Deadly Deeds (8 page)

Heat rose to my face. Frank was right, and I felt foolish. I’d been working with him for years now, and I should have known better than questioning his every move.

I reloaded a new film in the Minolta and muttered, ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s been a difficult week, and I wasn’t expecting this.’

Frank bent down and grabbed his pencil. ‘Well, at least we got the bastard. Nothing more is going to happen now. It’s black and white. There won’t be any prosecution or manhunt. There’s no need to rush. This is going straight on file as soon as we’re through.’

I felt a sense of relief that this investigation was over in less than a week. The Sheree Beasley homicide dragged on for months before we got the killer. It drained us, especially when we had so little to go on with.

With Jeremy Wilson’s murder, there was enough trace evidence and even a witness. It would have been only a matter of time before we would have caught up with Walter Dunn. But we got lucky, and things went our way in less than a week.

It took us a couple of hours to record everything at the crime scene and collect as much physical evidence as possible. A waste of time, if you asked me. Nobody was going to bother with forensic tests since the case would be classified solved and filed away in the next forty-eight hours.

Nevertheless, we took our time and did our job properly.

The detective in charge of the investigation was not going to be impressed by our procedures. We’d just cost him an additional notch on his resume.

When I tried to collect firearm discharge residue from Walter Dunn’s hands with scanning electron microscope (SEM) adhesive stubs, I was unsuccessful because of the level of decomposition on Walter’s skin, and the damage done by maggots and insects. This was a bit of a setback since the firearm discharge residue collected from Walter’s hands would have confirmed the Smith & Wesson .38 service revolver had been discharged by him.

I reassured myself this incident was a tiny problem since other evidence collected so far at the Wilson’s apartment would clearly indicate Walter Dunn was the killer.

I found no firearm discharge residue on Walter’s clothing.

Half way through the collection of evidence, we called the SES to provide us with additional lighting. Working in the dark, even with all the house lights turned on, was difficult.

When it came to the wound on Walter’s temple, I cut his skin beyond the blackened area surrounding the bullet hole and identified the ‘12 o’clock position’ with a suture. I placed the sample in a glass jar filled with a ten percent formalin mixture. This would help us determine an accurate firing distance and angle for the crime-scene report.

I also took various hair samples from Walter’s body to be used against reference samples, that is known samples collected at the Wilson’s apartment, and compared with those of the suspect.

I plucked thirty hairs from the pubic area, and thirty hairs from his scalp. All hair samples were stored in folded paper and inserted in clearly labelled plastic bags. The hair samples would confirm the colour, sex and race of the person, as well as the areas of the body from which the evidence came from. Although we knew where the samples from Walter Dunn’s house came from, comparison tests would confirm those samples matched those found at the Wilson’s apartment.

Sixty to eighty insects were collected from and under the body, and 90 to 150cm away from the body. I stored them in 70 percent ethyl alcohol per volume in distilled water. They would be forwarded to an entomologist for identification.

I also collected two samples of maggots containing sixty to seventy individuals, and placed one of the samples in a phial with flesh to ensure their survival. The second sample was stored in a glass bottle filled with formalin.

Meanwhile, Frank was busy collecting saliva, soil, tools, tool marks, vegetation, fibres and blood samples. He also found the jacket which matched the piece of cloth found on the window frame of the Wilson’s apartment.

The paramedics came ten minutes after I called them, just when we finished taking the final details of the crime scene.

They placed the corpse in a body bag and whisked it to the mortuary in Southgate.

Frank and I drove back to my place since it was less than fifteen minutes away.

‘
You know,’ I said, as we were climbing the stairs to my apartment. ‘It’s hard for me to believe this is all over. I’m not used to solving homicides in four days.’

‘
I have to admit this is the easiest case I’ve been involved in for quite a few years,’ Frank replied, his voice strained from lack of sleep.

Normally, homicides took months, sometimes years to solve.

