Part III

Joel was practically bouncing on his toes. "Found that myself," "darkest corner of the room, would've been missed if I hadn't thought to check." "The word DEFECT," Sean said. "What do you reckon it means?"

Joel jumped in before Martin could answer. "Could be political. Some kind of activist statement, he was a property developer as well as a burnout promoter, had his fingers in a lot of pies, greenies, anti-development types, someone with a grudge —"

"It's not political," I said. Everyone looked at me, first time I'd opened my mouth since we walked in. "DEFECT is a car term, At a burnout event, when the scrutineers check over a car and find something wrong with it — bald tyres, no roll cage, dodgy fuel lines, anything that makes it dangerous — they slap a defect notice on it, car gets pulled from the competition, It means the vehicle is unfit, Unsafe, Not allowed on the pad."

I looked at Winters' body on the floor. "Whoever wrote that wasn't making a political statement; they were passing judgment. In the scene's language, they were saying this bloke was defective, unfit, condemned."

The room went still; Martin was looking at me with an expression I hadn't seen before, not impressed, more like he'd picked up a rock expecting to find a bug and found a diamond instead.

"George is correct," Martin said. "This is a message written by someone who knows the burnout world intimately, from inside the culture, not an outsider with a grudge; they speak the language." He turned back to the wall and studied the letters with his magnifying glass. "The writing is done with engine oil; letters are formed with a finger — the index finger, based on the width of the strokes, the person who wrote this is right-handed." He pulled out his tape measure again and held it against the wall beside the word.

"The bottom of the letter D sits at approximately 162 centimetres from the floor, when a person writes on a wall, they naturally write at their own eye level. This suggests the writer is roughly 162 centimetres tall." He paused, looked at the boot prints on the floor, at the wall, then at the boot prints again.

"That doesn't match," he muttered. "What doesn't match?" Sean asked.

"The boot prints suggest a stride length consistent with someone approximately 178 centimetres tall, but the writing height suggests someone closer to 162, and the boot size is too small for someone of 178 centimetres." He frowned, tapping his fingers against his thigh three times. "Either this person has unique proportions, or they were deliberately lengthening their stride to appear taller than they actually are."

He filed that thought away somewhere behind his eyes; I could see him do it — a tiny flicker, like a drawer opening and closing. "What else?" Sean asked. "The blood on the floor." Martin crouched beside a dark smear near the body. "This isn't the victim's blood; no wounds on the body, as you've confirmed. The blood belongs to someone else, possibly the killer."

He produced a small glass slide from his jacket pocket, scraped a tiny amount of the dried blood onto it with a thumbnail, and held it up to the light from the window. "I'll need to examine this properly at the lab, but at first glance, the drying pattern and colour suggest it deposited several hours before we arrived, consistent with the timeframe."

He stood up, brushed his knees off, looked around the room one last time with that scanning gaze that missed nothing. Then he sniffed the air once, twice, a third time, slower.

"There's something else in here, under the oil, dust, and blood. Something floral, faint, almost gone." He sniffed again. "Hand cream, I think, the medicated kind, the type you get prescribed after skin grafts or surgical reconstruction."

"Could be from when the building was still in use," Joel suggested. "Old cleaning products or something." "Possibly," Martin said. But he didn't sound convinced; he filed that away, too, in another drawer, another flicker. As the ambos lifted Winters' body onto the stretcher, something small and gold slipped from his clothing and rolled across the concrete floor with a thin, ringing sound. Joel snatched it up. "Wedding ring," he said, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. "Plain gold band, there's been a woman here."

Martin took the ring from Joel and turned it in his fingers, studying the inside of the band; no inscription. "The ring didn't belong to Winters," Martin said. "It's too small for his fingers. Someone brought this ring here, brought it with them and left it on the body deliberately."

"Why would someone leave a wedding ring on a dead bloke?" I asked.

"Because they wanted him to know," Martin hissed. "They wanted him to see it before he died, to understand what it meant, who it belonged to." He dropped the ring into a small evidence bag Sean held out and walked toward the door. "You can take the body now," he said over his shoulder. "There's nothing else to learn from it."In the hallway, out of earshot of the cops, he stopped and looked at me, "That word on the wall. DEFECT, you said it means condemned, unfit."

"Yeah." "Someone from inside the burnout world murdered Jack Winters, used the culture's own language to mark him, and brought a woman's wedding ring to the scene and left it with the body as a message. He paused.,"This isn't robbery; it's not business or politics, it's personal, deeply personal. Someone hated this man for something he did to a woman, and they wanted him to know exactly why he was dying."

He started walking toward the exit. "And George?" "Yeah?"

"The boot prints, stride length, and writing height—something about those numbers doesn't sit right. I can't see what it is yet, but it's there and it's going to matter."

He pushed through the front door and into the morning light. I followed him out, my shoulder aching, my head spinning, and the smell of burnt rubber and engine oil and something faintly floral stuck in my nose like a question I didn't know how to ask.

Somewhere behind us, on a wall in a dead man's room, a single word stared out at the empty building. DEFECT.

The first body, first word, first in a series of things that would drag me and Martin down a road neither of us saw coming, toward a truth that was buried for twelve years in red dirt and burnt rubber, the silence that only exists in places where people have decided, collectively, to stop talking about what happened.

But I didn't know that yet; all I knew was that my flatmate had just sniffed a dead man's lips, measured footprints in dust, and told two homicide detectives they were useless, all before lunch, and God, I was hooked, wouldn't you be?