by Candice Fox
The Cairns dogs backed up the Zeerich dog’s indication that something about the area at the back of DeCasper’s yard was of interest to investigators. One of the dogs was a specially trained cadaver dog, so this led investigators to believe it was less likely he was confused by any organic fertiliser. While the reporters settled in to DeCasper’s street, doing doorknocks of his neighbours and calling in their findings, officers bagged a shovel, gloves, and any garden tools they could find in the storage shed in the corner of the yard and conducted a new search of the house. The decision was made to wait for a ground-penetrating radar unit to be flown up from Brisbane.
‘I know the parents are anxious,’ Clark sighed. ‘But I don’t want to fuck this up. If DeCasper wasn’t working alone, there could be biological or fibre evidence on that body or in the soil. The Zeerich chief wanted to go in with a fucking excavator. Every news channel in the country is watching.’
‘So what’s your gut feeling?’ I asked. ‘Is it him?’
‘He was in the area on the night of the abduction,’ Clark sighed. ‘He’s a known offender.’
‘No, he’s not,’ I reminded him.
‘Well, he’s a known “wannabe offender”,’ Clark snapped. ‘Do we need to be so politically correct?’
I bit my tongue.
‘I sure as shit hope the clothes in the television set aren’t linked to the grave. Or Richie. I hope it’s not a grave at all,’ Clark said. ‘Christ, don’t let it be a grave.’
‘At the very least, the search should keep the press off the hotel,’ I said.
‘That’s why I called,’ he said. ‘That may not be exactly what we want. If there’s a body out there, they are going to need an excavator eventually, and a trained dig team, and a couple of forensics vans. The commissioner will want to be there on the ground if it looks like we’ve likely found the boy, and I’m sure the parents will want to go. It’s going to be a fucking circus.’
He drew a deep breath.
‘Look,’ Clark said. ‘I know you don’t want your face on any more front pages. But there will be a certain number of journos hanging around who have been assigned to follow you and Amanda.’
‘Yes, I told you I ran into one this morning,’ I said. ‘He was delightful.’
‘It would be very useful for me if you could stay at the hotel today,’ Clark said. ‘Keep as many as you can off the Zeerich site.’
‘I can do that,’ I said. By now I had wandered through into the hotel’s foyer, to a small side entrance used by the valets. The ground was peppered with cigarette butts. I felt the presence of someone beside me and assumed it was Amanda.
‘It might not be a grave,’ I told Clark. ‘Keep your hopes up.’
Clark made a bitter sound. I hung up and turned to speak to my partner, but there was a man standing there dressed in grey coveralls, the underarms of the heavy garment stained with sweat. Maintenance guy. A ponytail of chocolate-coloured hair rested on his shoulder. The man was small beside me, but most people are. I imagined he was apt at squeezing through vents to retrieve dead rats and at climbing ladders to change chandelier lightbulbs. I remembered him in the CCTV vision, riding his bike to the hotel at 4 am on the night of Richie’s disappearance.
‘You must be our long-suffering maintenance man,’ I said, putting my hand out. His palm was sweaty when we shook, his grip too tight. He kept his head low as he introduced himself in a voice so small I had to ask him to repeat it.
‘Dylan Hogan.’ He forced a smile, drew on his cigarette hard as though sucking up courage.
‘Ted Collins.’
‘Were you just saying …’ He pointed to the phone in my hand. ‘Uh, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop.’
‘They’re conducting a search for the boy south of here,’ I said. ‘I can’t say more than that.’
‘Did they say there was a body, or …?’
I put my hands out, shrugged, unable to divulge anything to him about what I knew of the crime. I remembered doing the same shrug, pulling the same face, for gawkers at the edge of crime scenes when I was a drug squad cop. Dylan the maintenance man stubbed out his cigarette and followed me inside again, a step behind and to my left, wanting to come along and hear any more tidbits that I dropped but not wanting to seem like he was fishing for them. I gave him a nod as I turned back towards the restaurant, a creeping feeling making me glance over my shoulder to see if he was still following even as I reached Amanda and our cluttered table. Amanda was scooping the undissolved sugar out of her coffee cup and sucking it off her index finger as she read her papers.