I opened the door to my apartment and turned to Frank. ‘You don’t have to go home. If you’re tired, you can sleep on the couch. It’s big, comfortable, and frankly I could do with someone in the house tonight.’

‘
What about Michael?’

‘
What
about
Michael?’

Frank had a oblong smile on his face.

‘And no, it’s not what you think,’ I said defensively before he had time to utter a syllable.

‘
I didn’t say anything,’ he protested, his hands up in the air. ‘You’re the one who’s invited me in.’

‘
Just making sure we understand each other.’

I made him a cup of tea while he showered.

At 5.23 a.m., he was snoring on the couch, and I got to bed.

I was restless. My mind was turning endlessly. Flashes of what I had seen in the last few days haunted me. I kept thinking about Teresa and saw myself in her place.

Thank God I was no longer married. If someone had decapitated my husband, they would have had to send me to an asylum and throw away the keys.

I tried hard to close my eyes and escape reality, but when I heard the first tram travelling down Chapel Street, I knew daylight was just around the corner.

And then someone knocked gently on my bedroom door.

‘
What?’

‘
Mum?’

‘
Yes, Michael.’

He poked his head in the room. ‘There’s a man sleeping in the lounge room.’

‘I know. Don’t wake him up. He’s on our side.’

‘
Okay, then,’ he said, as if we were the dynamic duo.

When he closed the door, I felt like a rotten mother. I didn’t spend enough time with Michael.

At around six a.m., I closed my eyes and slept for twenty hours straight.

CHAPTER SIX

O
n Tuesday the 25th of February, the weather was kind of strange. The day began with a cool wind sweeping in from the ocean. After lunch, it was too hot to even wear a jacket. And that’s what I loved about Melbourne weather. Totally unpredictable. This was also why I kept nursing a chest cold which had been close to an end for almost two weeks now. I was seriously wondering if my chest cold wasn’t some form of asthma. I knew Australia held one of the world’s highest number of asthmatics, and nobody knew why. After all, Australia was one of the least polluted countries on the planet.

I made a mental note to see a specialist, but I knew I would put it off forever. I seldom went to a doctor, and it would take more than a cough to get me there.

Straight after lunch, I got a call from the telephone company asking me how I was going with a case involving a person who was stealing coins from telephone booths in the City of Port Phillip. I told them I’d been busy with a homicide and had little chance to look into it. After hanging up, I decided to do some research in the afternoon. They’d given me the job two weeks ago, and I hadn’t done a thing.

Because of the small amount of serious homicides in this state, I supplemented my income by doing private investigative work for financial institutions, large corporations and various government departments.

I spent most of the day shopping on Chapel Street, indulging at Black Whale and Checkerboard, two second-hand book shops, two hundred meters apart, on the same side of the street. Both owners of the bookshops knew me well since I purchased a ton of books from them at least three times a week. They often gave me a discount on multiple purchases. But I found no information in either shop on stealing money from telephone booths.

I ate a vegetarian souvlaki for lunch and washed it down with a Dr Pepper.

By the time the evening came, I was still restless. I had a vague idea of visiting Teresa Wilson in hospital, but it didn’t feel right. She wasn’t a relative of mine, nor a friend. And yet, not acknowledging what she had gone through seemed cruel.

I sat on my balcony with
The Rainmaker
, a second-hand hardcover legal thriller by John Grisham. Although the story was well-written and captivated my interest, my thoughts kept drifting back to the Wilson investigation, making it impossible for me to fully emerge myself in the adventure. The past week kept trotting in my mind, and I wasn’t going to deny I was now sightly anxious about my future after the Deputy Commissioner of Police would find out I’d deliberately disobeyed a direct order and persisted with the Wilson case.

When Michael came back from god-knows-where, I asked him if he knew anything about people stealing coins from telephone booths.

‘Sure, it’s on the Internet,’ he replied, as if this should have been the first place to look. He was wearing the same Michael Jordan T-shirt he had on all week. I was seriously considering going shopping with him for some new clothes. ‘You can get anything from the Internet,’ he added, flipping his blond fringe away from his face.

