Dead Heat

by Peter Cotton

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraphs

  News

  1

  News

  2

  News

  3

  News

  4

  News

  5

  News

  6

  News

  7

  News

  8

  9

  News

  10

  11

  News

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  News

  18

  19

  News

  20

  21

  News

  22

  23

  24

  25

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  DEAD HEAT

  Peter Cotton has been the media advisor to three federal cabinet ministers, worked as a foreign correspondent for the ABC, been a senior reporter on the ABC’s AM and PM programs, and had stories published in most major print outlets in Australia. Dead Heat is the second novel in the Darren Glass series, following Dead Cat Bounce.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John St, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  Published by Scribe 2018

  Copyright © Peter Cotton 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  9781925713428 (Australian edition)

  9781925693195 (e-book)

  A CiP entry for this title is available from the National Library of Australia.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  For Charlie and Ruthie

  ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’

  Requiem for a Nun, by William Faulkner

  ‘When the enemy is relaxed, make them toil.

  When full, starve them. When settled, make them move.’

  The Art of War, by Sun Tzu

  QTV INTERNATIONAL

  WEDNESDAY 30 NOVEMBER, 9.30AM AEST

  International protestors occupying the centre of Jayapura in Indonesia’s Papua province were last night strengthening their barricades in anticipation of an all-out assault by units of the Indonesian Army.

  Australian Prime Minister Lou Feeney yesterday warned Jakarta of ‘severe consequences’ if any of the one hundred and twenty-three Australians at the protest site were injured or killed in the clearing operation.

  The Jayapura protestors are demanding autonomy for Papua province and for West Papua, and an end to Indonesia’s internal migration program, which over recent decades has settled tens of thousands of Javanese on land forcibly acquired from native Papuans.

  Ominously, Indonesian President Saleh Maharani has told the five-hundred-plus foreign protestors in Jayapura that their safety can’t be guaranteed should they remain at the occupation site after midday today, local time.

  This is Jean Acheson for QTV International in Jayapura.

  1

  The screeching plover made another strafing run at us, this time passing so close to me that I had to duck so the thing didn’t cannon into my face. The bird scythed the air at the back of my neck and forced me into a protective crouch.

  When I looked up, it was flying low over the sand towards the line of trees separating the beach from the car park. It dropped onto a branch next to its mate, and the two of them sharpened their beaks, building for the next attack.

  Jervis Bay Station Sergeant Martin Cherry called one of his uniforms over and put her on bird watch, and I refocused on the half-buried body of a young woman in a red bikini lying face-down in the wet sand at my feet.

  About three metres of green fishing net hung from her left wrist, secured there by at least half-a-dozen black cable ties. Some of the ties had been pulled so tight they’d ring-barked her wrist back to the bone. Her right ankle was also deeply abraded — an indication that the net, with its fringe of white plastic floats, had originally been attached there as well. A forensic examination would reveal all, but if it did turn out to be a diagonal restraint, then the killers had effectively hobbled the woman before they’d dropped her into the drink.

  It would’ve been a terrible way to go. The hobble would’ve restricted her ability to move, let alone swim, and the weight of the net would’ve made it extra hard for her to keep her head out of the water. Eventually, she would’ve lost all hope, and that would’ve depleted her even more. And when she was spent, she would’ve gone under. The plastic floats had kept her from sinking to the bottom.

  Her bikini was ragged at the edges, but surprisingly intact, meaning she’d stayed in the gentler waters of the bay — the open ocean would’ve stripped her in no time. Her dark skin was wrinkled and somehow translucent, and her fingers and toes had been reduced to phalanges by nibbling crustaceans. Her back, her arms, and the backs of her legs were covered in irregular bruises and abrasions. Her deeper wounds had expanded in the brine to expose layers of fat and flesh.

  She’d been discovered just after sunrise by a couple of teenage boys out for an early-morning swim. They’d phoned triple zero and the call had gone through to the Australian Federal Police at Jervis Bay.

  Sergeant Cherry had arrived at the beach minutes after the first responders and he’d immediately assessed the death as suspicious. The net spoke for itself. Then his people had spotted two red beach towels and two piles of clothes on the sand a hundred metres from where the body had washed up.

  The larger pile had consisted of a pair of grey trackpants with a matching sloppy joe, an extra-large T-shirt, and size-twelve joggers with socks stuffed inside them. A neatly folded denim dress, an AC/DC T-shirt, and a pair of small joggers, also stuffed with socks, had made up the other pile.

  Cherry had assumed that the set of large clothes belonged to a male and the smaller ones belonged to a female. He’d found only one identifier on any of it. A handwritten word on the tag inside the woman’s T-shirt: ‘Jade’. Nothing else. No wallet or purse in the pockets. No phone or set of keys in the towels.

  The upper area of the beach was fairly flat, which allowed the cops to quickly spot a late-model phone embedded in the sand about thirty metres from the clothes. The phone was housed in a waterproof sheath and still had some charge on it.

