Voodoo Doll jj-2 Read online

  Because his father and grandfather had purchased the house together, young Henry was the only child to have a bedroom of his own. He would have preferred to sleep in this room with everyone else, on the mattresses that were rolled out each evening; but his grandfather had insisted that Henry occupy his own bed, telling him that he would one day inherit the home and should be aware of his place in the family.

  Cutter had had great respect for his grandfather, who'd died when he was only eight, less than twelve months after Cutter's father had been hit by a car and killed instantly.

  Cutter's grandfather had been a hero of the war in Vietnam, a general in the South Vietnamese army, fighting for the allies. At night, he had sat with Henry by the hour and verbally recreated epic battles, his role in fighting for the South. He'd prevented the deaths of hundreds of Australian and American troops, teaching them how to recognise and survive the perils of the steaming jungle. There were the panji pits: sticks and branches concealing a ditch studded with protruding spikes that had been poisoned with rotting meat. There were mines suspended from trees, created from discarded Western supplies, set at heights designed to pulverise half the face. He taught them to recognise signs in the bush that the enemy had passed or were waiting – bent leaves, a broken branch. He told Henry of the elaborate Cu Chi Tunnels, designed to house whole families as well as munitions, with deadly snakes kept ready to be released upon enemies brave enough to venture inside. The landmines in the hills of Long Hai; the perils of R amp;R in the streets of Saigon. Young Cutter, wide-eyed, sat on his bed with his chin on his knees, rapt, as his grandfather conjured up the tastes, smells and sounds of a country he had never visited.

  Of course, the history lessons were not without pain. Henry understood that. One terrible night, betrayed by some of his own villagers, his grandfather had been captured by the Vietcong. Before he was rescued a week later when the Australians overran the camp, he had been tortured almost to death. Grandfather had watched each of his loyal troops beheaded one by one, their heads used as footballs by the enemy. When he'd closed his eyes, unable to watch, his eyelids were cut from his face. Grandpa told Henry that he knew his time would soon come when he had watched his lieutenant's manhood being cut from his loins and forced into his mouth, his lips then sewn crudely shut. He had watched his best friend's eyes pleading with him, the blood from his balls running from his mouth, before he too had been decapitated.

  Grandpa told Henry that the experience had made him more than a man; he felt immortal. Death had no power over him. Pain held no fear. But the most powerful lesson, he told the boy almost every night, he had learned from the needles. It was his responsibility, he explained to his grandson, to teach him, to impart to him the same power.

  Grandfather told him that the needles were inserted by his captors under the foreskin of his penis. Any sound made caused another needle to be inserted. This continued until the man made no murmur, no sound. The lesson would then be over until the next day.

  Cutter learned the lesson in one night when he was four years of age. He'd had the flu and his grandfather had stayed home with him while his family was out celebrating Tet. Most nights thereafter, until his grandfather's death, Henry was instructed in his heritage by the war hero.

  As a boy, Henry had loved Saturdays. Once a week on this day, he had the honour of accompanying his grandfather to the local market. There, neighbours and stallholders would pay their respects to Grandpa. Small children would stare at Henry in awe or curiosity as he led the war hero through the bakeries and vegetable stands. Grandpa's eyesight was very poor and he wore his usual huge dark glasses to protect his scarred eyes. He walked slowly; Henry knew his grandfather had terrible arthritis in multiple old injury sites on his arms and legs. Yet his bearing was regal – stallholders would crow to their neighbours with pride when he had purchased from their store.

  And then the accident had happened.

  It was a wet day, much like this one, Cutter thought now, as he patted at his nose, already sore from blowing it too much. It was a well-worn memory, and he leaned back against his pillow to think it through. His grandma had required medication for one of the babies, he recalled, Chinese medicine from Thanh Kha's store above Dutton Lane. Henry had led his grandfather through the marketplace and into the narrow side street. Slowly, they climbed the stairs to the apothecary's small shop – the living room of an apartment above the market.

