why I hadn’t noticed this, along with the missing phone and syringe lid, earlier, or why the incident had been classified by the police as accidental.
‘As individual anomalies they mean very little,’ I said, following Briggs out to the foyer. ‘But now I’m putting them all together it starts to look like the kid may not have whacked up in the loading bay.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Briggs said. ‘Coagulation and lividity are consistent with the position he was found in.’
I lowered my voice as two doctors walked in front of us. ‘I’m not saying he didn’t die in the loading bay. I’m saying he might have injected himself elsewhere. If that’s the case, then we have to ask how he got there.’
‘Okay, I see your point, but it doesn’t change the fact that you green-carded this as accidental. You can’t just come in here and change your mind, then expect us to juggle bodies like tables in a restaurant.’
‘I realise that,’ I said, ‘but if it turns out someone else may have been involved, we can’t leave it until Monday. I don’t even have a TOD.’
‘That I can help you with,’ Briggs said. ‘We had stable temperatures most of last night, so calculations were made on body movement at the scene. I shouldn’t be telling you this, because they’re only estimates, but based on rigor mortis you’re looking at time of death around midnight last night.’
I nodded my appreciation. All I needed now was the final step.
‘Listen, just give Julie Wong this list and tell her I’ll be here tomorrow morning. If she can’t do the preliminary exam, then so be it, but she needs to see this list.’
Briggs sighed, his face exhausted.
‘Just give her the list,’ I said gently. ‘It’s not your decision to make, Matthew. It’s hers.’
•
I went back to my car and sat in the driver’s seat with the door open. Heat radiated off the concrete and the bushfire smoke irritated my eyes and throat. The missing syringe lid was one thing, but the absence of a mobile phone and now the confirmation of no teeth marks on the tourniquet smacked of another person’s involvement. What that involvement translated to, I wasn’t sure. There was one thing I was sure of: I’d made a mistake in writing the overdose off so quickly and that needed to be rectified.
How to achieve it was going to be a problem. What was I going to do, walk into the squad room and tell Eckles I’d fucked up? Admit that the psychologists were right all along, that I shouldn’t have come back so soon. That I wasn’t ready for desk duties, let alone dead bodies.
I looked around for a tissue to blow my nose but didn’t have any. I was angry with myself, and the heat and the hayfever were only making it worse. I drove to a service station, bought a pack of tissues and a bottle of water. At the counter, I guzzled the water and noticed the front-page headline of the Herald Sun: FREEWAY HORROR. I knew it referred to the accident Briggs had mentioned. It reminded me that Dallas Boyd had died a silent death and I knew that if I kept quiet, no one would ask questions. My reputation would remain intact and the overdose would remain an accident, just like the hundreds of others each year.
As much as I hated the idea of admitting fault, I wondered whether somebody out there had been counting on Dallas Boyd dying silently, that we would rush the job, write it off as another overdose and simply wipe our hands of it. The very idea of this struck a nerve, because I’d always been alert to such attempts. People tried to trick the police every day and most of the time they failed. Or did they? How many other kids had died an accidental death that wasn’t an accident?
Being a good investigator meant being in tune with your instincts; instincts that let you know when something wasn’t right. During my rehabilitation I’d allowed those skills to gather dust, to go blunt. Worse still, early this morning I’d allowed a junior officer to cloud my judgement. As I drove out of the service station, I made a decision. It was time to face the smirks of my colleagues, the whispering behind my back and the rumours that I’d lost the touch. And it was time to prove them wrong.
4
THE SMALL ROOM LOOKED over the main floor of the YMCA gymnasium, a