by Alan Carter
‘No Mim?’
‘Homework,’ say Michael and Paulie at the same time.
Vanessa seizes the opportunity to start rattling some pots and pans in the kitchen and Michael takes the hint.
‘Better unload those bales.’
‘I’ll give you a hand.’
Back outside the sandflies are end-of-day thick but the trick is to keep moving. Michael doesn’t seem to notice them; stubby shorts and polo shirt, bare legs and arms, he seems mildly amused by my slapping and waving like a nancy.
‘Nice place you have here.’
‘We like it.’
‘Peaceful, out of the way.’
‘Yeah, it is.’
‘Missus must get lonely though. Not much social life around here and she’s got a bit of spark.’
He gets under my skin like Cunningham seems to get under everybody else’s. ‘We manage.’ The bales are stacked in the corner of the garage and I’ll be happy to see the back of him. Maybe a retaliatory dig. ‘Your daughter, too. Must be lonely for her out on the farm?’
‘Jan? No, she’s good. It’s been tough since her fella passed away but you keep on keeping on, don’t you?’
‘She must appreciate you being around to keep a close eye on her and Mim.’
‘Yeah. I guess she must.’
A wink and a wave to show he’s not going to be baited and away he goes down the valley road.
15.
The van had been stolen in Nelson the weekend before the murder. The owner, hearing about its possible subsequent use, was ambivalent about having it returned if we ever did recover it. The Lodge CCTV picked it up passing midmorning last Sunday, the driver wearing a hoodie and low-pulled baseball cap. Somebody was now chasing any other sightings along that road and others for around that time Sunday morning.
‘Stolen from seventy-odd k’s away, in plenty of time for the dastardly deed,’ says Maxwell. ‘So that rules out a spontaneous crime of passion.’
‘Masterful deduction, boss.’
‘No need to call me boss, Nick. We’re a team here.’
‘Did Hoodie get a lift up to collect the van?’
‘We’re working through that. Lots of traffic up and down the valley on a sunny Sunday morning. Could’ve even cycled over from the Wairau Valley, shoved the bike in the back and gone his way. Endless possibilities.’
Maxwell seems buoyed by developments so I leave him to enjoy his day. Much as I’d love to join the chase, he already has the people he needs. He wants me to focus on Havelka, see if we can find the other half of the body and identify a culprit. Easy as. The hitman thread is the one to follow and I can’t help thinking that Thomas Hemi has unresolved secrets in his life: he didn’t want us looking over his farm and he took umbrage at me bringing up his past. Fair enough. We all like to think that our home is our castle and that what we were back then is not necessarily what we are now. On the way back up the road to the cop shop my phone goes. Speak of the devil.
‘Thomas? How’s it going?’
‘Okay. Jax told me last night those nuts in the Lodge are pretty pissed off at the AOS raid. They’re planning something. Bit of retaliation.’
‘He got this from Melvyn, I assume?’
‘Just thought I’d pass it on.’
‘No specifics?’
‘If there were, I’d tell you.’ Jeez, he’s terse as.
‘Thanks, Thomas.’
‘I’ve told him to keep his ears open.’
‘Cheers.’
Thomas hangs up. Another set of toes trodden on. It’s easy to do around here. Back in the office Latifa has left a note saying she’s out on SH6 looking for dickheads. Odds-on, she’ll find some. It’s midmorning and yesterday’s wind has whipped up again. It was my turn to drop Paulie off this morning. As I was pulling into the school car park Mim was hugging goodbye to her mum. I’d never met her before: a striking-looking woman with a strongly defined face and broad shoulders. She smiled at Paulie and at me before getting back into her car.
‘Michael double-booked?’ I leaned down to her open window as Paulie and Mim went their way.
‘Doctor’s appointment. You’re Paul’s dad, I take it. I’m Jan.’
‘Nick.’ We shook hands. ‘Michael brought some hay up to our place last night. Much appreciated.’
Jan nodded. ‘He said he was going to.’
‘Settling in okay?’
‘Getting there, gradually. Takes a while to get to know people.’
‘Good. Well, see you around I suppose.’
‘Expect so.’
