Prime Cut (3 page)

Cato had asked Tess and Greg to find out tide and weather conditions for the last few days to see if that would tell them where the body might have entered the water. He also suggested following up any missing person reports from the last few weeks or so. Tess had given him a ‘No shit, Sherlock?’ look. Obviously, in both instances, she was already on the case. Cato should have expected the hostility from her but it still bothered him. It was at least twelve or thirteen years ago but it was clearly a sore that had never properly healed. And why should it? Cato was fairly fresh out of the academy and four years her junior. They had been partnered up, working nights out of Midland, Perth’s bandit country, in the souped-up unmarked Commodore. Cato Kwong – Prince of the Mean Streets. High-speed chases through the suburbs, domestics, prowlers, break-ins. Routine stuff but still usually more a thrill than not in those days. And the adrenaline had fed the spark between them. It all seemed natural and inevitable and it was good, great at times. All over each other like a rash. Until he walked out on her.

It was nearly dark as they drove into Ravensthorpe. Just a few pale strips of sky lay in the west, sandwiched between the silhouette of distant hills and a blanket of ink-black clouds. Ravy, as it was known locally, was bigger than Hopey, only just. The main street was dark and deserted except around the two-storey red brick Ravensthorpe Hotel where an array of utes and four-wheel drives were angleparked in anticipation of the Wednesday night pool competition. Some of the utes bore mine company logos. Cato had seen the lights of the mine off in the eastern distance as they passed the airport turn-off halfway between the two towns. You couldn’t miss it, a patch of brilliant daylight in the surrounding dim dusk. They’d had to pull into the side of the road while an ambulance, with lights flashing, sped past.

Cato pulled into the hospital car park and killed the radio. According to the eight o’clock news the Australian stock market just had its worst day in twenty years. Jim Buckley snorted and muttered something to the effect of ‘Boo-fucking-hoo’. It was deadly quiet, not many lights on. Like many country hospitals, Ravensthorpe was little more than a glorified nursing post, kept open by the skin of its teeth, the marginality of the electorate or, as in this case, the persuasive power of the mining company. The ambulance, having deposited its patient, was swinging back out onto the road; the driver and Cato exchanged a relaxed hand-flick wave.

Cato and Buckley approached the front entrance expecting the automatic doors to slide open. They didn’t. Except for emergencies, the hospital operating hours had recently been cut back to an eight to eight shift. ‘Staff Shortages’ said the handwritten notice blutacked to the door. It was 8.05. Cato rang the bell and they waited. And waited. Cato cupped his hands to the door and peered through the glare for any signs of life or movement inside. Nothing. He swore loudly and pressed the bell a tenth time. Finally an elderly woman in a pink dressing gown floated into view with a cup of something steaming. She almost dropped her mug as she saw Cato’s face up against the glass. He pressed his ID against the door mouthing ‘POLICE’. It didn’t help; in fact she seemed even more determined to hurry back to her bed and hide under the covers.

Jim Buckley stepped forward with a kindly smile, a cheery wave, and a non-Asian face. That seemed to do the trick. The old woman poked a button on the inside and the doors slid open. With a bedside manner that was a complete revelation to Cato, Buckley got directions to the operating theatre at the rear of the hospital as well as learning all he needed to know about her hernia and cataracts.

‘Thanks Deirdre, and you take care of yourself now, love.’

‘Are you coming back tomorrow, Roger?’

‘Yes love, ’course I am.’

Buckley gave her a last little wave and led Cato down the corridor. Cato wondered who was meant to be looking after Deirdre overnight when he spotted a grumpy-looking woman with angry red hair knotted up in a bun. She was coming out of the ladies. She didn’t give either of the men a second glance, as if strangers wandering the hospital corridors at this hour was an everyday occurrence. Instead she thumped through a set of double doors behind which Cato could hear muffled cries and commotion. Dear Diary, remind me to avoid needing an overnight stay in Ravensthorpe General and to never whinge about city hospitals ever again.

The lights were at least on in the operating theatre, a good sign. They pushed open the doors and walked through. A short wiry man paused, scalpel in hand. Behind him an assistant sat on a stool at a steel bench in the corner taking notes with one hand and eating a sandwich with the other. She didn’t pause or look up from behind her curtain of black hair. In the other corner stood Tess. She looked at her watch meaningfully and smiled mock-sweetly.

