Dark Angel_a fast-paced serial killer thriller

by P. J. Nash

  The beginnings to her teens spent in an ex-council house in a dreary Midlands town in the UK had been shit. It wasn’t so much the place as the people. Dead-eyed navel gazers who looked only to spend their hard-earned cash from menial jobs on doing up their sad semis. Or blasting themselves on sugary cocktails at the Roxy on a Saturday night. When the booze wore off and the lights went down, all that beckoned was a hangover and the hair salon or factory on Monday. She had hated the weather in the UK. Warm and windy rainy days in the summer and cold winters where it got dark at four pm. Dull weather made dull people. No wonder she’d loved the sunny expanses of Australia when her dad had bought her here. Sadly, they’d had no time to stay in one place for any length of time. But at least she’d seen the world. They’d had fun together. Wherever she went with Geoff, she wanted to have a place she could call home. And for it to be warm, wherever they went. But, first, there was some unfinished business. The ‘creeps’ had to die’.

  Alchemy Investigations Office, Victoria Police HQ, Melbourne

  ‘There … just there,’ said Deb Boyd, a grey-haired woman in her late fifties. She was sitting next to Sandersen.

  ‘I’ll print the stills from those. Three seconds,’ said Sandersen. The printer whirred and spat out high-quality prints. For the past two days, Boyd and Sandersen had been hunkered down running through video footage from Melbourne’s Tullamarine airport.

  Fingerprint and DNA testing had confirmed that the bombmaker had been Alice Havilland. But all that did was verify what they had already thought. Having constructed several timelines starting at the estimated time that Alice had placed the bomb, they had approximated her journey to the airport using various types of transport including private car, taxi and public transport. From this, they had assembled information on all the possible flights to Darwin Alice could have taken. Via a contact in the AFP, Sandersen had gained access to all the CCTV footage from the cameras in the departures lounge. Then the hard work had begun. While James was wrapped up in bringing down Cyrus Bain, Sandersen was heading up the investigation into Alice Havilland. Since disappearing from the burning hostel after her release, nothing had been seen of her. Despite her having carried out a triple murder made to look like a murder suicide in the Northern Territory, there was no conclusive forensic evidence. Alice, though, had been tutored in forensic awareness so there was no surprise there. The bomb had failed to go off properly, so the evidence which she had hoped would be destroyed in the blast had not been destroyed.

  Boyd picked up the prints and put them on the lightbox. ‘There it is, it’s the left ear, there’s no doubt.’

  Sandersen looked at the date stamped time on the right-hand top of the photograph and was buzzing. ‘Bloody epic, Debs, that’s her. Look at the time stamp. It fits perfectly.’ They had hit pay dirt. If the Darwin flights angle had run into a dead end, they had been looking to work out alternative flights Alice might have taken. Such as flying to Sydney or heading North to Brisbane.

  The pair hugged. Deb Boyd may have looked like an unassuming librarian, but she was in fact a “super-recogniser”. She had worked as a detective sergeant in London with the Metropolitan Police for several years before her talent for remembering and spotting faces, meant she was asked to join a specialist squad. It had been rolled out on a small basis, but the London riots of 2011 had seen a massive amount of crimes had been recorded on CCTV. Desperate to regain the upper hand after being seen to pretty much stand aside while London burned, the Met had thrown all its resources at rounding up everyone they could, who could be identified. Boyd and the rest of the team had identified hundreds of suspects, and the judges had been heavy with the sentences. Boyd had enjoyed it for a while. But working for an organisation that had been branded “institutionally racist” and therefore effectively hamstrung against pursuing criminals from ethnic minorities, she had become disillusioned and left the force. The “super recogniser squad” story had been a media phenomenon and had been her golden ticket out of the force that put saving face and political correctness before saving lives.

  Sandersen had met Boyd at a conference on geographical profiling. It was their mutual interest in this new area that had caused Sandersen to contact Boyd when she was stuck in a proverbial cul-de-sac.

  Sitting down at her computer, Sandersen printed off the passenger manifest for the flight they though Alice had boarded. Cross-referencing with a couple more databases, Sandersen got a hit. She picked up the phone to the AFP. “Hello, we need a BOLOF for one Casey Jones, DOB twenty-seventh of May 1989.” The hunt was on.

