DINING WITH DEVILS -- A Tasmanian Thriller

by GORDON AALBORG

  DNA . . . DNA . . . DNA. No! – not to worry. He’ll discard the sample into a bag with a hundred of them and that’ll be the end of that problem.

  He took a deep breath, blew into the mouthpiece exactly as he knew the policeman wanted, watched the green figures come up 00, nodded politely as the policeman, still whispering, thanked Stafford for cooperating and waved him onward into the night.

  After that, things got easier, except for an annoying number of wrong turns and false starts as he meandered through a maze of tracks that became harder and harder to negotiate as he threaded his way into the scrub jungle above Loila Tier. He was exhausted by the time his vehicle lurched to a halt in front of the shack.

  The shack was little more than a hovel, its iron roof pitted and pocked with rust where it hadn’t rusted through entirely. The windowless slab walls were constructed from sleeper flitches – the half-round leftovers from logs milled for railway ties – and the floor was native soil and half-rotted planks. It squatted in head-high bracken fern, blended into the background like some illustration for a particularly ghastly kiddies’ nursery rhyme. The whole structure sagged drunkenly, but it was sounder than it looked and, Stafford reasoned, would serve his purpose. It would have to . . . he wasn’t long on choices.

  I could use a drink, just about now. A cold glass of nice, full-bodied Piper’s Brook would go down well. If I had any, which I don’t.

  He was even thirstier by the time he got the vehicle unloaded, almost filling the shack with a folding table, camp cots, the cooking gear, the various boxes of food he’d hurriedly collected, the tools – most of them gathered earlier from a cache that hadn’t been found in the investigation of his earlier crimes. Then came the task of finding a suitable means to confine Kirsten while she recovered from her sedation. He didn’t want drugs in her system when the time came; adrenaline would be problem enough.

  Eventually, he settled on installing a six-inch eyebolt, drilling a hole for it into a solid section of wall, then arranging a suitable length of chain so that he could allow her some freedom of movement with no hope of her getting loose. She would be able to recline on the camp cot provided, reach the latrine bucket if needed, but little else.

  Kirsten, still satisfactorily sedated despite the roughness of the journey, was a heavier load than he’d expected, and by the time he had her properly installed in the windowless, lopsided shanty, Stafford was breathing heavily and very much feeling the effects of having let himself get out of shape.

  Two glasses. Maybe even three. Surely the event calls for a celebration?

  He slumped into a folding camp chair and let his breathing come back to normal, all the while watching his captive in her drugged slumber on the camp cot he’d set up for her.

  Kirsten would stay sedated until well into the morning, Stafford reckoned, then lapsed into a convoluted mental calculation of how long it would then take for the drugs to work their way out of her system.

  Forty-eight hours, minimum. Seventy-two would be better. Plenty of time for us to get to know each other again. I can probably use hypnotic means to keep her calm, which is good. No sense in flooding the tissues with adrenalin, not when tenderness and flavor are at stake.

  He dozed awhile himself, but was wakened by maniacal kookaburra laughter with the onset of dawn. Stafford yawned, stretched, let his gaze roam around the squalid interior of the hut. His first task on rousing was to check his tools, just for the reassurance that he’d brought them all, that they’d traveled without mishap. Stafford was, indeed, a specialist, and whatever else he thought about Kendall’s true-crime thriller, he quite liked the title.

  He’d managed to salvage some of the precision, top-quality butcher knives and surgical tools he’d cached before leaving Tasmania the last time. He’d had no inkling at the time, of course, that he might be caught out in Canada, that discovery of his main headquarters here in Tasmania would mean the loss of his best, most favorite tools.

  But Stafford had always been a careful, organized individual, even before his mind began to disintegrate, before his psychoses began to take control and change him from a healer to a butcher. So he’d kept a few tools cached here and there – just in case.

  His skills, of course, went where he did. He could dismember a human carcass with a boning knife alone and do it as quickly and more neatly than a butcher could do the same with a lamb or a quarter of beef. He could turn the carcass into recognizable cuts of meat. And cook them to perfection. And eat them.