‘So you found the place okay.’

Cato’s patience was stretched paper-thin. ‘Had a bit of trouble getting in.’

The man with the scalpel was obviously keen to get on with it. ‘Evening gentlemen, you must be the detectives. I’m the pathologist. Harold Lewis, Harry to you. Forgive me for not shaking hands. Shall we proceed?’

All this addressed in a fey voice to Jim Buckley who nodded. His attention was elsewhere.

‘That’s Sally,’ said Harry waving his scalpel in the general direction.

It was a kind of low-rent
Silent Witness,
silent except for Sally munching on the sandwich and the scratching of her biro on a notepad. The body lay on a shiny steel table. Cato edged closer. His eyes travelled over the skin, the wounds, the stumps and the handless arm. Flipper. It didn’t look human any more. But it – correction, he – once was. This shapeless lump of meat had a family somewhere. Cato would try to hold on to that thought. The smell was like an extra presence in the room. Sally seemed oblivious to it, wiping a wholemeal crumb daintily from the corner of her lips.

Dr Lewis got to work. The subject was a medium-sized male probably in the twenty to forty age-range. No obvious indications of any disease or illness. No scars, tattoos, or distinguishing birthmarks, and no obvious indications of racial origin. ‘Going by the general slippage and flesh deterioration I’d estimate he’s been in the water for up to a week. Sorry I can’t be more precise.’

Harry examined, and Sally listed, the various wounds, mainly teeth-marks and tears. With the sandwich out of the way, Sally hopped off her stool and took some photographs.

Dr Lewis held the pale arm up, quite gently. ‘Pity about the missing hand; it might have had a wedding finger, something to help us along. No such luck.’

As far as he could tell, the missing hand, right arm, and legs were probably the work of sharks. Lewis turned his attention to the neck, dragging down the magnifier on its extension arm.

‘The neck hasn’t been snapped like you might expect from the wrenching movement of a shark’s jaw. It has been cut, or more likely sawn, perhaps with a chainsaw? A handsaw would be a lot of effort and leave more jagged markings on the bone. Not exactly my specialty but we’ll get it looked at in Perth.’

Cato certainly agreed with the ‘handsaw effort’ part. Was it only that morning they’d been decapitating a cow in Katanning?

Lewis continued. ‘So my observant friend, Dr Terhorst, would appear to be on the ball. Speaking of which, I thought he might
have been with us tonight?’

He looked around the room as if Terhorst might have been hiding somewhere.

Tess looked up from writing her own notes. ‘He was booked to give a talk at the Hopey Wine Club tonight. He gave his apologies, said he’d call you tomorrow.’

‘A wine buff too. A man of many talents, our Dr Terhorst,’ Lewis said, a touch insincerely. He made the ‘Y’ incision and opened the body up. Tess went pale. Cato made himself keep watching; it wasn’t his first time, by any means, but it had been a while. Buckley was concentrating on Sally’s calf muscles, oblivious to the carnage on the steel trolley. Lewis lifted the lungs out. Cato could see where the wiry muscularity came from. A few lung lifts every day would keep anyone in good shape.

‘The lung contents rule out death by drowning,’ Lewis confirmed.

He examined them further, probing with his scalpel, humming softly to himself. Cato tried to place the tune: it might have been a bit of Puccini, or Shirley Bassey. Finally Lewis glanced at Cato.

‘I would say your friend was definitely dead before he went into the water.’

Cato and Tess shared a look; it seemed he was going to be around for a while longer. Lewis plucked out and squeezed what appeared to be a blood-soaked semi-deflated balloon into a plastic container. Stomach contents: pretty empty, but there were indications of rice and chicken in there. Blood, skin and tissue samples would be taken for further testing but Cato had seen enough for now. His neck prickled with something approaching excitement.

‘Are you saying this is a murder, Dr Lewis?’

‘Possibly; that’s your job not mine. There could be any number of reasons for what we see here: accident, panic, cover-up, foul play. Anyway...’ he tapped Flipper’s neck lightly with his scalpel and looked Cato straight in the eye, ‘it’s definitely a bit fishy.’

‘Fuck.’

