“That black sonofabitch said he was going to kill us all,” Mike finished his sentence for him. “Ya-bloody-hoo. A breakthrough at last. All we have to do is bring Somerville in for questioning, find out who that ‘black sonofabitch’ is and why he wants to kill them all, and it’s game over. Finally it will all make sen…”
The conversation was once again interrupted by Brian’s mobile phone ringing. He was quick to answer it and the White Snake team sat up and listened intently to the quick, one-sided call.
“Yes, Ray…WHAT!!?...how?…when?...oh fuck! OK, we’re on our way. Be there in an hour or so.”
He hit ‘end’ on his phone and started packing up his notes.
“Saddle up folks, we’re off to Londonderry. Fucking Somerville’s swallowed a shotgun.”
Chapter 22
The scene of the crime.
Exactly one hour later, their commandeered NSW Police van drove into Thomas Road, Londonderry where a crowd of rubberneckers had gathered, and two or three paparazzi had materialised. A motorcycle cop was keeping them at bay like a wary lion tamer. Weiss who was driving, showed his badge to a Highway Patrolman who moved the yellow and black bunting aside to let them park as close to number 29 as possible. They pulled up just in front of an ambulance. Its red and blue lights were still flashing, but there was no siren; the paramedics were in no hurry.
Inside the front yard, it was a hive of activity, yet the first responders had done well. The crime scene had been professionally established and managed. Pristine rolls of hard plastic had been laid down from the gate to the front door and presumably inside the low set house as well. Everyone – cops, forensic investigators and ambos alike – were wearing latex gloves, plastic booties and cotton masks whilst maintaining a minimal footprint.
A ‘seen-it-all’ senior sergeant and a green-around-the-gills newbie were camped at the door, the young guy given the task of keeping tabs on who went in and out, and handing out the PPE. Weiss, Winslow and Ronda hung back on the footpath – too many cooks and all that – as Thurlow and Marr presented their badges.
“You’re a long way from home, Detective,” the sarge said, probably thinking that Mike was just a hick cop from the bush sightseeing. Or maybe even getting some work experience in the big smoke.
“Yeah, well he’s with me,” Brian said, “or more to the point, I’m with him. You guys first on the scene?”
They took the proffered gloves and shoe coverings and quickly started putting them on.
“Sure were, Superintendent. Although Seb here probably wishes he wasn’t.”
“That bad, eh?”
“Yep. Point blank with both barrels. Isn’t much left of his head I tell ya. Bits of brain splattered everywh…”
Mike cut in as the newbie, recalling the bloody scene, looked close to spewing again. “What about the other two?” he asked.
The sergeant looked at him and then at Thurlow as if to say: you Feds got this genius in all the way from the Northern Territory…just to ask dumb questions and waste our time?
“What other two?” he replied. “We did a full, room-by-room reccie. Checked the whole yard too, plus the garage, the garden shed’n all. It was just him. Looked like a classic suicide. Are you telling me there were two other…”
Then the penny dropped.
“Oh, you mean his dogs? The two Rotties? Yeah, they’re as dead as doornails too. Just as well because big mutts like that’re definitely occupational hazards. I remember one call out, there was this American pit bull…”
“He shot them?” Brian asked.
“Nah, hardly a mark on them. Apart from one that’s got a coupla bites on its nose…maybe a funnel web spider or something.”
Marr and Thurlow gave each other a look that said ‘oh no, here we go again’. Brian asked the sergeant where the dogs were, while Mike went over to fetch Ronda.
***
The constable helped Mike carry the dogs, which were found sprawled side by side in the front room under an open window, out to the garage where they were plonked down on a hastily cleared workbench.
It was no easy task. One of them, “Bear” it said on the brass plate on his spikey collar, was easily 60 kilograms while “Devil” was even heavier, around 65kg; both of them were dead weights and flopped around like giant hacky sacks. Rigor mortis was yet to set in, so they probably had been dead for three hours, four tops.
As the young copper returned to his post, Ronda studied the bite on Bear’s snout. The puncture wounds she guessed were approximately 25mm apart; another mega-snake, probably male but she wouldn’t know until the bite was biopsied. She removed the mini herpetologist kit from her well-travelled knapsack – just the basics but she never went anywhere without it – and got to work.
She was very respectful. The pair might have been savage watchdogs, but until a few hours ago they were living, breathing animals… all creatures great and small and all that.
After removing Bear’s collar, she measured the bite width – hmm, 24.8mm, not a bad guesstimate – and then opened a new blade and expertly slipped it into her decades-old scalpel. She incised a 1-centimetre section from the dog’s nose which she placed in a small specimen jar, screwed on the lid and duly recorded the details… name, date, place.
The bite that killed Devil was harder to find. She had to painstakingly sift through the dog’s thick black and tan fur. Starting from the nose and working backwards, she spread the hair apart with her thumbs before she located the tell-tale puncture marks, on his lower right shoulder. Usually she would shave around the wound with her battery-powered clippers, but she had to make do with cutting the surrounding hair with a small pair of scissors before performing the biopsy.
