DINING WITH DEVILS -- A Tasmanian Thriller

by GORDON AALBORG

  Dining with Devils

  A Tasmanian Thriller

  by Gordon Aalborg

  2nd in the series

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated to Deni, for her unswerving faith and support.

  And to the Jack Russell terriers of the world, all of whom have a bit of “Bluey” in there somewhere, just waiting to escape and create havoc.

  And, not least, to Foothills Mocha Magic and John Whitton, who loved her as I did. They are both gone now, hopefully to a better place, and together again, as they should be. R.I.P.

  CHAPTER ONE

  At first, everyone thought the retrieving trial judge had been killed by a blind man shooting blanks at a dead pigeon. With typical Tasmanian logic and the blinkered focus of hardened gundog trial fanatics, they ignored the fact that the judge had been standing behind the blind man when the gun went off and the blanks in the blind man’s shotgun were loaded only with primers, and therefore harmless.

  Instead, they focused on the obvious, which was that blind John had the shotgun in his hands and all the motive in the world for shooting the judge, who, the evening before, had callously told John, in front of everyone, that he should give up entering his guide dog Magic in retrieving trials because, “You can’t possibly win.” Insensitive and unkind words to a highly competitive individual like John, so in the eyes of most observers, the judge deserved shooting!

  And then the judge had compounded the offense by growling back when John’s guide dog/retrieving trial entrant sensed John’s anger and curled her upper lip in the beginnings of a snarl. Foothills Mocha Magic was not known to snarl without good and sufficient reason. The chocolate Labrador bitch took her work as a guide dog seriously, and reading John’s moods, not to mention protecting him, was part of her chosen role in life. A short-lived incident, but a memorable one that gained the judge no credit even in death.

  When he died, nobody was actually watching the judge anyway. All attentions were focused across an arm of the South Esk River, on the place where the mechanical catapult was set up to fling dead pigeons for the trial dogs to retrieve. The trial site was on Ormley, a grazing property nestled in the Fingal Valley east of Avoca between the looming bulk of Ben Lomond and the lower Fingal Tier to the south.

  It was a typical late autumn morning in which everyone had awakened to a river valley swirling in a fog that roosted in the tall blue gums and stringy-barks along the river and shrouded the gorse bushes and lower scrub. It took quite some time to burn off, but by mid-morning the day was as splendid as anyone could ask for. Except maybe the judge.

  Thus, this astonishing chain of events:

  * The judge raised his clipboard in a signal.

  * The bird thrower was released, flinging the pigeon into the air for Magic to see and John to shoot at even though he couldn’t see.

  * John, who’d been a shooter before losing his sight in an accident, heard the thrower and fired at the appropriate moment the bird should have been at the zenith of its flight.

  * And both the hapless pigeon and the trial judge ended up face-down and dead on the boggy ground, a hundred yards and a river between them, but equal in death.

  Foothills Mocha Magic, splendid dog that she was, kept her attention focused on the pigeon – if the idiot judge wished to do his job lying face down in the dirt, that was none of her concern. John, of course, didn’t see the judge fall, so he waited the requisite mental ten-count, then ordered his dog to fetch, whereupon she took off like a rocket, launched herself into the river, swam across, ran straight to the bird, picked it up, and was swimming the river on her way back almost before the judge stopped twitching. She threw him a scurrilous glance, then presented John with her trophy in a perfect, ten-point delivery, and walked back to heel, neither knowing nor caring that her best run ever wasn’t going to count.

  Hardly anyone even saw the delivery; most of the gallery had, by this time, realized that their trial judge had just fallen down dead.

  About seventy-five people and half that many dogs watched it all, but nobody saw anything that Sergeant Charlie Banes, head of the St. Helens police station, out of uniform and trying to enjoy a rare Saturday off, didn’t also see from his position in the gallery of onlookers. A gun was fired and a man whom many people actively disliked fell down dead. That simple. It made no sense, at first, to anyone. Nobody’d heard any shot but John’s shotgun going off, and it wasn’t until they went to look that the bullet hole in the judge’s back became suddenly, brutally obvious. So did the pool of his own blood, welling out under him from where the bullet’s exit wound had blown apart his chest.