‘
The Internet?’

‘
Yeah, some guy name Jolly Roger wrote an entire manual on how to do illegal stuff. You know, basically everything wrong you can do. Fraud, murder, absolutely anything.’

‘
Jolly Roger? Is that his real name?’

He gave me a look that implied I had no brain left. ‘Do you really think someone is going to write all this stuff on the Internet under his real name?’

‘Show me.’

I took him to my study, flicked on the computer and logged into the Internet.

Michael accessed one of the most popular Internet search engines.

In less than thirty seconds, Michael located a web-page on how to torture, how to kill with your bare hands, how to make dynamite, how to make bombs, how to break into a house, and how to do another one hundred and one illegal things.

My eyes were open wide in front of the screen. I was astounded at how fast Michael got there. He was better than me on the damn thing. I knew how to trace people, break into government and company databases, but I wasn’t an Internet freak.

‘
What did you do?’ I asked.

‘
What do you mean?’

‘
How did you find this?’

‘
I was doing some stuff at school on terrorism, and I found it by accident.’

I wanted to throw up. We were busting our guts trying to catch criminals, and some lunatic in the USA provided the world with recipes on how to kill people.

‘Jesus Christ!’ I muttered, jumping from one foot to the other.

‘
Okay here we go,’ he said, shifting from the chair. ‘I found it.’

I looked over his shoulder and saw that he was right. ‘Can you print this stuff?’ I asked. In front of my eyes were clear instructions on how to steal money from telephone booths.

‘Sure, hold on a sec.’

He did a COPY and PASTE command from the web side to Microsoft Word 6.0, followed by a simple lay-out, and printed the article.

In less than a minute I was holding the information in my hands.

How to Get Money out of Pay Phones

by Jolly Roger

I will now share with you my experiences with pay telephones. You will discover that it is possible to get money from a pay phone with a minimum of effort. Theory: Most pay phones use four wires for the transmission of data and codes to the central office. Two of them are used for voice  (usually red and green), one is a ground, and the last is used with the others for the transmission of codes.

It is with this last wire that you will be working with. On the pay phone that I usually did this to, it was colored purple, but most likely will be another color.

What you will do is simply find a pay phone which has exposed wires, such that one of them can be disconnected and connected at ease without fear of discovery. You will discover that it is usually a good idea to have some electrical tape along with you and some tool for cutting this tape.

Through trial and error, you will disconnect one wire at a time starting with the wires different than green and red. You do want a dial tone during this operation.

What you want to disconnect is the wire supplying the codes to the telephone company so that the pay phone will not get the 'busy' or 'hang-up' command. Leave this wire disconnected when you discover it.

What will happen: Anytime that someone puts any amount of money into the pay phone, the deposit will not register with the phone company and it will be held in the 'temporary' chamber of the pay phone.

Then, (a day later or so) you just go back to the phone, reconnect the wire, and click the hook a few times and the phone will dump it all out the shute. (What is happening is that the 'hangup' code that the phone was not receiving due to the wire being disconnected suddenly gets the code and dumps its 'temporary' storage spot.)

You can make a nice amount of money this way, but remember that a repairman will stop by every few times it is reported broken and repair it, so check it at least once a day.

I had seen things which were of poor taste. But this kind of information really irritated me. Sure, I believed in freedom of speech, like most people, but I objected to instructions on how to break the law.

‘
You didn’t go around and try this?’ I asked Michael.

He gave me a sour look.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just that, I mean you found this information. So, I thought maybe you wanted to try it out.’

‘
And because I found it, it means I’m going to use it?’

‘
No, but you’re a bit young.’

He sighed angrily and said, ‘What would you know, anyway? You’re never home to find out if I grow up or not.’ Bitterness infested his tone.

I knew he was right, but I had to defend myself. Part of my nature was to argue. ‘That’s not fair, Michael. I’m trying to make the world a better place.’

‘
Well, how about starting here?’