“Same snake kill both?” Mike asked after she had put both jars in her bag.
“99.9% positive. Unless there were two identically sized snakes.”
“Any idea what kind? he asked.
“Nah, not really Mike,” she answered, “quite possibly an Eastern Tiger Snake or an Eastern Brown, they’re both fairly common around these parts, but that’s just an educated guess.”
Mike looked at Devil; his face was grotesquely contorted, and his long pink tongue hung down past four very long and sharp canine teeth.
“The snake must have been pretty lucky to avoid those two sets of jaws,” he said.
“Maybe lucky, but more probably super quick,” she replied and then went on to explain. “A lot of people worry about how big a snake is, but the thing about snakes, even the small ones, is their mind-boggling strike speed.
Try to get your head around this. 200 milliseconds it takes a human to blink. Well in that time a snake could theoretically have carried out two strikes.”
“No way!” Mike exclaimed, blinking to see just how fast that was.
“Yes way! They have unbelievably explosive acceleration. Fighter pilots black out at around 9 or 10G, right? Ten times the force of gravity. Their brain can’t cope with the acceleration and switches off. Well, some snakes such as the Death Adder reach upwards of 30G when striking, yet remain in full control, ready to go again straight away. Imagine up to 15,000 muscles flexing, building up energy for the strike, before releasing like a fully stretched rubber band. High speed cameras can barely keep up with them.
“Those dogs wouldn’t have stood a chance. They would have been tagged before they even realised they were under attack. Then the snake would only have to keep them at bay, ducking and weaving for another 10 to fifteen seconds or so before their muscles started seizing up and they were gone.”
“Dog gone,” Mike said.
Ronda gave him a withering look. “Yeah, you could say that,” she said, before brandishing the scalpel. “And I could cut your dad-joking tongue out!”
“Ha! You’d never do that. You love my dad jokes…and my tongue!”
They both turned around as Brian stuck his head around the garage doorway. “Excuse me, Ronda,” he said, “when you’re finished in here, there’s something yo
u really must see back in the house.”
***
The smell was exponentially worse. The snake cages hadn’t been cleaned out since Caldwell and Van Heerden had visited weeks ago and, forget the sawdust, the carpet snakes were crawling around in their own filth.
“Ugh!” said Ronda. “Some people hate seeing birds in cages. I hate seeing snakes cooped up, especially if they’re not looked after, like these seven. Makes me want to take them out into the bush and set them free…and I damn well will when I get the chance.”
Mike and Brian, hands covering their masked noses to block out the stench, looked around the room. Despite what she’d said, Mike was glad they were in cages. He wouldn’t have been able to handle being here if they weren’t.
“But what are they doing here?” Mike asked, “Surely Somerville wasn’t an ophiophilist? That’d be way too much of a coincidence.”
He looked at Brian’s blank face. “A snake lover,” he explained. You know these things when your girlfriend is into snakes.
“No way did that arsehole love snakes,” Ronda interjected. “No snake lover ever kept snakes in atrocious conditions like this!”
As she spoke she moved up to the wire cages and had a closer look at one of the snakes. “Hang on…what’s this?”
Not even bothering to put on one of the thick gloves that were lying around, she opened one of the cages and – much to Mike’s horror – grabbed an emaciated looking Python and brought it out. She lightly squeezed it behind its head until it opened its mouth. It seemed to sense she meant it no harm. Or maybe, like George in the adjoining room, it had simply given up the ghost.
“Look at this!” she exclaimed, tears welling up. “The prick has removed its frigging fangs! The others are probably the same. They do grow back in time, but what a bastard of an act. Why would he do such a thing?”
“To keep from getting bitten obviously,” said Brian, reflecting. “Or…”
“Or what?”
“Or he didn’t want his dogs to get bitten. I remember years ago, one of my first cases actually, we busted these unscrupulous greyhound ‘educators’. They were going from state to state, pulling the teeth and claws out of cats – family pets mostly – and giving them to racing dogs as a kill. To blood them. The trainers were paying big money for this. They thought it gave their dogs the edge and with no feline teeth or claws to worry about, their dish-lickers were safe from injury as they tore the cats asunder.”
Ronda was even more furious. To think that someone would do that to someone’s pet cat!
“Well, if Somerville thought he was giving his dogs ‘the edge’, he was sadly mistaken. These are pet shop snakes, as docile as they come. That’s why they’re sometimes called Children’s Pythons. For a dog to kill one of these, even with their fangs, it’d be like shooting fish in a barrel. Like training to swim the English Channel by having a bath. It sure as hell wouldn’t prep them for when a real snake came along. Seriously, if he believed he was sharpening their reflexes, he was dead wrong.”
Their discussion was interrupted by the late George Somerville, thankfully covered by a sheet, being wheeled out on a squeaky gurney past the door.
Chapter 23
And then there were two.
