She took a few short breaths. Even with the door open, the smell in the Toyota was overpowering and she was forced to vacate and gulp long drafts of fresh air. The search would have to be continued by police with breathing masks.
The constable handed her a fistful of tissues and she used them to wipe the body fluids from the outside of the wallet before riffling more thoroughly through the contents. As she searched she told the constable about the camping equipment she’d seen in the back of the van, shaking her head as she talked to clear the air of the hovering flies. Her fingers felt the outline of something solid in one of the wallet’s compartments and she found a newish key. ‘To the pump station you think?’ she said.
When the constable didn’t answer she looked up to find him nowhere in sight, she’d been talking to herself. Frowning, she turned slowly, shaded her eyes from the glare and scanned the surrounding bush.
‘Constable Nagel?’ Only the gentle waters of the weir lapping against the shore answered her call. Flies buzzed, a parrot squawked, but other than that, silence.
Then from the nearby scrub, the painful sound of retching.
Seconds later, the retching morphed into a scream of terror.
Stevie slapped her hip. No gun, shit. A stout stick lay across the track. She picked it up and charged through the bush to a burnt clearing where rubbish had been dumped. She found the constable on the ground beside a pile of empty bottles, one arm thrown protectively over his face and the paws of a giant dog resting on his chest.
‘Oh God, oh God, get it off me,’ he moaned.
Stevie approached cautiously. The dog turned from his busy licking of the constable’s arm, fixed her with spooky yellow eyes and wagged its tail.
Stevie swore, partly from relief and partly from amusement. She grabbed the dog by its collar and hefted it off the stricken man.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked him.
‘Oh, yeah, jeez ma’am, I’m sorry,’ Nagel gasped, ‘the dog came from nowhere, gave me one helluva a shock.’ He struggled to his feet and began to dust himself down.
She took off her belt and threaded it through the dog’s collar, holding him back a lot more successfully than she could her smile. Nagel smiled back sheepishly. ‘He seems quite friendly, but,’ he said.
Stevie ran her hand down the pinky-brown fur, feeling the prickling highway of hair scratching at her palm. ‘Looks like a Rhodesian Ridgeback,’ she said.
‘Must be a stray, lucky he’s not vicious. Wonder where he comes from?’
Stevie thought for a moment. ‘Try the front seat of the car. There was a dirty old blanket on it, covered with dog hair.’ She paused to pat the dog. ‘Constable Nagel, this just might be Miro Kusak’s mysterious passenger.’ She bent to examine the disc on the dog’s collar. ‘Meet Bonza. 41 Weir Rd Mundaring.’
13
The late afternoon sun weighed on the heads of the investigating officers, yet the mood remained buoyant as they combed the area around the crashed Toyota. This prick was no loss, Monty heard one of the SOCO officers say, the killer had saved them all a pile of bother. Another answered that he’d shake the killer’s hand, buy him a beer if he ever ran into him. Fine, he thought, but at this stage, despite the discovery of the dog, he wasn’t discounting the possibility that two men were involved, and who could say which was the nastier piece of work.
Monty was sitting under a tree, filling out an evidence label, when he heard the crunch of approaching footsteps.
‘“Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to Heaven.”’
He looked up. ‘What?’ he asked Angus Wong.
‘Henry Fielding, Tom Jones.’ With his Asian looks, his ocker accent and his propensity for producing a literary quote for most occasions, Angus was a maze of incongruities. Monty stared at him for a moment and wondered if he was also a mind reader.
Angus flopped onto the ground next to Monty, reached into one of the folds of his overalls and handed him a bottle of water. A television news chopper slashed through the air above their heads. Monty thanked him, took a long draught and returned to the task of labelling two small paper evidence bags.
‘What’ve you got there?’ Angus asked.
‘A bullet and a shell case; the slug was embedded in a tree at the lookout, the shell case near the rubbish bin.’
‘Beauty, can you tell what they’re from?’
‘Looks like a point 40 S&W cartridge.’
