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

‘What is wrong with you, man?’
    ‘I wasn’t violating the corpse, I was testing a theory.’ He looked towards the mouth of the river. ‘The kids who found the body said they thought they recognised the girl from a party last night, a few streets back from the river. I wanted to find out if that was bullshit before we go off interviewing all the morons who attended the party. She wasn’t there. So we can forget that.’
    I felt as if I were dreaming. This man seemed to have no idea how inappropriate his handling of the body had been. He was looking off towards the river and talking to himself as though I wasn’t standing there.
    ‘Of course she wasn’t at the party,’ I said. ‘Are you
that
stupid? She’s a Georges River girl. Right river, right age, right placement of the body. I could have told you that before you stuck your finger in her mouth.’
    ‘Are
you
that stupid?’ Tox looked at me finally. ‘She’s
not
one of the Georges River Killer’s victims. No. She didn’t die anywhere near here.’
    ‘You’re insane.’ I waved him away and turned back to the crime scene. ‘You don’t touch a body until forensics are done with it. That’s the first thing they teach you on the first day of forensics. You just … you’ve compromised the case.’
    I could hardly speak I was so mad. His passive stare made it worse.
    ‘Forensics won’t find anything,’ he said. ‘She’s been in the water for hours.’
    ‘I’m not listening to you. I like my job too much.’
    ‘Heh,’ he said. ‘If you liked your job so much, you wouldn’t insist on doing it wrong.’
    ‘Fuck you.’
    ‘She wasn’t killed here. She was killed out to sea. She came here in the storm.’
    I stopped walking and stared at him.
    He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket and looked back with the ease and calm of a madman.
    ‘Bullshit.’
    ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘She’s got mottled livor mortis on her ass and pulmonary oedema in her lungs.’
    He waited, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of asking him to explain how he’d come up with that. He walked towards me and stood over me, as most men do.
    ‘Livor mortis,’ he said. ‘The settling and pooling of blood in the veins after de—’
    ‘I know what livor mortis is, asshole.’
    ‘Well, you’ll know that if a corpse is being tossed around in rough water, the blood doesn’t settle, so it never collects,’ he said. ‘Except in the ass. Fine skin. Lots of big juicy fat cells. I’d say she’s been in the water at least twenty hours. With the storm blowing a westerly, she was likely dumped out there, in the ocean.’
    ‘The rigor mortis? Not set?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘And the pulmonary oedema,’ I said, feeling my hackles rise again. ‘The foam in her lu—’
    ‘I know what pulmonary oedema is, asshole,’ Tox said.
    ‘She was alive when she went in,’ I whispered.

CHAPTER 10
    I FOLLOWED TOX back to the body of the girl and stood facing away from the crowd. My mind was swirling. Sure, Tox knew his stuff. He’d already started developing a theory, helping my case enormously within only minutes of the scene being cordoned off. But as I glanced at the cops behind me, I knew I couldn’t keep him around much longer or I’d never get the thing solved. Working with Tox Barnes wouldn’t throw a spanner into the works. It’d throw a whole toolbox.
    As far as I’d heard, people now and then were forced to work with him. But he was a burden that one took heavily, and offloaded as soon as possible. You found a way to transfer out of partnership with him, or soon enough you would begin to find your job almost impossible. People started avoiding you in the coffee room. Losing your reports, delaying your lab results. Accidents would begin to happen – someone would spill coffee on your laptop, bump your car on the way out of the parking lot, forget to include you in weekend get-togethers.
    I’d just turned to him to ask him again to leave when I