  Jervis Bay was an Australian Territory in its own right, but the Australian Federal Police in Canberra provided its policing services. The seven AFP officers stationed at the bay dealt mainly with minor crimes, and they assisted in search-and-rescue efforts. Major crime in JBT was handled directly from Canberra. So, as a matter of course, Cherry had phoned head office and he’d eventually spoken to my boss, Assistant Commissioner Len McHenry, the AFP’s chief of operations.

  McHenry had credited Cherry’s reading of the situation — that the body on the beach constituted a suspicious death and a probable homicide. The boss had also agreed that if the female clothes belonged to the deceased, then the owner of the male clothes might be a suspect in her murder, or he might still be in the water somewhere, needing assistance.

  Che
rry had told the boss about the name inside the AC/DC T-shirt. He’d said he knew a young woman called Jade — Jade Rawlins, a recent arrival at the nearby Steeple Bay Aboriginal community.

  Cherry had cautioned that if the stiff was Jade Rawlins, and if the ‘possible male’ was a Caucasian who’d contributed to her death in any way, then local outrage would go into overdrive when news got out about the shocking way she’d died.

  McHenry had instructed Cherry to bag the phone and secure it. He’d then called Bay Marine Rescue and requested a grid search of the waters off the beach. And he’d organised a chopper to fly me and my partner, Smeaton, with Loz and Staker from forensics, over to the bay.

  A strong northerly overnight had combined with the high tide to deposit the body onto the upper wash zone of Murrays Beach. High tide had been at two-twenty that morning, meaning the body had been out of the water for at least six hours. The waves had since receded, but the crime scene was still within range of the wash. In an effort to protect the body, Cherry’s people had banged two lines of star pickets into the sand on either side of it and tied plastic tarpaulins to the pickets. But the tarpaulins were no match for the wash, which surged underneath them, inundating everything inside the makeshift enclosure, including the body. Water rushed over Loz’s gumboots as he examined the arm with the net attached to it.

  ‘Tell me about this Jade Rawlins,’ I said, flicking a glance at Cherry.

  ‘Works at JB store,’ he said, mopping his forehead with a folded hanky. ‘Moved into the area about six months ago with her mum, Daisy Rawlins. They share a house with Daisy’s brother, Ken Bynder, at Steeple Bay. And one of the vehicles up there in the car park? I just got word. It’s registered to Bynder.’

  I looked at Smeaton and he nodded, as pleased as me at the prospect of an early identification.

  ‘And comparing the Jade from Steeple Bay with this one?’ said Cherry, gesturing at the body. ‘They’re about the same age. Same skin colour. And about the same size and height.’

  If these pointers were on the money, we’d soon identify the body — the first and most obvious hurdle in an investigation. Next, we’d explore the dead girl’s relationships. Around ninety per cent of homicide victims were killed by people they knew. A family member. A lover. A friend. A business associate. I had limited experience working with Aboriginal people, so if our victim did turn out to be this Jade Rawlins, I might need local guidance in conducting this case.

  I gazed over the expansive waters of Jervis Bay and ran my eyes along the southern shoreline. Creswell naval base filled a low headland a couple of kilometres away. I couldn’t distinguish any of its buildings, other than the giant submarine hangars that lined the water in front of it. Beyond the base, a couple of towns and a series of long white beaches were already shimmering in a heat haze.

  Loz cleared his throat, his way of catching my attention. He made a flipping motion with his hands. He was ready to roll the body. Given she’d been in the drink for hours, I had a fair idea of what we’d see. And what’d be missing. Her eyes would be gone for a start. And her ears and nose. Immersion in open water killed evidence nearly as fast as fire. There might not be a face for Cherry to identify.

  In preparation for the move, Cherry arranged three cops around the enclosure to keep the birds away. Once they were in place, Loz took hold of the stiff’s legs and eased them together. He then dug one gloved hand into her armpit and cupped the back of her head with his other hand. Staker got under her pelvis and her knees. On Loz’s signal, they lifted, the sand gave way with a squelch, and they eased her onto her back.

  The face hadn’t been erased as such, though I had no sense of what she’d looked like. The points of her features had been pared back to a red pulp dotted with white beach sand. A patch of knobbled skin on her upper lip remained intact, as did the skin on either side of her eyebrows. A fine, white foam pushed through the sand around her nose. I watched the foam slowly expand.

  ‘Is this the Jade Rawlins you know?’ I asked, prompting everyone within earshot to look at Cherry.

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ he said, grimacing in disgust. ‘No bloody idea at all.’

  I looked down at the body again. Loz and Staker were already hunched over it, going to work with their prodding and poking. They’d soon get onto the intrusive stuff. I didn’t usually hang around for that. Not if I had something else to do. Cherry provided that something this time. He said Smeaton and I should go with him to his SUV and work on the discarded phone.

  We retrieved our shoes from where we’d left them higher on the beach and walked barefoot across the warm sand towards the car park. We were passing the yellow marker where the phone had been found, when Smeaton sounded the bird alarm.