  Sisters of Mercy, Retirement Home, Northern Territory

  Geoff Carincross was a mental health professional, but you didn’t need qualifications to see that Cyrus Bain was a broken man. He looked like he had physically shrunk a few inches, the normally blazing eyes were dull, and his feline-like grace had collapsed into a hunched up older man. The only thing that remained of the old Bain was his vicious desire for revenge.

  ‘She fucked up the bomb. Ironsides and his moll are still waltzing around Melbourne, and I can’t even attend my little girl’s funeral,’ said Bain, taking a slug of vodka from a dirty glass, the normally pristine house was filthy. The only clean thing in the room was the picture of Tess Bain in a silver frame.

  ‘Admitted, Mr Bain. That was a fuckup. But she’s not fucking Leon. She’s a twenty-nine-year-old girl who got her bomb making knowledge from Google and her equipment from Tandy,’ said Cairncross.

  ‘Well, the Semtex was real enough. Do you know how much that shit costs?’ snarled Bain.

  He poured himself another vodka. Cairncross did his best to keep his temper down.

  ‘Look, Geoff, I’m sorry. Losing Tess has caused me to lose my edge. I’m the first to admit it, but you bought the ticket and you gotta take the bloody ride, right to the end. Let her kill the old paedo priests and then go and meet her. Then, make sure she gets snuffed and is never found. Then, and only then, do you get your money. If you see her as a loose end, then I see you as a loose end. And I’ll make sure all my loose ends get tied up,’ said Bain.

  ‘Crystal clear,’ replied Cairncross.

  Sisters of Mercy Retirement Home Northern Territory

  ‘You got to get up to speed with the internet age,’ said Johnson to Toohey. The pair were sitting in a van with the slogan, “LEAF IT TO US”, emblazoned on it. They were wearing overalls and had spent the last few hours swapping the monotony of watching the hidden CCTV cameras for the monotony of raking moss from the huge lawn that surrounded the retirement home.

  Inside, Father Ted Hanson was asleep after his dinner, his mouth open as he snored. The seventy-eight-year-old had been a predatory paedophile during his time as a priest in the UK. Toohey and Johnson were trying to distract themselves from the fact they were protecting him by discussing how easy it was to get a fake identity.

  ‘You don’t stand in some churchyard looking for a dead child’s grave anymore. That shit’s from the sixties. Like in Day of the Jackal,’ he said.

  ‘So, how do you it, then?’ asked Toohey.

  ‘Well, you either create a totally new ID legend and then hack something easy like the Driver’s Licence Bureau. You request a new licence, and, Hey Presto, you’ve got the beginnings of a new life.’ Toohey looked impressed. Removing the .38 revolver from his shoulder holster, he began loading it from a box of bullets on the dashboard. ‘What’s the other way?’ he asked, dropping a bullet into the chamber.

  ‘Well, that’s a bit easier. You basically find a John or Joan Doe, a working stiff with no criminal record. And by a bit of forging and mail fraud, you get a new passport in their name but with your picture. You really need to find somebody who doesn’t use their passport much. The Israeli MOSSAD pulled off a mission that way,’ said Johnson, stretching in his seat.

  ‘Bit of a shock for John or Jane Doe when a SWAT team comes through the windows first thing,’ said Toohey. Both men laughed.

  Undisclosed Location, Northern Territo
ry

  They’d made love, tenderly, quietly, sweetly. Now, Casey/Alice slept soundly her head nestled in the crook of Geoff Cairncrosses’s arm. It was making love with him, she’d said. She’d never had it before. Fucking, she’d done plenty of, - willingly and many times unwillingly. Unwillingly, at the hands of her step-father and his mates. Willingly sometimes to get things she wanted or just to feel needed by someone for a brief moment.

  He lay there, pondering his next move. Fuck, it was complicated. Here he was, with a victim who had victims and was planning more. This young woman who could be so gentle had honed her talent for extreme violence in the crucible of her youth. Cairncross tracked back a year or so when Bain had approached him. Having gained his first real postgraduate job at the facility where Alice Havilland was being held, he’d been excited. But within a few months, he’d seen the light. Handed all the crummy admin jobs and earning crappy money, he’d fallen into Bain’s arms.

