Chapter 21
THE WORKOUT WAS invigorating, my quiet exhilaration heightened when he announced ruefully that I’d completed it. My body screamed through dozens and dozens of burpees, joint-grinding squats and panicked sprints to the end of the yard and back. When I knew he was looking, I scratched my nose with one hand during the push-up sets, the other arm continuing on through the exercise with what I hoped looked like effortlessness. I finished drenched in sweat. There were no congratulations from my new partner. He trudged off towards the house in silence.
I sat in bed making a list, light beginning to creep under the curtains drawn closed around the glassed-in porch. The porch was creaky, and when Jerry the pig came out to join me at sunrise the whole thing rattled like an old wooden wagon. The huge animal stood snuffling at me for a while, its big brown eyes searching mine, then flopped to the floor by my bed with an exhausted sigh.
Snale was right. The snoring was oddly comforting. I lay on my side and watched the animal’s ear flapping now and then as it dreamed. Its body warmth made my corner of the porch cosy. I fell asleep to thoughts of Sam’s case.
I had so much that I wanted to do to help my brother, but all of it was out of my hands. There was so much evidence against Sam. Not least his confession.
I walked up behind her. I was quiet. I swept my arm around her neck, pulled her backwards towards my car …
Sam confessed to all three murders. But less than an hour after leaving the interrogation room, he said the confession was coerced. I didn’t want to believe that my own colleagues might have psychologically tortured my brother, exhausted him and threatened him until he simply surrendered. Maybe they’d beaten him. I’d been known to get a little rough with suspects myself, inside and outside the interrogation room.
But I also didn’t want to believe that Sam was guilty. So I tried not to believe anything.
Marissa Haydon had disappeared from the university grounds, in a small car park behind the campus bar on a quiet Tuesday afternoon. My brother’s credit card records showed he had been in the bar that same afternoon.
Elle Ramone had disappeared from a street three blocks away from the university, in the residential area behind the main street of Newtown. Sam usually walked home that way at around the same time she had gone missing, from his graphic design business in Marrickville, where he worked the three days a week that he wasn’t teaching.
Rosetta Poelar had disappeared from a side street off of Parramatta Road, near the university’s veterinary science building. CCTV inside a bicycle shop captured Sam walking through the area just fifteen minutes before Rosetta was last seen.
Sam had been at the right place, at the right time, for all three abductions. Police had been watching him, and they didn’t like what they saw. He was single. He was antisocial. He had a history of juvenile crime. If he was as violent as his sister when he lost control, he might be deadly. The task force had jumped in and made an arrest even if the evidence was flimsy. The media had been hounding them for progress. Even a false arrest at that point would have been something.
That night, things took a turn. The police had found worrying evidence inside Sam’s apartment – some violent porn, a rape dungeon–style set-up in his back bedroom. Those things were circumstantial. There was no evidence of any of the girls at Sam’s place, and no evidence of Sam on any of their bodies. But the prosecution could physically place him near all three abduction sites. What were the odds?
I woke from a sweaty half-slumber and slid my notebook out from under my pillow. I flipped through the crime scene photographs of the girls’ bodies sprawled on the banks of the Georges River. I looked at the trees on the opposite bank, a blur of pale eucalypts in the photograph. Fine grey sand and murky brown water. This place meant something to the killer. What had it meant to us?
My childhood had been full of rivers, fields, national parks. Often, Sam and I found ourselves in large families with multiple foster children lumped together with biological children. When child services found a willing foster carer, someone who was reliable, they sent them as many kids as they could possibly handle. Sam and I, two moody, aggressive white kids, would become part of an odd collection of youngsters all under the care of one foster couple. With so many kids in tow, traditional means of entertainment were off the cards. Going to the movies was too expensive. The families would take us to parks, rivers and long, empty beaches. Sam and I had spent time at the Georges River, but that time hadn’t been any more meaningful than it had been anywhere else. At least, it hadn’t to me.
Maybe there were things about Sam I didn’t know. We’d been separated now and then, sometimes for up to a year, when families wouldn’t take us both. Maybe there was another Sam, a brother grown out of those blank spaces in his life, the ones I hadn’t witnessed.
An evil Sam.