Corley homestead was a lot further away than one kilometre; more like ten. The jump-up was well within one click. Hux was headed up it to check the area for clues, but why would anyone else want to go up there? Photography? Star gazing? Was Dodgy Dave a geologist interested in those bits of plateau that were once ground level?
He scanned the slope ahead of him. It was smaller than the one up near Winton, where the Age of Dinosaurs Museum was housed. The sides were steep—some of them too steep—and he’d bet they crumbled into dust or sand if you took a misstep, but there were places where the gradient was less steep. Climbing it was doable.
He wondered—could Dave have been interested in fossils? The idea wasn’t so outlandish; after all, that’s what Jo was here for. But that didn’t factor in the drug residue in the helicopter.
No, he had to think a little deeper.
Solitude. Opals. Fossils. Sheep. They were the top four reasons he could think of that anyone came out here to this remote part of Queensland. And the opals, fossils and sheep options were an end in themselves.
But solitude? That was ameansto an end.
Solitude to cook up meth? But the guy had no gear beyond his duffel and cooking up meth required gas, power, lab equipment. Solitude to top himself? An ominous thought. Plenty of room in his duffel for tablets, a weapon, a rope—or were the drugs his weapon of choice? But if so, where was the body?
The police would have checked out the abandoned homestead, wouldn’t they? If there had been a body in it or a meth lab then they’d have had no reason to keep putting the wind up Charlie. Still, it was an idea he should follow up.
Perhaps Dave had wanted solitude to do something he didn’t want other people to see or know about—or to meet someone who didn’t want to be seen.
That made the most sense.
Dodgy Dave came out here to meet someone whodidhave water. Whodidhave food and shelter, or transport to food and shelter. Or who wanted whatever was in his duffel.
Possum stuck his nose into a crevice below a rugged, black-barked shrub that might have been a tree if it were given water and nutrients, and Hux saw movement within. Something brown and scaly and smooth.
‘Snake, mate,’ he said, clicking his fingers. ‘Come away.’
Possum looked like he wanted to ignore the command, so Hux clicked his fingers again and kept walking. The little dog fell into place beside him.
‘This way,’ Hux said. ‘We’ve got a bit of hilly ground to cover. Reckon you can make it on three legs?’
The dog seemed keen, so Hux picked up his pace. If Possum started to flag, he could carry him.
He had just spied something glinting in the red soil and was debating on the wisdom of picking it up and ruining whatever was on it with his own fingerprints when a shadow fell over him. He turned and found Jo.
‘Found something?’ she said.
She looked wary, but she’d not wandered this way by accident, so she clearly wasn’t trying to avoid him. Which was good. Or bad, depending on whether his head or his idiotic heart was calling the shots. He’d only had half a coffee so the question was too complicated to answer this early.
‘Beer bottle cap. I was just trying to decide if I should pick it up or not. Evidence, you know. If I’d thought to bring Possum’s lead with me I could have used one of the poop bags I’ve got tied to it.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘Oh! You’re taking this investigation of Dave seriously.’
‘Of course I’m taking this seriously.’
‘I’ve … er … got sampling bags in the crates back at camp. In fact,’—she patted down the pockets of her shorts and tucked her fingers into one of them—‘here. Use this.’
She handed him a bag that looked like the sort of thing that might contain a goldfish. It was perfect. He covered his hand with it and picked up the bottle top, which turned out to be slightly brighter than army green and had two bright yellow letters on it: SP.
She took the bag from him. ‘No signs of discolouration from age. No pitting or rust in the surface, which we’d expect to see from metal left in the elements—morning dewfall out here is negligible, but it’s still moisture. Enough to kickstart the oxidation process, certainly.’
TYSON: [open mouthed] Wow. The chick’s got skills.
Jo wasn’t finished. She tipped the bag up and inspected the cap from all angles. ‘Opened with a bottle opener not screwed off; you can see the bend in the surface where the opener has used leverage to break the seal. For a controlled trial, we’d have to leave a fresh bottle top from the same brand of beer—is this beer? Could be soft drink, ginger beer, kombucha, I suppose—out in the elements to see at what point rust degradation was visible to the naked eye to give ourselves an absolute time frame. But we can hypothesise that this bottle top hasn’t been out here long.’
She was frowning at the scrap of metal with much the same attention as he’d seen her give one of her precious fossils. He let his eyes linger on her for a moment. He could have kidded himself it was for descriptive research purposes for a novel—woman at crime scene makes forensic deduction about potential evidence, blah, blah, blah—but actually, he was having a hard time keeping his eyes away from her.
Her hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail, so she must have hidden a brush somewhere in the stuff he and Luke had hauled over from the four-wheel drive. She was wearing a variation of the workwear she’d been wearing yesterday—the same shorts, obviously, judging by the bags on hand (because she wasn’t the only one who could read clues here), of some sort of heavy-duty navy cotton. Rumpled socks hung loose from the ankles of her dusty work boots, and she’d swapped the long-sleeved shirt of yesterday for a faded navy t-shirt whose printed slogan,Dino Dig Argentina 2009, had begun to perish and flake. A bandanna of mostly red with a few swirls of white paisley was tied loosely around her throat.
‘What do you think?’
