Read Online Gladiatrix by Rhonda Roberts - Free Book Online

the battered leather briefcase sitting on his lap, ‘is an important new lead.’
    This airy optimism wasn’t the hard-line Des I knew so well; this past year had to have affected him too. The link to the Dupree case wasn’t, as yet, an important new lead and he knew it. It wasn’t anything at all, until we had a lot more information. He wasn’t thinking clearly. I was tired, but he must be exhausted.
    â€˜Des, you’re gonna have to be realistic here,’ I said, with concern. ‘Be prepared for resistance. These guys don’t know you, and they certainly won’t know, or care, about what happened in this area twenty years ago. They’re probably overworked, understaffed, and just keeping up with their own case loads.’
    He continued to ignore me. Which worried me. I’d never seen him this vulnerable before. I sighted the turn-off with a mixture of both relief and revulsion, saying, ‘There it is.’ We turned right, into Lithgow’s main street.
    Lithgow is an old mining town, established in the mid-1800s to make use of the local coal seam. Later other industries sprang up like copper smelting, small arms production, and even a gaol. I hated the rottenplace. It was full of Depression-era housing and dilapidated factories. It routinely had heatstroke weather in summer, and snow in winter. To me, everything looked past its use-by date. Burnt out. A nasty, tinny husk of suffering, full of failed ventures.
    Well, that was how I saw it anyway. I didn’t feel that way about the rest of the Blue Mountains. I’d even been back to Kanangra-Boyd Park when I was a teenager, as part of the post traumatic stress therapy. But I’d never been in the cave where I’d been found, and I hated Lithgow more every time I saw it. I couldn’t remember being brought here when I was first found, but there was just something about it that revolted me, made me angry.
    Des loved Lithgow. The people and the life. Even now his spirits were lifting as he looked around. Like he’d come home. Des could have gone as far as he wanted in the police force. He was a smart man, with all the right qualities, and he’d been an exceptional detective. He had a kind of instinct for it. He’d had chance after chance to join the city squad, but he’d decided he wanted to stay a country copper right here, cradled by the mountain wilderness, in love with the romance of snow on gum trees. He’d spent nearly two decades in Lithgow because of his twin passions; the law and the bush. Until he was forced to take medical retirement, that is, for his heart.
    We pulled up in front of the police station, another Depression-era, red-brick monstrosity. ‘Still the same old place,’ Des mumbled with affection, as he opened his door.
    I didn’t reply. Yep, it was still just as ugly.
    We walked in the front door, and got a shock. The station was exactly the same on the outside, but inside had been gutted. Instead of an open building you couldlook into, with desks and uniformed officers, a small front foyer had been created that completely blocked off the rest of the station.
    Des was a little disoriented, but said gamely, ‘Well, there never was enough room the way it’d been laid out before.’
    The foyer, which was really a mini waiting room, ended in a walled-off front desk and had a grey plastic bench running along one wall. There was a solid-looking door next to the front desk, with a keypad on the lock. Okay, it was more secure, but, before, the place had some character. Ugly, sure, but character nevertheless. Now it looked like every official waiting room I’d ever been in. Institutional grey, with bolted-down, hardened plastic fittings. I wondered what else had changed.
    The constable behind the front desk looked up. He’d been busy filling out a form pinned to a clipboard. ‘Yes?’ He was around my age, but still had a crop of pinky-red