Signal Loss

by Garry Disher

  Quine jumped violently, her hand going to her throat. ‘You frightened me.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Pam said, not feeling sorry. She disliked Quine. The dislike had been immediate and powerful the very first day she met Quine, earlier in the year. ‘Anything wrong?’ she repeated.

  ‘I’m just collating the paperwork belonging to that man who was shot.’

  ‘It shouldn’t be left out in the open like this, Janine. It’s sensitive material, relating to a murder. We’re still gathering evidence and some of this paperwork could be crucial.’

  ‘I’m working as fast as I can.’

  ‘Glad to hear it,’ Pam said. ‘When it’s all itemised, please lock it away.’

  ‘I will.’

  Pam turned on her heel, feeling faintly ashamed, and went out to her car.

  FIVE MINUTES LATER SHE was in the office of Mervyn White Real Estate, White himself confirming that the figure was correct. ‘That’s what the landlord’s asking.’

  He said it apologetically, a man with silvery hair, a sombre suit, a garish tie, a calm, scraped-clean man on the other side of a vast desk. ‘Sorry, Ms Murphy,’ he added.

  Pam spluttered, ‘But two days ago he was asking fifty dollars a week less.’

  Not that it mattered: she was too late, the little Balnarring house already rented.

  The agent looked at her sadly. ‘For what it’s worth, our firm handles a third of the residential property market on the Peninsula, and that house was the first vacant one we’d had in two months. Vacancy rates are at an all-time low.’

  ‘So landlords can charge what they like.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘I’ll never find a place as good as the one I’m in now.’

  ‘Pity your landlord wants to sell. Look, you might have to try further afield. Gippsland. Dandenong. The Latrobe Valley.’

  ‘I need to be close to work. I can’t live ninety minutes away.’

  ‘People do it.’

  ‘People aren’t on call at a moment’s notice.’

  He shrugged.

  She gnawed her bottom lip. ‘I’m on a reasonable salary. How do the battlers manage?’

  ‘Food parcels,’ the agent said.

  Pam shot him a look. Was he being snide? No. If anything, he looked troubled.

  ‘We have a one-bedroom unit in Waterloo available in the next few weeks.’

  Pam shook her head. ‘Rule of thumb, Merv, if you’re police you don’t live among your clients.’

  He gave her a quick grin. ‘Clients.’

  ‘Repeat clients, a lot of them,’ Pam said.

  SHE DROVE DESULTORILY, NOT wanting to go home just yet. For a while she steered in and around Tyabb, Somerville and Baxter, as if a FOR RENT sign might appear, hammered into the front lawn of some gorgeous little house.

  She could take out a mortgage, but her financial history was patchy, her prior decisions skewed in unwise directions.

  Shook herself and headed back across the Peninsula towards home, taking back roads. Maybe a cute farmhouse would announce itself.

  What announced itself was the poultry farm gate, the glimpse of the poultry sheds and Michael Traill’s caravan parked at the rear.

  WTF? Cross with herself, dismayed and embarrassed, she sped past.

  23

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, tense as he always was when Chloe made a run to the border, Carl Bowie flicked around his CCTV monitors. In the Waterloo bakery, Liv stood slack-jawed behind the counter, staring into space. No customers right at that moment, but Carl saw clearly the dirty cups and crumpled napkins on one of the tables. Get off your arse, Olivia. Every now and then her jaw made chewing motions—her mouth open—as if recalling that a wad of gum was still lodged there.

  He called the store, watching as she snapped awake and glanced fearfully at one of the cameras. ‘Bowie Bakehouse, Liv speaking, how may I help you?’

  ‘Olivia, what I want of you, what I simply expect of all my staff, is a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay and a pleasant, professional demeanour. You with me?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Bowie.’

  ‘So be a good girl and spit out that chewing gum, all right?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Bowie.’

  ‘And if you really want me to be a happy chappie, clean the fucking mess off that table.’ Having no wish to hear her say, ‘Yes, Mr Bowie, sorry, Mr Bowie,’ he cut the connection. He wiped a fleck of spittle from the monitor.

