by Dave Warner
…
Richie Laidlaw, everybody called him Richie Rich, stopped his truck and climbed out. He thought he’d seen a shape, running in the distance, probably a roo but he couldn’t be sure. The police had asked all the Parks and Wildlife people to keep a special eye out for a white girl and her boyfriend driving a Landcruiser, and when he’d asked old Warry, who was camped a few k east cooking up a parrot for dinner, whether he’d seen anything unusual, he’d said earlier today he’d seen a car heading through the bush towards the waterhole. Bloody stupid he reckoned, everybody knew there was a croc down there, you could hear the birds going crazy. Warry hadn’t seen the car coming out but admitted he might have been sleeping. He’d had a good nap. He wasn’t sure how long ago it was he’d seen the car as he didn’t eat lunch today and that usually helped with time. Maybe three or four hours he thought.
Richie Laidlaw stood totally still, listening to the rhythm of the breathing bush the way a mother listens to a sleeping child. It seemed as it should, undisturbed, normal. And yet, the ranger sensed something, some alien presence.
‘Hello? Is there anybody there?’ he called out loud and clear. He thought there was the faintest sound, a low one, like a gum groaning. He grabbed a flashlight and walked forward twenty metres calling out again, sweeping the torch left and right. He held his breath but this time he heard nothing. He waited in the same spot for nearly five minutes. A fluttering above made him shine the torch: black-shouldered kite.
He walked slowly back to the car and waited another ten minutes, listening in vain. He drove as close to the creek as he dared and shone his spotties. The water was dark as blood. He thought he could see a flattened area a metre or two from the bank that looked as if a croc might have lain there, probably after a lazy bird at sunset. The croc and whatever birds may have been there had since gone. Reluctantly he climbed back into the car making a note in his head to check in with Warry every couple of days. That old fella was almost as good as having twenty-four-hour CCTV. He slowed one final time where he thought he’d seen the roo and wound the windows down but again heard only the same sounds this bush had yielded up for a thousand years. He was hungry now. He had pasta back at the house. He bet a thousand years ago his ancestors would have killed for a microwave.
CHAPTER 20
‘So where were you between when you left Sidney Turner’s house and three-thirty-five pm when you returned?’ Clement had not made up his mind whether he thought Mongoose Cole was lying in his claim that he had called in to see Sidney Turner but that nobody had answered the door. It was possible Turner had already fled, or fled when he heard or saw the distinctive car. Cole’s suggestion that he had heard about Turner being in court and had gone over to offer him ‘the support of a bro’, he did not believe for a second.
‘I just been drivin’ round. Bought a chicken burger.’
That burger part was likely true. The car had smelled of it. Cole had allowed them a cursory check. No obvious blood, boot vacant but that didn’t mean he hadn’t used another vehicle.
‘You didn’t visit anybody?’
‘Nope. Just drivin’, listenin’ to the iPod, chillin’. ’
‘We can check.’
‘Course, you’re the man.’
Graeme Earle shot a look over at Clement that suggested he would have given him a quick backhand for the insolence.
‘Okay, Cole, you can go. Don’t leave town.’
‘If I hear anything, I’ll let you know … Officer.’
Clement asked Earle to show him out. When they had shuffled out of the interview room, Clement stopped the tape and sat there carving one big word out of the thick atmosphere: If. If he had spied the bluebird pendant like Lane had, they would be well on the way to knowing where it came from. If bloody Marilyn had let him be, he would not have ignored Louise, they’d have been in contact, she would have mentioned she was representing Turner, he could have anticipated he might get off, be a flight risk. Now he was stuck with the ugly possibility that Turner had been silenced. He’d left it to Mal Gross to chase up the list of associates the aunt had given him but none of them claimed to have seen Sidney. The doorknock had turned up no clues at all. Graeme Earle walked back in.
‘What do you think?’ Clement valued Earle’s input. Earle had been a cop up here a lot longer than Clement, and you had to allow for regional differences in the way people acted, criminals, cops, everybody. What a crim might do in Perth might be very different.
‘From what I’ve learned,’ Earle said, ‘Cole’s a brutal bugger. Beat up one of his women dealers so bad she had to be hospitalised. If Turner had something big on him, he might have got rid of him.’
‘Why not just beat him up? Turner hadn’t told us anything.’
‘You can’t expect any kind of normal behaviour from these mutts. Each one is worse than the one before. Each one goes that bit further. It’s like ice has pushed everything to the edge.’
This was true. Only two weeks ago a paramedic had been bashed by a meth addict wielding a metal bar. Two weeks before that there was the incident at the hospital.
‘Could Cole be involved?’
This time Earle was deferring to his boss’s expertise.
‘With Autostrada? No.’
Cole was thirty-four. Technically he could have been old enough but Claremont was a world away from here, not just geographically. An Indigenous teenager would have stood out in white-bread Claremont. Cole’s file said he’d grown up in Derby.
‘Turner is a thief. Odds-on he nicked that pendant.’
‘His last job was the motel.’
