Crucifixion Creek

by Barry Maitland

  Harry sees. It’s a classic con. ‘But how did you get onto them in the first place? How do you do your research?’

  ‘Investment conference. Always good for networking one way or another, meet their son Justin in the bar. Wow, he is a gloomy guy. His folks have got it into their heads to give all his inheritance away. What can he do? So I tell him to get them to come talk to me.’

  ‘So you sorted it out, what, for a fee?’

  ‘Ten per cent, but what Justin doesn’t know is that I’ll actually take fifty. He’ll accept it. He’s got no choice. I could take more, but who knows, he may have friends who need my services. Half is better than zilch after all.’

  ‘And the other case, March? You’re taking half?’

  ‘Oh no, I get the lot on that one. That loser should never have been in business. He was on his last legs.’

  ‘But won’t you lose your investment?’

  Kristich smirks and places a finger beside his nose. Then he looks suddenly bored and shuffles the files apart to reveal the third one, Belltree. ‘What’s this?’ and his flaccid features abruptly stiffen. He turns to stare at Harry. ‘Why this one?’

  Harry’s mind goes blank. He can’t think of a word to say, but then it seems he doesn’t have to, because Kristich’s face breaks into a broad smile as he looks over Harry’s shoulder. ‘About bloody time, Benji.’

  Benji is a large, heavily tattooed Pacific islander, the same Benjamin Lavulo that Harry identified at the Creek. ‘Yeah, sorry, Sandy. Whatsa problem? This guy thieving?’

  ‘That’s what we have to find out, Benji.’ Since he saw the Belltree file Kristich has become more focused. ‘Give him a good search, will you? I couldn’t find anything—no wallet, no phone.’

  Benji does a thorough job, feeling under Harry’s arms, his groin, his ankles. ‘No, not a thing.’

  ‘A bug, a wire?’

  ‘No, don’t reckon. Not even a watch.’

  ‘Do it again.’

  They wait while Benji examines Harry’s hair, his ears, his shoes. ‘No.’

  Kristich points to an office chair and tells Harry to sit down. ‘So who are you?’

  Harry stares back, says nothing.

  ‘Lost for words, eh? You got that knife of yours, Benji?’

  ‘Sure, Mr Kristich.’ Benji takes a horned handle from his pocket and springs out the long blade.

  ‘Okay, I’ll take it and you cover him with this.’

  They exchange weapons, and Benji expertly works the slide on the pistol, cocking it.

  ‘Now.’ They both close in on the seated Harry. Kristich waves the blade under his nose. ‘Just so you know, I like hurting people. What’s your name?’

  Harry stays silent, and Kristich crouches in front of him, a greedy smile on his lips. ‘All right.’ He jabs the knife at Harry’s chest. Harry feels it pierce his skin and touch something solid, a rib. He flinches.

  ‘Oh!’ An excited little gasp as Kristich withdraws the knife and examines the blood on the tip. ‘You might as well give us a name to put on your grave, mate.’ He draws back his elbow for a harder stab. As his arm lunges forward Harry’s right hand shoots out and grabs it, steering the blow away from his own body and hard into Benji’s chest. With his left hand he grips Benji’s hand and squeezes, pressing on the trigger finger. There is a stunning bang and Kristich topples backward, a large bloody hole in his front.

  A long reverberating moment. Both Kristich and Benji are on the floor. Blood pumps from Kristich’s wound for a count of four, then fades to a trickle. Benji is groaning, blood spilling from his lips, and he coughs and tries to sit up. Harry reaches down and punches the knife in deeper. He subsides, twitches for a moment and is still. Harry feels for a pulse in his neck. Nothing.

  He gets carefully to his feet. Checks his shoes for blood and steps away, around the bloodstains on the carpet. This is a crime scene, he tells himself. What do you see? Take a deep breath, take your time.

  He goes over to the desk and thinks about how he will pack the computer into his bag, along with all its bits and pieces—wires, keyboard, mouse and mat. Then he notices a dark grey box attached to the computer. External back-up hard drive. He slips that into his backpack along with the files, leaving the computer intact.

  When he’s ready he looks over at Kristich and murmurs, ‘So where did you come from?’

  He goes back into the sitting room to take another look and sees that its back wall is in fact a set of sliding doors, now half-open. Through the gap he can see the end of a bed. Kristich lives here, he thinks. He goes to the opening and takes in the whole little windowless bedroom, and on the bed a naked woman, eyes closed. There is a syringe on the floor.

  As he stares at her, wondering if she’s alive or dead, she opens her eyes, taking a long moment to focus. ‘Who’re you?’ she mumbles.

  ‘Sandy’s friend,’ he says.

  She opens her eyes wider and stares at him for a moment, then sighs, ‘Oh.’ She rolls over and drifts off to sleep again.

