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

bone. Tox glanced at his shirt.
    ‘Eh,’ he said.
    ‘You’re going to go to uni,’ I mused. ‘Start fresh. Make something of your life. You’re twenty-four years old, so you’ve left it late, but not that late. You’ve been accepted. What do you do?’
    ‘You go out and buy textbooks,’ Tox said.
    ‘Right. Textbooks, a laptop maybe. Not expensive clothes. And where’s this money coming from in the first place? The big money she says she’s about to come into?’
    An email came up on my phone and I checked it. It was a brief summary from the medical examiner, a quick review of his initial findings before the full autopsy on Claudia Burrows. Tox had been right about the livor mortis, and the pulmonary oedema, and the fact that Claudia had likely been dead a day, in the water about twenty hours. He was also right about the breast implants. I saw him smiling at his laptop screen. He’d probably just got the same email.
    ‘This is interesting,’ I said. ‘She’s had her hair dyed and cut no more than a week ago. And she’s taken a good bonk to the back of the head.’
    ‘Feet are showing blisters from the new high heels,’ Tox added.
    ‘So whatever she needed to jazz her appearance up for, she’s done it in the last week or so. Parents didn’t mention any job interviews. Weird.’
    Our coffees came. I gulped mine and ordered another.
    ‘“Skin slippage around the right ankle suggests ligature, ante-mortem, for a short amount of time, pulling downward over the front of the foot towards the toes,”’ I read. ‘So she was weighed down when she went in the water.’
    ‘How do you figure that?’
    ‘Well, weight goes into the water.’ I drew a circle on the greasy tabletop with my finger, a line rising from it. ‘Rope goes up from the weight, ties around Claudia’s ankle. Claudia floats upward, pulling the rope down towards her toes. The rope doesn’t bruise her too badly because it comes loose in the storm, letting her body float away.’
    We fell into silence to consider the images before us, the cold medical text detailing Claudia’s horrific last moments on earth.
    ‘This is a pretty nasty killer we have here,’ I said. ‘I can’t imagine why throwing her in alive was necessary. By the time you’ve got her tied to the weight, she’s under your control. Why not put her out of her misery? Why make her think about the journey down to the bottom of the sea? It’s so vicious.’
    ‘I don’t know about that,’ Tox said. ‘Think about it. Putting her out of her misery is extra effort. Extra
consideration
. What we might have here is someone who isn’t even that thoughtful. Someone who never thought about what the victim would or wouldn’t feel. I think we’re looking for a killer whose priority is getting the job done, ticking the boxes. Just my opinion.’
    I pushed my phone away and studied his face as he checked through the rest of his emails. I couldn’t help but feel an icy heaviness in my chest at his talk of priorities and getting the job done. He’d shown himself to be just that kind of man. Unconcerned with what people feel. I wondered if he was just talking about Claudia’s victims, or his own ones too.

CHAPTER 20
    MY KNUCKLES STILL hurt from the impact against the back of Ben Hammond’s skull, but I wasn’t focusing on that as I smacked my opponent in his ribs, his chest. I surged forward and drove an elbow into the side of his padded head. Pops backed up into the corner of the ring. I didn’t think of him as the old, squat man that he was. In the ring we were equals. I gave him a couple of jabs in the face and backed off to let him out of the trap he’d fallen into.
    ‘Mind that back step.’ The Chief pointed at my foot with his red boxing glove. ‘Don’t cross.’
    Pops had been training me since I’d arrived at Sydney Metro to take up the grand position of the only woman on the sex crimes squad. There hadn’t been a female in my role for five years, but the