Clement was thinking the same thing. He made a decision. ‘I want you and Shepherd to concentrate on locating Turner. For a start, go through every CCTV camera you can find and see if we can pick up Cole’s car between eleven am and three-twenty-five. And get Cole’s phones checked, and the aunt’s. We need to know if Turner arranged with anybody to pick him up.’
‘Turner might have had a mobile.’
‘Everybody says he never had one.’
‘Could have used a stolen one.’
That was a good point. He might have kept one or two phones back from any one of his thefts. They would be handy for covert meetings. It was no certainty that victims of his burglaries had cut off their phones, so many tourists, empty houses, they might not have even realised yet, thefts might be unreported.
‘Go back over his known robberies, make sure all phones reported stolen have been found, double-check victims gave us details of all their stolen phones. And tell Mal we want to be informed of any report of any stolen phones in the last forty-eight hours, particularly today.’
‘You?’
‘I’m going to brief Lane. He can go through the motel people with me. I owe him.’ He wondered if Earle would object, complain that he was stuck with hack work while a civilian was doing his job, but the big man just accepted it. ‘Do what you can till, say, nine. If nothing breaks, go home and start first thing tomorrow.’
‘What about Perth?’
A question already on Clement’s mind: should he contact the hierarchy in Perth? Officially the Autostrada case was still open but the Commissioner considered he’d personally closed it. If he contacted Perth he ran the risk of interference, worse, media. It would be a nightmare; any chance to lay a trap would be blown. Ultimately it was Risely’s call.
‘I’ll have a talk to the boss.’
‘Josh?’
So far the only people in on the loop about the pendant find were Lane, Earle and Mal Gross. Keeble he’d asked to check for prints but without explanation. It reminded him he needed to follow up. He had discretely shown the pendant to the aunt who said she had never seen it before. But what to do about Josh Shepherd? Josh could be a loose cannon.
‘Not yet. Let him think this is all about the drugs. You okay with this?’
‘Sweet as a nut.’ Earle saluted and left.
En route to Risely’s office, Clement called Lisa Keeble at the lab.
She said she was just about to call him. ‘It was hard but in the end I got enough of a thumb print off the pendant: Sidney Turner. Nothing else I could lift.’
Which was as he had expected. He told her he needed to speak with her about something and they arranged to meet in his office in thirty minutes. He rang off and tapped on Risely’s door.
‘Come in.’
One word occupied his brain as he entered: If.
…
Following on from the breakfast, I ate the counter-tea fish burger at the Cleopatra. The two best meals I’d had since the girls had been away, in the one day, in Broome. Tash watches those cooking shows – she has to because of the magazine and, let’s face it, the locations are always amazing and the chefs make everything sound delectable – but you just can’t go past bacon and eggs for breakfast, and fresh barra on a lightly toasted bun with crunchy iceberg for dinner, especially when you haven’t eaten in between. Once I’d recognised that pendant, the day swirled around me like I was standing in the middle of the Indianapolis 500 track watching the cars. Food didn’t penetrate my consciousness. All I wanted was to hear they’d found the kid. It was lucky I’d spotted the drug dealer’s Subaru outside Turner’s. Clement had missed it. I wished I’d have been allowed in on the interview but I understood them keeping me out. For three or four hours there I pretty much forgot I was a civilian. I was back! Prior to the Mongoose Cole interview, Clement had called and advised me to check out the Cleo fish burger. He’d debrief me in person if and when he could. I was grateful. Plenty of cops would have frozen me out. It was only when I was attacking my burger that I remembered Ingrid Feister, and then only because a text arrived from Dee Vee asking if there was any news. I ignored it for now. Not long after Dee Vee’s text I got another, this one from Clement asking if I was still at the Cleo. When I confirmed, he texted he was on his way. It was around 6.15.
He joined me ten minutes later and accepted my offer of a cold beer, which we drank while he ate. Through mouthfuls of burger he told me what they’d got from Cole: a big fat nothing. I’d held onto this case for seventeen years, like one of those bog men they pull out of some hill in Wales still clutching a bag of coins that he is supposed to enjoy in the next life. Well, this was my next life, and I was not enjoying it. I was frustrated, maybe not in hell, but purgatory for sure. Sidney Turner was the key but he’d been lost down the stormwater drain. I blamed Clement and his crew, naturally, and he knew it. But I had to stay cool. It was a long time since I had any close friends in the department.
When Clement was finished he wiped his hands. ‘I know you’re frustrated. So am I. But if you want, we can work this thing.’
I noted the pronoun with interest and budding hope.
‘I talked to my boss. He’s happy for us to keep it among ourselves for now. I’ve briefed Lisa Keeble and asked her to confirm, if she can, the pendant is Jessica’s, not some copy. Graeme Earle and Mal Gross know too. As far as everybody else is concerned, we’re looking into the disappearance of Sidney Turner and we’re concerned he could come to harm. That’s all true and all we need to say.’
‘What about the aunt, you ask her if she recognised the pendant?’
‘Said she’d never seen it before. She’s straight as they come.’
He had brought some zipped-up folder case with him. He held it aloft.
