I took the hint and slowly went to the envelope, picked it up and returned to my chair. Calm movements were essential. Don’t antagonise her. Don’t challenge her. Just listen, keep alert for something you can use. Something you can bring out, nurture, the key to stopping it all. Because this was a clever young woman. Cunning, manipulative. Not the kind of killer who would have carelessly left her diary full of murderous plans in a blazing red backpack at the local rest stop. That’s why the bag was red. Why the bag was otherwise empty. It was a red bag or a fucking neon sign. STOP ME. She wanted to be caught. She wanted to be listened to. She had chosen me to stop her.
I opened the envelope, only now realising how badly my hands were shaking. The photographs inside were jumbled together, corners sticking out everywhere. I slipped my fingers in, pulled out a handful.
The first picture was of a young boy sitting with his back against a bare rock wall. He couldn’t have been older than ten. Naked. Legs splayed. Another young boy had his head resting on the boy’s thigh, face turned inwards, just centimetres from his genitals. Both were clearly unconscious.
I let the pictures fall to the floor one at a time. The same faces. Different faces. Boys and girls in their teens. Some youngsters, tweens. Some of them were simply splayed out, on their own, mostly in the light of a fire. On sand. On rock. Curled on their sides on beds of dry grass. Some of them had been entwined awkwardly together. Heads leaning sloppily on bellies and shoulders, gaping mouths in the dark.
A man began appearing in the photographs. His bulging, white, bespeckled belly. His pale thighs. Dez.
A sickness was rising steadily in my stomach, pressing at the back of my throat. I’d seen pictures like this many times in my work.
‘What are you going to use me for, Bella?’ I said.
‘To get my message out.’ She smiled.
Chapter 111
THERE WAS A thump at the door, a fist bashing, a shouting voice.
Tox ignored it, stood over Regan as he writhed on a fallen couch cushion, trying to scramble away. Tox stabbed down, got the inside thigh of his jeans, the cushion, some carpet. He put a boot into the man’s leg and tried to hold him still. Tox was making this man feel what his victims had felt. It was so good.
The door burst open. A tall, broad figure in a dark polo shirt, hands out. A neighbour on his way home from work, walking past the apartment door, hearing the scuffle within. Tox was distracted for barely a second, and in that time Regan slipped out from beneath him.
A blow to the side of his head, the smash of something porcelain. Tox stumbled. The knife was gone. He twisted, arm up to ward off another blow, but his enemy had risen and encircled him in a tight embrace.
Tox didn’t even feel the first entry wound. The knife slid into him like butter. Practised killer, jamming it under the ribs at the front, into the softness of his abdomen.
Tox gripped Regan, tried to hold him, to make another blow awkward. But the knife came again, sinking deep, pushing the air out of him.
His legs went. Tox hit the floor. His bodily control was gone but his mind was crystal clear. It wasn’t over. Couldn’t be over. He focused, opened his eyes wide, found the killer moving past him in a dark blue blur of shoes and jeans. He was heading for the good Samaritan in the doorway, a neighbour who’d thought he was breaking up an ordinary everyday domestic scuffle, who had then watched the stabbing, frozen in horror.
Tox reached out with all his strength. Careful now. Don’t miss it. The killer’s ankle breezed by. Tox grabbed on, under the hem of the jeans, above the low black sock, as Regan bent his knee, exposing the tiny slice of flesh. Tox gripped Regan’s ankle. Clamped down with his nails. Held on for as many of the precious passing milliseconds as he could.
Regan hardly noticed the scratch.
The neighbour in the doorway was backing away from him as he advanced.
Chapter 112
I PUT THE photographs on the ground. I’d seen enough. Bella was keeping an eye on me as she readied things on the table, duct tape and three small plastic mobile phones, the kind bought at supermarkets for thirty bucks. Dez was watching the floor, his eyes wandering over tiles, trying to distance himself from what was happening.
‘It started when I was fourteen,’ Bella said. ‘Just after Mum left. For the first couple of leadership camps, he left me at home. But I guess he decided he needed an accomplice, someone to disarm the mothers who didn’t want to send their teenage girls away with him into the desert. He had a really good routine going, didn’t you, Dad? He’d wait until the second night, after he’d made everyone do the Morse code exercise and report back to their families that they were all having a great time. The second morning starts with a big trek, so by the time we made camp in the evening everyone was always hideously tired and dehydrated. That’s when he’d have me spike the water bottles.’
Dez squeezed his eyes shut and burst into tears. The stuff in the water bottle at his throat washed back and forth to the rhythm of his sobs.
‘It worked so very well with me,’ Bella said, watching him cry with disinterest. ‘I was the spectacle. The measuring stick. Everyone would wake up the next day and talk about how dazed and tired they still were. And how they couldn’t remember anything after the camp fire. I’d be there to reassure them everyone fell asleep so quickly – we all must have been so tired. When we got back to Last Chance Valley I’d prance around and tell all the parents what a great time we had. What choice did I have but to be his accomplice? I was a kid.’ She looked at her father. ‘I was a kid when he started this.’
‘Bella,’ I said, ‘I can understand your anger.’
‘Can you?’ she asked. She took a seat at the dining-room table, by her little pile of equipment, and looked at me. ‘I guess you’ve probably seen stuff like this before, doing what you do. You’ll know that sometimes the boys and girls who have been drugged, they start to remember. It’s not like they’re completely unconscious. You can’t give them too much, or you might snuff one of them out. So sometimes they’d recall things. Someone pulling off their pants …’ She looked at Dez. Her lip curled in a snarl. ‘Someone pushing up their training bra.’
‘Bella –’
‘But I was there,’ she said. ‘I was the alibi. I’d wrestle the genie back into the bottle. You were dreaming. You were having nightmares. It wasn’t real. After a while I got so good at it I’d have them believing they hadn’t even dreamed it. Especially the littler ones. You just make them feel ridiculous. And then they never mention it again. Not even to their parents.’
I could hear the distant music from the town pub. A bass beat, the occasional cheer. The big windows that looked out onto the fields were pitch black. What I would have given for someone to arrive unexpectedly, Kash or Snale, someone who would know instantly what to do. Even if it was just to distract her so that I could grab my gun back. But she followed my glance, smiled a little, pitying. We both knew no one was coming.
Chapter 113
IT HAD BEEN her plan. All of it. She’d taken great pleasure in the planning, relishing as she counted down the days. Day Seventeen of the countdown to oblivion. Day Ten. Day Zero. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had counted down to their Day Zero from more than a year out. They’d woken up on the day of the massacre with the excitement of Christmas morning buzzing in their brains. No one had listened to them before. But they would now.
‘The first time I ever told someone outright, it was Chief Campbell,’ Bella said. ‘I thought about going to Sergeant Snale first but I didn’t think I’d be able to stomach her pity. She’d have been so … understanding. So gentle with her questions. You know? I couldn’t deal with that. So I marched right into Soupy Campbell’s office one day and just told him outright.’
‘He didn’t believe you,’ I said.