  At times, at night, the musty smells of the medicinal powders and roots still came to Cutter before he dropped into dreamless sleep.

  That morning, Dr Kha's family was eating a late breakfast in the room behind the shop. Cutter remembered that on that day he had been walking as carefully as his grandfather, his groin aching deeply from an extended lesson the night before. As they were leaving, Mrs Pham came out of the gloom of the narrow stairway and greeted them with a bow.

  'Please be careful,' she had warned, looking down at young Henry. 'The stairs are wet with the rain this morning.'

  Cutter's grandfather had been wrong about being immortal.

  You had to give it to him though – he had made no sound as Henry had shoved him hard in the back as he was shuffling down the steep stairway. In fact, the only sound Cutter heard before the stallholders came running was the dull splat when Grandpa's head had split open like a melon on the concrete below.

  Cutter thought he could hear the sound now; it caused his penis to harden under the thin bedsheet and set him to coughing again. His grandma stood slowly and came to his side, bending down to feel his forehead with her soft, papery hands.

  Cutter always came home when he was sick. He loved the memories.

  16

  JOSS CARRIED HIS old schoolbag with him when he left his mother's house. He sat directly behind the driver on the bus, shifting from time to time to adjust the position of the knife in his pocket. It seemed to prod for his attention; he couldn't stop thinking about it. He'd have to fashion some kind of holster; it wasn't as though he could just wear it in his belt as he had overseas.

  He looked down at his schoolbag – just like any sports backpack, really. It seemed hot in his lap, and he wondered whether any of the other passengers could tell that it had travelled from the past, from another world.

  Inside the bag, the boy from the streets waited to get out.

  Joss changed buses again at Wynyard, but this time he crossed the road to catch a train to Cabramatta. He swung his backpack over his shoulder and jogged to the platform. The knife thumped against his thigh as he ran.

  How does one go about making an anonymous call to the police, Isobel wondered. Can't send a fax or email, of course. Traceable. Her mobile? She always used a prepaid mobile phone because she knew how easy it was to find out someone's identity when they subscribed to a plan. Still, she'd heard that even though a prepaid number wasn't registered, the phone still acted as a satellite tracking system when it was switched on. If police had a number that was of interest, they could find the phone, even if they didn't know whose it was.

  How ridiculous, she thought, and snorted as she sipped her coffee. She felt like she was in a spy movie or something. The woman from the next table looked up from her novel and stared.

  Isobel got the file out of her shoulder bag and read it through again briefly. She'd found Henry Nguyen and had done a work-up on the Donatio file for Shields as well, and all before two o'clock. I am pretty good at this stuff, she reminded herself.

  Nguyen had no Centrelink file that she could find, but she'd been able to find his Medicare record. There was also no hiding his criminal past. From age eighteen – it would take a bit longer to get any juvenile files – it seemed he had spent more time in than out of gaol. Violent crime and robbery. She chewed at her lip, worried Joss could be right – that this man could have been the one who'd attacked them at Andy Wu's. Still, she figured, maybe Joss would have a record, too, if he'd not been rescued from that life.

  But that was crazy. It can't be him, she told herself. J
oss was just shaken up by the robbery. God knows, she still was. And Joss also had his memories of Africa, of the massacre, to contend with. She could easily see how Andy Wu's blood could've triggered memories of his friend Fuzzy's death. Fuzzy made him think about Cutter, and he had just projected Nguyen underneath the mask of the devil at the home invasion.

  There was no way Joss could recognise someone underneath that balaclava – there just wasn't any face to see.

  The memory of Joss's panic at the movies yesterday surfaced briefly. It did seem a coincidence that they had run into this guy just after the home invasion, but it must just have been spooky chance. She pushed her doubts aside with the remainder of her coffee, not allowing them to fully register. She could not let herself believe that Joss was right about this guy. She'd collected this information just to placate her husband – to give Nguyen's details to the police and let them rule him in or out of this thing.

