Natasha Ryder downed a grape from the plate on the table and rocked in her chair.
“The insane defense? You’ve got to be joking.”
Anya handed the prosecutor her report of Gary Harbourn’s assessment.
Natasha pulled on rimless glasses and read while Hayden Richards and Kate Farrer sat quietly.
“Hearing voices, that’s original. Is there an ‘Idiot’s Guide to Faking Insanity’ that we don’t know about?” Natasha mumbled as she turned the page. “Let’s get to the crux. Is he faking?”
Anya had to be honest. “From that short interview, I can’t be sure. His psychiatrist is convinced but Harbourn was reasonably lucid when I saw him, until I mentioned Savannah’s death. That’s when he went berserk.”
Kate slapped the arms of her chair. “How can he be insane and lucid? He’s making fools of us.”
“It’s not that simple,” Anya explained. “He claims to have been in a psychotic state when the Goodwins were attacked. One induced by depression, cannabis and alcohol. It’s irrelevant about whether or not he’s thinking clearly now. My purpose was to assess any physical injuries he had and whether he was fit for police interview. That’s it. The rest is my non-expert opinion.”
“I appreciate that,” Natasha said, “but what’s your gut telling you?”
Anya had to be careful what she said. This was outside her field of expertise. “Sorry, but I’m not qualified to judge.”
Hayden Richards stroked his mustache with one finger. “How about we show you his behavior at the house search and you can compare that to the impression he gave you?”
“I want to review that tape anyway.” The prosecutor stood and turned on the portable television. “Maybe you missed something. These guys aren’t that smart.”
Anya could see Kate grip the chair. “We even had a stud gun looking for metal hidden behind the walls, which is how we located the knife, which is consistent with the girl’s stab wounds. We’ve established that the underpants in the bag belonged to Rachel. We believe we were thorough.”
“Let’s see.” Natasha hit the play button and returned to her seat with the remote.
The DVD began with Noelene Harbourn in view wearing her gown. It quickly fast-forwarded to the room searches. A few minutes later, Gary Harbourn came into view, wearing nothing but underpants.
Bare-chested, it was possible to see a torso, biceps and triceps that had only developed from weight-lifting, with or without steroids. He may have had strength, but the shortened hamstrings and bulked quadriceps meant he was unlikely to be fast or flexible.
He didn’t appear to be in any distress from his feet, which were bare and bandage-free. From his comments and wisecracks, this was a man who didn’t fear the police. He had cut the soles of his feet some time between the search and being admitted to Saint Stephen’s.
Natasha paused the footage of the smirking Gary, who seemed to be daring Kate to arrest him.
The behavior was arrogant and taunting, not what she would expect from someone in psychosis, with no memory of an event. Experience and instinct told her Gary Harbourn was faking to avoid prison.
“He’s pretty smug, the bastard.” Kate scratched at the arm of her chair. “As if he’s sure we wouldn’t find anything on him in the house that day.”
Natasha agreed. “Not exactly Einstein, this guy.”
“What about the baseball bat? Any prints or blood on it?”
The conversation she had with Savannah and mention of the baseball bat had been confidential, but then she remembered Sophie mentioning the man with the bat going into Rachel’s room. Gary’s overreaction to the brothers borrowing it the night Savannah was beaten meant it was probably incriminating.
Natasha played, then paused the recording again. When Milo sprayed the luminol in the living area, there was no bat. A few minutes later, a baseball bat and tattered mitt were by the sofa.
“For occupational health and safety reasons the CSO wouldn’t spray with members of the public present.” Kate sank in her chair. “She got them to leave the room, then re-enter it.”
Natasha forwarded through more images. The cameraman moved to the next room and followed Liz Gould and the CSOs.
The lounge room, where the family had waited, was only searched with the naked eye once the bat appeared. If an object had been in contact with blood, then washed, it wouldn’t have been obvious to anyone doing the search.
“Where did the bat come from?” Anya wanted to know if it had been there or brought out by one of the family when they moved back into the room.”
The prosecutor moved closer to the screen and paused the image. She forwarded slowly. The cameraman had recorded each of the children filing back from the corridor.
One of the elder boys entered the room with something at his side, then the children huddled together. A few frames later, the youngest sister was standing near the bat, the handle now covered with a mitt.
They watched Liz Gould checking the walls with the stud finder, to knee level. Kate explained, “Anything metallic, like the knife, would register. We got lucky in Gary’s room.”
“Smart,” Natasha commented. “It should become part of the routine. So we think this could have been used to threaten Rachel?” Anya could not admit knowing that the bat had been used for other assaults.
“We need to check it for traces of blood,” Hayden shook his head at the mistake.
“That leaves us with a few problems.” Natasha tapped the desk with her pen. “Were Rick and Patrick the other Harbourns at the Goodwin home, and do we have anything to link them to that house, or even to Rachel and Sophie? And what about this Simon Vine character? If we can only prove Gary was there and he claims insanity, we could lose. If there’s nothing to suggest he deliberately planned the attack on the Goodwins, he might get away with insanity as a defense. Without motive or a logical reason for him attacking the girls, it’s hard to challenge a drug-induced psychosis. If a jury sees his act, they’ll acquit.” A good defense lawyer could tear Sophie to shreds on the stand given her severe blood loss that night and inability to ID the others.