Angus met Monty’s eyes. ‘Semi-automatic pistol? Interesting.’
‘Could be.’
‘Anything else?’
‘They found several of what appear to be Bianca’s short bleached blonde hairs in the Toyota, subject to confirmation of course. Plus a long dark brown hair on the dashboard.’
‘Another victim?’
‘Who knows? The results will be sent to missing persons, there’s always a chance it might match someone in their database.’
They fell silent. Monty put the bags into the top pocket of his overalls.
He spotted the mortuary van bumping along a rough weir-side track. They’d sensibly decided not to come down the steep path. Upon vacating their van, the assistants grappled with the Stokes stretcher while Henry Grebe buzzed around them like a blowfly. At the Toyota, Grebe raised a hand to signify a halt and beckoned his team around him for a briefing.
‘Found anything else of interest?’ Angus asked Monty.
Monty switched his gaze from Grebe and pointed to the red-brick structure at the water’s edge. ‘That’s the old pump station, long since abandoned but with a new padlock. Stevie found the key in Kusak’s wallet.’
‘You think that’s where he kept the girl?’
‘More than likely. Forensics have swept it clean—already sent their samples back to Perth for analysis. There was bedding in there.’
‘His own private hideaway,’ Angus looked sickened. ‘Anything else I should know about?’
‘No sign of Bianca’s laptop, but we found a PC in the back of the van. It’s had the sun glaring down on it like a laser beam for most of the day so I’m not sure what kind of nick it’ll be in. It’s on its way to Central. Also found camping stuff and enough food supplies for about a month in the wilderness.’
Angus gazed at the enormousness of the vista. ‘Looking at this place, I’d say he might have got away with it too. How are the others going?’
‘Stevie’s visiting Mrs Kusak, breaking the news about Miro’s death and returning the dog, and Barry’s conferring with the Mundaring police. Wayne wasn’t doing much except whinging about jock itch, so I sent him with some uniforms to start questioning Kusak’s neighbours.’ He paused, gave Angus a faint smile. ‘And I’m supervising the crime scene.’
‘The press are gathering at the lookout. Want me to give them a statement?’
Monty nodded gratefully, took another pull on his water bottle and watched as Angus made his way back up the track. He felt like shit, his toothache had become a headache and his stomach churned. The last time he’d felt this lousy was when he was a kid when he’d been out all day on the mustering at Stevie’s family station and got heat stroke. He poured some water from the bottle over his head, rubbed it into his scalp and attempted to lose himself in the activities of the crime scene investigation.
The photos had been taken, the pathologist long gone.
But the body snatchers seemed to be taking their time. It should have been a routine job, but for some reason they seemed to be discussing the body’s removal at length.
From where he still sat under the tree, Monty saw Henry Grebe beckon to the probationer, Constable Nagel. After a few moments, Nagel nodded and walked with hesitant steps to the Toyota. Monty hauled himself to his knees and squinted through his aviation sunglasses. As far as he knew SOCO guys wearing breathing apparatus had thoroughly searched the back of the van, photographed and removed the camping gear. It was hard to believe the body snatchers had noticed something in the Toyota the experienced searchers had missed.
The SOCO team had worked their way in a radius away from the Toyota and were now out of sight in the bush. The police divers had not yet arrived to search the surrounding waters. A group of local police were positioned at the lookout, holding the media and the curious at bay. As far as Grebe and his assistants were concerned, there was no one in their immediate vicinity. They don’t know I’m sitting here under the tree, Monty thought.
Nagel opened up the back door and stepped inside. Right behind him, Grebe closed and latched the back door, then skipped over to rejoin his men who were laughing themselves stupid a few metres away.
Monty had seen enough. Heat exhaustion forgotten he leapt to his feet and strode towards the Toyota. He could hear the blows hammering upon the doors from within, and the anguished cries from the constable trapped inside. He turned the handle and wrenched the door open. Through the sickening miasma of methane gas the hapless constable all but fell into his arms.
