Before It Breaks
Page 24
‘Actually just because the photo was sent from that phone doesn’t mean it was taken on that phone. It could have been taken on a camera and downloaded to the phone before being sent. It could have been blue-toothed from another phone. All you can say is it was texted from that phone.’
Earle soaked up this revelation. ‘So Lee may not have been at Jasper’s Creek?’
‘Exactly. It could have been transferred to his phone after he was killed.’
Risely was unfazed. He checked his watch. ‘There’s a strong connection somewhere, even if we don’t know exactly what. I’ve got a radio interview in ten. I’ll ask for anyone who was on the beach this morning around five thirty to six thirty to call us. I’ve got the phones and the CCTV stuff underway.’
Earle said, ‘Schaffer and Osterlund are both German. You know what these dickheads are like, most of them are clueless. Maybe Osterlund was the target all along, “the rich Kraut”, but they screw up and go after the wrong one.’
It wouldn’t be the first time something like that had happened but Clement couldn’t see why the abductor would give Osterlund a heads up. Why not just snatch him? Clement made himself look at the photo of Schaffer again. There was something about it he should be seeing. Clement’s phone rang. Lisa Keeble was overseeing the evidence collection from the lay-by, run off her feet but holding it together.
‘Definitely signs that a vehicle was there recently, and I think we can say it’s not a small car and it’s not a truck but there’s no tyre tracks to speak of. Just got off the phone from Rhino, too, nothing in the samples I took from the undercarriage of Karskine’s car that matches any vegetation or soil from Jasper’s Creek.’
The trouble with the science of a case was it was always two or three steps behind where the case was heading. Clement mentioned to Keeble the wet stuff in the sand where the phone had been found.
‘Was it blood?’ he asked.
‘Yes. I’ll let you know if it matches Osterlund’s.’
‘There didn’t seem to be much of it.’
‘There wasn’t. I’d say it wasn’t a big wound.’
‘Could he have been shot?’
Keeble spoke off the phone, giving one of the techs a direction before returning to him. ‘Normally I would expect more blood.’
‘Small calibre?’
‘Possibly. We’ve got a metal detector down there just in case there’s a spent cartridge. We found an area that looks like the primary location of the attack on the beach about twenty-five metres in, equidistant almost to the ocean, slightly to the northwest. Then it’s essentially clear until those drops where you found the phone. None on the grass where the lay-by borders the dunes so I think the vehicle was backed in and whoever was bleeding went straight into the vehicle.’
‘Okay, keep me posted.’ Clement felt sweat pooling on his collar, excitement or humidity, he wasn’t certain. He ran Keeble’s info past Earle. Earle’s brows knitted.
‘Osterlund was a fair size. How could one person have carried him? Are we looking at two?’
‘Maybe. Osterlund gets a photo of his dead mate at five thirty. For whatever reason he doesn’t call us or tell his wife about it. I don’t know about you but I’d be very wary. Yet he still goes on his walk.’
‘To meet someone?’
‘He’d have to be cautious. Maybe he armed himself?’
Clement went back inside and took himself down the staircase to the bedroom. Jo di Rivi was sitting on the bed, Astuthi Osterlund staring out the window sipping her tea. She swung at his footfall, anxious. Clement got in quickly.
‘We’re still trying to work out what may have happened. At this stage we believe he may have been abducted.’
‘You think they will ask for money?’ She was hopeful.
‘It’s possible. Did you have any problems with neighbours? Friends?’
She shook her head. ‘We don’t see many people. They are all nice.’
‘It seems somebody must have known Gerd’s movements. Did he mention meeting anybody regularly down the beach?’
‘No.’
‘Have you had people through the house lately, besides your friends, any tradespeople?’
‘Not for a long time. We had the dishwasher person last year.’
‘Gerd went for his usual walk even after he had that text. I would think he might arm himself. Did your husband own a gun?’
‘In Bali we had one. Some Europeans were attacked. He left it there.’
‘Would you know if there are any knives missing?’
‘I’ll check.’