Damn!
I couldn’t get used to how kids talked to their parents these days. Okay, I promised to myself I would never be mean to my children, but now I realised everything had a price.

‘
Michael, don’t talk to me that way.’

‘
Forget it,’ he said and left the study.

I flicked the computer off and threw the printed page in my in-tray.

Half an hour later, we were having dinner over the dining table. We seldom ate together, not since Michael was around eight years old. It felt kind of weird for the both of us.

Michael ate his oven fries, fish fingers and three vegies, avoiding eye contact. It hurt me like hell to think I was becoming the parent I swore I would never become. But there was never enough time in the day to do everything and to take care of someone else as well. God only knew how the other mothers managed.

And then, suddenly he announced that he would be away for the weekend. He’d be staying at a friend’s place on Friday night and wouldn’t be back until Sunday evening. I knew better than to ask him why. I just smiled and said, ‘sure’.

After dinner, Michael left for his room, and I did the dishes.

Right on 7.00 p.m., I decided to go to Terry Bennetts’ Gymnasium.

I was kind of surprised to see Ken there because he usually turned up at around ten o’clock. Now that the Wilson investigation was over, I felt at liberty to discuss the details with him.

Ken seemed particularly alert that day, as if those daily four hours of body building were finally paying off. I told him once that if he’d put as much effort on studying as he did on body building, he’d be a genius by now. But he replied he abhorred anything which involved mental activity. His reply surprised me because I found him so in touch with himself and the world around. For a man who never tried to go beyond his high school certificate, he possessed an amazing sense of self-awareness and understanding of the world around him. Working at the State Library obviously gave him a chance to dip into hundreds of books a year. And although he never saw it as intellectual stimulus, his general knowledge far surpassed many people I knew.

‘
I don’t see anything wrong in visiting Teresa Wilson,’ he said between two one-hundred-and-twenty-pound deadlifts. He wasn’t wearing a top, and I felt a bit uncomfortable standing too close to him. Not that I expected to lose control and suddenly jump on him, but near-naked men made me feel at awe. I hadn’t slept with anyone for a long time and began wondering if I’d end up like an old maid. Funny enough, I didn’t feel a strong need for a sexual relationship, but some warm body contact, cuddles and love would have been welcomed. I guess I could have always used Frank for that purpose, but I wasn’t that type of woman.

I watched Ken lift those weights the way I lift two shopping bags. ‘I know there’s nothing wrong in visiting her,’ I said, ‘but her husband just got his head cut off, and I don’t know how I could handle a normal conversation without mentioning his name.’

Ken dropped the weights. I thought they were going to go straight through the first floor and down to the garage below. ‘You don’t need coaching to hold a conversation,’ he said while walking to a cable-rowing machine. ‘You’re the only person I can talk to for hours without being bored to death.’

‘
Thanks,’ I said, feeling myself blushing as I took a sip of water from my Coca-Cola drink bottle. I liked Ken because he got straight to the point. You knew where you were standing with him. I wished more people were like him.

I worked my chest, biceps, shoulders and abs.

By the time I finished, I was certain of two things. I was incapable of doing another sit-up, and I would go and visit Teresa Wilson the following day.

I had to give a lecture in Introduction to Crime Scene Investigation at Swinburne University of Technology on Wednesday afternoon, so I decided to visit Teresa Wilson at St Patrick’s Hospital in the morning.

On my way to the hospital, I worried about my afternoon lecture. I was poorly prepared and would have to improvise.

The Quality Management Branch at the VFSC designed the Diploma of Applied Science in Forensic Science in conjunction with Swinburne University of Technology and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) in Canberra. The only course previously available of its kind was an Associate Diploma in Applied Science in Forensic Investigation, which was only opened to Australian Federal Police crime scene examiners throughout Australia. Other crime-scene examiners had to be satisfied with on-the-job training only, and usually complemented their skills by doing training courses in areas considered to be associated with the duties of crime scene examiners, such as photography, fingerprinting and laboratory technician courses.