Kate flicked through her notebook. “The singlet and shirt that showed positive for luminol were Gary’s, and they’d both been washed. Lab’s trying to get DNA from the blood in the seams, but hasn’t had any luck yet.”
“We’re still canvassing friends and acquaintances about who left the street party, but so far no one’s talking. It seems everyone we approach thinks of the Harbourn brothers as folk heroes beating the system by getting out of jail, or else they’re too scared of being bashed, or worse.” Hayden sounded more frustrated than the prosecutor.
“What about the knife? Do we know where it came from?”
Kate answered, “Patrick claims Gary took the knife from him that night. Wait for it, to carve up roast chickens for the street party. Funny how he could hand Gary a knife and not leave his own print on it.”
Hayden added, “There’s no obvious link between the Harbourns and the Goodwins, so we don’t have a motive. The pubic hair found on Rachel’s body could belong to a number of extended family members, but so far all but one has a sound alibi, some interstate and others overseas. It seems that even the cousins want nothing to do with Noelene’s bad brood.”
The prosecutor turned to Anya. “This isn’t enough. We need more on the family.”
Giverny’s rape and death, Rachel’s murder and Sophie’s brutal assault should have been enough, she thought. But the legal system put the onus on the prosecution to prove beyond reasonable doubt. Giverny was dead so that case was compromised. Natasha Ryder was placing all of her hopes for a conviction on the Goodwin case, or any other they could prove. Yet despite physical evidence linking Gary Harbourn to the Goodwins, he could avoid prosecution by pleading insanity.
“I have spoken to a woman who came to the SA unit. She was raped by some of the Harbourn brothers over a year ago.”
Natasha sat forward and flicked open a folder containing a legal pad. “What’s her name? When can I see her?”
“Hold on.” Violet’s name had to remain confidential. “At this stage she still refuses to make a statement, but the forensic evidence from her attack is kept locked in the SA fridge. I’ve spoken to her recently but until she officially comes forward, there’s nothing I can give you. She was involved with the family and is still terrified of them.”
The prosecutor tapped her pen on the pad. “Not good enough. If she knows the family, maybe she can fill us in on some of their dirty secrets, give us something to go on. Can you put pressure on her?”
Anya’s first thought was Giverny Hart and how she had been threatened with the weight of the law if she refused to testify. Violet didn’t deserve that treatment either. “I pushed my luck tracking her down in the first place.”
Hayden considered, “Can you make a statement to the effect that there was a similar pattern of evidence in the attacks between this woman and Giverny?”
“Everything was different. Giverny was randomly snatched off the street, this girl was linked to one of the brothers and was drinking with them when the rapes took place.”
Natasha dropped the pen on the pad. “We’re back to having nothing. Even if she does agree to talk to us, it sounds like a disaster to prosecute. It would be her word against the family’s, no matter what the evidence shows. It always comes back to ‘he said, she said.’” She swiveled around to the window. “We have the murder weapon, but we also need something to connect the Harbourns to the Goodwins and the names of exactly who else was present. Without all of those things there’s virtually no chance of prosecuting.”
Anya remembered the cropped top Zimmer found at the scene. It had a bloodied fingerprint on it. “What about the print on Rachel’s pink top? The one we think was used to gag her?”
Hayden shook his head. “Fingeprint’s not on file. It doesn’t match anyone in the system.”
“Aren’t all the brothers on file? Each of them has a criminal record.”
“They should, I’ll double check that. Maybe someone else was at the scene that night, like Simon Vine, our phantom friend. So far we’ve only looked at the Harbourns.”
“That’s because they only ever travel and hunt in a pack. The family’s like Medusa’s head,” Natasha said. “You cut one of the snakes off by sending it to jail and another one slithers up to take its place.”
Hayden’s phone rang and he moved away to answer it. A minute later he returned to the table with a large grin.
“We just got two breaks. It seems Noelene Harbourn’s been telling lies. Two of her sons were filmed at a bottle shop that night, nowhere near the Goodwin house when the girls were attacked. With Ian still in prison, that only leaves Patrick and Rick with Gary at the Goodwins. And Rick’s prints weren’t on our data base. It seems he had a juvenile file sealed at the mother’s request. We got a court order to access it. The print on the top was definitely Rick Harbourn’s.”
“So we’ve just narrowed down which three were most likely to be involved.” Natasha smiled for the first time that day.
“Now we crank up the pressure and see which one loses his head first,” Hayden said. “We’ll bring them in for questioning, then charge them.”
Anya asked Natasha about prosecution for Giverny’s rape.
“If we successfully prosecute the Harbourns for Rachel and Sophie, it will be easier to argue that pack rape is their specialty. But if we fail on the first trial, the chances of ever making them pay for what they did to Giverny Hart are too low to even contemplate. It all rides on convicting Gary, Rick and Patrick.”