Mary Singer came into the room, uncharacteristically flustered. In her hands, she held the newspaper. “Have you seen this?”
Anya studied the front page of the Daily Telegraph. A large photo of a woman with short-cropped hair and dangling earrings smiled back.
The headline read, “Teacher slain in horror bloodbath.”
As she scanned the first few paragraphs, she felt a chill. Elizabeth Dorman had been found brutally stabbed to death in her Kellyville home.
“The popular high-school teacher…”
Anya stopped reading. It was the woman from last week. The one who’d given the false phone number. “Just Elizabeth” had been mutilated.
Mary said, “Do you think it could be related to the sexual assault?”
Anya felt numb. “You’d have to wonder.”
Attacked a week ago, and murdered-with a knife-last night.
She read the rest of the article. Liz Dorman’s boyfriend, a band member, was performing at a local pub and returned home at two a.m. to find the body in a pool of blood on the lounge-room floor. Parts of the room were damaged, suggesting that Ms. Dorman had fought her attacker.
“The poor woman.” Mary had tears in her eyes. “I didn’t push her to stay, she kept saying she had to go.”
Anya thought for a moment. It was too much of a coincidence, to have been raped a week earlier and then murdered. From the way she’d behaved, it was possible that Elizabeth had known her attacker, which is perhaps why he’d returned.
“I’ve got to let the police know that she came here.”
“What about confidentiality?” Mary wiped her eyes.
Drumming her fingers on the desk, Anya said, “Our duty to Elizabeth doesn’t end with her death, but we have a duty to the community as well. The police need to know about the assault. Without it, they’re probably suspecting the boyfriend. And it may help prevent someone else getting killed.”
“Or maybe the boyfriend did do it. We should have paid more attention to the signs-too afraid to talk about her attack, the inappropriate clothing that covered her. Domestic violence was a definite possibility.”
Mary closed her eyes and said a prayer, something she hadn’t done in front of colleagues before. Anya understood that Mary felt somehow responsible for not looking after Liz Dorman better, even though she had done all she could at the time.
She dialled homicide.
Hayden Richards, Meira Sorrenti and two homicide detectives stood outside the Kellyville house. Though this was essentially a homicide investigation, any possible link to a sexual assault needed to be thoroughly investigated.
Local newspapers lay on the front lawn, and the letterbox was stuffed with catalogues and junk mail. It appeared like any other suburban home, except for the crime-scene tape surrounding the perimeter.
The area was filled with “McMansions,” as they were known in the press. Rows of similar homes, designed to fill almost every inch of the small blocks of land. Gone were the backyards, replaced with two storys, four bedrooms, a rumpus room and double garage. In an area where heat could be searing, every home had an air-conditioner, which attracted the ire of environmentalists and beach-dwellers who were lucky enough to enjoy an ocean breeze. Their criticisms filled the letters pages of the local newspapers.
As a mother, Anya could understand the trend toward a bigger home with more space, even without children. With the burden of mortgages, people couldn’t afford to go out that much, so home became the entertainment center of their world. Time otherwise spent on a garden went toward enjoying movies on home cinemas. Or so the theory went. The irony was that families felt safer closed off from their neighbors, but these areas led the state’s crime figures for break-and-enters.
Anya hesitated before getting out of the car. Like Mary, she couldn’t help but feel guilty about a death that might have been prevented. Even if she had no idea what more could have been done.
“What are you doing here?” Meira glared.
“She’s the only one of us who saw the victim alive and she’s still a pathologist. At this stage,” Hayden said, “we need all the help we can get.”
Cars slowed to a crawl as they passed by, some passengers straining to take photos of the site of a tragedy. Anya wondered where those photos ended up. Not the sort of thing you’d scrapbook for future generations, surely.
“Crime scene’s done. You can go in,” said one of the uniformed police manning the barricade.