  None of which he’d done since escaping from Kirsten’s cave and wending his circuitous route through healing, facial reconstruction, and identity theft back to Tasmania, where it had all begun. But now he had his tools. And the time. And he had Kirsten.

  Stafford spent a moment rearranging his few remaining favorites, keeping half an eye on Kirsten as he did so. Then, suddenly, he remembered what he’d forgotten.

  The wine! Idiot! How could you forget the wine? You were quick enough to think about it last night.

  Whereupon he began to dither, which annoyed him even more but which, for some reason, he couldn’t stop. Would they even have a decent wine in St. Helens, or would he be faced with the long drive back to Launceston? His mind flooded with annoying, sometimes embarrassing scenes with ignorant clerks in the local bottle shops when he’d worked in St. Helens. Before. Clerks who thought, as did most of their customers, obviously, that wine only came in cardboard boxes and should be evaluated by lowest-of-price and drunk by the four-liter cask. Peasants.

  Kirsten showed no signs of stirring, even when Stafford lifted her wrist to check her pulse . . . which was slow, steady, as normal as he would have expected. She’d be out until midday, at least. But . . . ? Another dose of sedative – just to be sure? He would have to be gone several hours, perhaps into the afternoon . . .

  But then I’d have to wait that much longer for it to clear her system.

  Which might not be a bad thing. We have so much to talk about, after all.

  Except . . . the poor girl will be terrified beyond belief if she wakes up and finds herself all alone, chained up like an animal, not knowing where she is, or why.

  But I wouldn’t be here to enjoy it.

  But if I was here, she wouldn’t be alone.

  And yet . . .

  I wonder which would be more terrifying.

  Stafford began to chuckle, and was still chortling as he thumped and bumped his way along the rough track that led to the slightly better track that led to a half-decent bush track that would lead him to a decent road and, eventually, St. Helens.

  Where there would be wine. Good wine. Piper’s Brook, for preference. Stafford liked nothing better than Piper’s Brook with his meals.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Rose Chapman dearly wanted to shoot Ian Boyd. She was that angry with him, with how things had gone so horribly wrong. But she was equally angry with herself for depending on such an unreliable fool in the first place.

  It seemed like such a good idea at the time.

  She had recited that mantra over and over and over as she’d tracked him from the Pub in the Paddock at Pyengana to the seclusion of his hidey-hole in the scrub, as she’d waited through the night, dozing fitfully on the back seat of her own vehicle while trying to decide what to do. And when. And how.

  Watching his apparent lack of fear as he slouched over, drinking the coffee as if providing it for him was her proper role, Rose’s temper, never the calmest on her best day ever, overflowed.

  “You bloody fool!” The words emerged in a hiss of exasperation coupled with frustration so extreme it crippled her tongue. “Do you know what you’ve done?”

  Rose knew. They both did. It had been all over the electronic media within an hour of Ian’s bullet smashing the life from the gundog judge.

  “Wasn’t my fault,” he replied, trying to look defiant about it and failing in the face of his own rifle staring at him, the menace of that growing more and more threatening.

  “Y
ou weren’t meant to kill anyone!” The words hissed and her eyes blazed. Rose had wonderful eyes, huge eyes that complimented her raven hair and milky complexion. Eyes that could change from the palest, softest, dove-breast gray to the hard black of cast iron, depending on her mood. And, usually, she knew precisely how to use those eyes to greatest effect. She could appear vamp or virgin, soul mate or sex goddess with the merest flick of one dark eyebrow, the slightest widening or narrowing of her eyes. Combined with her natural good looks and truly splendid figure, her eyes were lethal weapons where most men were concerned.

  Now, she was too angry to bother with such tricks, and instinctively knew they’d have no effect on Ian Boyd anyway. Ian was far past being influenced by feminine wiles – seduction to him came in the form of white powder in a plastic sachet, or illicit pills in a plastic bottle. Thankfully, she had those, too, at her disposal.

