Getting Warmer (15 page)

The gods were furious so Tantalus offered up his son as a sacrifice to appease them. He cut the boy up, cooked him, and served him up in a banquet for the gods. The gods found out and were even angrier. Tantalus was then punished after death, condemned to stand knee-deep in water with perfect fruit growing above his head. If he bent
to drink the water, it drained below the level he could reach, and if he reached for the fruit, the branches moved out of his grasp. Eternally tantalised to temper his greed.

Dieudonne loved the story: it was like those the old people of the village would tell before the militias came. It had cannibalism, human sacrifice, infanticide: atrocities he was all too familiar with. The militias, the businessmen, the government officials; they all passed through his village and took whatever they saw: food, women and girls, boys for fighting, lives. They took the dust. They always wanted more and they would never be satisfied.

Dieudonne once again studied the boys around him, their eyes locked on the screens, faces twitching, transported into a cartoon world where only the quick and strong survive. A world where blood gushes and guns roar. Would they be so brave faced with the real thing? Technology. They craved it. They believed it was the answer to all of their problems. They were very wrong. He logged out and went to pay his hire fee. He smiled at the aggressive game-boy: it could be seen as a peace sign or a provocation, he didn’t care. He’d grown up knowing you can slaughter a nation in less than a week using only machetes. Hunted. With all the technology in the world it had taken them nearly two weeks to even catch his scent.

The instructions were to do it tonight. He needed to sharpen his knife.

At home after an early finish and a recuperative nap, Cato had put in a call to Andy Crouch to follow up his thoughts on Kevin Wellard. The retiree’s phone was switched off so that line of inquiry would have to wait. Meanwhile Cato had the post-mortem reports and photos on Christos Papadakis and on the pig found in bushland at Beeliar. The images were fanned out across the kitchen table. Cato made sure he finished his dinner before getting them out and it was just as well. Spaghetti bolognese sat warm and heavy in his stomach: he hoped it would stay there. The night was still and balmy and traffic throbbed along the main drag that connected to the bottom of the street. The smell of frying meat wafted up from the corner burger joint. Next door, Madge was clearly on the mend:
barking, albeit feebly, at the waning moon. For some reason that had reminded Cato to get around to the subject of the nail gun.

Around forty nails in each case: following the line of the spine, one either side, spaced approximately according to where the vertebrae would be. Then, in both cases, bunched around the base of the skull was another deadly bloom of between ten and twenty nails: among these, at least one would have been the eventual killer. According to the pathologist, the sequence of placement along the spine meant that Christos Papadakis would have endured a torture of medieval agonies prior to death; same with the pig. In both cases the nails were the same size and, given the corresponding patterns, had probably been fired by the same person with the same gun. Prime suspect: Mickey Nguyen, one seriously sick puppy.

Had he done this before? Cato scanned an email from DC Chris Thornton listing hospital admittances for nail-gun injuries in the last twelve months. They averaged two or three a month. Most were fingers and hands but one poor bloke managed to blind himself when he checked too closely on a malfunctioning Senco. There were two instances of deliberate or malicious abuse: an apprentice hazing incident in Geraldton left one young man with a plank attached to his left foot, and a disaffected youth in Bunbury used one to self-harm. No reports anywhere of unusual patterns up the spine.

The pig had no doubt been used for practice then buried at the locale Wellard had led them to. The coincidence factor was huge but why was DI Hutchens so interested in pursuing it if both Nguyen and Wellard were dead? Cato decided to try the direct approach first: he prodded his mobile.

‘So what’s the point?’ said Cato after outlining his observations on the two cases. ‘Mickey and Wellard are no longer with us. It’s a coincidence, but is it a priority?’ He could hear soft music in the background, Burt Bacharach. Cato pictured dimmed lights or candles, chilled wine, Mrs Hutchens in a negligee. Maybe he was projecting.

‘Is this urgent?’ DI Hutchens was very territorial about his personal time. It was a one-way street; everybody else could get stuffed and fit in with his plans.

‘I guess not.’

