"Yep," Kit responded. "Encountering the Chuck yesterday was bad enough but this is an unpleasant coincidental blast from my past, and I hate coincidences. So, I'm going now."
"I don't get you, O'Malley," Cathy remarked, with another half-smile that meant Kit couldn't work out whether she was disappointed or baffled or, in fact, why she was anything.
"What's to get?" Kit shrugged. She pulled out a business card and placed it on Cathy's desk. "Thank you. If you need anything, or have anything for me, please call."
Kit was at the door before Cathy reacted. "There was one thing you didn't ask, O'Malley."
"Only one?" Kit said mockingly.
"Yeah. The when did Gerry Anders die question."
"Okay. I'll bite. When did Gerry's severe loss of blood result in his no longer being alive?"
Detective Senior Constable Cathy Martin raised her eyebrows - and kept them there. "Ruth reckons last weekend - as in six or seven days ago. His body had evidently been kept on ice."
"Oh, that's charming," Kit remarked. "Who the hell would want a dead Gerry Anders lying around in their freezer?"
"He wasn't frozen, he was stored somewhere just cool enough to keep him fresh."
"Oh, now you see," Kit noted, "that is way more information than I needed."
Cathy laughed. "And it, all of it O'Malley, is for your ears only, okay?
"Oh yeah," Kit agreed, as she opened the door. "And thanks, Cathy."
CHAPTER SIX
"So?" Erin demanded as Kit emerged from the interview room. "What have you found out?"
"About what?" Kit teased, walking by the squad room towards the lift and chocolate cake.
"About whatever it was you were in there to find out about," Erin said seriously.
"Erin honey, this is a two cappuccino story, at least. And I'm not going into any details until we're sitting in some café with the appropriate..."
Bang!
"...ambience," Kit finished.
Seven cops, from three or four crews, working a host of still-to-be-solved murders, raised their heads in a united squad reaction to the slamming of a single door. All eyes, Kit's and Erin's included, were on the detective standing alone and stunned outside Jon Marek's office.
Marek himself paced fro then back to his door, wrenched it open and crowded the much-heavier-built-than-him detective back against the hall wall. "I don't want any more bloody excuses, Harper. Find that sick little creep, ask him the questions again and get us something we can use. If you can't manage that, then I can manage you a transfer out of this squad."
"Right boss. Whatever you say, Marek."
"Like there'd be any other way to do it!" Marek stepped back into his office, picked up a phone book and hurled it at his chair which sent it crashing into the back wall.
Harper glanced at his colleagues, who returned their collective attention to everything else around them, so he headed down the hall in the other direction.
"What's going on?" Erin whispered. "Do you think Jon's okay?'
"No, I don't actually," Kit replied. "Listen Erin, I'm supposed to meet a couple guys you know at Leo's in an hour. Do you want to wait for me there? I think Marek-"
"Go, Kit," Erin insisted.
This time as Kit reached Marek's door, he stepped out and scowled at her. "Now what?"
"We need to talk," she said quietly.
"Not now, O'Malley."
"Yes now, Marek. Please?"
"What about for Christ's sake? Can't you see I'm busy?"
"Can we go in here?" Kit asked, indicating the room behind her which had no windows to the rest of this interior world.
"You do not want to go in there," Marek stated.
"Is there anyone in there?"
"No."
"Then that's exactly where I want us to go." Kit opened the door and all but dragged Marek into the room. She shut them in, but he switched the light on and then crossed his arms defensively over his chest and gave her a look that said, 'well, get on with it then'.
Oh. Actually, on closer examination, Kit realised his was a typical 'how come you never listen to me?' stance, and his expression was more of a 'you asked for it'.
Kit looked around at three cork-boarded walls, covered in the crime scene photos of what could only belong to the Barleycorn Task Force - the homicide investigation into the murderous activities of the person the press had dubbed the Rental Killer, but what those in the know regarded as the serial nightmare of Bubblewrap Man.
"Do you still want to be in here?" Marek asked, coldly.
Kit held on tight to a shallow breath, and walked a horror walk around a pictorial gallery of torture and mutilation beyond description which showed, from every possible angle, the ghastly images of once-were-women - stolen, starved, brutalised and murdered.
Kit looked at the photos, at the victims, not to prove she could and certainly not because she wanted to - the devil himself, the bastard, knew that wasn't so - but because this was what was wrong with her friend.
Day and night, for nearly four months, Jon Marek had been enduring the depravity wrought by this 'barbarian' as he'd called him. And Marek's job on this investigation was not a case of applying work time and professional energy to solving one or two beyond-awful murders. This was a thirty-hour a day offering-up of his mind and psyche to find the killer of two, then three, then... It was now five women who'd been starved, raped, beaten and had their hearts cut out while still, but barely, alive. Five victims, who had then been encased in bubblewrap and left in empty rental houses.
Erin Carmody had been involved in finding victim number three, which was partly how Kit knew as much as she did about this case; and that was way more than the average woman on Melbourne's streets, who knew only that there was a serial killer loose amongst them. They could only surmise, from what the media were allowed to reveal, that this was a killer who worked to no apparent rhyme and with no reasonable pattern, there being nothing similar about the victims - not their age, their hair or eye colour, their job, their marital or financial status, their religion or ethnicity, their car, their gym, their vet. Nothing - except their gender. The random nature of the Rental Killer's choice of victim made him all the more terrifying, because any and every woman in the city was at risk until he was caught.
And each time, since the phone call that led Erin and the police to the body of Susan West in an otherwise empty house in Elwood, Bubblewrap Man had called a different journalist to inform them where, in their neighbourhood, he'd left his latest victim.
Marek sighed deeply and dropped into one of the orange plastic chairs placed at the huge table in the centre of the room. "Get the hell out of here, O'Malley," he advised.
As Kit's attention shifted from the crime scene photos to the multitude of evidence bags that covered the table, she was overwhelmed for the first time in her life by the oppressive, age-old and female-only surge of cowering anxiety spawned by a perceived powerlessness.
Shit! That's an awful feeling, she shuddered. Thank something, however, the already-dissipating flush of nameless panic did not make her feel afraid, or leave a residue of dread.
No. You're not getting me, Kit scowled; feeling righteously angry and fighting mad. All she wanted now, was to draw her broadsword and cut this murdering bastard to pieces.
"O'Malley, please?" Marek's eyes sadly searched hers. "This is no place for..."
Kit squatted down, balancing herself with