That was the considered response of DI Hutchens when Cato phoned his ex-boss early the following morning and told him about the preliminary pathology report. Cato was outside on the street, the sun was just up and birdsong filled the air. Magpies warbled sweetly like angels being drowned in a bathtub. A gentle breeze filtered through the gum trees. Cato was enjoying the peace and tranquillity.

‘Fuck,’ Hutchens said again.

Cato waited and kept his mouth shut. Hutchens had let it be known that he wanted an open-and-shut case with papers filed. He didn’t have the manpower for a murder investigation, if that’s what this was. And, gruesome as it might be, at this stage he did not see it as that high a priority. Right now the body was a nobody that nobody had reported missing. Nobody seemed to care. Maybe nobody would and it could quietly slip away into the ever-growing list of ‘Unsolveds’.

Cato watched a magpie swoop a morning walker as he patiently listened to Hutchens rant. The bugger was that, already, there had been journo inquiries to Police Media in Perth. Crime or no crime, sharks were big enough news. Head office wanted it played down until they knew more about what they were dealing with. So far the media were being fobbed off with what appeared to be a ‘drowning’ and the probability that the so-called ‘shark attack’ was most likely post-mortem curiosity. In the meantime Hutchens had to be seen to be doing something just in case a grieving relative popped out of the woodwork. And now the pathologist was suggesting foul play. Hutchens punctuated his monologue with another expletive.

One of his detective sergeants was due back on duty on Monday
from a family holiday in New Zealand but had phoned in saying he’d slipped on a glacier and snapped his ankle.

‘A fucking glacier. Prick.’

The next one due back was a week later and she’d cleverly kept her phone turned off while she no doubt partied hard in Bali. Everybody else was too fucking busy. There was a stagnant, ill-tempered pause. Cato wanted a crack at this so he let the silence hang. And hang. And was rewarded with an exasperated grunt.

‘I hope I’m not going to regret this. Reckon you and Buckley can hold the fort for a week or so?’

Cato made sure nobody was looking, punched the air and grinned. Hutchens sucked in a breath as if he’d seen the gesture down the phone.

‘Just look and act like real detectives but don’t actually try to find anything out. We don’t need it. Just walk the walk, okay? Then, a week Monday, walk away. I’ll have someone else down there by then.’

‘Won’t let you down, boss.’

‘Too right you won’t.’ Hutchens cleared his throat. ‘In effect you run it, Cato. Work out whatever you need to with Buckley to keep him sweet. Any journos come sniffing, send them my way or just tell them to fuck off. Mate, keep your nose clean on this. Don’t stuff up and I’ll owe you one. I might even bring you back in from the cold.’

Cato didn’t intend to hold his breath on that.

Hutchens made some scratching and rustling noises. ‘Give me the number of that boss of yours. What’s his name again?’

‘Saunders. Brett Saunders.’

‘Oh yeah, “Colonel” Saunders, Sheep-Shagging Squad. I hope he can spare two hotshots like you and Buckley.’

So did Cato.

Cato went back inside to get some breakfast. Miraculously two rooms had been free at the Fitzgerald River Motel, directly over the road from the police shipping container, now a de facto ‘Murder HQ’. It was a miracle because everywhere, including the
caravan park, had been full for the last two years. Life in a mining boomtown, apparently. Yet to Cato this place still seemed tiny, quiet and unspoilt. Mining boom to him conjured up the vivid red earth of the Pilbara and mile-long trains. If this was a boom then – first impressions anyway – it seemed to be a muted one.

The two rooms had become available because, according to Pam the bustling receptionist who seemed to know everything and didn’t mind sharing it, the previous long-term resident, a middlelevel accountant at the mine, had just been sacked for downloading extreme porn. Pam’s lips pursed disapprovingly at that one. The second room had just come back into service after being trashed the previous month by a party of contractors ‘celebrating’ the end of their tour of duty. Either way it was a big relief to Cato. The idea of bunking in with Jim Buckley for the next week didn’t appeal. Pam’s eyes had widened when they presented their police ID and gave Albany CIB as the billing address.

‘That’ll be the body on the beach. They reckon he’d been involved in drugs.’

‘That right?’ said Cato.

‘Oh yes, since that mine opened the dealers have been targeting this place. Eastern States cartels out to make a killing. You mark my words.’ Pam gave a what’s-the-world-coming-to shake of the head and disappeared out back.

