The Tribute

by John Byron

  ‘A few biological traces, after excluding the victim and his labourer, but they’re minuscule,’ said Chartier. ‘Could just as easily have come in on building supplies. No DNA matches on CrimTrac, for what it’s worth.’

  ‘So, on resources,’ added Murphy. ‘With the premier’s support, Commissioner Carr is making this investigation a priority, so we get two extra uniforms for the hackwork.’

  ‘Yeah, well, there is an election next year.’ In addition to crunching the data, Nikloaidis was the house cynic.

  ‘When did you become so jaded, Niko?’ Murphy shook his head mournfully. ‘Maybe the premier just cares.’

  ‘Takes a serial killer for him to get serious, though,’ said Nguyễn, backing up her colleague.

  ‘So that’s what we have here, is it, Nguyễn?’

  ‘The newspapers think so,’ she replied. ‘And the government, apparently.’

  ‘A serial killer. Okay.’ Murphy was enjoying himself a bit too much. ‘You realise that seriality entails more than one body, right?’

  ‘Sure, boss, but there are other hallmarks.’

  ‘And maybe there’s another body out there somewhere,’ added Harris.

  ‘All right, let’s look at the data before we get carried away,’ said Murphy. ‘Janssen, what proportion of Australian homicides are serial killings?’

  Detective Sergeant Matthijs Janssen stood and faced the room. A tall, pale, rangy man who still carried a faint accent from a childhood in the Netherlands, Janssen was the resident scholar, with a natural seriousness leavened by intelligent bemusement. ‘Just under one per cent, in the sense you mean, excluding organised crime and terrorism,’ he said.

  ‘And how do serial killings differ from other homicides, statistically?’

  ‘According to the Institute of Criminology, about two-thirds of all homicide victims in Australia are male. The typical scenario is a man in his thirties killing a male acquaintance with a knife, in an argument in a residential setting. Often while intoxicated with alcohol or drugs.

  ‘One-third of homicide victims are female, the vast majority also killed by a male known to them – usually a partner or ex-partner; sometimes a relative – also in a domestic setting, by knife or blunt trauma.

  ‘By contrast,’ continued Janssen, ‘two-thirds of serial victims are female, killed by a man not known to them, by knife or strangulation in a non-domestic setting. There is commonly a sexual element and often evidence of advance planning.’

  ‘Sound like our guy to you?’ asked Murphy.

  ‘Well, he’s got a knife.’ Nguyễn shrugged, not conceding. ‘Sounds well planned, and it’s not in the home, exactly. Could be sexual, for all we know. Plus, there’s no connection yet.’

  ‘All true, but it’s early days,’ said Murphy. ‘And not only serial killers plan ahead.’

  ‘So, wait: are you saying this is not a serial killer?’ asked Harris.

  ‘Oh, fuck no,’ said Murphy. ‘I’d never say that. Not out loud, anyway.’

  ‘Not while the premier’s allocating extra resources,’ added Nikolaidis dryly.

  ‘I don’t get it, boss,’ said Harris.

  Murphy sat on the edge of the desk and leaned forward. ‘I’m sure you’ve watched your share of television, my boy, and if you’d been paying attention instead of inspecting your undercarriage you would know that, in the public imagination, the key to getting away with murder is misdirection: making Inspector Plod think the crime he’s investigating is different from the crime you’ve committed.’

  ‘People often try to make murder look like an accident,’ said Janssen. ‘Or suicide.’

  ‘But every now and then, someone goes the full Hannibal,’ said Nikolaidis.

  ‘So, yes, this one looks a lot like a serial killer starting up,’ said Murphy. ‘It’s very ugly, somewhat ritualistic, methodical and well-planned. But.’ He lifted a finger and paused for effect. ‘Experience suggests that all the melodrama is probably just smoke and mirrors.’

  Chartier nodded. ‘I haven’t worked on anything like this before, but I kind of recognised the scene: not from reality, but from TV. Whether or not it’s actually a serial killing, it looks like one.’

  ‘As though it’s been done for effect,’ said Janssen.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Chartier. ‘Everyone knows the set-up these days.’