And she’d driven off leaving me feeling slightly short-changed. I’m not sure why but I’d been expecting someone timid, shrunken, brow-beaten. Maybe it’s something about Michael’s intensity and protectiveness, that vehemence of his when we’d disrupted Mim’s sleepover plans. I recall the Māori phrase Latifa had used a couple of days ago about a man searching the mountains and forests for a wife to call his own. Māhana. Jan didn’t seem to be the type of woman who would allow herself to be someone’s possession. Husband or father. Anyone.
Having revisited the Havelka case, examined the pathologist’s report, looked again at the circumstances leading up to the death, I’m inclining to the view that it’s Morgan Hopu’s handiwork, and that in turn brings my mind back to his once enforcer-cum-hitman, younger half-brother Thomas. Looking at that aerial map and the track from Pelorus Bridge over the hill to Butchers Flat only adds to my suspicions: the Hemi property is less than a kilometre from where the half-body was found. So, is the other half buried somewhere on Thomas’s farm and is that why he didn’t want us poking around? None of it quite rings true, though. Thomas was at Butchers Flat when the body was unearthed. Not a flicker of reaction. Is he that good an actor? Or maybe it was all just too chaotic that day and I wouldn’t have noticed anything anyway. Either way, there are insufficient grounds yet for a warrant so I need to find some. Thomas’s charge sheet is a good place to start.
It’s remarkably clean for an ex-thug. Most of the convictions are for relatively petty violence in his early gang days. He would have been late teens, early twenties. Skirmishes and turf disputes in pub car parks and nightclubs around Nelson, a drive-by shooting on a house but no injuries reported, the firebombing of a massage parlour. Drug possession, carrying an offensive weapon. A more serious assault over a drug debt left a man in a coma for six weeks. Gemma is right, he was a nasty piece of work back then. But he barely registers after his twenty-second birthday, and he’s in his mid-forties now. Two decades clean. Did he get smart or lucky or did he change his ways? There’s one blip. Eight years ago he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in Wellington. He’d got hammered during a pub crawl in the city centre and, shortly after midnight one summer night, the police had been called in response to reports of someone shouting, swearing and disturbing the neighbours. It wasn’t something that happened very often around there. The neighbourhood was Oriental Bay. Check the address and a map. A few blocks away from Lucy McLernon’s home. Two years later she would be raped and murdered in a motel in Westport and six months after that the motel manager would be shot, execution-style, just like Karel Havelka.
Coincidence? Hemi arrested a few blocks away from McLernon’s home. It’s like saying a shooting a few blocks away from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is an attempted presidential assassination. Hemi could have been in the area for any number of reasons: work, holiday, visiting friends or relatives, a wedding, a funeral. What was he doing over there anyway? My understanding is that he has lived on his farm in the Wakamarina for the best part of ten years. Where were Ruth and the kids during this time? He married and started his family nearly a decade earlier, not long after he dropped off those early gang charge sheets. A few residential blocks in Wellington notwithstanding – is there anything linking Hemi to Lucy McLernon? Searching her case file on the database it seems not. Lunchtime, the bakery beckons.
Brooding over a chicken salad wrap and coffee, I map out where to fr
om here. Maxwell needs to be brought up to speed: maybe we should seek a search warrant on the Hemi homestead, and perhaps a visit to Wellington and to Westport is in order. Keegan had mentioned the name of a Nelson D who worked both homicide cases – McLernon and the motel owner Robertson. Scrolling through the emails on my phone, I find his name and number: Nigel Watson. It turns out he’s still in the Job but barely.
‘Caught me just in time, mate. I retire next month. You the bloke that caused all the fuss last year? Arresting captains of industry, torturing Russian tourists with eels? Fucking the district commander-to-be? Hoped I’d meet you before I left. Nice to put a face to a juicy rumour.’ He hasn’t got much on today or any other day for that matter and is happy to drive over the Whangamoa to meet here in Havelock. ‘Treat me to a pan of mussels and I’m anybody’s. Or maybe I shouldn’t be saying that to the infamous Roger the Todger, eh?’ Hoot.
We agree a five o’clock rendezvous. That should give me enough time to brace for his verbal onslaught.