  Isobel left the last bite of her toasted sandwich and stood up. She waited at the lights outside the cafe with a couple of dozen other people and crossed the street when they got the 'walk' signal. Then she stepped into one of the payphones opposite her work for the first time ever.

  'Honey, I really don't think all this is necessary,' Isobel said to her husband in their bedroom that evening. She used her reasoning voice, trying to speak calmly, holding at her side the baseball bat Joss had given her. 'The police have his details now, and if he's implicated in any way, they'll pick him up.' She sighed, looking at his face. Nothing she said made any difference, she thought. He was just waiting for her to finish.

  She was right.

  'Show me again,' he said.

  She gripped the very end of the bat with one hand as he had demonstrated, her other hand in the middle, as though she were holding a javelin. She lunged forward at an imaginary attacker, holding the bat at face-height.

  'Remember,' he said, 'You can go for the face, throat, or the balls. Don't go for the chest. Winding him is no good. An eye socket will do.'

  He looked her straight in the face, but she felt he wasn't really seeing her.

  'Don't forget,' he continued, 'you don't want to hesitate. You don't want to listen to anything anyone's got to say. You'll have one chance only and you've gotta put every bit of strength you have behind it. And don't miss.' He paused, then held his fingers up to emphasise each point. 'One, use all your force; two, don't hesitate; and three, don't miss. Now, show me again.'

  Five minutes later, Isobel finally threw the bat on the bed. 'Where are you going to be while I'm hitting this home run?' she asked.

  'Don't worry about me. Hopefully, it won't come to this. If they come, with any luck, you, me and Charlie will be on the roof.'

  As soon as she'd arrived home from work, Joss had again tried to persuade her to take Charlie to her mother's home in Cairns. She'd turned him down without waiting to listen to his argument. As though he'd known that would be her response, he'd insisted she come up to their bedroom and practise climbing out of the window and onto their roof.

  'Can we at least wait till it's dark?' she'd wanted to know. 'And I'm not teaching Charlie to climb out a window onto the roof!'

  'Fine,' he'd capitulated. 'We take her only if necessary.'

  So, when evening had fallen, Isobel had climbed out of the low bedroom window onto their tiled roof. Joss had followed her out.

  'Move around to the side a bit.'

  He'd spoken softly, thank God. Isobel couldn't imagine trying to explain this to Mrs Wilkinson next door.

  Isobel had inched her way around on the tiles; the slope here was gentle, and it was not difficult to move along. Fortunately, the rain had cleared up just after lunch, and the tiles had been dry and still quite warm.

  'What the hell's this?' she whispered when she'd come across a dark shape wedged into a corner on the roof.

  'The ladder, of course. How did you think we were going to get Charlie down?'

  On her haunches on the roof, Isobel had found herself worried far less about a potential home invasion than about her husband's grip on reality. Was she right to humour him in this way? Should she just insist he see the counsellor, refuse to go along with his paranoid plans? Was all this making him worse? What was she doing squatting out here? She'd studied Joss from behind as he negotiated the roof, moving assuredly across the tiles, considering every angle. She determined to try to talk to him again tomorrow.

  Back in the bedroom, Isobel put her hand on Joss's shoulder.

  'Come on, babe, I'm tired. Let's have a shower and go to bed early.'

  Joss picked the bat up from the bed and handed it to her.

  'Remember, we're in a confined space,' he said. 'You don't want to have to try and swing it. And you don't want him to get closer to you than a metre. Show me again.'

  17

  'DO YOU WANT to get out of here today?' Jill asked Gabriel as they sat at their desks in the communal detectives' office in Liverpool. The taskforce meeting had just concluded and Jill was not looking forward to chatting with her colleagues this morning. As Gabriel's smiling eyes met hers over the rim of his coffee mug, she continued, 'It's that bloody current affairs show from last night. I don't want to hear what Derek Reid and his mates have to say about it.'

  'You looked pretty tough handcuffing the dangerous assailant in the suburbs,' said Gabriel.

  'Don't start, Mr Door Job.'