‘It’s okay, son, it’s okay,’ Monty said, guiding him away from the vehicle and into the shade. Tears ran down the young man’s face as he gasped and choked down his anger, humiliation and fear. Monty handed him some water, which he promptly threw up.
‘You’re fresh meat, that’s your problem,’ Monty said, turning his back on the kneeling, puking kid. If he wasn’t careful, he’d soon be joining him. ‘But this is above and beyond.’
When the constable had recovered, Monty handed him the evidence bags containing the bullet and case. ‘Take this up to the lookout and get the exhibit officer to make a record of it, then I want you to take it personally to the ballistic lab in the city, lights and siren, top priority. I’ll ring and tell them to expect you.’
Nagel wiped his mouth, flicked Monty a grateful smile and headed up the track.
The body snatchers were scowling around the Toyota when Monty returned, at last getting on with the job in hand. They’d laid the body bag open on the Stokes stretcher and two of them were struggling to remove Miro Kusak from the car seat. Henry Grebe watched the proceedings from the shade of a nearby tree, still smiling, hands on hips.
Monty walked over to him and met his arrogant glare head on.
And then he punched Henry Grebe, smack on the end of his long beaky nose.
14
Mrs Kusak nodded and dabbed at her eyes with a lace hanky. This was the second round of bad news Stevie had had to break in forty-eight hours, but this time, her sympathies could not have been less stirred. Mrs Kusak’s eyes streamed, and her plump fingers traced the cross at her neck, but her beady black eyes conveyed no sense of grief.
The knock at the front door came as a welcome reprieve. There was an unpleasant odour about the place of rancid oil and stale cheese and she was glad of an excuse to escape. She found Wayne on the front step, patting the head of a white concrete swan.
The day was cooling, but Wayne’s thin hair stuck to his head like a helmet, feathery sideburns plastering his cheeks like beached seaweed. He wore herringbone flares and a floral nylon shirt bright enough to give you a headache. When he lifted his arm to give his head a scratch, Stevie caught an unpleasant whiff and stepped back, making an obvious point of fanning herself. Wayne couldn’t have cared less; Stevie even detected a slight smile on his craggy features. She suspected he enjoyed the distaste he stirred in others. Here was another one who followed a carefully rehearsed act. But given the choice, she’d take Wayne’s BO over the cloying cheesiness of the Kusak house any day.
He pointed to the Christmas lights threaded through the porch eaves and the melting ‘Merry Christmas’ written in fake snow on the window.
‘It’s weeks past Twelfth Night,’ he said. ‘Miro’s certainly had his dose of bad luck. What about her?’
‘I’m not sure if she regards this news as bad luck or heaven sent,’ Stevie said.
Wayne had gleaned some interesting information from the neighbours. As he made his report Stevie wondered if Tash had discovered the same when she’d visited yesterday.
She returned to the small, black-frocked woman in the cluttered lounge room, and couldn’t help but think of Rosemary West, Catherine Birnie, Myra Hindley. Was it the dog, or could Mrs Kusak have been the figure in the passenger seat when Bianca Webster’s body had been dumped? And if she wasn’t an accomplice, how the hell could she have been so oblivious to her husband’s activities?
She offered to make Mrs Kusak the traditional cup of tea, keeping her voice as gentle as possible, struggling to resist falling into any kind of judgemental trap.
Mrs Kusak shook her head and reached down to pat the dog at her feet. Bonza seemed exhausted from his harrowing experience at the weir; he twitched as he dreamed. Stevie wondered what he had seen, wondered if dogs suffered from nightmares too.
‘When the police first told you that your husband was a suspect in the murder and abduction of a child,’ Stevie said, trying to keep the accusation from her voice, ‘why did you tell them that you had been separated for over a year?’
The woman spread a puffy hand over her mouth and said nothing.