The whiteboard at the back of the White Snake war room now had some new additions. The most noticeable was a banner headline stretching all the way across the top:
“THAT BLACK SONOFABITCH SAID HE WAS GOING TO KILL US ALL.”
Unfortunately, George Somerville had taken any explanation of that outburst to his freshly dug grave. The team were no closer to working out who the coloured person making that menacing comment was, when he had threatened them, or his motive for wanting them all dead. By “all” they presumed that meant just the ten Uluru visitors back in January, and not every neo Nazi in Australia. There were thousands of them, and their numbers were rising daily.
George’s mugshot now had a big red cross Nikko-ed over his face, alongside all pertinent details of his trip to the Rock and his untimely death. Only two faces remained uncrossed.
The words “The Benefactor?” were also prominent on the board, but no one was any closer to removing that question mark. Ronda and Toby Winslow had overheard that pseudonym mentioned again only yesterday at Somerville’s wake in Penrith…
***
They had guessed where the wake was going to be held after learning that Somerville’s funeral was taking place at White Lady Funerals – of course it had to be white – at 1.30pm in the city’s High Street. The Australian Arms Hotel was the closest pub to the funeral, so Ronda and Toby had gone there, pretending they were co-workers-cum-lovers enjoying a long lunch.
Their guess had paid off; no sooner had the funeral ended at 2pm than the pub started filling with mainly young, angry, heavily tattooed men, all wearing Doc Martens and colourful Hawaiian shirts. The couple went through the motions of being disgusted and intimidated by the new arrivals, but held their ground. Stuff you, we were here first…this is our local their body language seemed to say. The fact that they were there first made them less suspicious-looking too. Had they arrived after all the Home Base homies, they would have stuck out like the proverbial. No legit couple would walk in on that lot. The kicker was they were just too damn good looking to be cops. No way was this pair blending into the background.
They were in luck too. Who should choose to sit at the very next table but a group of six; four young blokes and two older dudes, Caldwell and Van Heerden. All of them checked out Ronda’s long tanned legs – none too subtly the sexist pigs – and glared at Toby as they took their seats and slapped their jugs of beer and glasses of rum and bourbon onto the polished timber table, spilling heaps in the process and not giving a shit.
“He was a fucking great bloke,” one of the young guys was saying. “At our last little stoush in the Cross, these two big coons were laying into me and George came along and smashed both their fucken heads in. Fuck it was fun! Man, he could fight.”
“Yeah, nah,” another replied. “100%. He was ace like that. He said that he’d cut his ponytail off if he ever got beaten in a one-on-one scrap. He’d never give up, never say die.”
He clammed up as he realised what he’d just said; there was a pregnant pause, no one knowing how to follow that up. Everyone took a long slug of their drinks and looked elsewhere.
“Ah fuck! Would you look at that!” another exclaimed. In the nearby sports bar, an English Premier League soccer game between Chelsea and Manchester City was about to start. All of the players plus the referee and the two linesmen had bent the knee to show support for racial equality. “What a load of shit! I tell ya, soon it’ll be fucken illegal to be white. We’ll be third class citizens in our own country.”
Boos, catcalls and whistles reigned throughout the pub as other friends of the late great George picked up on what was on screen.
“See that black prick there,” the guy continued over the din, “number 7 for City? Name’s Raheem Sterling. He’s on fifteen million pounds – not dollars, pounds – a year for the next four years. That’s over half a fucking million dollars a week, like winning Lotto every Saturday, just for pouncing around with a soccer ball…and the cunt has the cheek to want equality. I’d like to be that equal. Not fucken black of course! No amount of money’s worth that. Fucken unbelievable!”
Chelsea kicked off and the hullabaloo died down.
“So,” the guy who’d embarrassed himself asked, “when’s our next protest march, Col?”
Van Heerden looked at Caldwell knowingly, and the latter gave him a wink.
“Nah, Jack,” he answered. “Our marching days are over. The Benefactor has something really big planned, something that will…”
He stopped mid-sentence, as he saw Ed give an almost imperceptible shake of his head and a nod towards the table behind him where Ronda and Toby were sitting, smiling, talking shop, holding hands, getting cosy, getting pissed on their non-alcoholic bottles of vegan wine…doing every
thing but eavesdrop.
Caldwell gave himself an uppercut. The emotion of George’s funeral and the rum and cokes he’d put away had loosened his lips and made him reckless. He’d almost fucked up. He swore that he would be far more cautious in future and never mention The Benefactor or his grand plan in public again.
“Anyway, here’s to George!” he shouted over the ruckus. He jumped to his feet, raised his glass and saluted the room with curved forefinger and thumb. “Up there in heaven, drinking piss, screwing beautiful virgins and watching his doggie buddies chase each other from cloud to cloud.”
“GEORGE!” “GEORGE!” “GEORGE!” came the return chant.
Toby and Ronda stayed for another half-hour, getting jostled by the increasingly drunken mob as they made their exit, but there was nothing else to report, nothing they could add to the whiteboard at least. They did learn a few more swear words however…
Overkill : Pure Venom Page 14