  “All I wanted was for you to scare him, maybe hurt him a little,” she hissed at Ian, her voice kept low despite the fact there was nobody within miles of them. “Threaten him, frighten the hell out of him . . . that’s all.”

  “ That’s what I was trying to do,” Boyd mumbled, never meeting her eyes, his own gaze focused on the wavering rifle barrel but his mind already straying into speculation about what drugs she’d maybe brought him, and in what quantities. If she was going to shoot him, she’d have done it by now, he reckoned. Certainly no sense trying to explain that he hadn’t shot to kill, that if it hadn’t been for the bull ant, the flinching . . .

  With all the night to think about it, Rose had made a similar decision. Ian Boyd was a clumsy, inept tool, but better than none at all. Maybe. And perhaps still a useful one. Maybe. Nobody would ever connect him to the slaying of the gundog judge, not without Ian himself doing or saying something stupid, and once he’d served his purpose she could make sure he never said anything at all. Ever.

  Rose had spent much of the night reviewing all she knew about Ian, which was more than he could have imagined. During her stint as a psych nurse at the Birch Clinic in St. Helens, where Ian Boyd was in and out with boring regularity, Rose had come to know a good deal about his lifestyle. He was a big man, rough as guts and mean as a snake. A brawler, easily provoked. Quick to anger, equally quick to forget the reasons for his anger. When he was high, Ian raved. When coming down, he raved. During his rare periods of stability, he would talk if anyone showed the slightest interest in listening. But he hardly ever made sense.

  He’d appeared to understand when she’d originally set him against his target, and she’d expected him to provoke an incident, maybe even a fight. She’d tossed off the shooting suggestion, a throwaway line, never thinking he’d take it seriously.

  No matter. Too late now to worry about things already done. For now, she needed merely to keep Ian away from public places, under control, and useable if and when she might need him again.

  “You’ve still got that shack up behind Loila Tier?” She hadn’t intended it as a question, exactly, but Ian took it as such, and was quick to nod agreement.

  In point of fact, he’d have agreed to almost anything that would make Rose stop pointing his own rifle at him, but she couldn’t know that.

  “Good,” she continued. “Let’s go. It’s a better place to talk about things than here.”

  She was on her feet, the rifle still in her hands but less threatening, now, before Ian could even think. Then he had to think, at least a little, following her directions as he doused and kicked apart the fire, collected the coffee pot and implements. Then he rolled his swag and got everything loaded into whichever of the two vehicles Rose Chapman directed.

  He was not happy that she kept his cherished rifle when she climbed into her own SUV and fired off her final orders for the journey.

  “I’ll follow you. Drive properly . . . no speeding. Remember I’ll be right behind you, and remember I’ve got this!” She punctuated her final remark not with the rifle, but with little waves of a baggie whose contents gleamed snow white in the morning sunshine.

  Rose knew about manipulation. She was an expert at it, whether the method be emotional blackmail or substance deprivation. She hadn’t expected Ian Boyd to be overly frightened by the rifle, but she knew what his reaction would be to the mere sight of the drugs he so desperately craved.

  For his part, Ian practically salivated at the sight of the drugs. Their image filled his imagination as they made their way in tandem, first out to the Tasman Highway, east past Goshen, then south into the maze of tracks and trails and bush roads that eventually brought them to the decrepit old shack Ian thought of as his own.

  He was so focused on the rewards awaiting him that he paid no attention to the condition of the track during the final few miles to the shack. Merely drunk, or at least undistracted by having Rose hot on his tail, he might have noticed the broken branches and disturbed underbrush as he forced his battered vehicle through, but today . . . ? No chance.

  Rose had no inkling of the situation. She merely followed in Ian’s wake, doing her best to keep her SUV from being destroyed by the exertions she forced upon it. The SUV was a high-end model with all the bells’n’whistles, but she’d never used it in conditions like these, and it took all her energy just to keep the damned thing on this wallaby-pad that passed for a vehicular track.

