Free Black & Blue: BookShots (Detective Harriet Blue Series) by James Patterson Page A

slept all the way home in it.
    The laptop jangled again. I didn’t know how long I’d been out. I crawled to the screen and tapped.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Harry? Vicky.’
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘I was telling someone here what happened to Claudia and I might have a lead for you,’ she said. I fumbled blindly in the dark across the cluttered coffee table for a pen. ‘One of the other girls said Claudia had been hanging around a prostitute from the Cross named Hope.’
    ‘Huh,’ I laughed. My instincts about Kings Cross and its connection to this case were right. The Cross was where dreams, lives and promises failed. Claudia had been cooking up some kind of dream, and it had got her drowned at the bottom of the ocean.
    ‘“Hope”,’ I said. ‘That’s all you got?’
    ‘That’s all I got.’
    ‘I’ll take it. Thanks.’
    Almost immediately, an instant chat message popped up on the screen from my brother, wondering why I hadn’t been answering my phone all night. I gave him a brief rundown of my experience out in the sticks, my fingers dancing over the keys.
    SamBluDesigner77: Are you OK? Should you go to a hospital?
    BlueHarry: I’m fine. It was just a rough-housing. No worse than the guys used to give each other at the academy.
    SamBluDesigner77: You should report those cops! Not only is it assault, but if they didn’t arrest you, dragging you out there against your will was probably abduction, right?
    BlueHarry: You don’t rat on your colleagues in this business, Sam. No matter what they do. We deal with our problems in-house.
    SamBluDesigner77: God, it’s all so pathetic.
    BlueHarry: Speaking of abductions, how’d the second interview on the Georges River Killer thing go? What did they ask you?
    I watched the screen for an indication that Sam was writing back to me. He started, and then mysteriously the speech bubble he was writing in disappeared. I waited for whatever was distracting him to go away, but he didn’t start typing again. I had a strange urge to call him. My sisterly senses were in overdrive, but I told myself it was just fatigue.

CHAPTER 36
    TOX DIDN’T HAVE any kind of desk. No police station would officially lay claim to him, so he would wander from station to station picking up cases as he liked. I’d heard his old department over in Auburn had started processing a transfer to North Sydney for him, and then the paperwork had ‘stalled’. They’d been waiting for the police officer in the transfer position in North Sydney to transfer out, apparently, and then he hadn’t. They’d filled Tox’s spot in Auburn. So he existed in administrative limbo, not really Auburn’s problem, not really North Sydney’s. He might have complained and had the whole thing cleared up, but I got the sense that the wandering life suited him. He was basically a freelance detective, a consultant, but without the extra pay consulting detectives receive. Sometimes he would nab cases from the police scanner radio which he kept in his car. That’s how he’d got onto Claudia’s crime scene before me. He’d been out driving, and had heard about the find.
    When I arrived at Surry Hills station he was perched on the corner of one of the coffee-room tables, tapping away at that old, broken laptop. A group of my colleagues glared at the back of his head. I wondered if he’d gone home at all – he was still wearing the bloodied shirt. He didn’t see me come in. Chris Murray was scrolling through pictures of boats. His computer screen was littered with CCTV footage of yachts. He looked at me guiltily as I went right to Pops’s office and threw open the door.
    ‘I need a gun, a badge, some handcuffs and a phone,’ I said.
    Pops glanced up. Detective Nigel Spader, whom I hadn’t noticed sitting in the chair behind the door, burst out laughing.
    ‘Oh yeah,’ I said, slumping into the chair next to him. ‘It’s really funny when police-issue items go missing. It’s hilarious. Laugh it up.’
    ‘How did this