Jill Jackson - 02 - Voodoo Doll by Leah Giarratano Page A

Monday.
    Isobel had insisted that she would go to work.
    'I might be able to find Cutter,' she'd reasoned. When he'd told her about Fuzzy, and explained to her why he couldn't tell the police about his connection to Cutter, she hadn't flinched. Instead, she was in problem-solving mode, and he wished he'd trusted her earlier.
    Isobel worked for one of the three largest law firms in Australia. Her role included investigating the paper trail of anyone who wasn't on their side, and sometimes those who were. She had access to almost every piece of electronic information the police did. Privacy meant little if you had the technology and resources to get around the flimsy obstacles set up to protect it.
    For his part, Joss was going to see his mother. Back to where it all began.
    Tiptoeing up from the loungeroom last night, with most of the second bottle of bourbon rendering the staircase a roiling escalator, Joss had wheeled a chair from the study out to the hallway in front of the linen closet. He'd positioned the swivel chair under the manhole cover and held onto it until the floor stopped moving. Managing to climb onto the seat of the chair, he stood with his feet slightly apart and his hand on the wall to stop the spinning.
    As quietly as possible he'd popped the manhole cover, sliding it back into the roof. Ordinarily, he would easily have been able to pull himself from the chair up into the dark cavity overhead. Last night, however, when he'd gripped the edge of the manhole and tried to launch himself up, his feet had propelled the wheeled chair into the closed doors of the master bedroom. With Isobel standing over him holding a tearful Charlie, he'd summoned as much dignity as he could muster and made his way to his side of the bed, where he found himself this morning.
    Problem was, now he couldn't keep his mind off the toolbox in the ceiling.
    The knife had gone into the box when he'd returned from Rwanda. He'd moved the box from the ceiling in their former home to this house when they moved in five years ago, and as far as he knew, no one else knew what was inside.
    Isobel had some idea of the horrors of the genocide in Africa. He knew that when he'd come home, she'd read everything she could find about the Australian peacekeepers' role there. She knew that Joss was one of the thirty or so Australian soldiers who'd been on-site during the Kibeho massacre, when four thousand Hutus had been slaughtered over the course of four days in a displaced person's camp of one hundred thousand people. Thousands more had been horribly wounded. She knew that the rules of engagement for the Australians had prohibited them firing their weapons unless they were directly fired upon. They were expressly forbidden from using their firearms in defence of the civilians.
    Two battalions of Tutsi warriors had surrounded the camp, convinced it was harbouring Hutu fighters. In fact, the majority of the camp consisted of women and children, but that had not stopped the bloodlust. The Tutsis had mostly used machetes in order to save bullets. The carnage would have sent any witness mad, but for a soldier, trained to defend and attack, the horror of the utter helplessness had been unspeakable. Literally. Although Isobel knew the facts released to the media, no one knew what Joss had seen and done in those three days. His brothers and sisters in arms had their own unspoken memories; he read them in their eyes on the rare occasions they caught up, but only Joss and the dead Tutsi soldier knew why he kept the knife locked in the toolbox.
    He turned his eyes away as he washed his sodden, uneaten Weetbix down the sink, rinsed the breakfast dishes and left the kitchen.
    Then he went back upstairs to get his knife.
    Despite the humidity, Joss kept the hood up on his jacket when he changed buses at Wynyard. The bruising on his face was at its most livid this morning, and he noticed that people averted their eyes when he glanced in their direction; today that