‘You need to look at your work and life balance, mate. You’re getting too obsessive. You need a girlfriend or something. Speaking of which, how did Shellie take the news?’

Cato ignored the jibe. ‘Kind of shocked, sir.’

‘Right, yeah, shame. Look, talk to me about nail guns tomorrow, mate, maybe read a good book or play that piano of yours. Get your mind off things.’

Lara Sumich had just stepped out of the shower and was drying herself when her door intercom buzzed. She’d luxuriated under the powerful jets, enjoying the warmth on the back of her neck as it soothed away the effects of several hours at a computer screen. The telcos were insisting on paperwork authorised at a higher level before proceeding with any of the high-tech tracing stuff they do: even then they weren’t promising anything. The buzzer went again and Lara squinted at the tiny screen next to the unlock button but could only see a shoulder.

‘That you, Col?’ She received a tinny incomprehensible grunt and hoped he hadn’t reverted to his grumpy state of a few days ago. She wrapped the towel around her head, buzzed him up, left her apartment door ajar and padded naked into the kitchen to get some wine out of the fridge.

Lara slipped on a pair of knickers and a T-shirt but she didn’t expect them to stay on for long. She admired her reflection in the lounge room window: nudging the big three-oh and still looking damned good if she didn’t say so herself. She began teasing her hair out to make it look beddable when a figure appeared behind her. It wasn’t Colin Graham.

Dieudonne shut the door behind him and slotted the deadbolt. He had a big knife in his hand. Lara turned to face him. Her service Glock was back at the station in the locker. Her backup baby Browning was in her undies drawer, seven or eight metres away in the bedroom. Dieudonne hadn’t moved. He wore baggy cargoes and another VonZipper T-shirt, red this time. He was about ten
centimetres shorter than her and with less arm-reach – but the knife gave him a bit more.

‘Hi Dieudonne. Is that how you say it?’

He nodded and smiled. It was a beautiful smile, like a child’s.

‘What are you doing here?’

No reply. Big knife, locked door. Silly question. She had to stay calm and focus when what she really wanted to do was scream like a girl and throw up.

‘Cat got your tongue?’

Dieudonne looked puzzled, then smiled again. He seemed to be admiring her furniture, specifically her shelves. ‘So many books!’

‘Of course, you’re a bit of a reader aren’t you?’ She waved a hand generously. ‘Help yourself.’

Lara was edging towards the kitchen, where her knives were. It was nearer than the undies drawer. Dieudonne was slowly shuffling to block her way. Where was Colin Graham when you needed him?

‘I’m thirsty. I need a drink of water.’ She started to walk naturally and purposefully towards the kitchen. ‘Do you want some?’

Dieudonne marched up to her, left hand raised to grab her hair, and right hand swinging with the knife in a backhand slash aimed at her throat. Lara swatted away his left arm, danced back from the swinging arc of the knife, then punched him in the face as hard as she could. He was dazed, his nose was pouring with blood, and he looked humiliated and angry. Lara smacked a nicely chilled bottle of Cloudy Bay sauvignon blanc across his forehead. Dieudonne dropped like a stone. She made sure his lights went fully out by pounding him a couple of times with the heaviest pan she could find. Lara wasn’t sure if she’d killed him but didn’t particularly care. She searched his pockets and got a pleasant surprise.

‘You brought my taser back, how sweet.’

She flipped open her phone and summoned assistance.

Dieudonne was in hospital under police guard, suffering from concussion and a possible hairline fracture of the skull. News media were clamouring for a file picture of the photogenic kick-ass officer and for further details of Lara’s capture of the wanted man. Around the office it was slaps on the back, big smiles, good news week. Lara was at her desk, hunched over the phone.

‘Where were you?’

‘Family emergency: Dylan got sick.’ Dylan, Colin Graham’s youngest, by his previous marriage.

‘You couldn’t have called or texted?’

‘He’s fine. Thanks for asking.’ That was Colin for you: attack, the best form of defence. ‘Anyway I was just calling to check you’re okay.’

‘Yeah, good.’ She relented. ‘Thanks.’ She wondered whether or not she should say the next thing. ‘When are you coming over?’

