Dirty Weekend Read Online Free PDF Page B

divorce.
    My ex-wife was very suspicious about how I’d been able to afford to buy something so soon after the divorce and I’d told her my father had helped me. The last thing I ever wanted Genevieve to find out—the last thing I ever wanted anyone to find out—was that I’d used dealer’s money. Jacinta had come back into my life after a year and a half on the streets of Sydney, with hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash in her carrybag, smacked off her face and on the run from the dangerous dealer she’d robbed. So far, only my children, my brother and my old partner in the New South Wales police, Bob Edwards, knew about this money. Malabar, with its mix of housing commission, modest old-fashioned cottages and brand new faux-Tuscan villas was just the right suburb for me, far away enough from the demanding city, close to the ocean and the sandstone cliffs.
    Lately, Jacinta was managing her academic load and her relationship with her boyfriend Andy well. I could always tell how things were going between them by keeping an eye on the velour and velcro toy lemurs Andy had given her for her last birthday. If the lemurs were twined together somewhere, all was well. Occasionally, I’d find the male lemur in disgrace, head first in the wastepaper basket. Only last week, when I’d spent a couple of days at Malabar, Jacinta had returned from a visit to Andy’s place, raced inside, ignored me, grabbed the lemurs from where they were hanging in a tangle from the light fitting, pulled their velcroed paws apart and hurled the black and white one out the window by his striped tail.
    I felt relieved and happy that, despite the shenanigans of Genevieve and me, both our kids were travelling better than a lot of young people I knew about. Genevieve, a difficult woman, had been resentful that both kids had elected to live with me after we’d separated, but we’d finally come to an agreement for us both to give some financial help to the kids while they were students.
    On the way back to work, I picked up a hamburger. As I munched it in the car, my eyes taking in the dry countryside, I thought about the crime scene I’d just left. Considering the half-smoked reefer I’d tweezered into an evidence bag, Brian Kruger’s reconstruction of the scuff marks could well prove to be correct. Tianna Richardson and her companion had probably slipped outside into the relative privacy of the parking area to share a joint. Maybe then the other party had decided that the invitation to share a joint extended to a more intimate exchange of body fluids. If we found traces of both people’s DNA on the reefer stub, and Harry Marshall found something similar when he took vaginal swabs, we might be well on the way to tracking down the other person. If the other party had form, we might already have him filed away on CrimTrak’s database. In my experience, murder was the last stage of a journey of violence that began in the offender’s babyhood with violent parental assaults. Children learned violence—if violence was the language at home—as thoroughly as they learned speech. Violence became the automatic tool for conflict resolution—the first resort. Proceeding through a series of escalating assaults, the violent offender—because invariably that was what he’d become by now, and almost always he was male—arrived at the inevitable assault where someone died.
    I was reasonably sure that whoever killed Tianna Richardson had either killed prior to this or, at the very least, had been involved in a serious assault or two. I felt sure he would have already served time for crimes of violence and that we’d have his genetic material on record to match against. And if it turned out that he owned a pair of boots that had made the print I’d noticed, we could lock him up and throw away the key. If, on the other hand, he hadn’t served time, he had the luck of the devil. And the investigators would have their work cut out for them.
    By the