Phone back on the table and a last slurp of coffee; looking up, I see Jessie James waving on the other side of the window. She invites herself in and joins me. ‘Want to buy me a coffee?’ Another round ordered while Jessie gets her iPad out and revs it up. ‘Been doing a bit more digging on your friends in the Lodge.’
‘Great. That warrants a bonus ginger slice.’
‘Make it a brownie.’ The order goes in. ‘Standing Rock and Harney County. Mean anything to you?’
‘Standing Rock. Backblocks of America. A year or two ago there was a big environmental protest that got violent. Made TV news around the world. The other one? No.’
‘Standing Rock reservation bridges North and South Dakota. It’s a few hundred klicks from Brandon Cunningham’s neighbourhood. The protests were over an oil pipeline through Sioux sacred grounds and other environmentally sensitive areas. Galvanised a lot of people from right and left, and got pretty nasty at times.’ Finger swipe and a new screen. ‘Harney County is in Oregon. An armed militia occupied a wildlife reserve in protest at some ranchers charged with arson on federal land. Effectively took over the adjacent town too. Went on a few months and one militiaman got killed at a police roadblock. A lot of he-said, she-said, but the gist is that some believed they were testing the water for an overthrow of the government.’
‘All very interesting. But?’
‘I trawled through social media looking for any traces from the names I have for those in the Lodge.’
‘I already did that. Cunningham’s a no-show.’
‘Sure but there’s this guy Georges, that’s George with an ‘s’, French style. Georges LeBlanc, Louisiana native, Cajun as they come.’
She shows me the photo. It’s Daniel Boone.
‘He heeded the call to arms at the militia stand-off in Oregon and later worked for private security at Standing Rock. If his social media presence is anything to go by, he’s one bad hombre. But his name also comes up in connection with some allegations at Standing Rock.’
I read the summary. Then bell Maxwell for a catch-up.
‘Look at the injuries.’
Jessie James’ research dossier has been printed out in full colour but Maxwell also has the electronic version plus sundry links to supporting news stories, official reports and social media feeds. Jessie also helpfully screen-captured some of the juicier posts in case they mysteriously disappear. It’s the Corson County medical examiner’s report that we’re focusing on right now. The victim was nineteen-year-old Alicia Gomez, a protestor at the Standing Rock site who went missing one night and turned up in a ditch two days later. As well as being sexually assaulted, there were other horrors done to her.
‘Secateurs, cigarette burns, snipped extremities, eye gougings.’ Not dissimilar to our friend in the Four Square coldroom. Still Maxwell’s not buying it. ‘Standard gangland or tinpot death squad MO, I would have thought. Horrible sure, but not proof. Anything else?’
‘A witness saw her that night heading back to town from the demo. A Trenton Logistics company 4WD was seen following her. That’s the company LeBlanc worked for. The same day he’d tweeted a photo of Gomez shouting at him and he made specific threats against her.’
‘It says in these reports he was questioned and released without charge.’
‘Questioned by guys he probably shared off-duty beers with. Look at the social media feed. He’s a big-time hater.’
Maxwell scrolls through. ‘Muslims, gays, lefties, women, vegans, greenies, ethnics. Tried reading the comments section of the Journal online recently? People like him and views like that are a dime a dozen these days.’
‘How come a guy like this gets through Immigration?’
‘C’mon Nick, he has no criminal record, and any allegations are just that. His views are deplorable but you get that in a democracy.’
‘I can’t believe this. Is there something I’m not getting here? Have those guys in the Lodge become untouchable?’
There’s the briefest eyelid flicker before he says no.
‘What changed?’
‘Maybe you should talk to Keegan.’
‘You out of the loop, Will?’
There’s a flash of anger and a little hurt in his eyes. ‘Talk to Keegan. Looks like that AOS raid tipped things.’
A knock on Maxwell’s door jamb. Gemma is on the threshold. ‘We just found the blue van.’
The car park beside the Renwick sportsground west of Blenheim has become a popular freedom camping spot. The toilets are just fifty metres up the road and the campers for the most part aren’t party animals so the site hasn’t attracted the opprobrium that others have of late. People keep pretty much to themselves and they keep their curiosity in check. But after two days, the blue van was starting to stink and attract blowflies. You get that when the inside looks like an abattoir apron.