Out of habit, all the police wiped their feet on the doormat, although it seemed unnecessary given the amount of blood on the carpet in the hallway. They followed the red trail to the lounge room. The smell of death was all around them. A combination of perspiration, fear and the metallic odor of dried blood filled Anya’s nostrils. She preferred the more sterile formalin.
A lamp lay on the floor in the entrance, with small markers indicating its position.
Inside the room, the darkness hit them. For the middle of the day, no light came in from outside. Someone switched on the light. The curtains were all drawn.
“Nice kitty,” Meira said, pointing to a mounted cat on the mantelpiece.
The once-living feline had been preserved in an attack pose and looked extremely unlovable. A small streak of blood had landed across its face.
A plasma television hung on the wall, with surround-sound speakers in the corners. They were all splattered with blood. In the center of the floor lay the largest pool. It was where the body had been found.
“The boyfriend said he tried to drag her into the street to get help. The phone wasn’t working and his mobile was missing,” the taller junior homicide detective explained. “We thought he was bullshitting until we got your call.”
Anya explained, “Elizabeth said she was asleep on the lounge and woke up with her attacker on top of her.”
“Why don’t you think she stayed for a medical examination?” Hayden asked.
“I can’t be sure, but she implied she was partly responsible because she’d left a window open.” Glancing about the room, she said, “The attack was very violent and frenzied, judging by the blood distribution. There has to have been a lot of movement during the stabbings.”
“Can’t have been that much. The body had over forty stab wounds, mostly in the upper chest and neck.” The second female homicide detective checked the windows in the room. “She can’t have fought through that many.”
“It depends on the depth and location of the wounds. Although, by the volume of blood loss and the way it spurted across the room, some have to have hit superficial arteries.”
Hayden had remained surprisingly quiet until now. “Some of the blood could belong to the attacker.”
“It’ll be a few days before we know.” The female detective couldn’t open the window. It had been boarded up with wooden planks. “No one’s going to be peeping through these again.”
The group walked slowly around the house. Each room had suffered the same window treatments.
“Did Crime Scene check the fridge? If he’s anything like our rapist, he might have stopped to eat something,” Meira offered.
“Good point,” said Hayden. “Make sure we’ve checked that and the bins as well, in case he threw out any leftovers.”
Anya looked around the kitchen, with its laminated benchtops and photographs on the fridge door. Two of the photos were of Liz Dorman cuddling a man, and another with a large group of people at dinner, raising their glasses.
“The way Elizabeth acted and spoke at the unit was the way victims often behave when they know their rapist,” she said.
Meira sounded impatient, again. “Maybe he realized and that’s why he came back.”
Hayden studied something on the floor. “Or maybe he’s one of those gentlemen rapists and he came back as part of his fantasy, like Quentin’s profile suggested. Only this time the fantasy got more violent.”
The other female detective continued to check the windows.
“The back windows all have keyed locks on them. This woman was suddenly very security obsessed. It’s the same in every room.”
“So how did he get in?” Hayden almost muttered.
“Looks like she opened the door and got stabbed in the back, then again as she ran into the lounge room,” the tall detective explained.
Anya studied the photos on the fridge. They were all placed symmetrically, with one space left. She wondered if that had been the spot where a photo had previously been.
A male voice called from the doorway, “Who’s here? I need to come in.”
They turned to see an unshaven man with a V-necked T-shirt and shorts. His visible chest hair was matted with dried blood, hands and face were smeared as well. He had to be the boyfriend.
“You can come in. It’s all right,” said the tall detective.
The man carefully avoided treading on the carpet stains and turned his head away from the lounge room as he passed.
“Greg found the body. He’s Elizabeth’s boyfriend. They lived here together,” the junior detective explained.
Greg looked like a broken man, stooped and unkempt. “I don’t have any clothes, not even my wallet,” he mumbled.
Anya assumed that, after moving the body, he had been covered in blood and the police had taken his clothes for forensic testing at the station. He was, after all, their prime suspect. He was still “a person of interest” until proven otherwise.
She stepped forward. “I’m Doctor Crichton. I met Liz last week when she came in briefly to the clinic, the day she went on the school excursion.”