She started up the steps. Jo di Rivi was about to follow when Astuthi Osterlund stopped and turned back. ‘He keeps a knife out here.’
She stepped out of the sliding doorway. Clement followed her to the barbecue, a luxury model shining like the skin of a formula one car. She picked up an empty self-sharpening scabbard from a sideboard.
‘There was a knife here he uses for the barbecue.’
‘You sure?’
‘I washed it and put it there ready for the next time.’
Like Arturo Lee, Osterlund had armed himself. Like Lee it had made no difference. Clement looked at di Rivi. ‘Credit cards, bank cards?’
‘I got all the details and rang them through to the Sarge.’
One less thing to chase up but somehow he didn’t think the abductor was going to make the mistake of using Osterlund’s cards. The policewoman went back inside to stick with Astuthi. The air around Clement was seething. Osterlund had been on alert from the photo. In his mind Clement saw the carcass of Dieter Schaffer stretched out. A switch in his brain snapped on. Once more he studied the photo. He knew what it was that bugged him. It was posed. There was Dieter Schaffer stretched out on the ground, head bashed in but the focus was the pristine t-shirt, Hamburg 1979 right across Schaffer’s chest. That was the message this photo sent, and now Clement understood why the t-shirt did not fit. It was not Schaffer’s. The killer had brought it with him specifically to take this photo.
30
‘Daniel?’ Mathias Klendtwort’s voice was croaky. Clement’s call had clearly woken him.
‘Mathias, I’m so sorry for doing this.’ And he was, four a.m. was a helluva time for a phone call but Clement had felt it was urgent.
‘It’s okay. Hold on.’
He imagined Mathias getting himself up, clicking on a light. Clement trudged a little further towards the grey ocean. Nature’s colours were merging, the sky and ocean one ominous grey.
‘It’s freezing here. I have to get the heater on. So?’
Klendtwort waited expectantly. Clement sketched the details of the second murder and the abduction of Osterlund. The German loosed a low whistle. Clement got to the point of his call.
‘Did something big happen in nineteen seventy-nine that involved Dieter?’
‘Yeah, real big, what we talked about before. We lost a colleague.’
‘The drug czar business.’
‘Yeah, the Emperor.’
‘Tell me about it, can you?’
‘You think this might be relevant?’
‘It could be.’
‘My whole time as a cop, it’s the worst thing. Okay it’s Hamburg nineteen seventy-seven, seventy-eight, around there, and heroin is everywhere. I mean it was easier to get smack than icing sugar to pretend was smack. Nobody can find out exactly where it’s coming from and we’ve got teams all over the city looking.’ Clement heard the shuffling of a packet of matches and the subsequent strike of the match head. ‘Al Quaeda have nothing on this group, they are smoke. So our superiors set a bunch of us up full time, Kripos that’s what they call us, as a special unit with a couple of guys going undercover. I’m on the unit, Heinrich, Dieter and a really cool guy Pieter Gruen, he’s the—how do you say it?—the golden boy, a great guy. We’re looking, looking, following down leads, putting pressure on junkies, tapping phones. Nothing. Finally we get a break, a ship bust. Somebody talks. Pieter Gruen goes undercover, like
deep cover, and follows the trail for a whole fucking year and we find it all leads back to this porn shop right in the middle of the Reeperbahn, right under our noses where we are stationed. That’s the distribution centre. Most of the heroin in Hamburg is coming from a porn dealer they called the Emperor. I’ll think of his name in a minute. He had a string of peepshows … that’s what you call them?’
‘Yeah, that’s right.’
‘Is this too long?’
‘No, please.’
‘The Emperor ran peep shows and strip clubs and porn magazines and movies all through the Reeperbahn.’
Clement was remembering the photo of him they had found among Schaffer’s printouts.