‘Have you met the maintenance man yet?’ I asked.
‘Yeah, he asked me some questions outside the cop shop yesterday,’ Amanda said. ‘Looky-loo. Wanted to know how the case was going. Could be one of the journos is paying him to be curious.’
‘Maybe. I just ran into him at the smoker’s door,’ I said. ‘He wanted to know if they’d found a body,’ I said. She didn’t look up. I thought about Clark’s request that Amanda and I stay grounded to the hotel for the day.
‘Want to take a tour with me?’ I asked her.
Amanda, being Amanda, was delighted to take a tour of the White Caps Hotel’s ‘bowels’, as she kept calling them. One of her more annoying eccentricities is a penchant for randomly spouting historical or scientific trivia, so she listened carefully as Dylan Hogan explained the background of the hotel, taking us through a service door behind reception and into a long, featureless labyrinth of hallways, our voices echoing off the high ceiling.
The building had originally been christened The Grand Hotel, the pet project of a retiring engineer who had come into the region to buy up surplus army equipment, building materials and textiles left over from the Second World War. Douglas Aaronson had fallen in love with the grey pebble and white powder sand beaches of Cairns, and decided to build the hotel and live out his days in its penthouse suite overlooking the ocean. As is the experience of many people who buy businesses in which to retire, the venture was a devastating one. Aaronson overspent on the lavish, eighty-room hotel and found it difficult to recoup the cost, with Cairns tourism still growing. He underestimated the amount of work that would personally be required of him, and ended up putting in a hundred hours a week running the place, dealing with the growing pains of undertrained staff and a populace not accustomed to the hotel’s lavish look and pricey room charge.
Aaronson recruited his entire family to keep the beast he had created alive, but in 1948, just two years after The Grand’s opening, Aaronson died of a heart attack in the hotel bar and his embittered children sold the hotel to try to claw back some of their inheritance. The building stood empty for almost a decade before it was bought and re-christened the White Caps.
Dylan explained that the hotel still had many of its original finishings, as the Queensland Heritage Council forbid the new owners from ripping out a lot of the useless but historically significant equipment. There was a boiler room under the staff change rooms that didn’t operate, the fifty-square-foot space packed with rusty, ancient equipment that did little more than collect dust. Amanda and I poked our heads into the darkened space and looked around, but it was clear to me that the room had been searched extensively. There were dog footprints in the dust on the floor, and the familiar print of police-issue boots.
Dylan showed us an old dumb waiter chute off the empty kitchen, allowing Amanda to pull the rickety wooden box down from where it had settled only feet above the iron doors accessing it. The dumb waiter access points on every floor, he told us, had been used by the room service staff in the old days to move trays of food up and down the building, and ingredients up and down from the kitchen’s storage room one floor below. Dylan handed me a torch from his utility belt when I requested it, and I sent the box up and looked into the empty cavity beneath it. When Amanda pulled the box down, I stuck my head into the space and looked up at the seemingly endless rising chute.
Amanda skipped ahead of us, pulling open doors a
nd rummaging through cupboards indiscriminately, while I strolled, keeping a close eye on Dylan. It was clear to me that he was a shy and socially awkward fellow, but as I watched, his body gave up its secrets one at a time. I noticed a couple of scarred slash marks on the flesh of his right forearm, a clumsy suicide attempt or the result of a knife fight, I guessed. The skin of his first two knuckles on both hands was scarred, and a kind of nervous tic had him scratching the inner rim of his ears now and then so hard that he almost drew blood with nails that were slightly too long. The keys on his belt had been split into one big clump and a smaller one, the little set featuring a plastic tag that read ‘Van 6A, Big Lots’. Caravan park.
As Dylan took us through the fuse room, the security office, the staff change rooms and the storage rooms under the parking lot, I noticed his nervous tic beginning to extend down into his feet. Whenever we stopped walking, he scraped the toe of one steel-capped boot into the concrete, making a grinding sound, his eyes invariably avoiding ours.