  Then he checked his watch. Chloe should be at the motel by now. He called her, using one of his disposable mobiles.

  ‘Carl, I’m still in the car.’

  ‘All good?’

  ‘All good.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Just coming into Mildura now. Carl, I have to go.’

  The line went dead. Carl sat back and watched the monitors gloomily and thought of the call from Hector Kaye yesterday, wanting to know where Lovelock and Pym had got to.

  ‘Haven’t seen them,’ he’d said.

  ‘No word for a fucking week,’ Kaye said.

  ‘Look, Hector, they texted to say the job was done, I paid you. That’s all I know.’

  Since that call, Carl had put two and two together. What he got was last Friday’s bushfire, flames engulfing a Mercedes. He agonised. Maybe he should call Hector back, say something like: ‘Now that you mention it, we had a couple of guys die here when their car got caught in a bushfire.’

  He tried to think through the ramifications if the dead men were Hector’s boys. Had they been identified yet? Identified but not linked to Hector? Identified, and linked to Hector, but the cops were biding their time? But what would the police do when the time came? How would Hector account for Lovelock and Pym’s actions south of the border? If Hector goes down, Carl thought, what are the implications for me? And right then, Carl felt a creepy inversion, the CCTV cameras watching him, the walls closing in, the shadowy corners deepening all around him. He knew what Kaye was capable of. The guy had a tattoo for each man he’d killed, for fuck’s sake.

  Carl rubbed his face to clear a tic that had developed beside his right eye. His knee jiggling, he texted Chloe: All good?

  Minutes passed, then his phone beeped, incoming: Same as five minutes ago.

  Bitch.

  FEELING NOT ENTIRELY SURE that his kingdom was intact, Bowie drove to the gym. Early afternoon, a quiet time. He could work out in peace, not feel crowded and looked at by dozens of men and women gasping and sweating around him. A sign in the foyer said YOUR BODY IS A TEMPLE, and Carl muttered, as he always did, ‘Or a moderately well-run Presbyterian youth centre.’ He’d heard it on a comedy show a long time ago.

  Not so funny anymore.

  God, he felt jittery.

  Some stretching, weights, an aerobics routine; finish with a few laps of the pool. The exercise cleared the immediate brain fog, but didn’t answer any of his more pressing questions.

  Say for a moment it wasn’t Lovelock and Pym in the burnt-out car but a pair of ordinary luckless civilians…What if their text, It’s done, had been intended to lull him into a false sense of security? What if Hector Kaye had briefed Lovelock and Pym to team up with Owen as the start of a move against him? Or what if Lovelock and Pym, acting alone, had teamed up with Owen? Or what if Owen had got the better of Lovelock and Pym?

  He should call Hector. Stress again that as soon as he’d got word the job was done, he’d transferred the rest of the fee, upheld his side of the bargain. If Lovelock and Pym got killed accidentally, it wasn’t his fault.

  Surely?

  Turning under the changeroom shower, Carl wondered if outsourcing the hit on Owen instead of doing it himself had gone against notions of a good business model.

  HE WAS ALMOST TEMPTED to sample his own product.

  But look what it had done to Owen.

  So he drove home and hit the scotch, ‘accidentally’ knocking over a rook with his briefcase as he passed the chess set. His wife was off playing tennis, the kids were God knows wh
ere, so he had the place to himself and he sat and paced and thought until deep into the afternoon.

  A part of him said: pull the plug, get out while you’re ahead. He had millions tucked away where no one could get it. Let this be Chloe’s last trip. She was a cleanskin, nothing traced back to her. Ditto her runners. They knew her, but not where she lived or her real name, and they certainly didn’t know him.

  But what if Hector didn’t like that idea?

  What if Chloe was moving against him? She was getting cocky.

  He tried to count his reasons for staying in the game. Fear of Sydney: got that, let’s not think about that. The money was good. He was at arm’s length from his operations. Business was booming, and according to Chloe, who’d heard it from her runners, new market opportunities were opening up out in the Yarra Valley and closer to, the Belgrave–Monbulk area.