‘The girls, the prostitutes and the strippers, they would do their shows and get a hit without having to leave where they were. There were loads of dealers and Gruen, he infiltrated there … Donen, that was the guy’s name, the Emperor—Kurt Donen I think—definitely Donen. He was like a phantom, this Donen. We had one photograph of him ever that Gruen got just before he disappeared. Nobody except his inner circle knew him and nobody knew them except the highest ranked dealers. Me, Heinrich, Dieter and a couple of other guys, we were the squad running the operation. Dieter was Gruen’s control, he was the point of contact, the only one who would meet with him. I spied him once or twice around town but never acknowledged it. For his own security, we didn’t even know where Gruen was living, not even Dieter.’
The German took a long drag on his cigarette. Above Clement a lone gull had appeared looking wary of the brooding ocean. Was it a brave scout or a scared straggler, he wondered. Klendtwort coughed then came back on.
‘Anyway more than a year after we start this operation we have this bust finally going down. Gruen is in, it is all set up. We’re ready to take down the Emperor in his porn shop. Gruen is going to call us in on his last visit, that’s the plan. We never get the call.’
‘What?’
‘Gruen vanishes, disappears and the Emperor too. And for a while everybody is pointing the finger at Pieter, saying he has gone over to the dark side and we have internal investigators checking our bank accounts and up our backsides. A week or two later body parts start turning up in the river wrapped in porn magazines. It was Pieter Gruen, cut apart by a chainsaw. We were devastated all of us, you can imagine, especially Dieter. Pieter had a boy he loved to death, a wonderful wife. This guy Donen was a monster. He killed anybody in his way. Somehow he found out about Gruen.’
Clement felt his skin tingling. This could be something. The brutality matched.
‘What did you think? Did somebody leak?’
‘Maybe one of Gruen’s old buddies saw him on the job and told the wrong person and it found its way to Donen. And of course there was corruption, somebody in administration could have found out. The internal people looked really hard at us all. Some junkie, I don’t remember his name, he came in to us off the street—this was weeks later—said Pieter had been his friend and they had both been dealing for the Emperor. He claimed Pieter was ready to take down the Emperor and nobody else knew. He said Pieter told him to scram because it was all going down and one of us must have given him up because nobody in the Emperor’s organisation had a clue.’
‘Did you find him credible. I mean, did you believe him at all?’
‘For a minute. The guy came to us, we didn’t bust him and he was scared, you know, that was real. But we showed him a bunch of photos and he couldn’t identify Donen so we figured he knew something second-hand but was making the rest up, maybe hoping for a reward. In the end they cleared us all. It left a bad taste though and Dieter didn’t want to do Narcotics or Vice anymore. He went to work on stolen automobiles. It kind of ended it for him, I think. And he wasn’t with his old pals so much. I stayed in touch with him the most.’
‘How did you identify the Emperor as Donen?’
‘Pieter Gruen somehow got the Emperor’s fingerprints on a cigarette lighter. We had a dead letter drop, a locker at a swimming pool. Pieter could leave messages there or anything else interesting. It was Heinrich’s job to clear it out. Anyway, we got the lighter in an evidence bag with a note from Pieter that the Emperor’s prints were on it. It was a big breakthrough. The prints matched a juvenile case. It never went to trial but somebody kept the prints and they matched. Donen’s parents were dead, the relatives had never seen him since he was fourteen, there was no photo of Donen at that time but now we had a name.’
‘What happened to Donen?’
‘He disappeared before we rounded him up. We got the minnows. My pal Heinrich, he kept looking for him. There was a rumour he got involved with Sardinians and was murdered.’
‘Do you recall the name Gerd Osterlund in connection with any of this? Tall, slim, balding but fair. Back then he probably had a good mane of hair.’
‘Not offhand. How old is he?’
‘Early sixties.’
‘Right age I guess. My mind these days, pfff.’ He didn’t need to elaborate. ‘I’ll ask Heinrich, call you if it rings a bell with him. Two Germans, same age. There feels like there’s something there but it doesn’t add up, right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I know that feeling.’
‘Thanks anyway. If anything occurs …’
‘We’ll call you, don’t worry. I’m still angry about it, I still feel guilty.’