It took two hours to see the entire hotel.
‘That’s about it,’ he said eventually, opening his hands like a man showing a dog he’s out of treats. We were standing outside his tiny office beside the pool gates, the filter system humming loudly nearby as an aquatic cleaner chugged along the bottom of the pool. ‘Uh, I think I’ve taken you though everything you need to see.’
I glanced at Amanda, wondering if she’d picked up on the oddity of Hogan’s expression – that he’d taken us through everything we ‘needed’ to see and not everything that there was. She was peering through the window into his office, and Hogan, receiving no confirmation from us that he was released, took the doorhandle in a grip so tight his knuckles were white.
‘What about the elevator shafts?’ Amanda asked.
Hogan’s shoulders lifted by an inch as his muscles tightened. He opened the door to the office and stepped in defiantly, the space only big enough for Amanda and me to hang our heads in the doorway.
‘Oh, you can see those if you want,’ he said, shuffling papers on the desk and a huge, tattered diary. ‘But the police have been through them a million times. That’s the first place they checked. Thought the kid might have fallen down underneath the carriage or something.’
‘Let’s look anyway,’ Amanda said. ‘I’ve always wanted to see inside an elevator shaft. Haven’t you?’ She poked me in the ribs.
Hogan scratched his ear and looked at me, and in his eyes I saw a strange desperation that a casual observer might have mistaken for fatigue.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
The maintenance man nodded resignedly, jangled the keys on his belt and led us back around the pool towards the foyer doors.
‘There’s something odd here,’ I murmured to Amanda as we followed Hogan to the elevators. She nodded, smiling pleasantly at the small man as we stepped into the carriage together. We rode the elevator down to the basement floor of the hotel in silence, the inside of Hogan’s left ear now smeared with a fine sheen of blood.
‘Tell us about the elevators,’ I said as the numbers counted down. Hogan looked at the stainless steel walls around us like he was unfamiliar with the space. He stood for a few seconds transfixed on framed posters advertising happy hour at the Clam and the Kenny Rogers tribute concert Amanda had attended.
‘I don’t, uh …’ Dylan shrugged. ‘What can I say?’
‘You had so much to say about everything else in the hotel,’ Amanda said. ‘Surely you have some interesting facts about the elevators.’
‘Oh, well.’ Dylan nodded vigorously at the challenge. ‘It’s just, I don’t service them or repair them. We bring in a company to do that. I don’t even clean out the bottom of the shaft. I have a key that switches them on and off, and sends them up and down, that’s it.’
‘They look pretty modern,’ I said, running my hand over the polished chrome railing beside us. ‘When were they installed?’
‘The hotel always had elevators,’ Dylan said.
We arrived in the basement, a long, empty space filled with the hotel’s spare supplies, stacks of beer kegs, laundry tubs, floor polishers and loading trolleys. Amanda and I watched while Dylan opened a panel at the side of the elevator with a key and sent the elevator back up one floor with a switch.
‘Whoa.’ Amanda grinned, watching the machinery in the cavity spin and clunk into place. ‘Check this out.’
The space was smaller than I had imagined, accommodating the elevator carriage between two huge, black, oily shafts that guided the box up and down the chute. There was not much space for anything else, gears and rails nestled on either side of the elevator. The floor of the elevator shaft was blackened and scuff-marked concrete, as was the back wall. Amanda didn’t hesitate. She stepped down into the two-foot-deep space and stood staring up in wonder at the bottom of the elevator.
‘Amanda, would you please get out of there?’ I sighed. ‘If that thing falls down it’ll crush you like a bug.’
‘Crushed by an elevator,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t that be a memorable way to die.’
‘The carriage can’t really fall,’ Dylan said, distracted by his fingernails. ‘The old types used to be just a box on a cable fed through a giant pulley, with a counterweight attached. This one’s hydraulic. There’s no cable. Those three shafts there, the two at the sides and one at the back, they send the carriage up and down. If one of the shafts fails, the box is still held up by the two others.’
‘So this elevator is new, then?’ I said. ‘Did the original one have a counterweight?’