  The last few hundred yards were as much creek as track, and the shack itself was nearly drowning in the bracken fern that surrounded it. It was close to invisible in the dank shadow of towering gum trees until one got within spitting distance.

  Ian got to the shack door before Rose, not least because it took her a moment to regain her equilibrium and another to reach back for Ian’s rifle as she clambered down from her SUV. But they were together when he opened the door, and shared equally the surprise at what greeted them when the rough-hewn plank door squeaked open.

  CHAPTER TEN

  There are degrees of worry. Sort of like the semantics of “lies, damned lies, and statistics,” as voiced by Benjamin Disraeli. Or was it Mark Twain?

  Teague Kendall was busy putting names of his own to the degrees of worry when the telephone in his hotel suite rang just before noon on Sunday and the leader of the Mole Creek caving group asked for Kirsten.

  “She’s not with you?” Kendall asked automatically. Then the ultimate definition he’d been seeking and trying to avoid at the same time came to him unbidden, leaping into his consciousness like some predatory animal.

  Terror.

  He’d felt it before, also with Kirsten involved. Not quite like this, but frightening nonetheless when he’d realized, back in what sometimes seemed the distant past, in what sometimes leapt out of his nightmares as if only yesterday, that Kirsten had gone caving alone with Ralph Stafford.

  Doctor Ralph Stafford.

  Serial killer.

  Cannibal.

  Terrifying, but not quite like this. This was worse, even with no real reason that it should be. There was no Stafford anymore, and whatever was going on, there would be a logical, reasonable explanation.

  Maybe.

  Hopefully.

  Please, God!

  “Stay there. I’ll be right down.” Then he paused, tried to force the panic from his mind and make his voice calm. “On second thought, you come up, if you wouldn’t mind.”

  He gave his suite number, hung up the telephone, then did his best to force his tired, confused brain into functioning with some degree of efficiency. Not an easy task.

  Kendall had been awake most of the night, worrying. Without any real reason, he’d almost-but-not-quite convinced himself that worrying might be normal, but it was unnecessary. He knew enough about caving to recognize that sometimes things happened and delays and changes of plans were called for. Somebody could sprain an ankle, a rope could come out of its mooring, any number of things could force an overnight delay in a cave.

  He’d given Rex Henderson a veritable shopping list of such excuses earlier that morning, when he’d phoned his fello
w writer to ask if Kirsten, by some miracle, was with Rex. Which of course made no sense at all and both men knew it, but at least, Kendall reasoned, it was doing something. He’d also checked with the front desk, asked around in the hotel’s coffee shop and everywhere else he could think of, but there’d been a shift change from the night before – nobody’d seen Kirsten. There had been no undelivered messages. The telephone in the suite sat silent and stared at him without blinking: no phone messages waiting, either.

  Nonetheless, he’d been able to keep his worst fears at bay – until now.

  When Michael and his caver mates arrived at the suite, Kendall had to force himself to show calm, to ask his questions in a quiet, ordered fashion, giving them time to answer, even to expand on their answers.

  It was a trial, especially when the subject of the knife came up. Kendall’s stomach lurched, then boiled in foul-tasting bile, when Michael showed him the knife – still in its piddle container.

  Then Kendall phoned the police.

  Then he followed Kirsten’s intentions and bought them all lunch. From room service, because he wasn’t about to let them out of his sight until the police arrived.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Charlie Banes was sprawled uncomfortably under the geriatric Land Rover he’d bought for a song but which was costing him an arm and a leg to renovate into something even remotely useful. He wasn’t accomplishing much, but the tinkering seemed to help him think, and he had much to think about.

  He was about as good a mechanic as he was a plumber, but he had a vague working knowledge of what he was about, and was actually enjoying himself when old Viv Purcell’s disreputable damned dog rushed in under the vehicle and playfully butted Charlie in the balls.