  ‘But that’s right: everyone knows it,’ said Nguyễn. ‘Including serial killers.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Nikolaidis.

  ‘A serial killer would watch the same TV as the rest of us. It could just as easily be his inspiration for real.’

  ‘That’s true, Nguyễn, and we won’t be excluding the possibility,’ said Murphy. ‘But it’s probably just somebody’s broken heart, or a bad drug deal, or a hook-up gone wrong, and he wants us to think we have a fucken lunatic out there.’

  ‘So what now?’ asked Harris.

  ‘Start with the victim’s connections,’ said Janssen. ‘Family, friends, neighbours, colleagues. It’s never completely random. Not even with serial killers.’

  ‘It’s not that complicated,’ added Murphy. ‘Homicide always comes down to rage, money or sex. So find out who he knows, who he owes and who he blows.’

  Wednesday 9 May – evening

  ‘So you caught this serial killer case, Dave,’ said Jo while he refilled her glass with sauvignon blanc. The three of them were eating at a favourite Thai joint in the backstreets of Coogee. The grumpy Sydney autumn had finally shown up, a blustery wind whipping sheets of rain and sodden branches against the restaurant’s plate-glass window.

  ‘If that’s what it is,’ Murphy replied.

  ‘There being only the one body and all?’ Jo asked.

  He nodded. ‘That, and it smells to me like a red herring.’

  ‘Hell of a red herring,’ said Sylvia as Murphy refreshed her glass. She shuddered visibly.

  ‘I reckon,’ said Jo, grimacing. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘It was so well planned and executed.’ Murphy filled his own glass to the brim. ‘No one saw him, he used proper euthanasia drugs and he left no trace at all, from an entire weekend. He must’ve been suited up like our crime-scene people: paper suit, booties, gloves, cap. Took everything away with him: piss, shit, garbage, the lot. It looked pretty professional to me.’

  ‘You think it’s a hit?’ asked Jo.

  ‘Not a spontaneous crime of passion, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Who’d go to those lengths to throw you off the scent?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it past the big drug outfits,’ said Murphy. ‘Shit, I wouldn’t put it past the property developers, if the price was right.’

  ‘Can we talk about something else?’ asked Sylvia.

  But Jo was intrigued. ‘Surely this wasn’t just business, though. I mean, it’s sickening.’

  ‘I’m not saying they didn’t enjoy themselves, but it’s misdirection. Hoping we’ll go all True Detective, start chasing shadows.’

  ‘But then isn’t a front-page headline counter-productive?’

  Murphy shrugged. ‘Maybe they’re sending a signal to the rivals.’

  ‘Crikey. Overkill, much?’

  ‘People are capable of anything, sis.’

  ‘Yeah, but cutting him up like that.’ Jo shivered. ‘I mean, that poor man.’

  ‘Mm, maybe.’ Murphy shrugged.

  ‘What do you mean, “maybe”?’ Jo protested. ‘It’s horrific.’

  ‘These people aren’t always angels themselves, Jo. Sorry to disillusion you.’

  ‘But nobody deserves to be sliced into ribbons.’

  ‘That’s enough, you two,’ insisted Sylvia. ‘Really.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Jo, holding her hands up.

  Murphy smirked at her across the table. ‘Don’t spread that around, by the way.’

  ‘I won’t. You’re getting enough attention already.’

  ‘Tell me about it. The journos are all over this, so of course the
pollies are all twitchy. The minister’s calling the commissioner first thing every morning for an update. Wants something new every day.’

  ‘Must be hard to get on with the job.’

  ‘Fucken oath,’ said Murphy. ‘Reminds me, I’ve got a bit of a problem with Sunday.’

  Jo’s eyes narrowed. ‘What sort of problem?’ The coming Sunday was Mother’s Day, and the siblings made a point of visiting their mother’s grave every year. Well, Jo made a point of it, and Dave trailed along: at least he had so far, over the three years since they’d lost her.

  ‘I’ve got to write the minister’s brief for cabinet. There’s no other time.’

  Jo sat back and folded her arms. ‘Really, David?’

  ‘Don’t be like that.’

  ‘She’s only at Waverley, Dave. Surely you can spare her half an hour.’