He looked embarrassed and wouldn’t make eye-contact.
“Were you the one in the car that morning, waiting?”
Greg ran a dirty hand over his face, leaned on the bench and began to cry. “I didn’t know what to do.” He sobbed for a few minutes before catching his breath. “She almost didn’t go to see you, but I pushed her. I thought she should go to the police.”
The detectives each moved closer to the doorway, giving them some sense of privacy.
“Do you know why she was so scared about that?”
“I shouldn’t say. It’ll get her into trouble.”
“Greg, we need to know. It might help the police work out who did this to her.”
“She said it could ruin her career. The night she was…” he paused and gritted his teeth, “raped by that bastard, I was at a gig. She sat up late with a girlfriend and they smoked a couple of joints and had a few wines. Then she fell asleep on the lounge.” He seemed to steady himself. “She was scared that if the school found out, she’d be sacked, and no one would believe her anyway.”
Anya suddenly understood Liz Dorman’s reluctance to be examined. With alcohol and marijuana in her system, giving a statement would allow for that to come out in an investigation, and would have left her open to prosecution. She must have known that her credibility as a rape victim would be questioned. Staying silent probably seemed like her only option.
“Did she tell you anything about the attack?” Anya kept the thought in her mind that Greg could be Elizabeth’s rapist, and her killer. The scenario was all too common. But why would she board up the windows if he still lived there? Unless she’d thrown him out…
He shook his head. “She was ashamed. It didn’t change the way I loved her, she didn’t ask for it to happen.”
“You’re right. It wasn’t her fault.” Anya reached for a tissue from the box on the bench and handed it to him. “How was she afterward?”
“A bloody mess. She should have gone back to see you but she kept saying she was taking control. She said every time she hammered a nail, she felt more in control of her life. Look at the windows-that’s not control, it’s a bloody prison she made.”
Anya wanted to ask about the emergency contraception. “I know this is a personal question, but did you use condoms as a form of contraception?”
“No. We didn’t have to. I had a vasectomy years ago. We were talking about having it reversed.”
Anya wanted him to stay calm. If what he said was true, then Greg wasn’t the rapist. “Is that why she wanted the morning-after pill? Because the man who raped her didn’t use a condom?”
“She was so upset, she didn’t remember. All she knew was that she didn’t want to have his child.”
Meira moved closer. “After the attack, did she stay in the house?”
“We went to her sister’s on the weekend. In the Blue Mountains.” He began to cry again. “Jesus, I haven’t told her yet. It’s all over the papers.”
“Local constables will have told her,” Anya said. She didn’t think it appropriate to push any more. Not now. “One last thing. Did the man who raped her take anything?”
“Some cash, credit cards, and a photo of her from the fridge.”
“Is this the one?” The female detective entered the room with a torn, blood-stained photo on a paper plate, careful not to touch it. “We just pulled it from the bin outside.”
Greg glanced at it, then ran to the sink and gagged.
Anya wondered why the perpetrator would take the photo as a trophy after the rape, then return to the scene and destroy it a week later. Moreover, if the same person had committed both the rape and murder, why hadn’t he killed Liz at the time of the rape?
She watched Greg for a moment, unsure what to think. He may not have been the rapist, but he was still the lead suspect in his girlfriend’s murder.
As they left the house, Meira Sorrenti offered her opinion. “If you ask me, Liz Dorman was having it off with someone, the boyfriend found out and she cried rape to cover herself. That’s why she needed the contraception and didn’t want to be examined. There were no injuries to find.”
“What about the photo?” Hayden sounded skeptical.
“She gave it to the new love interest, the boyfriend got it back and killed her. He has to know who she’s been sleeping with.”
Hayden cleared his throat. “That doesn’t explain why Elizabeth boarded up the windows yet stayed with the boyfriend.”
The only reason for doing that, Anya thought, was to prevent the windows from being opened, and to make sure no one ever looked in and watched her again.