  Charlie’s first reaction, like that of the other onlookers, was disbelief. His second, as he licked idly at a fang-bloodied knuckle, was that somehow this was more of Bluey’s revenge for having been collared and leashed. Bluey was the rough-coated Jack Russell terrier that Charlie was dog-sitting for the day, a singularly independent reprobate beast famed for his irreverent temper and noxious habits, and Charlie’s personal nemesis. Technically, Bluey shouldn’t have been on the trial site in the first place, not being a registered gundog, but Charlie’s status as an officer of the law had been duly noted and the presence of the scruffy little terrier grudgingly accepted.

  Charlie’s third reaction – and this was the one that would not go away; it scurried around in his mind like a demented, caged hamster for months afterward – was to wonder how he could ever explain to the higher-ups in the Tasmanian police department how he, a senior policeman, could stand and watch as a blind man stood before a crowd of people with a loaded shotgun in his hands, fired the gun, and somebody died.

  That terrifying thought was forcibly shoved to the background as he thrust Bluey’s lead into the hands of Teague Kendall, who was standing next to him.

  “Stay here, and hang onto this bugger, lest he eat somebody,” Charlie snapped, then rushed toward the fallen judge, waving his police ID and letting professionalism take control.

  “Police! Everybody stay where they are!” he shouted, and was gratified to see the stentorian tones have their effect on the crowd of now totally confused onlookers. Within moments, he had the crowd under a semblance of order, and had thankfully managed to keep everyone at least several feet from the dead judge.

  Kendall did exactly as he’d been told. He remained in place, torn between watching his police officer friend take control of the situation and hoping the recalcitrant Jack Russell terrier wouldn’t decide to vent his evil disposition on Kendall himself. Beside Kendall, Rex Henderson also remained in place, scanning the scene with quick, observant glances and, Kendall thought, already rewriting the scene in his mind.

  Both men were writers. Kendall’s best-selling true-crime thriller The Specialist, recounting the exploits of a crazy serial killer who’d operated in Tasmania and near Kendall’s home on Vancouver Island in Canada – nearly claiming Kendall and his lady friend Kirsten Knelsen as victims – was topping the charts in North America, while Rex’s latest crime novel had done so well his publisher had sponsored an Australia/New Zealand book tour for the Houston, Texas, writer. Their being together in a muddy paddock in the Tasmanian backblocks, observing the aftermath of what seemed to be a sniper attack on a retrieving trial judge, was the result of having met quite by chance at LAX on their way to Australia on two different flights.

  Rex Henderson was a quiet, unassuming, middle-aged man whose gentle demeanor belied the sometimes harsh violence of his crime novels. Originally from Minnesota, he’d found it necessary to put on a Texas drawl during his Australian visit just to please his audiences. Now he appeared lost in thought, calmly observing the chaos around t
hem as Charlie sheep-dogged the crowd into order. Rex was also rubbing nervously at his left ear lobe, or so Kendall assumed until he noticed the trickle of blood down Rex’s fingers, and realized there was more involved than just nerves.

  “What’ve you done to yourself?” he asked, leaning over to peer closely at the injury.

  His companion lowered the hand, then stared wide-eyed at his bloodied fingers before turning to look at Kendall. Only then, apparently, did Rex actually feel anything like pain.

  “Ouch!” he said. “They sure have vicious bees in this country. Or was it a hornet, do you think?”

  Kendall moved in for a closer look, first dragging a handkerchief from his back pocket so he could wipe away the still-oozing blood. Rex flinched at the touch of the hanky, but flinched more visibly when Kendall had finished his assessment.

  “A lead hornet,” Kendall declared with genuine surprise. “Bloody oath, mate . . . I think the bullet that got the judge must have nicked your ear on the way by.”

  “A bullet?” Rex stared at Kendall with a calmness the younger, taller man couldn’t help but envy. “Surely not. It was an insect of some kind. I heard it.”