‘I’ll see if I can get there tonight. So what’s happening with the African?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Anything to tie him to the Santo thing?’

‘Early days, we didn’t get to do much talking yet. He’s the strong silent type. We’ll run the usual tests. We’ve also got his phone.’

‘Yeah? Good stuff, should help clear up a few matters.’

He sounded falsely bright and encouraging. Lara felt a minirush of sympathy for him: sick kids, demanding wife, under the disciplinary spotlight. ‘How are
you
going?’

‘Good, yeah.’

‘Any developments?’

‘Nothing I can’t handle. Been summoned to a meeting with the Internals again today. Apparently all the paperwork is in.’

‘Anything I can do?’

He chuckled. ‘You’ve already done more than enough, sweetheart.’

Hutchens was right: it was mainly Danny Mercurio who was the headkicker although his mate Kenny got a few in as well. Kenny must have been the one wielding the sharpened toothbrush, although by then Gordon Wellard was on the floor and out of frame while Kenny leant over him, administering the coup de grace. It was quick, brutal, and very effective and caught on three different CCTV angles. The assassins had not made any attempt to hide their identities. Indeed it seemed to Cato that they made a point of ensuring the viewer could tell exactly who’d done it, pausing side by side to look up into the camera over the serving counter before walking away. The attack had taken two minutes and twenty-three seconds.

Ten seconds after the killers have left, the kitchenhand walks into frame to find the body. He couldn’t fail to see the killers leave. He crouches down for a few seconds to take a closer look and seems calm as he picks up the wall phone and raises the alarm. Meanwhile the officer on duty in the CCTV monitoring room coincidentally and conveniently is distracted by a phone call, logged in at ten seconds before the attack occurs and logged out at ten seconds after it’s all over. It explains why nobody came rushing to stop them. Cato rewound to where Mercurio and friend posed for the camera and froze the image. Was he reading too much into it? For all of this to work it needed split-second timing and collusion between inmates and jailers. Cato grimaced; he knew how much DI Hutchens hated conspiracy theories.

‘It’s not
Ocean’s Eleven,’
snapped Hutchens. ‘Split-second timing, my arse. We’re talking low-level bikie scum and screws who can’t wipe their bums without an instruction manual.’

It was a rather uncharitable view of his colleagues in Corrections but DI Hutchens wasn’t well known for his generosity of spirit. They were in the waiting room at the mortuary. The Professor was busy
on an overnight car crash but she’d be with them asap. Cato kept his mouth shut while his boss fumed. Hutchens was tetchier than usual today, despite the capture of Dieudonne.

‘Look, Wellard’s given somebody the shits, and Dumb and Dumber stepped up for the job. End of story.’

‘They were both due out later this year,’ Cato reminded him. ‘Now they’re looking at life.’

‘Like I said, Dumb and Dumber, these people rarely think about consequences. Look at the statistics. Master criminals and fiendishly clever plots just don’t figure. I agree that they’ve stepped up to do a job and I’d like to know who it’s for, but I don’t buy the collusion shit. That’s going too far.’

‘So we steer clear of Corrections staff for now?’ asked Cato.

‘We steer clear of Corrections staff, full stop.’

Cato looked at his boss for any signs of an agenda. Inconclusive. ‘Sure,’ he said.

They were saved by a summons from the pathologist’s assistant, a surfie-type with a scorpion tattoo on the inside of his wrist.

‘Lead on, Igor,’ said Hutchens.

‘Ha friggin’ ha,’ the assistant muttered.

Professor Mackenzie hadn’t come across anything like it before. ‘It’s quite an impressive way to kill somebody. A combination of force and almost pinpoint accuracy.’ She nodded in admiration. ‘Killing a man with a toothbrush to the brain. That’s creative, resourceful, very classy.’

Hutchens was less impressed. ‘Was that what did it or was it the stamping on the head?’

Mackenzie waggled her scalpel thoughtfully. ‘Six and two threes? The intracranial bleeding from the toothbrush would probably have led to death all by itself. But the stomping certainly sped things up and added a degree of certainty.’