  ‘Here it comes again,’ he said.

  A plover flew low over the sand towards a uniformed cop. The guy stood on a steep bit of the beach with his back to us, a phone pressed to his ear, and his eyes on the breaking waves. Cherry shouted as a wave crashed. The cop turned, and the bird screeched as it smashed into his head just above his ‘phone’ ear.

  The bird bounced off the cop’s head and fell, its flailing wings clipping a small wave, but it quickly righted itself and beat a hurried retreat back towards the tree line. The cop, off-balance and in mild shock, stumbled down the wet incline and fell phone-first into a medium-sized wave about to break.

  On his hands and knees, he braced as another small wave crashed over him. Then he stood up quickly and pocketed his wrecked phone. He looked so furious as he trudged up the slope of wet sand that none of his colleagues dared rib him, though they all wore amused smiles.

  We followed the cop’s watery trail off the sand and onto the crushed granite path cutting between the trees to the car park. Eight vehicles had been parked there when Cherry’s people had sealed off the entrance earlier that morning. They included five sedans of various makes and models, a couple of old panel vans, and a small truck. None of the vehicles looked like they’d been parked haphazardly by a driver in a panic, and they were all well spread out in a car park that could’ve accommodated a thousand more just like them.

  Cherry led us to a line of parking bays signposted as ‘Reserved for police and emergency vehicles’. Four were occupied by police vehicles. A fifth was stacked with plastic bags full of detritus. We sat on a wooden guardrail in front of the vehicles and put our shoes back on.

  ‘If the guy who owns the clothes isn’t our perp,’ said Cherry, brushing sand from his feet, ‘he likely ended up in the water like her, and at best he’ll be bobbing about somewhere out there, desperate as hell. But if he got the same treatment — and that’s my bet — he’s probably sunk to the bottom by now and he’ll surface in a day or two, full of gas and a lot worse for wear.’

  Cherry pushed his socked feet into elastic-sided boots, got up, and went to the back of the nearest SUV. He returned with three bottles of ice-cold mineral water. We’d shed plenty of sweat on the beach and we drained the bottles in no time flat. Cherry took our empties back to the SUV, started the vehicle, and turned on its air conditioner. We followed him over and he handed Smeaton a pair of disposable gloves and the bagged phone they’d found on the beach.

  ‘Might want to give it a bit of charge while you’re working on it,’ he said. ‘There’s cables on the floor on the passenger side. One of them’ll fit.’

  Smeaton examined the phone from all angles without taking it out of the bag, then he went around to the passenger side, opened the door, and climbed in. He pushed the seat back to accommodate his lanky frame, and put the gloves on, removed the phone from the bag, and peeled off its protective sheath. He sorted through a box of charge cables on the floor of the vehicle till he found one that fitted the phone. He attached one end of the cable to a power socket on the dashboard and plugged the other end into the phone.

  I leant in and watched as he pressed a button at the bottom of the screen and brought up the c
ontact book. The owner’s number was displayed at the top of the list. Smeaton wrote the number down in his pad and tapped the received-messages icon. The most recent was from someone who’d organised a rendezvous for the previous evening. The place the person had proposed was Murrays Beach. The text finished with a ‘See you’ — a very business-like salutation for someone setting up a tryst. It was simply signed ‘Jade’. The recipient of the text, the owner of the found phone, had responded saying he’d love to meet up at the time nominated. The name at the bottom of this text was ‘John’.

  ‘It’s certainly looking like your Jade from Steeple Bay,’ I said, nodding at Cherry. ‘And a bloke called John.’

  Smeaton hit a key on his own phone. He pondered the screen for a moment and tapped a few more keys. He sent Jade’s number and the number of ‘John’s’ phone through to Canberra. He asked them to organise a remote search for Jade’s phone, and to identify the ‘John’ involved. While we waited for a response, Cherry and I leant against the side of the vehicle, and Cherry removed his hat and palmed the sweat from the top of his head.

  ‘Gunna be another stinker,’ he said. ‘Thirty-eight, they reckon. You can feel it already. Now, tell me to shut up if you want, but weren’t you the guy involved in that business in Canberra? Took a bullet for the PM? Won the girl? Wrote the book?’

  ‘That’s him,’ said Smeaton, a disembodied voice from inside the vehicle. ‘The author.’

  I tried to smile at Smeaton’s little joke, but Cherry’s mention of ‘the girl’ had me instantly struggling for breath and I felt I was going to vomit. It was a terrible time for a panic attack, but thankfully it was a mild one this time. I turned my back on Cherry, took out my phone, and made like I was studying the screen.

  I’d suffered my first attack a few days after Jean had left for Jayapura. I’d been reading an online story about the blockade she’d gone to cover when I began to shake and had trouble breathing. It’d unnerved me at first. Till I worked out what it was. I’d had a number of attacks since — mostly while reading stories to do with the blockade, or late at night when paranoid fantasies about Jean’s safety got a hold of me.