  “So did I, now that you mention it,” Kendall replied. “And it was no insect.” He thought for a brief moment, then handed over Bluey’s lead to Rex. “Here, hold this mongrel while I let Charlie know about this. And don’t move. Where you were standing might turn out to be important when it’s time to see where the shot came from.”

  “Should we be standing here at all if somebody’s actually shooting at us?” Rex answered his own question before Kendall could think of a reply. “I guess it hardly matters, now. There’s been enough time to have wiped out half the people here, if that was the plan.”

  Both men glanced nervously around them and behind, across boggy riverside paddocks to the nearest real cover, a slight ridge adorned with bracken fern, blackberry scrub, and a few tall stringy-barks – Tasmanian oaks. Assuming Kendall was right about the direction involved, this was the logical place for the shot to have originated.

  “Helluva shot,” Kendall said. “Must be near-as-damn-it a thousand meters.” He ran his glance in a line between the judge’s corpse and the distant ridge, then returned to his announced course of action. “You stay here while I tell Charlie,” he said, “and don’t, for God’s sake, let that mongrel dog get loose. We’ve got enough chaos already.”

  Teague paused for an instant, peering intently at his companion, then added, “Jeez, but you’re lucky. If I was you, I’d go buy a lottery ticket today.” Then he shook his head in a gesture of disgust. “And I’m an idiot,” he said, and reached out to retrieve the Jack Russell’s leash. “You’re the one needing attention. Get yourself to the catering tent – they’re sure to have a first-aid kit. There’s all the time in the world to tell Charlie about how you almost got yourself shot.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  While the murdered gundog judge was hovering between Heaven and Hell, with most of his critics opting for the latter, Kirsten Knelsen was deep beneath the earth, somewhere between Paradise and Promised Land, staring at the inky depths of an underground river that could have been the Styx.

  It was not, in fact, the Styx, which was far to the south, almost at the other end of the state, but if it even had a name, Kirsten didn’t know it, hadn’t been told it, and – given the Mole Creek caving fraternity’s penchant for secrecy – wouldn’t be told it, either. Not that it mattered. Without an extremely detailed or very old map of Tasmania, it would be difficult enough to find either Paradise or Promised Land, let alone the subterranean stream at her feet. Neither was more than a wide spot on one of the island state’s more obscure back roads, possibly relevant in the dim distant past, but now lost in history.

  Kirsten found the names evocative, however, which didn’t help her to concentrate on the wondrous cave scenery she’d come so far to see. Her personal life was locked in a purgatory of guilt, and she feared escape as much as she dreaded staying with things as they were.

  None of the caving fraternity’s secrecy surprised her. Secrecy was part-and-parcel of the caving ethos. Something normal people didn’t seem to comprehend was the sheer fragility of cave ecosystems and the need for them always to be treated with respect and protected from invasion by those who couldn’t understand their importance. Vandalism and/or unwitting carelessness were always high on the list of threats to cave systems.

  And in the case of this particular cave, Kirsten thought, the secrecy was truly justified. Her companions had told her it rivaled anything the finest of Tasmania’s many well-known caves could offer, and Kirsten could well believe it.

  Just to get here, having left Launceston in pre-dawn blackness, they’d driven for hours, stumbled their way across a rocky, eucalypt-covered ridge, then crawled on hands and knees across what seemed to her to be an endless stretch of sheep paddock to avoid being spotted by the owner of the property where the cave entrance was located. There was an entrance elsewhere on the property, to a different cave, apparently, and he was notorious for his antagonism toward cavers and anyone else who dared to trespass.

  Within moments of the party’s descent (a straight, thirty-foot abseil plunge through a narrow slot between two rocks in a scrub-filled depression in the corner of an otherwise level paddock filled with sheep) into the cave system, Kirsten had been treated to some of the finest, most spectacular calcite formations she had ever seen.

  “And the best is yet to come,” she was assured by Michael Lichon, the leader of the three-person group giving Kirsten an exclusive tour of a cave system she was told had only been discovered a month earlier.