  He backs out of the room and returns to the office, takes one last look around and leaves.

  When he arrives home, Jenny is waiting. She recognises the smell of gunsmoke on his jacket from his annual drills on the police firing range. She doesn’t panic. She wants to know what happened. He tells her, and is surprised by how calmly she takes it in, every detail. He gives her the hard drive, which she strokes with her fingers while he opens the files. The Waterford file contains surveyor’s plans of the properties on Mortimer Street owned by the dead couple. Greg’s file, similarly, has a plan of his unit in the Creek, together with the loan agreement he signed with Bluereef Financial. The Belltree file contains a single sheet of paper, a photocopy of a group photograph of the judicial officers of the Supreme Court of New South Wales. Justice Daniel Belltree’s head is circled in red ink.

  They discuss where they should hide the files, how they should clean Harry’s clothes, dispose of the plastic gloves. He has a long shower, scrubbing his wrists and head thoroughly to remove any gunshot residue.

  He’s trying not to dwell on what happened tonight, but he feels strung tight as he dries himself, and when he gets to the bedroom he wraps his arms around Jenny and holds her to him. Her mouth, her body are like a narcotic, erasing the tension that grips his shoulders, his stomach. He is overwhelmed by a surge of desperate need for her and they tumble onto the bed. It is the first time they have made love for weeks, months even.

  13

  In the transition from sleep to waking he sees the woman on the bed. Her face is different, more alert, with huge frightened eyes. Not surprising, since he is covered in blood.

  Jenny is already awake, and at her desk setting her little friend to work on the black box. Prying out its secrets. Harry makes her a cup of tea and leaves for work.

  At headquarters he finds Deb all fired up.

  ‘Harry! Get your gear quick. We’re on our way. Double homicide in the city.’

  ‘For us?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He feels like a robot as he picks up his things from his locker and follows her down to the basement car park.


  She fills him in as he drives. ‘Little over an hour ago a woman came out of one of the lifts in the entrance foyer of the Gipps Tower wearing a dressing gown. She walked over to the enquiries desk, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the marble floor. She said to the guy, “Sandy and Benji are both dead,” then she passed out.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Still there, with security. They knew her, regular visitor…’ Deb checks her notes, ‘Chloe Anastos, record for soliciting and drug use. Ambulance came and checked her out, then a doctor who gave her the all-clear apart from a hangover. Attending officers went up with security to the offices of her companion, Alexander Kristich, on the twenty-third floor and found his body inside with that of another man, who security identified as Benjamin Lavulo, also known to them as an associate of Kristich. Kristich has no record, Lavulo convictions for assault and drugs. Suspected involvement in two unsolved murder cases.’

  ‘Somebody killed them both?’

  ‘Looks like it. Crime scene are there now.’

  As he drives along familiar streets, Harry sees them with a fresh eye, registering details—two women pushing a pram, graffiti on a billboard, a vacant shop unit—as if he may never see them again.

  When they arrive they are directed down the ramp to the basement, and Harry recognises the door through which he entered last night. He sees the camera overhead, an implacable eye, and he feels a tightening in his chest, wondering if Jenny did really fix the system. Maybe he and Deb will see his face come up on the security footage. It is as if he is being drawn remorselessly into a trap of his own making.

  The security man leads them down the ramp and points them to a reserved parking space, then takes them into the security suite. A local area detective is there with updates for them. Uniforms have sealed off the twenty-third floor for the crime-scene team who have also examined Anastos. Drug use is indicated, probably heroin, but she has refused a blood test. They go into the small office next door and a female detective gets to her feet as they come in. Anastos is sitting hunched under a blanket. Crime scene have taken her dressing gown and given her disposable slippers and tunic.

  Deb introduces herself and Harry, and Anastos barely glances up. But then her eye catches on Harry’s face, and she frowns and peers at him.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ Her voice is hoarse.

  ‘Probably,’ he says. ‘Scooters at the Cross?’

  She looks confused. ‘Oh…’

  Deb takes charge of getting her story. She and Kristich went out for a meal at the Hilton then returned here, had a few drinks and went to bed some time between ten and twelve, she can’t be more exact. She can’t remember Benji arriving. She didn’t hear anything. She had no idea anything was wrong until she woke up and went looking for Sandy and found them both on the floor.

  ‘He has a bed up there in his office?’ Deb demands.

  He converted part of the office into a flat, Chloe explains. It’s where he lives. Lived.

  Deb snorts doubtfully and goes out to check with the security people. While they wait for her to return, Chloe sneaks another look at Harry, surreptitiously, peering through her blonde fringe. Harry looks back at her and nods. She says, ‘Scooters?’

  ‘Yeah, I reckon that’s where it was.’

  ‘Unbelievable.’ Deb is back. ‘This is an office building. He made a nest for himself up there, a little apartment. Against all the regulations but everyone turned a blind eye.’