Buckley was freshly showered and shaved and finishing off a big fry-up. Cato joined him at the cramped table overlooking Veal Street and Murder HQ. Buckley glanced up from the remnants of brekkie and mopped up some egg yolk with a corner of toast.

‘What did your mate Hutchens say then?’

Cato thought he detected a note of resentment there. He savoured it for a second but almost immediately felt guilty. Maybe his soon-to-be ex-wife was right, he did have a mean streak and a chip on his shoulder. He tried to shake it off and stay bright and positive.

‘We’re on the case, temporarily seconded to Albany Detectives; they’re over-stretched. We’ve got just over a week before Hutchens sends one of his regulars over to run things.’

Buckley didn’t seem that excited, even less so when Cato told him
just who Hutchens wanted in charge. Cato sweetened it so that it sounded like Buckley would maintain a ‘managerial overview and inter-agency liaison role’.

All bullshit and they both knew it.

Buckley squinted out through the lace curtains. ‘Go get ’em, Jackie Chan.’

Something was burning. There were blood spots in the sink. Stuart Miller muttered his third ‘fucking hell’ of the day, chucked the disposable Bic into the scummy water and rushed through to the kitchen to rescue his toast. The timer on the microwave read 8.20. Days when he woke up after The Dream were usually like this: accident-prone, out of sorts, pissed off. He hadn’t had The Dream for months: just as well, too many mornings like this and he’d have topped himself by now. He tried scraping some of the black stuff off the toast. He didn’t actually mind the taste that much but Jenny kept warning him he’d get cancer if he ate it. He gave up, binned it and slotted two more in the toaster.

Miller switched on the radio. Somebody was wittering on about the cost and quality of a cappuccino in Perth versus Fremantle. He usually preferred the ABC talk over the ads and crap music on the other stations but lately the chat seemed to get more and more trivial and giggly. Alien. Sometimes when he woke up from The Dream he felt as if he’d just landed like those poor wretched asylum-seekers in the leaky boats up north: desperate, unable to fully understand what was going on, isolated, not knowing what the day would bring. He went back to the bathroom and peeled his daily pills off their foil – blood pressure, cholesterol, blood thinner, beta blocker – chucked them down without the water and got back to shaving. Why shave? He no longer had a job to go to, no longer had appearances to keep up. Jenny had left him a list of things he might do to occupy his dotage, provide him with a meaningful and active retirement. The backyard needed weeding, a few things to be got from the shop, he could walk or cycle into town and back, and there was always retirees tennis for fun, fitness and friendship.

‘Fucking hell.’

That was the fourth for the day.

Everyone was gathered at Murder HQ for the first official squad meeting on Operation Flipper. Cato had passed on the news from DI Hutchens and noted a raised eyebrow and half-smirk from Tess when he explained the operational arrangements and line of day-to-day command. He kept to himself the bit about Hutchens wanting them to just go through the motions and not actually achieve anything. He had a point to prove, if only to himself, that he could be a good cop. Just once more. He’d called Jane to let her know something had come up at work and that he wouldn’t be able to have Jake this weekend. Jane sounded particularly bright and carefree. Cato got the message: she was already moving on.

He outlined, for Greg Fisher’s benefit, the essence of the pathology findings so far. The body would be on its way to Perth in a cold box on the next flight out from the recently expanded airstrip at Ravensthorpe. In the absence of proper freight facilities the torso was in a sealed body bag, in an old chest fridge supplied by the Ravy butcher. In Perth it would undergo further examination and tests. Cato was well aware that the flight from Ravy to the Perth PathLab would be the only fast-moving thing about the investigation. This wasn’t a high priority – an unidentified person who nobody seemed to be making any noise about. Meanwhile, in and around Perth, there were at least four murders, a handful of rapes and half a dozen violent home invasions ahead in the forensics queue. He pointed this out to the faces in front of him and told them not to hold their breath. Jim Buckley smiled benevolently and promised he wouldn’t. Cato felt the need to explain himself.

‘This might just seem like a lump of rotting meat to some people...’ – as expected, Buckley held his gaze; he wasn’t the backing-down type – ‘but he is somebody’s son, or brother, or even father. And I’d like to think that, if he belonged to me, somebody would do their job and find out what happened to him.’