  Murphy’s colour rose. He swirled the wine in his glass, draining it savagely in one draught. ‘It’s not half an hour, Jo, and you know it.’ He poured himself the last of the wine. ‘First we go and choose flowers. Then we go to the cemetery and pay our respects, usually in the rain. Then you talk to her, for fuck’s sake, then you make me talk to her. Then we go for lunch so we can talk about her some more. At some point we have a fight and my day is a fucken write-off.’

  ‘We fight because you behave like an arsehole.’

  ‘Jesus, Jo …’

  ‘So you’re getting in early this year, are you? How efficient.’

  Murphy took another slug. ‘I’m not going to argue with you, Jo. I have to go to work; that’s that.’

  Jo regarded him sourly. ‘You don’t have any common decency, do you?’

  ‘Christ, Joanna, it’s not going to make any difference to Mum, is it?’

  ‘Oh, for …’ said Jo, pushing her seat back and standing up. She turned to Sylvia. ‘I’m sorry, sis. I have to go.’

  Sylvia stood and hugged her sister-in-law, then watched as she hurried out into the blustery night without a word to her brother. ‘Nice one, Dave.’

  ‘Not another word, Sylvia.’

  The waitress chose that moment to ask if they wanted dessert. Murphy shook his head sullenly and handed her his credit card without looking up.

  They dashed to the car then drove home in silence.

  Thursday 10 May – morning

  Stephen Porter poured his second cup of tea for the morning and reflected on the public lecture on Andreas Vesalius early the previous week. It had been audacious to attend, in light of how he’d spent the weekend preceding, but obsession had overwhelmed prudence.

  The art historian had discussed Holbein’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, executed at Basel in 1522. ‘I’m not going into details, it’s too horrible,’ she had warned, citing commentary on the paintings by everyone from Fyodor Dostoevsky to Julia Kristeva. These critics all remarked upon the image’s devastating existential force, while uniformly struggling to account for it. The lecturer argued that this uncanny power was an effect of Holbein’s mercilessly unsentimental physiological accuracy: by painting exactly what he saw – over many days, using a drowned man for his model, the body progressively decomposing before his eyes in the studio – Holbein had achieved a kind of temporal compression within the scene of the painting, with all phases of post-mortem deterioration existing simultaneously inside the frame. This was more than a dead man, which the theology could handle: it was a hyper-dead man, which denied the possibility of resurrection and divinity.

  She speculated that Vesalius – who would certainly have seen the Dead Christ while in Basel two decades later – would have immediately apprehended the importance of rendering exactly what one saw visually, in addition to describing it textually, ensuring the artistic values of empiricism he set for the Fabrica matched his scientific standards.

  Porter had been persuaded by the academic’s argument, but not her preference for restraint: her thesis turned entirely on those very forensic aspects that caused disquiet, the specific manifestations of death and decay upon the mortal flesh after its abandonment by life and by God. The pursuit of Truth did not brook squeamishness. As the Master himself had demonstrated, anatomical enquiry was not for the faint-hearted.

  There was no ‘too horrible’ about it.

  On the other hand, it had been clear from the chatter around him as he had risen from his seat and waited to speak with the academic that her lecture had been perfectly calibrated to its audience, with just a frisson of horror but not too much visceral detail. His own inclinations notwithstanding, Porter conceded that the scholar had the measure of her public.

  It had been dangerous to approach this Dr Joanna King, but if she made contact he would relish the chance to pick her brains on the Fabrica. He would need to be cautious, however: an intelligent, knowledgeable scholar on a wavelength harmonic with his own, she had the potential to make intuitive leaps that could prove awkward.

  He turned his mind to the triumph of his first dissection. It had unfolded almost perfectly, and the results had exceeded his hopes. The working conditions had been ideal, with complete privacy for the duration and excellent light afforded by exquisite weather. The gods had smiled.

  The one shortcoming of his otherwise faultless method had been the intensity of the struggle at the outset: he had failed to anticipate the quantum of brute strength required. He had been prepared for resistance, of course – it was no small thing to separate a body from its life – but he had been surprised by the subject’s sheer ferocity. Despite Porter’s superior physique, it had been an uncomfortably near thing.