  Then, a mysterious benefactor left a tranche of money to be used in specifically for the psychological rehabilitation of criminals. Geoff’s boss had been recalcitrant to put Geoff in charge of such a pioneering project and with such a high-profile patient. The metallic taste of a Sig Sauer placed in his mouth after he was jumped by two guys in the carpark had bought him to his senses.

  Geoff remembered the first time he saw her in the observation room. The “Daughter of the Dingo” sat slumped catatonic in a chair gazing blankly at the TV screen. A few weeks later, with the medication tapering off, she had appeared more lucid. Somewhere between then and now he had fallen in love with her. Defining who “she” was, was difficult. When Geoff had started his therapy with her, she has been a tabula rasa, a blank slate. He hadn’t brainwashed her in the old-school way of thinking. He’d just put a new interpretation on the events in her life that would mean she would take care of some business for Cyrus Bain without anything being traced back to him. The worse that could happen to Casey/Alice is that they’d lock her up again.

  ‘She’s just a very efficient tool, mate. Once we’ve used her, you can put her back in the rack, safe and sound,’ Bain had said.

  Some tool, Geoff thought. So, what were his options? For one, he wasn’t going to kill her. But he knew that if he left her, Bain would do the job. So, he had to take her with him. But to fly, they needed money. Bain would only cough up when she was dead. And then what he was he supposed to tell her? Any which way but win? He threw on some clothes and went out for a walk. He shut the door quietly. Then, his phone rang.

  Alchemy Investigations Office, Victoria Police HQ, Melbourne.

  So, can you let us know what you’ve got on Martin Scudamore?” asked James. It was the second meeting of the multiagency operation entitled “Operation Jockey”.

  ‘Scudamore is the head of a network of RAAF and other defence force active duty members who are smuggling unrefined heroin from Afghanistan. It’s being flown in on C17s straight back here. For our part, AFDIS has got conclusive photographic and wiretap evidence of members of the gang, buying heroin from local Taliban chiefs,’ said Jared Mycroft.

  ‘How are they getting it out of the base past the RAAF Police,’ asked James.

  ‘Well, we’ve got dogs and scanners at the base perimeter, so we were foxed about that. So, we tracked back along the plane’s route. And that’s where made a breakthrough. As it was jointly thanks to the radar permissions we got via our colleagues at the AFP, I’ll let Mal Dewhirst talk you through it,’ said Mycroft.

  A tough looking middle-aged man in a suit stood up and walked to the front where the multimedia projector was located. ‘Thanks, Jared. As you know, it was your theory on what they were up to that caused us to carry out the surveillance.’

  Dewhirst played a short video and highlighted several parts of it. ‘All C17 flights are radar tracked along their whole flight path. Someone has been turning a blind eye to certain flights of certain planes. Once the C17 crosses the coast into Australian air space, they drop below radar detection height. Then, the loadmaster opens the side door and drops out three or four UAVs – Unmanned Airborne Vehicles, drones in layman’s terms. They’re loaded with a kilo or two of heroin. The drones are pre-programmed with a flight path and fly to a rendezvous point in the back of Bourke. A team of guys in a four-wheel drive tracks the drones via GPS trackers on them and picks up the brown when they land. So, at no time are the drugs and the RAAF guys on the ground with the drugs.”

  ‘Wow that’s pretty impressive,’ said James. ‘It’ll be pretty hard to pin anything on Scudamore then,’ he added.

  ‘Actually, probably not,’ said a woman sitting next to Dewhirst.

  ‘Sorry, this is my colleague, Anita Booth. She’s a forensic accountant,’ said Dewhirst.

  ‘And she can speak for herself,” snapped Booth.

  ‘My apologies, Anita, please fill the others in,’ said Dewhirst.

  ‘Scudamore, has not been very scrupulous in covering his financial footprints,’ said Booth.

  This came as no surprise to James. As a police officer, he had seen criminals take make huge efforts to burn their clothing, arrange alibis, etc, and then be tripped up on the simplest thing. One armed robber he had arrested had done all this but couldn’t part with his favourite red Nike trainers. They were in his kitchen when the cops called. Footprint forensics and CCTV footage tied him to the raid. Fifteen years in a supermax for the sake of a pair of couple of hundred bucks’ worth of trainers.