Buckley winked and mimed applause. Cato, point made,
signalled it was time to move on.

Young Greg Fisher was like a puppy, almost widdling himself with excitement. His first murder, Cato surmised. Greg reported on the two jobs he’d been following up yesterday. There were three missing-person reports within the Great Southern and South-East Coastal districts over the last two weeks. None of them matched. The first, a thirteen year old girl from Albany, had returned home the next day having proved some point to her parents. Tess grimaced at that one. The second, a thirty-six year old farm labourer from nearby Jerdacuttup, had looked promising but he had been located by Kalgoorlie police three days later when they arrested him for disturbing the peace in a Hay Street knocking shop. He reckoned he hadn’t got his money’s worth. Finally, a seventy-three year old woman with Alzheimer’s had gone walkabout the previous Saturday and been found the next morning under Esperance jetty, sleeping dangerously close to Sammy the Sea Lion.

‘So we’re no closer to finding out who Flipper is,’ concluded Greg.

Tess looked daggers at him. ‘Don’t forget to pop over to the town hall and pick up those room dividers when we finish here, okay Greg?’

Cato pushed on.

‘Let’s widen the trawl through the mispers. Get the whole state, no time limit. Meanwhile what about the tides and weather, anything there?’

Greg was looking pleased with himself. ‘The prevailing conditions around here are south-westerlies. Anything dropped in the ocean would tend to travel eastwards. But for the last four days it’s been easterlies. As the body ended up that side of the groyne we can assume it was dropped in somewhere east of here in the last few days. The Sea Rescue guys have a chart on the wall over there.’

They all got up and gathered around it. Greg continued, rapt at being the centre of attention.

‘It was mainly strong easterlies in the late mornings up to midarvo and then it moved around to the south and west by late arvo and evening. Dropping right off to practically nothing overnight.
Averaging fifteen to twenty knots at the height.’

All of which meant very little to Cato. ‘Where do you think the body went into the water?’

‘After talking with Sea Rescue I’d say anywhere between Mason Bay and Starvation Bay.’ Fisher pointed to dots on the map. ‘Starvo’s about forty kilometres from here, Mason’s maybe halfway? There’s a boat ramp at Starvo and easy beach access at Mason but my bet is Starvo.’

He looked over to Tess for approval. She nodded agreement. Cato was duly impressed. Not being a boatie or a local, he didn’t know any better anyway.

‘Good work, Greg. Can you follow up any unusual activity in those spots over the last week – any strangers, any boats going out at unusual times, stuff like that? We also need to check known shipping and other boat traffic. Our friend could have been dumped by a passing tanker or trawler for all we know. Let me know how you go.’

Greg beamed and reached for the phone.

Buckley and Tess both looked expectantly at Cato.

‘We don’t know much but let’s look at what we do know,’ said Cato.

‘Dead,’ shrugged Buckley.

‘Thanks,’ said Cato.

‘No head,’ mused Tess.

Cato nodded. ‘Somebody wants to make it hard for us to work out who he is.’

Buckley sniffed. ‘Detection 101, so that’s what they teach you on the Golden Boy Fast Track these days.’

Cato ignored the dig and turned to Tess. ‘Any Chinese restaurants in Hopetoun?’

Tess and Buckley looked at their watches and at each other. It was just gone nine o’clock in the morning.

Cato patted his stomach. ‘Hungry as.’

The temperature hovered in the low thirties for the third day running. It was bloody October as well, unbelievable. In Sunderland
this would be a ‘Phew What a Scorcher’ tabloid heatwave: riots in the streets, prisoners on the rooftops, questions in Parliament. In Busselton it was ‘fine, sunny, temperatures slightly above average’. My arse. The only room in the house with air conditioning was the bedroom but he knew if he was caught in there he’d be in trouble. Stuart Miller had to put on a show of being an active and happy retiree and not laze around in a nice cool bedroom and read the paper like he really wanted to. He could hear Jenny’s words now in the prim Edinburgh Miss Jean Brodie schoolteacher’s voice she used for the bad kids:
You’ll be a long time dead, plenty of time for sleeping then, Stuart Miller!
Stuart Miller was well over it: the heat, the healthy, active retirement. The lot.