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

noticed he was smoking a cigarette.
    ‘Jesus Christ,’ I said. ‘Put that out! You’re in my crime scene.’
    He grunted.
    ‘You’ve just had that hand in a dead girl!’
    ‘That was this hand.’ He lifted the other from his pocket, waved it, pulled the cigarette from his mouth with the clean one. ‘For a detective, you’re pretty blind to details. Me? I’ve noticed everything there is to notice about your hands. Chewed nails. Swollen knuckles. No sign of a wedding ring, probably ever.’
    ‘Look.’ I leaned close. ‘I don’t like you. I don’t want to work with you. I’ve heard bad things, and they appear to be true. You should have waited for an autopsy to confirm your findings. There’s a process, and it’s in place for a reason.’
    ‘I don’t like to waste time,’ he said. ‘And that’s exactly what you’re doing now, jibber-jabbering at me. What station you work at?’
    ‘Surry Hills,’ I said.
    ‘Right.’ He clapped me hard on the shoulder as he turned to leave. ‘I’ll see you there first thing.’
    He wandered off, and the police officers lining the tape watched him go. When he was a good distance away they ducked under the tape and started setting up to do their jobs. I stood stunned in their midst, no idea what I should do next. The photographer snapped a picture of me standing over the body, my arms folded.
    ‘That guy’s a murderer, you know,’ he said, adjusting his lens. ‘Killed a mother and her young kid. Beat ’em to death. Tox was seven.’
    ‘Yeah, so I hear.’ I was badly craving a cigarette of my own now. I hadn’t smoked in years. But no one around me was offering anything but hateful glances.
    ‘Guy like that’s gonna do it again,’ the photographer said. ‘You don’t start that young unless it’s in your bones.’

CHAPTER 11
    MY HEAD WAS a mess by the time I arrived at Surry Hills police headquarters. It was 6 a.m. and the sun was rising. I’d stayed at the crime scene and orchestrated the evidence collection, got rid of the press and sent out a couple of detectives to bring the parents in. Within an hour we had preliminary identification. Until we could get the parents to ID the body, we weren’t sure. But it looked as though the girl was Claudia Burrows: her description linked up with a missing persons report that had been issued a day earlier. She had a tattoo of a rabbit in a waistcoat on her hip that matched the report exactly.
    I didn’t like where this was all going, mainly because it was heading in the very opposite direction to the Georges River Killer. The killer we’d been hunting didn’t drown his victims – he didn’t put them in the water at all, but left them stripped to their panties, face down on the beach. His victims showed signs of physical and sexual abuse, while Claudia hadn’t looked in any way battered. I’d checked her wrists and ankles for ligature marks but there were none, except for a rough sort of rubbing on one foot. For all I knew, she might have fallen into Botany Bay drunk and drowned there, the waves stripping her clothes off as she floated towards the mouth of the river.
    Though it didn’t look good for my entry onto the Georges River Killer task force, I wasn’t going to let go. It was possible the killer had changed his methods to confuse us. He was a wily creature, as far as I could tell, and he might have recognised that he was being tracked. I went right to the door of the task force’s case room and knocked, trying to shove my way in when no one answered. I came up against the thin and wiry Detective Nigel Spader just inside the door.
    ‘You’re not allowed in here.’ He pushed me back out the door before I could get a glimpse of their case board. ‘This is the last time I’m going to tell you, Blue.’
    ‘I’m allowed in,’ I said. ‘Chief Morris put me on a Georges River body last night. You’ll need to debrief me and get me up to speed so we can start making connections.’
    ‘Your case is