‘You see, we’ve been given reason to doubt that,’ Stevie continued. ‘Apparently on the day after the child’s abduction, your neighbours spotted you with a trailer load of things, believed to be your husband’s possessions, and then another neighbour saw you at the dump with them. These same neighbours said they’d seen your husband’s four-wheel drive parked outside the front of your house many times over the past few weeks.’ Stevie let the silence linger. ‘Can you see what I’m getting at Mrs Kusak?’
The woman sniffed but said nothing.
‘It makes us think that maybe you knew what your husband had been up to and were trying to get rid of evidence—had he told you to get rid of evidence, Mrs Kusak?’
The woman twisted her hands on her lap and spoke in heavily accented English. ‘We were separating. Miro was a worthless piece of shit. He’s a Slav, I’m Italian, I should have listened to my mamma, but I didn’t. I should have thrown him out years ago, but I didn’t. When I went to the dump I didn’t know what Miro had done, all I knew was that I wanted to be rid of the worthless shit Slav and all his worthless shit things.’
‘Our crime scene officers will be able to recover his things. If anything incriminatory is found you might find yourself charged as an accessary to murder.’
‘No no, only clothes, books and shit.’
‘What about a computer?’ She knew that a hard drive and a flash drive had been found in the Toyota, but she wondered how much the woman knew.
‘He took the computer with him when he left.’
‘Which was when? Not a year ago? When was he last here?’
‘Three days ago was the last time I saw him.’
After Bianca’s abduction but before her death, Stevie calculated, when she was most likely being held prisoner in the pump house.
‘Did he spend a lot of time on the computer?’
Mrs Kusak nodded. ‘Always, he spent all his time and money on computers. Always the latest and the best.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Looking at filth. He made me sick.’
‘Did you know that he had an unhealthy interest in young girls?’
The woman inspected her rings. They were hardly visible between the folds of fat on her fingers. ‘Maybe. It was filth.’
‘Your neighbours said he used to stare at their children. They never let their kids near him. Or you.’
‘He only looked. That’s all. I told him it was wrong but he never listened to me.’ She sniffed. ‘My neighbours are nosy bitches, I’m gonna move.’
‘Do you admit to lying to the police then, about the separation?’
‘I no speak good English, they heard wrong. I told them we was separating, that’s all. He was looking for somewhere to rent. This week I told him to take his computer and leave.’
‘Where did he work?’
‘Samson’s factory in Welshpool, he worked shifts. I never know if he was coming or going.’
>
Stevie’s gaze slid across the mantelpiece, taking in the colourful religious cards, noticing the absence of family photos. ‘Do you have children?’
‘No. He was married before. There was,’ she hesitated, ‘problems with the kids of his first marriage. We think better not to have them.’
Stevie could guess what the problems were. Jesus Christ, lady, you’ll think twice about marrying a Slav but not a paedophile? This exercise in patience was getting harder by the minute.
‘Was he capable of killing a child, Mrs Kusak?’ she asked, suppressing a shudder. Talking to this woman was testing enough for her—she flinched at the thought of the effect she would have had on Tash. She wished she’d listened to her instincts and seen the woman herself yesterday.
The woman shook her head vehemently. ‘He never would, no, never. He couldn’t kill nothing. He hated blood, he even hated fishing. If she died, it was accident. He didn’t kill her.’
For all that the woman filled her with revulsion, Stevie believed her. It helped too that the pathologist had determined the murder to be a sexual assault gone wrong.
‘The child had been missing for nearly two days when her body was found. Have you any idea where he might have taken her after he abducted her?’
Mrs Kusak seemed to ponder the question, but who knows where her mind was.
‘Mrs Kusak?’
The woman let out a sigh and rolled the hem of her black dress between her fingers. ‘Yes, I think I know,’ she said. ‘Mundaring Weir. He always takes the dog to a special place there where no one else goes—it’s a good dog, but it always fight other dogs.’ She nodded to herself, ‘Yes, he would have taken her there.’
‘Where is this special place?’
SH02 - Harum Scarum Page 9