‘Mmm-hmm.’ Dylan cleared his throat. I leaned into the shaft as far as I dared and looked up at the perfectly square bottom of the elevator. The shaft smelled of engine oil.
‘So many great movie scenes play out in elevator shafts.’ Amanda put her foot up on a ridge in the side of the shaft and attempted to hoist herself onto the wall, humming the Mission Impossible theme. ‘Man down, Ethan. Man down,’ she said gravely. I reached in and pulled her out.
‘All right,’ I told Dylan. Relief flooded into his face, until I said, ‘Show us the other two elevator bottoms. The service elevator and the backup one in the foyer. Then we’ll go to the roof and look down at the carriages from above.’
He swallowed and seemed to want to offer something in protest. Instead, he stood with his arms hanging by his sides as Amanda climbed out of the shaft.
There was nothing to see of the bottoms of the other elevators. Amanda climbed into each one and stood, cheerfully defying death, looking up at them from underneath. We rode the elevators to the roof, and Dylan played with the radio on his belt, switching the signal dial on and off. I didn’t expect that we would find anything when we looked down at the elevators from above. I decided that the maintenance man’s discomfort must have been coming from the sheer proximity of Amanda and me, the minutes ticking by in our presence while we edged around discovering whatever it was he didn’t want us to discover.
‘So how long have you had this gig?’ I asked conversationally as we rode the elevator to the roof.
‘Oh, a couple of years.’ He smiled stiffly.
‘Pretty sweet, seems like,’ Amanda chimed in. ‘You just rock around on your own all day fixing stuff up as you see fit?’
‘That’s …’ He shrugged. ‘That’s about the gist of it.’
‘You haven’t got any assistants?’ I asked.
‘No.’
‘You set your own hours?’
‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘I have a roster. I have to be available if anything stuffs up. If there’s nothing to do, I just do paperwork.’
‘So on the morning of the boy’s disappearance,’ I said, edging closer, ‘you rode to the hotel on your bike. You live nearby?’
Dylan’s shoulders twitched again, and Amanda cocked her head at him, her clockwork mind collecting observations.
‘I don’t have a driver’s licence,’ Dylan offered. ‘I always ride to work. It’s not far.’
‘The Big Lots ca
ravan park?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’ve lived in the caravan park for the whole time you’ve worked here?’
‘I’m single.’ He ground his boot into the floor of the elevator. ‘I don’t need much space.’
‘Where were you before that?’
‘Here and there.’ He glanced at me. It was the first time I’d seen a flash of anger in him, a little prickle of frustration he was trying to keep buried deep. I guessed he’d been homeless, a junkie maybe. His sleeves were rolled to just below the crook of his elbow. There might have been track marks or tattoos he was hiding.
‘Four in the morning is a pretty brutal start,’ I said. ‘Why do they put you on so early?’
‘I wasn’t rostered on for four,’ he said. ‘I was rostered on at seven. I came in early because I had a backlog of stuff to do, thought I could get it all knocked over in a day, you know? Get back on track.’
‘You told me you were deadly hungover,’ Amanda said. ‘To the point of being sick.’
This was new information to me. We both watched Dylan for a response.
‘I was hungover,’ he said, offering a small, tight grin. ‘It took a while to come on. I guess riding the bike, you know, getting the air in my face. I was pretty rusty by seven.’
We arrived at the eighth floor. Dylan led us through another service door, up a short flight of stairs, and onto a rooftop. The sun was blazing as the afternoon set in, baking the dusty concrete. I went to the edge of the roof and looked out over the ocean, making my way between huge stacks of air conditioner units as big as cars. Hot air thrummed out of the machines, searing against my skin. The edge of the roof was waist-high, splattered with seagull shit and feathers.
There were children’s footprints in the dust and dirt near the rooftop, no distinct shoe prints, just small smears. I knew they had likely already been photographed by the police units, but I took my phone out and snapped them anyway. There was no telling how old they were, and a thousand explanations might have accounted for them. Any staff member with access might have led their children up to the rooftop to look at the view.
