Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) Read Free Page A

who had worked with him were harassed relentlessly by their peers. He was the fox in the henhouse. Aligning yourself with him meant you were on the side of a predator.
    I’d heard that there was nothing the administration had been able to do to stop Barnes being a cop. He’d aced his application, and he’d committed the murders so young his record had been expunged. But that didn’t mean the rest of the force was going to sit by and let a murderer operate in their midst. He was the enemy, and if you joined him, you were the enemy too.
    ‘Listen, Tox, I’m Detective Harriet Blue.’ I shook his rough hand half-heartedly. ‘I’m going to need you to clear out of this scene. Chief Morris has put me on it.’
    ‘Meh,’ Tox said, and returned to crouching.
    I waited, but nothing further came, so I bent down beside him and glanced at the body.
    ‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that.’
    ‘I said “Meh”,’ Tox replied. ‘It was a dismissive noise.’
    I was so shocked, so furious, I hadn’t even taken in the sight of the girl on the sand before us. My eyes flicked over her naked chest, unseeing, as I tried to get my mind around the reality of the situation. She looked mid-twenties, beautiful, dark-haired. She was wearing only a pair of panties. She was a Georges River girl. I knew it. I needed to get this parasite of a man off my case.
    ‘You don’t understand,’ I said, ‘this is my crime scene. This is my case. And I don’t work with partners.’
    ‘Neither do I,’ he said, as if it were a matter of choice.
    ‘Right.’ I sighed. ‘So you can give me a brief on what you’ve observed, and then I need you to beat it and take your dismissive noises with you.’
    Tox seemed to smirk in the dark, stood and walked around the back of the body. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard me or not. At the edge of the police tape, twenty yards away, my fellow officers were watching carefully to see if I’d cooperate with their nemesis, thereby giving them permission to make my life a living hell. I noticed some journalists among the crowd. The uniformed patrol officers securing the scene were so interested in Tox and me that they weren’t even pushing them back.
    When I turned around, I saw that Tox had a pocket knife. He flicked open the blade with a snap, and slashed at the girl.

CHAPTER 9
    ‘WHAT THE—’ I stood up, tried to shield what Tox was doing from the press, who’d started snapping pictures. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’
    Tox didn’t answer. He flipped the girl onto her front and pulled the underpants he’d slashed from her hips off her body. I watched in horror as he poked at the corpse’s backside with the butt of the blade. He leaned in close and examined the surface of her skin. Someone at the edge of the crowd sneered.
    ‘Sicko,’ somebody said. ‘Someone say something.’
    ‘Nah, man. Leave him. Let him mess up all the evidence.’
    ‘Detective Barnes,’ I said, ‘I’m ordering you to stop what you’re doing
right now
.’
    Tox put both his hands on the corpse’s back and pushed down hard, just once. He pulled the hair away from the girl’s face and stuck his third finger between her lips, pushed it deep inside her throat. The dead girl’s cheeks puckered obscenely to allow his finger to push down. He extracted the finger and looked at the tip in the torchlight, grunted thoughtfully. I watched him take the girl’s wrist and give it an exploratory wiggle before he stood up and dusted off his palms.
    ‘Mmm,’ he said, and strode away from me towards the riverbank.
    I followed, grateful to be out of earshot of the vile things the cops at the tape were saying about him. I caught him at the water’s edge and shoved him hard in the back. He stumbled in the sand.
    ‘What was that for?’ he said in his strange whispery voice.
    ‘Jesus, I don’t know, for violating the corpse of a young woman in front of all the nation’s leading newspapers and half the police force?’ I snarled.