  “Only . . .” Michael actually looked sheepish, might even have blushed, although that didn’t show in the harshness of the caving lanterns. “. . . you have to take off your clothes if you want to see it.”

  Kirsten did a double-take, unsure for just a millisecond whether to laugh at him or actually worry. She was, after all, way to hell and gone out in the backblocks of the Tasmanian wilderness, deep underground, with three people she’d only met that morning, didn’t really know, and . . .

  And one of the three is a woman. Get a grip, Kirsten. What did Teague say about these Australians and their weird sense of humor?

  Then she caught that look again, and realized two things: (1) Michael was having her on just a bit, but more important was (2) the entire Tasmanian group seemed uncharacteristically hesitant about doing so.

  They’re intimidated by me!

  That realization struck her like a physical blow, because it kicked her mind back to the problems she’d been having with Teague Kendall. And explained those, too, in that single word. Intimidated.

  “Jeez, Mike, give it a rest.” This from the female of the party, a diminutive blonde in her mid-twenties whose name Kirsten had already forgotten, not least because these were the first words the woman had spoken since her silent nod at their introduction back in Launceston.

  “Michael’s famous for his sense of humor – not!” continued Sue . . . that’s it! as she began unself-consciously stripping off her own mud-smeared caver’s coveralls. “We’ve only to wade a little bit is all. Easier going, and less chance of doing unintentional damage that way.”

  Simple as that. All four removed their boots, socks, coveralls and the jeans or – in Michael’s case – sweat pants they wore to combat the slight underground chill, and stepped single-file into the inky waters of the unnamed river. A hundred meters later, numb from the cold water but exhilarated by the beauty of their surroundings, they stepped out onto the opposite bank, hastily dried off, and got dressed again in preparation for further explorations.

  Kirsten was as impressed as the others by the sheer volume of decorative, calcite features they encountered in their journey downstream, her voice added to theirs in a chorus of ooohs and aaahs at the magnificent way in which Nature had embellished the subterranean chambers of the cave system.

  She no longer cared that she’d be
en unable to secure access to Kubla Khan, arguably the best decorated cave in all of Australia. This as yet unnamed cave was quite spectacular enough.

  But, now aware that she might be considered intimidating to the Tasmanian cavers, she found herself consciously pre-editing her comments, pausing to think before she said anything at all. And wishing she’d done so during their drive from Launceston, when the Tassie trio had, at first hesitantly and then with enthusiasm, seduced her into a detailed account of her underground escape from clinical psychologist and psychopath Dr. Ralph Stafford, the “Specialist” of Teague Kendall’s now highly successful true-crime book.

  At least, she thought, she hadn’t been lured into revealing that she’d actually consulted Stafford professionally, albeit briefly, as her therapist. Wild horses couldn’t have dragged that admission from Kirsten; it was at the seat of her own worst nightmares. Confiding her most intimate thoughts to a madman who intended to eat her was, she thought, good and sufficient cause for nightmares.

  Stafford had slain and eaten women, including Kirsten’s sister Emma, both in Tasmania and on Vancouver Island. And had nearly claimed Kirsten and Kendall, too.

  In a cave.

  Kirsten had led the madman on a merry chase through the caverns and tunnels of a cave system she, herself, had discovered on Vancouver Island, ultimately leaving Stafford trapped and/or lost in the cave system where he’d pursued her. Or eaten by a cougar. Stafford’s body had never been found within the cave system, but blood evidence outside one cave exit and Kirsten’s own encounter with a cougar near that exit had authorities certain the dastardly doctor was dead, dragged from the cave exit and subsequently killed and eaten. Or still inside, somewhere, and starved to death.

  It had been a nightmare for Kirsten, at the time, but more than a year had passed. Kendall had written his book; Kirsten had come to terms with her experience. But it had never crossed her mind that her exploits might be misinterpreted by anyone, let alone these three highly experienced cavers. Every one of them had vastly more underground experience than she did, although none had gained an international reputation by using their cave knowledge to elude a madman who wanted to eat them.