Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) Read Online Free PDF

that. I was a loner. Hardly a cheerful spirit. I forgot people’s birthdays and didn’t turn up to work drinks. None of my colleagues tried to set me up on dates. They knew a romantic train wreck when they saw one.
    ‘If I stick with him too long, I might have to start chewing my lunch more carefully,’ I continued.
    ‘Cops,’ Sam said. ‘All that ancient brotherhood bullshit.’
    ‘I can see where everyone’s coming from,’ I sighed. ‘I mean, apart from what he’s supposed to have done, the guy is also a world-class arrogant dickhead.’
    I told Sam about his treatment of Claudia’s body, about how he’d spoken to her parents.
    ‘He might just be out of practice on his behaviour with other people, if he’s such an outcast. He might have genuinely forgotten how people are supposed to talk to each other,’ Sam suggested.
    ‘You always think the best of people,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how. I’m about ready to kill him.’
    ‘Well, that might make things messier.’
    ‘You may be the only man I’m not prepared to strangle right now,’ I told him. ‘That detective Nigel Spader caught me at the door to the case room. I didn’t even get a peek.’
    ‘Ah yes, I’ve met that one. He was here yesterday doing interviews of the tutors, trying to find out if we know anything about the Georges River girls,’ Sam said. ‘I think we’re booked in for second interviews today. Two of the victims were students here.’
    ‘Second interviews?’
    ‘A couple of us, yeah,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why.’
    ‘Weird. Were the victims students of yours?’
    ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘But some of my students were friends with them. A girl rushed out of my morning class yesterday, crying. It’s hard to know what to say.’
    My stomach felt mildly unsettled. I put the phone on speaker and washed my face under the tap.
    ‘Tell me how the second interview goes,’ I told Sam. I convinced myself it was just the stress of the new case and my new partner making me sick. If I kept on track, it would go away.
    As I’d find often in my life, I should have listened to what my instincts were telling me.

CHAPTER 15
    TOX SMOKED IN my car. As I drove, I tried to think of one thing about him that didn’t annoy me. I decided I didn’t mind Tox’s leather jacket. I had a similar one of my own. We stopped for coffee outside the station and then headed west towards Claudia Burrows’s apartment on Parramatta Road.
    ‘When you arrived at the crime scene last night, I saw you unwrapping your knuckles in your car,’ Tox said, putting one of his boots on the dashboard. ‘You box?’
    ‘I box, yes.’
    ‘Who’d you beat up?’
    ‘I didn’t beat anyone up.’
    ‘Boxers spar. There’s very little blood involved. Looked to me like you pounded on someone outside the ring, using your boxing skills to get the upper hand.’
    ‘See, this is what you do,’ I said. ‘You make microscopic observations and you blow them out into wild theories that make no sense.’
    ‘Like the tits.’
    ‘Stop saying “tits”! Christ, you sound like a fat, sleazy truck driver in a highway bar.’ I imitated his quiet, gravelly voice, grabbed my crotch: ‘
Look at those tits! I love tits! Urgghh!
’
    ‘Was that supposed to be me?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘You want to know why I sound like this?’ he rasped. I glanced over, and he pulled at the collar of his shirt, revealing a long pink scar at the base of his throat. ‘Drug dealer stabbed me in the neck during a raid. Went right through the windpipe and out the other side.’
    ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make fun.’
    He stared at me. ‘What kind of a horrible person makes fun of someone with a physical disabil—’
    ‘Shut up!’ I shoved him into the car door. ‘Goddammit!’
    ‘All right, so. Mum and Dad claimed Claudia was a part-time waitress,’ Tox said. ‘She wasn’t paying for those knockers on a waitress’s salary, and even if she was, you don’t