  Would she let him know things like that if she was moving against him? He texted her: All good?

  The reply came back a long time later. Fucking good, all right?

  New territories would mean more dealers, more clients, greater managerial responsibilities. There was always someone who paid late, or not at all, or not the full price. Always someone who wanted to pull out, or start their own operation. Always someone who might be working for the cops or the opposition.

  He didn’t think he could stand that. And now he tasted blood. He’d bitten the inside of his mouth.

  24

  IN THE BAD OLD DAYS, sexual assault victims were questioned first by uniformed officers, usually male, then by detectives, usually male, and then—if they were unlucky, or the paperwork was mislaid or inaccurate, or the detectives were transferred or took leave—by even more detectives, one after the other. These detectives would be busy, distracted, working car theft, burglary and other cases. Some of them didn’t much like women, others had no empathy, or tended to victim-blaming, and a handful were themselves given to exploiting their authority to commit sexual assaults. That left a small number of detectives who had the nous, sensitivity and experience to be good sex-crimes investigators.

  Meanwhile, in the absence of single points of contact, specialists to act in their best interests, or clear avenues for counselling, the victims were further traumatised. Then, in court, defence barristers would go all-out to discredit them:

  ‘How many sexual partners have you had?’

  ‘What were you wearing?’

  ‘How intoxicated were you?’

  ‘You were carrying condoms in your purse, were you not?’

  ‘I put it to you that you were flirting with the accused.’

  The old days…

  At least specialist detectives handled each incident from start to finish now, taking victim statements, referring victims to counsellors from the Centre Against Sexual Assault, investigating and arresting offenders, and following the case through the court system. Trials had become less traumatic. Victims were more prepared to come forward.

  But Ellen Destry knew that vestiges of the old system remained. The majority of sexual assaults continued to go unreported, and there were still uniformed police, detectives, lawyers, magistrates and judges who paid no more than lip service to the reforms. In action, speech, body language and legal rulings it was clear they saw fault in the victim, excused many assaults as male high spirits, and didn’t understand the short- and long-term impacts on victims.

  Was Ian Judd one of these men?

  He’d been a good thief catcher before moving to sex crimes. He was proving to be a good sex-crimes investigator. But a couple of victims had found him to be—in the words of one of them—‘stiff, reproving’.

  And so, after dropping Hal at Waterloo Automotive on her way to work, Ellen called Judd into her office and began a slow, careful assessment of what made him tick.

  ‘OUR MAN’S CLEARLY A COMMUTER,’ she said.

  Judd nodded. She could see him thinking. He cocked his head and said, ‘Uh huh,’ wondering where she was going.

  ‘Remember that conference earlier in the year, the four categories…?’

  Hosted by the Criminology Department of the University of Melbourne, attended by sex-crimes detectives, lawyers, counsellors, academics and postgrad students, four sessions a day, lectures and workshops. A keynote address by an FBI profiler who spoke about four types of violent sexual attacks: power–reassurance, power–assertion, anger–retaliation, anger–excitement.

  ‘I remember,’ Judd said, pushing his glasses back on his nose.

  ‘How would you rate our man?’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘Humour me, Ian.’

  She knew he had a prodigious memory and an analytical mind. She saw the mind at work in his eyes, saw his long unseeing stare as he began to sort, order and select.

  ‘He could be after reassurance. Let’s say he has doubts about his sexuality: he’s attacking women to prove he’s not gay. Meanwhile, his inability to achieve and maintain an erection feeds this doubt, so he keeps raping, or trying to rape.’

  ‘Or he’s a heroin addict and can’t get it up,’ Ellen said, ‘or can’t get a woman in the normal social sense because he stinks.’

  A tightness in Judd’s face. He didn’t like to be interrupted. ‘According to the FBI profiler, the power–reassurance rapist is a careful planner and not overly violent—which seems to fit our guy.’

  ‘Grabbing a woman?’ said Ellen. ‘Tying her up, gagging her, cutting off her clothes…?’

  Judd shook his head. ‘I’m not downplaying that, Ellen. What I mean is, he doesn’t punch or kick or stab or torture.’