  'Yeah, well,' he said, 'maybe we should go out and do some more interviews.'

  'Who's up next?' Jill flicked through the folder in front of her.

  'Um, that couple in Balmain,' Gabriel answered. He spoke without looking up, absorbed in the statements in front of him.

  'Yeah, that's right,' she said. 'Isobel Rymill and Joss Preston-Jones. That was the Wu case, right?' She didn't really expect an answer and got none. 'Poor bastard, they couldn't save one of his legs, you know. Surgery didn't take.'

  'Are you gonna eat that?'

  Jill looked down at the banana on her desk. Morning tea. What the hell. She slid it over. He grinned, more at the fruit than at her. He peeled it with his thick fingers and ate it in three huge bites.

  'So are you ready to head over there?' He arced the banana skin through the air, and it dropped into a garbage bin on the other side of the room. Reid's bin.

  'Yeah, I guess.' Jill thought about the long drive to Balmain, the trip back here to Liverpool afterwards, and then at five or six tonight, the trip back to her unit on the beach. She took a deep breath and stood. God I miss working at Maroubra, she thought.

  When they got down to the carpark, Gabriel walked straight to the passenger side and got in, still reading from one of the files he held in his hand.

  'So, I guess I'm driving again,' she said to the roof of the car before she climbed behind the wheel.

  'You know, these first interviews on the home invasions aren't that great.' Gabriel hadn't heard her. He spoke with his head down, still reading from the case files.

  She didn't respond, trying to picture the best route from Liverpool to Balmain. 'Do you know a better way to get to Balmain than the M5?' she asked, tired already.

  'Huh? Nuh.'

  'So, we'll just take the M5 back into the city, and double back to Balmain?' I could use a little help here, she thought. New girl, remember?

  'Okay,' he said.

  'Off we go then,' Jill said dryly, making her way back into the traffic she'd sat through not an hour before to get there.

  It wasn't until they were at tollbooths that he spoke again. Jill had already worked her way through half a litre of water from a bottle by her side.

  'Reid and Tran did most of these victims' interviews,' he said.

  Jill waited for his point. Finally, she said, 'Yeah, so?'

  'There just seems to be a lot of information lacking. Like Rice and Temple. It didn't take us long to get more information, extra evidence from them. Some of the most important evidence in the case so far.'

  Jill thought about the two kids, Justine
and Ryan, and wondered how they were doing today. She wondered how Narelle Rice was coping with having her home trashed again by crime scene. In the group meeting this morning, Superintendent Last had told them that the analysis of the towel Justine had kept would be back tomorrow at the latest. She frowned; it was pretty sloppy that Reid and Tran had not discovered the sexual assault. Still…

  'Maybe Justine just couldn't tell two men about the sexual violence,' she said. 'Maybe they interviewed her while Ryan or her mum was there with her. It's not easy to talk about that stuff you know.' God, she knew.

  'Exactly.'

  'What, exactly?'

  'Well, that's Interview 101, isn't it? There just seem to be a lot of holes in all of the statements. Maybe we should tell Last that we'll reinterview all of them?'

  Jill choked on a sip of water. 'Are you serious?' She could just imagine what the rest of the detectives would say: Yeah, she's been here less than a week, and already she thinks she can do it all better than us. 'It would take forever for just you and me to interview all the witnesses. There's other stuff to be done on this case, Gabriel.'

  'Yeah, but the single most important determinant in successfully resolving a case is the quality of information gathered from the interviews with victims and witnesses.'

  She looked over at him. His trucker cap hid most of his eyes.

  'Anyway,' she said, changing the subject, hoping that he wouldn't try to insist on this, 'what do you think of that anonymous call that came though yesterday afternoon?'

  Lawrence Last had mentioned the call in the morning meeting. It was from a woman, identifying a male who might be involved. It had been just one of many calls from the public since their work on the case had started. None of them to date had thrown up anything useful.

  'What do I think?' he said. 'I think someone's feeling guilty.'

  'Why do you say that? It's not like she was confessing to anything.'