killed and a teenaged – or younger, or even older – boy surviving,’
he said. ‘I’ll keep widening the criteria though.’

‘What about the search into missing persons?’

He shook his head. ‘There’s nobody missing with his date of birth, but a heap of missing males in that rough age range. If we use the date when he first appeared to Suzanne and her friends as Connor Crawford, the field gets smaller.’

‘Murphy and Katzen, you take that over today,’ Dennis said. ‘See
if any look promising enough to get an age progression done. Have any of the calls to the hotline given anything along those lines? Anyone called in to say they recognise him as their long lost?’

‘Nothing like that,’ Hepburn said, ‘but we had a couple of sightings of their car driving around the inner western suburbs. I faxed off a notice to the stations in the area and asked VKG to tell all
cars.’

‘Good,’ Dennis said.

‘Blood report’s in,’ Hepburn said. ‘The smears in the hall and on the doorstep did come from Bridges’ shoes. There were three different blood types on the kitchen floor though.’