  ‘So he doesn’t have another address?’

  ‘Not that anybody knows of. And nothing about family members, next of kin.’

  A nest is right, Harry thinks, an eyrie, somewhere he could fly from at a moment’s notice.

  Deb questions Chloe Anastos about Kristich, about his business, and about his relationship with Lavulo. The exchanges are laboured, yielding little but mumbled claims of ignorance. It’s an act, Harry decides. She is a smart woman who has been interviewed by the police many times before. Eventually they are interrupted by a call on the local detective’s phone. He murmurs to Deb that crime scene are clearing the twenty-third floor and they can go up. They finish the interview and go back outside to the security control room, where Deb asks the staff for the camera tapes and other security records for the past twenty-four hours, and a list of tenants of the building. She and Harry take the lift up to the twenty-third floor.

  As they give their names to the uniform at the door of Kristich’s suite and go inside, Harry looks around, eyes searching for some sign of himself, something he overlooked. They pass through the reception area and into the inner office, where two men are standing in conversation. The pathologist, Garry Roberts, looks up and gives a cheery smile. He and the crime-scene guy step back to give them a clear view of the bodies on the floor.

  Harry and Deb take it in, squat, peer at the knife and gun, the shell casing lying to one side. Harry stares at their hands, wondering if he bruised them when he gripped. He can’t see any marks.

  ‘Okay,’ Deb says, puzzled, ‘what happened?’

  Roberts answers in his clipped way, pointing. ‘Kristich—Lavulo. Kristich’s prints on the handle of the knife in Lavulo’s chest. Lavulo’s prints on the gun.’

  ‘So…’ Deb still doesn’t buy it. ‘They what…killed each other?’

  ‘That’s how it looks.’

  ‘Who first?’

  ‘Must have been pretty much simultaneous. Kristich couldn’t have stabbed Lavulo with that wound in his chest, and vice-versa.’

  ‘Or someone else set it up?’

  The two men don’t like that idea. ‘Hard to see how,’ Roberts says. ‘I’ll have a close look at them on the table, but there’s no sign of them being restrained before the event or moved afterwards. It definitely happened right here, as you see it. No obvious signs anyone else was present.’ He points to some blood smears on the carpet leading to the door. ‘Assuming those are the girlfriend’s footprints.’

  ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘Hm, between midnight and three?’

  ‘That’s a big pistol,’ Deb persists. ‘A forty-five. Noisy. Anastos didn’t hear a thing?’

  ‘She’d taken heroin. And the gun was definitely fired in here—the bullet passed clean through Kristich’s body and into that wall over there.’ He points to a marker across the room.

  Deb, frowning, turns to Harry. ‘What do you think?’

  He shrugs. ‘No sign of an argument?’

  The two experts shake their heads. ‘Furniture undisturbed. No bruises, scratches. Nothing. It’s like they were both standing here, close together, when something flared up, bang-bang, that’s it.’

  Harry says, ‘The lights were off?’

  The crime-scene man says, ‘They were on when we arrived, but Anastos may have done that. You’re thinking Kristich surprised Lavulo here in the dark and mistook him for an intruder? Maybe he was an intruder. Yeah, that’s what my money’s on.’

  ‘Makes sense,’ Harry says neutrally.

  Deb seems unconvinced. ‘Let’s look around.’

  Harry hangs back, letting Deb discover things while the crime-scene unit finish u
p, removing the bodies and the last of the bagged items. Roberts puts his head around the door of Kristich’s den to tell them he’s leaving.

  ‘Incidentally, Lavulo was a bikie. He has a Crow tat on his left arm. Either of you coming to the post-mortem? About midday.’

  Deb says, ‘Will you go, Harry?’

  He nods. It seems only right.

  A little later they hear a commotion from the outer office. The uniformed officer at the door is arguing with a tall thin man in a dark suit.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Deb asks.

  The man looks over the officer’s shoulder and says, ‘Are you in charge?’

  Harry recognises the face, deeply—perhaps prematurely—lined, the severely cut black hair. He’s seen him on TV outside courtrooms, making statements on behalf of clients.

  ‘Detective Inspector Deborah Velasco.’ Deb shows her ID. Harry is sure that she must recognise him, but she says, ‘And you are?’

  ‘Nathaniel Horn, solicitor. My offices are on this floor. What’s happened? They told me downstairs there’s been a fatality.’

  ‘We’re investigating that now, sir. I’ll accompany you to your offices.’

  Horn doesn’t move. ‘These are Alexander Kristich’s rooms. He’s a client of mine. What’s happened?’

  ‘Mr Kristich is dead, sir. We’re anxious to contact his next of kin. Can you help us?’

  ‘How is he dead? I saw him yesterday evening. He was quite fit then.’

  ‘What time was that?’