  Booth flashed up a document on the projector screen. ‘Scudamore earns eighty-thousand Australian dollars a year. He has a three-hundred thousand mortgage on his house and runs a two-year-old Ford. So far, nothing too flash. But when we looked at his parents, in the last six months, they have had nearly one point five million put into their Supers and savings accounts. A Platinum American Express has been used to lease a Range Rover Sport and book a holiday in Mexico. Whilst Scudamore’s parents were no paupers before this windfall, there’s no reasonable explanation for this,’ said Booth.

  ‘So, his parents are in on all this?’ asked James.

  ‘No, it seems not,’ said Griffiths. ‘His father has got Alzheimer’s and is in a care home. The wife had him put in a home after he got violent and hit her. Martin has power of attorney for both of them, Essentially, he’s using his old folks as a shell company,’ added Dewhirst.

  James looked on pensively. ‘So, we’ve got leverage on him.’

  ‘How do you figure that?’ asked Mycroft.

  ‘Well, we threaten to send his dear old mum to a supermax for criminal conspiracy and living off the proceeds of crime,’ added James.

  ‘Then what?’ asked Booth.

  ‘We get him to turn to turn Queen’s evidence on Bain. Then, we drop the pressure off his mum,’ said James.

  ‘Sounds perfect,’ said Mycroft.

  ‘You’re a tough bastard, James, but I like the way you think,’ said Dewhirst.

  ‘What about the Afghan end?’ asked Mycroft.

  ‘Well, it depends who wants to take the collars,’ said Dewhirst.

  ‘In the interest of getting the best case and the heaviest sentences, it would make sense to for AFDIS to forward our investigative evidence and let you pick them off as they return for leave from Afghan,’ said Mycroft. ‘After all, the dope being dropped off from the plane is officially happening in Federal Territory,’ he added.

  ‘Well, I’m more than happy with that, but I will ensure that any arrests are flagged as a joint AFDIS/AFP operation,’ said Dewhirst.

  ‘Oh, pass me the sick bucket, would you. I can’t stand anymore of this multiagency love in. You guys are supposed to hate each other,’ mocked James.

  Undisclosed Location, Northern Territory

  Alice was awoken from a blissful sleep by the beeping of Geoff’s phone. She picked it up and pumped in his PIN. He had a missed call and a voicemail. She listened to it. A man’s voice rambling and incoherent. ‘Just top the bitch ASAP and get your arse back here. You’ve got for
ty-eight hours.’

  She deleted the message and the missed call. Hearing footsteps in the hall, she threw the phone back on the bed and feigned sleep. Geoff came in.

  ‘Hey, darling, good news. I’ve got us some proper artillery. Forget sneaking in. We’ll just blast our way in and blow them away.’

  Over his shoulder was a black holdall. After placing it on the bed, he pulled out a submachine gun.

  ‘These are MP5’s just like the UK SWAT teams have,’ he said like an excited kid at Christmas. ‘And check this out frag grenades. Just pull the pin, throw it and boom,’ he added.

  She was suitably impressed. ‘So, what’s the plan then?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, we park as near as possible, take out the cops in the car, then hit the home and kill the priests. Shock and awe, baby, shock and awe!’

  It had been fun, but all good things must come to an end, she thought as she watched him playing with the guns.

  Big Joe’s Coffee, Melbourne

  ‘Cuba?’ asked Munu.

  ‘Cuba,’ replied Bain.

  ‘Sun and cigars and no extradition treaties,’ he added.

  For just a fraction of a second, Munu felt a sliver of sympathy for Bain. There was one thing you could say for Bain. He was a professional criminal with every fibre of his being. There were no shades of grey. Some crims Munu had met put on a veneer of civility, played the businessman, the family man, tried to put a legitimate front overall criminal enterprise. Many of the other guys got high on drugs or addicted to booze. They flashed the cash and got caught doing it. Bain was a monk by those standards. His only vices were the Remy Martin and the Monte Cristo Cuban cigars. Munu recalled an Irish villain called Martin Cahill, aka “The General”, who had run the heroin trade in Dublin. He had lived an ascetic life, too, despite making millions.