‘Assume that’s Gelder’s blood?’ says Gemma.
‘Hope so, or we’re really behind the eight-ball.’ Maxwell waves the forensics team back in and we retreat behind the perimeter tape. ‘It’d be nice if something in there linked us to Monsieur LeBlanc.’
‘Who?’ says Gemma. We bring her up to speed. A tag team, me for, and Maxwell against the emerging hypothesis. ‘And who says we can’t talk to him?’
‘I do.’ It’s Keegan. She got here so quick I’m wondering if I missed a helicopter landing. ‘Nick, Will. Over here.’
Gemma doesn’t even frown at the freeze out. Maybe she’s watching and learning the Keegan power moves. Instead she gets on her mobile and looks busy.
‘It’s only temporary,’ says Keegan. ‘My contact from Porirua has gone all antsy and advised we hold off while she looks further into it. Sirens went off when she plugged some of those names into the internal search engine. She had a late night personal visit at her home from some departmental heavies. Somebody had been jumping up and down about the poor boys being bullied and having their guns inspected.’
‘At this stage there’s no reason why we should be bothering them any time soon,’ says Maxwell.
‘You’ve got to be joking, mate.’ Before he can stop me, I introduce Keegan to the mad, bad world of Georges LeBlanc. ‘In the absence of any other strong leads, I think we’d be negligent if we didn’t have a chat with him.’
Keegan blows out a stream of cigarette smoke. ‘Put your case together, maybe wait for the report on this meat truck too, run it past me and, if I like it, in we go.’
Maxwell sniffs. ‘Am I still in charge here?’
‘Course you are, Will.’ She flicks the ciggie away. ‘Wouldn’t have it any other way.’
Maxwell, still smarting from Keegan’s leash-jerk, has told me and Gemma to put the case together against LeBlanc. I guess that means a promotion from the plumbing list. Driving back from Renwick to Havelock, a doozy of a wind is blowing off the Sounds and slapping my car broadside. It’s late afternoon, the road is busy and the sun has gone. I’ve messaged Nigel Watson that I’m running late but we’re still
set for an early evening rendezvous at The Mussel Pot in downtown Havelock. At home, Vanessa has said she’ll see me when she sees me and hung up with a kissy sound.
Nigel Watson looks older than his fifty-five years. He doesn’t get much exercise or sunshine but he certainly seems happy enough. His talk is punctuated with chuckles and quips and he’s a font of cop war stories, some of which I’ve heard before as far back as Sunderland ten, fifteen years ago. Global urban myths with names and places interchanged. He’s ordered Thai green mussels and I’ve gone the blue cheese. There’s a bottle of local pinot gris to smooth the way but this guy doesn’t need alcohol to loosen his tongue.
‘What’s she like in the sack then? Keegan? Fuck, you lucky man.’
No wonder he’s been shunted aside. Voice like a foghorn and subtle as a house brick. ‘Shouldn’t believe locker-room gossip, mate.’
He taps his nose. ‘Right you are, big fella. So what do you want to know about those west coast jobs?’
‘Everything you can remember, particularly the stuff that didn’t end up in the official record. I’ve already read that. How about chronological? Lucy McLernon happened first.’
Watson mops some sauce from his chin. ‘One of the few I didn’t close during my time. Had a better batting average than most of the Black Caps top order.’ A truculent slurp of wine. ‘Counts for nothing when your face no longer fits and you’re up against kids who’ve been to university.’
I raise my glass in fellowship. ‘Old school, mate.’ He buys my sincerity and pushes on.
‘Nice girl. Good family. Seemed so anyway. But you have to wonder what drives people into these cults don’t you? Something amiss behind closed doors?’
‘Maybe she was a rebel, or a searcher.’
‘Certainly desperate. Not many mothers leave behind their kids.’
It’s a balancing act. Cut to the chase, or let him take his own sweet time to get to wherever we’re going? ‘Were there any suspects from her private or family life?’
‘No. Long story short, they all checked out.’