  ‘Okay. So does he fit the power–assertive category?’

  Judd was emphatic. ‘No.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘For a start, he doesn’t know these women.’

  ‘As far as we know.’

  ‘As far as we know he hadn’t met any of them beforehand. He hadn’t had a date with them, made sexual advances to them at a party…He hadn’t met them, hadn’t been rebuffed by them, so there’s no indication that these rapes were revenge attacks for being rebuffed.’

  ‘Unless,’ Ellen said, ‘there was an early assault we don’t know about, and he decided he liked the experience.’

  She watched Judd consider that, his frowning concentration, the rapid mental testing and sifting, as if the exercise were academic and there were no real-life victims.

  Perhaps that was part of the problem with Judd—if there was one. It wasn’t that he was hostile or unsympathetic to women—he was first and foremost a man who saw the world in analytical, not emotional, terms.

  Finally he gave his answer. ‘I don’t buy that, frankly. He’s a planner. The first assault might have been spur of the moment, committed during a burglary, but the burglaries, and the subsequent rapes, show planning. I’m not discounting hate, even rage, but it’s controlled.’

  ‘Okay, anger–retaliation?’

  She watched Judd put his mind to it. Time passed.

  ‘Possibly,’ he said. ‘There is an element of humiliation in his treatment of his victims. Does he feel anger towards all women? Maybe. He’s clearly not targeting a specific physical type. But, again, he’s a planner and not overly violent. Identifying the target, scouting her house and her street, breaking in, waiting, then the orchestrated attack—each one’s an important stage in a process.’

  Ellen found herself thinking not about Judd’s apparent shortcomings as a victim interviewer but their shared concern, catching a rapist. She said, ‘You’re right. He needs all of these elements. He’s not impulsive.’

  ‘Apart from that first attack.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That leaves us with the anger–excitement rapist,’ Judd said, as if taking charge.

  But he waited, eyeing Ellen. She looked at the ceiling, trying to remember the definition of the anger–excitement rapist. ‘Some of the elements are there,’ she said presently. ‘Location, tools, method—all carefully worked out. And he probably g
ets a thrill out of seeing fear in his victims.’

  ‘But he’s not sadistic in the sense of inflicting great pain,’ Judd said. ‘No torture.’

  Ellen nodded glumly. ‘Maybe in a sick way he’s looking for love. Makes them a cup of tea, stays for a chat, says he’s worried about their security. Imagines a relationship, almost.’

  ‘I don’t think so. I think it’s cheek. He’s having a laugh.’

  Ellen saw something in that. She shivered. ‘A cruel laugh.’

  ‘Yes,’ Judd said, and he was watching her again.

  ‘Ellen,’ he said, ‘trying to find a category for this bloke is a waste of time, in my opinion. Let the shrinks come up with the category after we’ve caught him. It’s police work that’ll catch him, not pontificating.’

  ‘It’s good to understand him, Ian.’

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Judd said, and he was unshakeable.

  ‘Ian,’ Ellen said gently, ‘I’ve been talking to Robin Lincoln.’

  The Lincoln case dated back some time and was just now limping through the system. Judd was the investigating officer.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Since the rape, she’s moved house three times.’

  He gazed at her levelly. She had no idea what he was thinking.

  ‘She used to like living alone, now she needs others around her. Then if they’re careless about security, she has to look for others to live with. Mentally, she’s in a terrible state. Apparently her friends confiscated her car keys, worried she’d do something stupid like kill herself or kill others.’

  ‘I know that,’ Judd said flatly.

  ‘All I’m asking is, go easy on her.’

  Meaning, go easy on every victim.

  He blinked, genuinely baffled. ‘What do you mean? I’m understanding. I’m sympathetic. But we have to cut through the dross sometimes.’

  Ellen hated this. She liked Judd, she realised. He was an unmoveable block of wood, that’s all. ‘A smile, a nod,’ she said. ‘Listen, be understanding, don’t interrupt, don’t judge.’

  ‘I don’t judge. Never that,’ Judd said. He paused. ‘I judge the pricks who do it, though. You can count on that.’