  His fundamental error had been selecting a young man in prime condition. It had seemed logical to choose the very best specimens available, but in retrospect this was of least importance to the bones, and it had made the operation more difficult.

  The study of the musculature, however, would indeed require an outstanding physique, which entailed strength and agility. A female of compact stature was the answer, he realised: one against whom he could exploit his advantages of height, weight and strength, offsetting fitness and survival instinct.

  Thenceforth it would become simpler. Physical excellence was less important for subsequent Volumes, beyond a baseline of reasonable health. All the same, he needed to be in vastly better shape than his candidates, to put the result beyond doubt. Tying the laces of his running shoes, he resolved to double the length of his daily circuit, and to extend his schedule with Charlie, his pitiless combat trainer, to six days a week. The current regime was simply inadequate.

  Friday 11 May – evening

  ‘Hey, Dave, how was your day?’ asked Sylvia as Murphy strode into the living room then flung his bag and jacket onto the sofa.

  He only grunted in reply as he crossed to the sideboard, dropped his keys into the mortar and opened a beer. He drank deeply then sighed in satisfaction. ‘Fuck, that’s better.’ He removed his shoulder holster and dropped his enormous revolver into its kitchen drawer.

  Sylvia stood up and rested her guitar in its cradle on the wall. She asked mildly, ‘Dave, would it be okay if you kept your gun in the safe, please?’

  ‘No, darlin’, it lives in there,’ he replied, pointing with the bottle at the kitchen drawers. ‘Third drawer down. That’s where people keep handy utensils. And there’s no handier utensil than a .357 Magnum.’

  ‘It makes me nervous, honey, that’s all. Isn’t it supposed to be secured?’ She didn’t like to nag about it, but she could never quite relax when that weapon was in the house. It would help if it were in the gun safe.

  Murphy drew in a sharp breath, but he blew out his cheeks and rolled out his best Clint Eastwood. ‘Little lady, there are two kinds of guns in this world: the ones locked away like the law says, and the ones that’ll save your life.’

  According to Jo, Murphy had been riffing off The Good, the Bad and the Ugly since he was about thirteen, when the other kids were rolling out lines from Ferris Bueller or Monty Python. He’d tried it on with Sylvia the night they f
irst met in a Newtown pub and it had worked a charm, making her laugh after a particularly brutal double shift at RPA. She’d been a sucker for it ever since.

  She could see she wasn’t going to get anywhere on the revolver business tonight, so she went along with it. ‘Could be you know what’s best, Blondie.’

  ‘Damn straight I do,’ he drawled.

  ‘Supposin’ you fix us some drinks, then, and bring ’em to the waterhole?’

  ‘Is it warm enough?’ he asked, dropping out of character. It was a pretty fresh night out, clear but cold.

  ‘Should be, I turned the heater on earlier.’

  He switched on the outside light and the courtyard appeared beyond the wall of glass doors, the plunge pool shrouded in steam. It looked like a scene from The Lord of the Rings.

  ‘All right, then. What’ll it be, purty lady?’

  ‘Sauvignon blanc, please, barkeep,’ said Sylvia as she shed her slackerwear.

  Murphy looked her up and down – although less up than down as she bent to take off her socks. ‘Fuck, you’re gorgeous,’ he said.

  ‘Why thank you, kind sir.’ She gave him a mock curtsy then opened the back door. She yelped at the cold night air and dashed for the pool.

  —

  ‘Goin’ for a slash, Sylv,’ Murphy called out as he raced up to the study. He opened his PC to check that his new wireless spy camera was recording. It was one of a pair: the one on the front door was to record any comings and goings, and this one out the back would keep an eye on what Sylvia got up to when he wasn’t here, and capture a bit of the action for posterity when he was. Everything was perfect: the motion sensor had activated and the resolution was incredible. The angle was fine for now, but he’d have to adjust it later to pick up the living room a bit better, especially the sofa. He watched his unsuspecting naked wife for a moment, enjoying her obliviousness as much as the high definition view of her flawless body. He went back to the living room, poured a glass of chardonnay for Sylvia and a bourbon for himself, then headed outside for a piece of the real thing.