‘I wouldn’t normally associate these guys with finesse and class,’ said Cato.

‘Ach, there’s no telling what a man can achieve when called forward in his hour of glory.’ Mackenzie’s assistant finished putting labelled bags of organs back inside the body ready for the closing
sutures. ‘My report will be with you in due season, Inspector. Was there anything else, gentlemen?’

Hutchens gave her a grumpy shake of the head. Cato lifted a finger.

‘If you’ve only got a margin of a minute or so to work with, is this the best way of killing somebody in this situation?’

Mackenzie slipped off her butcher’s apron. ‘I’m not an expert in prison assassinations but I can think of at least half a dozen quicker, easier, and more reliable ways of killing somebody with limited time and means. A sharpened toothbrush through the eye to the brain isn’t high on my list.’ She ran her arms and hands under the tap and grabbed some paper towels. ‘But very theatrical, don’t you think?’

Dieudonne’s prepaid phone turned out to be with Optus and it looked like any top-ups were cash transactions in Optus shops. Lara had put in a formal request for any CCTV from their outlets in the metro area corresponding with the top-up days and times. She also asked for a printout of all calls made and received along with the locations of those calls. If the printout duplicated the info they’d already taken from the SIM card then it would just be the one number calling him, or being called by him. That number was also being checked out and was probably a cash prepaid too. None of the clothes they’d taken from Dieudonne bore traces from any of the crime scenes he was associated with. For any decisive DNA or forensic evidence they needed to see if he left anything of himself on the victims or at the loci – that would take longer to trace. It would also help to have access to his current bolthole, but they hadn’t been cleared to talk to him yet.

It was early afternoon. Lara had only had a few hours sleep once Dieudonne was removed from her apartment and the techs had finished with it. The earlier adrenalin rush had dissolved into a creeping fatigue. She called the hospital yet again and was advised that they could probably expect to get access to their man the next day, all things being equal. Lara zapped an email to that effect through to DI Hutchens and checked her in-box. Good
news. All clear on the blood tests, she hadn’t picked up anything nasty from Dieudonne’s much-used knife: apart from a pain in the arm of course. She decided she’d earned the right to an early finish and a power nap before, hopefully, Colin Graham called around this evening. She had some pent-up emotional energy to use on him and wanted to be in good shape for it.

Lara’s email pinged. There was a match on the mobile number Dieudonne kept getting calls from. Again Optus, prepaid, with cash top-ups. Registered seven months earlier in the name of a Leon Johnstone who gave an address in Rockingham. The ID proof had been in the form of a Medicare card and a driver’s licence number. Lara plugged the DL number into the system and found no match. It was fake. She sent a reply back seeking the precise location of the Optus outlet that had taken the registration and a request for any CCTV footage from that day. Lara put her power-nap plans on hold and set out for Little England.

Leon Johnstone’s address was in a cluster of grim brick and tile units, two streets back from the Rockingham foreshore. Lara could see down the street through gaps between the units and the back of a real estate agency, a thin strip of Indian Ocean, startling blue to match the sky above. The turbo ute and Monaro in the adjacent carports spoke ‘bogan’ in mile-high capital letters – bold and underlined. Cigarette butts and empty packets skittered in the sweltering easterly. The wheelie bins were packed to bursting with empty stubbies, cans and pizza cartons. There was a sour and dusty quality to the air. Lara rapped on the front door of Unit 4. Heavy metal music thumped through the open window next door. No answer. Maybe Leon couldn’t hear because of the fucking Foo Fighters. Lara rapped again. Nothing.

‘Whatchawant?’

The bearer of the gravelly voice was the neighbour, a woman of indeterminate age in a straining Cougar singlet. Lara flashed her ID. ‘And you are?’

‘Sheree.’ Sheree lit a cigarette and nodded her streaky locks in the direction of next door. ‘Nobody there, been empty for months.’
There was a flatness to the vowels, a distant memory of northern England.

‘You sure?’

‘I’m not stupid.’

‘Okay. Do you know who owns these places?’