Clement ended the call frustrated. He was sure the text sent to Osterlund was a specific warning, a threat. The only seemingly significant criminal event that might be related had been the murder of the undercover officer. Could Osterlund have been involved with the Emperor? It had to be possible. But there was no evidence of Osterlund being involved in narcotics here. They would have to look deeper, ask the Germans for support too. Time was running out. The case felt schizophrenic. One half pointed to Germany and a near distant past, the other pointed to bikies and the present. He rang Graeme Earle and asked him to join him outside.
‘Something?’
Earle laboured over the sand in his leather shoes. Clement ran through his theory of the photo. ‘If it was about a ransom he wouldn’t send the photo and then snatch Osterlund half an hour later. This was a message, “This is what I did to Schaffer because of Hamburg: you’re next”. The t-shirt was original, never worn. But I don’t think it was Schaffer’s. Even in the early photos he was a big guy and the t-shirt is clearly too small.’
‘You think his killer brought the t-shirt with him. You reckon we’re looking for a German?’
‘Probably.’
‘Where does Lee fit?’
‘I don’t know. But I’m sure this is what the photo was all about. He wanted to make Osterlund squirm.’
He explained what he’d learned of Pieter Gruen and the Emperor. ‘Dieter Schaffer was Gruen’s contact.’
Earle digested that. ‘Could he have seen the Emperor out here, you know a chance meeting?’
‘It’s possible I suppose. Drugs are involved via Lee and maybe the Emperor is still in the game.’
Earle was thinking hard. ‘Maybe Osterlund witnessed something. Say at a German function. Something he hadn’t realised was important.’
It was a sound point. It didn’t really explain why the abductor would send that photo to Osterlund though.
‘I need you to try and find out every German living or staying in the Kimberley or greater north-west. There’s a German club and society in Perth. They’ll have a list and you can follow that up. Each of those people on the list will know somebody else and so on.’
‘Ellie, my German friend, should be able to give me a rundown of locals.’
‘Even better. She must know Osterlund. Check if he was hanging with anyone, or anyone seemed interested in him.’
His phone buzzed. It was Shepherd. Clement had sent him to check on Mitchell Karskine’s movements that morning. One of the techs was moving around taking photos and sifting sand. It looked like a scene from a sci-fi movie.
‘How’d you go?’
Clement’s phone indicated another call. His tooth had begun to throb again.
‘Hold on a second.’
Mal Gross this time. ‘Right after the boss went on radio we got a call. Guy walking his dog says he’s pretty sure he saw Osterlund on the beach this morning around six.’
‘I’ll send Shep. Call him with the details.’
He went back to Shepherd and gave him the good news. ‘Interview him and pay particular attention to his car. We can’t rule out anybody at this stage.’
‘Gotcha.’
Lisa Keeble appeared near the barbecue area and held her iPad up like a tour guide. ‘Got something I think you’ll want to see.’
Earle and Clement huddled to look at the screen.
‘This is from the area just a few metres the beach side of where you found the phone.’
The entire screen of the iPad showed a video tracking some impressions in the sand.
‘Footprints?’
‘Yes and see these lines here? They are very faint.’
She paused the image. By peering very closely Clement could see two parallel lines in the sand about a metre apart extending for around ten metres towards the lay-by.
‘What I am looking at?’
‘I think your guy might have used some kind of sand sled to transport Osterlund.’
Earle said, ‘I’ve seen things like that. Some of the guys take them when they’re beach fishing remote spots. You can bung on a full esky, all your gear and drag it through the sand.’
Keeble ran on. ‘I think the victim, presumably Osterlund, was incapacitated then placed on the sled. Your perpetrator then pulled it up towards his vehicle. At the secondary point where the tracks are visible the sand is fractionally harder and there are some rocks. I’m guessing there was a bump and the phone dropped out of a pocket a few metres further up because it had been dislodged.’
Clement went with it. ‘If that’s anything like what happened, our guy was totally prepared and knew Osterlund’s movements. He’s been watching the place. It wasn’t an accident he sent that text at five thirty, he knew Osterlund would be up. Lisa, I want your guys to pay particular attention to any areas front or back of this house that somebody could spy from.’