‘This is the file on the burglaries. Chances are whoever Sidney stole that pendant from is in here. Wanna go back to your place and take a look?’
He didn’t have to ask twice.
Clement pulled up a chair. I sat on the bed, file spread open in front of me. It wasn’t that hot, so I had the fan on low.
Even though my clients were paying and there was a full bar fridge, a vestige of Depression-era penny-pinching had carried down the paternal line of the Lanes and I stocked up on beer at the Cleo. Given the Mimosa was a classy establishment, ceiling fan plus air con, I’d felt obliged to get Peroni to match the atmosphere. I handed Clement one.
‘Turner’s a meth-user so I think it’s safe to assume that he cashed his spoils straight away.’
I couldn’t disagree with Clement’s reasoning and stated the obvious. ‘So we look at his last known burglary first.’
‘Yes. Pearl Motel. I was there.’
‘On the job?’ I wasn’t being clever. I actually meant ‘as in working’, thinking he might have anticipated the target.
‘On the job is a pretty accurate description.’
‘Oh.’
He saw me glance at his finger. Even though I’d already done that and noted there was no band, habit had shoved me that way.
‘Divorced,’ he offered. ‘My place is not exactly conducive.’
Contrary to what women might think and perhaps unlike themselves – this I’m basing on my female clients and that I admit might be a skewed sample – Aussie men don’t generally go into detail about a night of sex. It might be that most of us don’t think we’re very good at it; it might be we’re too drunk to remember it. Clement offered no further embellishment of who, when, how. He explained he’d been sleeping when the guy in the unit next door started shouting. He gave a brief account of the chase and wash-up: six rooms burgled, five wallets stolen, three purses, two cameras, seven phones and some jewellery and watches.
‘Let me guess, nobody mentioned the bluebird pendant?’
‘Between picking Turner up yesterday, getting him to hospital, Shepherd having himself checked out, we hadn’t had enough time to reconcile the complete list. We never found any wallets on him so we were mainly worried about reconciling cash and the phones.’
The pieces of jewellery and watches, other than the pendant, had been taken from three different rooms. One of these was occupied by the Bernards, a South African couple who were not even in Australia seventeen years ago.
‘Of course they might have innocently picked the pendant up there or here but then surely they would have mentioned it on their list of stolen items.’
I agreed.
The other room where jewellery had been taken was that of two young women from Adelaide. They would have been about four years old when Jessica Scanlan went missing. Their families weren’t on the radar for anything criminal. Their taste in accessories was different too, cheaper, mass-produced mall variety. We didn’t fancy them as being involved. So who did not report stolen jewellery?
‘Bruce Henderson, fifty-six, works on a rig off Onslow, watch and wallet. He maintains a flat in Perth, divorced, no criminal record apart from a drunk and disorderly in the early eighties.’
He would have been late thirties at the time of Autostrada, almost too old for the profile I’d imagined but not quite. The lack of criminal record counted for nothing. I didn’t think the killer would have much of a record or the police would have found him. We agreed we couldn’t rule out Henderson. Of the three other victims of that night only one seemed promising: David Grunder, forty-three, married, living in Sydney, on holiday with his wife and daughter Keira, eight. Clement had checked. Grunder had been born in Perth and held a West Australian driver’s licence up to 2001.
‘He works for ANZ, some corporate finance job.’
I was surprised Clement knew so much about him and asked if he’d questioned the motel staff.
He smiled. ‘Facebook.’
David Grunder interested me a great deal. He was a perfect fit for the age group. He had lived in Perth but moved away … and the abductions had stopped. Moreover he was in the kind of job that screamed university degree. Claremont would surely have been his stomping ground. I said all this to Clement as I processed it. We were both excited and that fuelled our drinking. He took it upon himself to hit the bar fridge to replenish the beers.
‘I’d love to know if he was interviewed by the task force,’ said Clement. ‘But then I’d have to tell Perth.’
‘Maybe not,’ I said, took a gulp and winked. I explained I had a list of all the people the task force had interviewed, although
not the actual interviews.
‘Tacich?’
I told him I couldn’t reveal my sources.
‘And you still have the files?’
‘I still have the boots I wore in my first league game. Unfortunately I only ever needed one pair. I kept my old computer. It’s basically my filing cabinet.’ I didn’t confide in him that so far as I was concerned, the case was never closed. I didn’t want to come across as one of those obsessed old investigators, but in truth I was, it was just vanity protection. The first thing I had done before heading to the Cleo and its vaunted fish burger was to call my young pal, Dylan, who lived in the same strip as my office, in a flat above a hairdresser. Dylan was studying philosophy at uni and came cheap when I needed shit work done like getting the car cleaned, or cataloguing. My call found him in Bunbury, well south of Perth, visiting his family. He said he would be back to Perth sometime the next day. While Dylan was talking I was running through alternatives. I could call my mother-in-law Sue Holland but she was a bit old to be up on the technical side of things. There was nobody else I really trusted.
‘I can have the files sent sometime tomorrow afternoon.’ I explained the situation to Clement.