‘Some dick up in Claremont. That mob on the corner manage it.’ She pointed at the real estate agency Lara had noticed earlier. ‘Manage my arse. They do fuck-all except take our money.’

Lara handed Sheree a business card and asked her to get in touch if ever anybody did show up.

‘Filth, huh? Yeah, right.’ Sheree grunted and retreated back indoors.

Lara rummaged through the designated letterbox for Unit 4 but there was only junk mail. She tried squinting in through the curtained windows but it was too dark to discern anything of consequence. Next stop, the real estate agent.

‘Yes,’ said Carl from Tudor Dreams Realty, checking his computer screen, ‘that unit is rented out to Mr Leon Johnstone.’

The only contact details were the mobile number Lara already had. Carl wore golfing pastel shades and his accent was further south in England. The office overlooked Rockingham foreshore, the sandstone dolphin statue, the fake Tuscan architecture, the naval base shimmering over at Garden Island, and the Indian Ocean just beginning to ripple with the hint of a late sea breeze.

‘According to the next-door neighbour, nobody has lived there for months.’

Carl shrugged: it multiplied his chins from three to five. ‘Mr Johnstone’s rent is up to date.’

‘Really? How’s it paid?’ Lara tried to lean over the counter and look at the screen.

Carl tilted it away from her. ‘That has to be confidential at this stage unless you have a warrant.’

Lara resisted the temptation to bury his face in the computer. ‘Is it a monthly cheque, or EFT deposit, or cash? You can tell me that surely. This is a serious crime we’re investigating here.’

Carl thought for a moment. ‘It was paid six months in advance, cash.’

‘Is that usual for a place like that?’

‘A place like what?’

How about bogan rathole? ‘The budget end of the market,’ said Lara.

‘None of my business as long as the rent is paid.’

‘Do you have spare keys for the property?’

‘Yes, but again I suggest a warrant.’

‘Of course, but I have reason to believe that Mr Johnstone may in fact be inside and seriously ill or even dead. As such I need to effect an entry as a matter of some urgency. I could just go and kick the door down but your cooperation and a key might be less damaging.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Deadly,’ said Lara.

‘Ladies first.’

Carl stepped to one side to allow Lara to cross the threshold of Unit 4. There was a musty, unlived-in smell and a fug of baked-in heat. If Leon Johnstone existed then he sure as hell didn’t live here now. Next door the Foo Fighters were at full throttle. Lara wanted to thump on the wall but suspected it would be to no avail. Carl looked a bit distressed.

The place was furnished, cheaply, and had all the basics a transient boarder would need: crockery, cutlery, bedding, towels, et cetera. All appeared to be unused. There was an open plan kitchen and dining area, a lounge with a TV, two bedrooms, bathroom and laundry and a small courtyard at the rear with a couple of withered plants. Ex-geraniums. The general colour scheme was overwhelmingly beige.

‘Anything else I can assist you with?’ By the expression on Carl’s face he clearly hoped the answer was negative.

‘No.’ Lara handed him a business card. ‘If Mr Johnstone or anyone else shows up in connection with this place call me, please.’

They parted company. Before she started the car, Lara phoned Leon Johnstone. She got a message telling her he was either turned
off or out of mobile range. Chucking her phone onto the passenger seat, Lara relished the promise of an evening in the company of Colin Graham.

After a late lunch topped up with another couple of painkillers (he was developing a taste for them), Cato cited his injury and took his work home. Once there, he opened his backpack and took out the Wellard papers he’d acquired that day. Witness statements, phone logs, visitors log, duty rosters, background files on inmates connected with the inquiry. He spread them out on the bed, flicking the fan down to one to keep the sheets from blowing away, and lay down for a read.

Mercurio and his mate Kenny Lovett were in for firearms and drug possession offences, and a serious assault charge in Lovett’s case. Both were due for release in the second half of the year. Next item. The officer who was meant to be monitoring the CCTV screens but was summoned away for a conveniently timed phone call had an unblemished record and even a couple of commendations to his name. On paper he seemed clean. Maybe Cato was once again just chasing shadows and it was all as simple as Hutchens said. No conspiracy – what you see is what you get.