Bright City Deep Shadows

by Graham Storrs

“I’ve finished. I got in. It was not so hard as I expected.” She held up a thumb drive. “It’s all here.”

  I dropped the carrier bag full of food and drink on the counter. “You beauty! You’re like a hacking genius or something. My god!” She held out the thumb drive and I took it from her. “It’s really here? Will they know you took it? Will they trace you here?”

  She smiled. “I was careful.”

  I stared at the gaudy little stick. “Oh my god!”

  She set aside the biscuits and clasped her hands in her lap, leaning forward slightly. “There’s more.”

  “More? I only wanted...”

  “I hacked the schools too.”

  “What?”

  “I went to Facebook to see what schools she’d been to. Then I went into their systems. Schools are very easy.” It was beginning to dawn on me what she was telling me, why her deep, dark eyes were glistening like that. “So then I had lots of lists: the electoral roll, two high school class lists each for several years and the university enrolment lists for all the classes she took. I wrote a little Python program to search them all, comparing every name in every list to every name on the electoral roll for the Central Brisbane electorate.”

  “And you found him?” I looked at the little stick in my hand. My heart was racing.

  She pursed her lips. “I don’t know. Maybe. I found five males who live in that suburb and who either went to school with Chelsea, or shared one of her classes.”

  “Five?” I was expecting one, at most. Five seemed ridiculously high.

  “Brisbane is a small world,” Karen said, shrugging. “People here tend to be born here, go to school here and go to uni here. Then they get jobs here. I was surprised at first but when you think about it, it’s not so strange.” She stood up, obviously preparing to leave. “Anyway, the names are on there, in a file called “Suspects.doc”, along with all the data.” She picked up her giant laptop. “I hope it helps.”

  I wanted to print out the file and get to work finding and eliminating each suspect. I wanted to bury that stick and never see it again. Trying to stay calm, I gave Karen a lift back to the office – promising her my undying gratitude all the way and apologising again for raking up whatever it was in her past I had inadvertently unleashed. I drove like a maniac on the way back, though, and ran to my own little laptop, pushing the thumb drive into the slot with shaking hands, turning the damned thing over and over because every way I tried seemed to be upside down. There was one folder, labelled “Research”. It contained a couple of dozen “.csv” files, all clearly labelled. They must have contained the data. There was a file called “Namextract.py”, which was probably the program Karen mentioned, and, at the bottom of the alphabetical list, there was “Suspects.doc”.

  I stopped. I daren’t click on the file to open it. I wanted to see the names. I wanted to find the killer but the enormity of what was in that file overwhelmed me. One of the names in there was the man who murdered Chelsea, the man who had plotted for weeks, lured her out to that alley and stabbed her over and over, the man who had put on a coat despite the summer heat and walked through the streets of Brisbane, his clothes soaked in Chelsea’s blood, the man who had changed into his everyday clothes, gone home, showered and shaved, and had then gone about his life while mine had crumbled into dust.

  It was too big, too important. I shouldn’t be doing this. I should take it to the police. I should give it to someone whose job it was to hunt people down and administer cold, hard justice. I had a mind full of subtle abstractions, I pondered the quality of knowledge, the nature of reality, the limits of doubt. The contents of that file were too heavy to be supported in such a fine web of thought. It would crash through, tear and smash everything. Chelsea’s killer! It was too real.

  I was too scared even to look.

  I put my laptop down on the table and pushed it away from me, sat back in the chair and stared at it.

  * * * *

  I was still staring at it two hours later when Ronnie arrived. I almost didn’t let him in.

  “The perfect end to the perfect fucking day,” he grumbled when I finally buzzed him in and opened the door. He looked pointedly at the laptop. “Not cool, mate, having a bloody wank while I’m left standing in the street like a bloody shag on a rock.”

  I went to sit down, well away from the computer. He went straight to the kitchen, opened the fridge, the freezer, then started on the cupboards. “Not a beer, not a pie, not even a bloody biscuit? What’s the matter with you? Where do you keep your booze?” He scoured a few more cupboards while I watched.

  “I hope you had better luck than me,” he said. “Bloody schools. You’d think they were protecting the bloody lotto numbers instead of the names of our great state’s future burger flippers and dole queue bludgers. You know, one of those stuck up cows threatened to call the police? Practically called me a kiddie fiddler. After I’d spent half the morning laying on the charm with a trowel! And you know how charming I can be.” He looked around, as if he’d just realised where he was. “Come on, let’s get out of this dump and find some pub grub. We need to drown our sorrows and make a new plan.”

  He stood up to go. Somehow, his grump and bluster had broken the spell Karen’s suspects file held over me.

  “I’ve found him.”

  He looked at me, possibly seeing me for the first time, too.

  “I found Mr. X. He’s on that laptop.”

  He looked at the laptop, then at me, then sat down again. “Go on,” he said.

  So I told him everything I’d done that day and he listened in complete silence. When I finished, he said. “That was not smart. You committed a crime. You dragged that poor girl into it. You could both end up doing time for this. And now I’m an accessory after the fact.”

  I said nothing and we sat in silence until he said. “So, who is it?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I haven’t looked yet.”

  I saw his brow crease, in anger or puzzlement, I couldn’t be sure. In a voice that was almost kind, he said, “Go put the kettle on. I’ll look.”

  I tried to ignore him as I busied myself getting cups and grounds and working the coffee machine. In the corner of my eye I could see him pushing buttons and reading from the screen. Then I heard the printer whining and clacking. When I returned with coffee, he handed me a sheet of paper. There were five names on it.

  “Do you know any of these people?”

  I took a deep breath and looked. “No. No-one.” It was a relief.

  “Call that woman at the office.”

  “Karen?”

  “The other one. The boss.”

  “Kazima?”

  “That’s the one. Read her the names and ask her if she knows them.”

  “I thought we’d just google them or something.”

  “This is quicker.”

  Kazima picked up on the second ring. I told her I had a list of suspects.

  “Is that what Karen did for you?”

  Remembering Ronnie’s admonition, I said, “It’s best you don’t know what Karen did. Can I read you the names?”

  “OK.”

  I read each one and then waited. She was a long time responding.

  “So… do you know any of them?”

  “Yes,” she said and my heart thumped. She seemed reluctant to say who it was.

  “Kazima?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Nothing bad, I promise. I’ll just ask the police to look into it. That’s all.”

  There was another long pause before she said, “Simon Anning. He’s one of our clients. He runs a games company here in Brisbane. He’s big in e-sports, organises the East Coast Gamefest, you might have heard of it?” I hadn’t. “Makes Silent Empire and a few other titles. All games with in-app commerce, even gambling.”

  I had no interest at all in computer games and had no idea what any of it was about. “What’s his connection to Chelsea?”

  “I’m not s
ure. Friends from uni or something. We sold him a license for our e-commerce suite and he’s building it into the next release of Silent Empire. As far as I know, that’s our only contact. I never met him in person. Is he the one?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Look, can you dig out the files, see if there’s anything in there that might explain why Chelsea was meeting him that night? I’ll come by tomorrow and we can chat, yeah?”

  “OK. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I pocketed my phone. To Ronnie, I said, “Simon Anning.”

  He nodded, eyes hard. “Now what?”

  “I – I thought you’d know.”

  He studied me carefully for a moment then nodded again. “OK.”

  With a start I realised what had just happened, what he’d really been asking. “No. I meant what I said to Kazima. We’ll just turn him in to the police. I don’t want...” Whatever Ronnie was offering.

  “The police? Yeah, well, that’s not going to happen. Come on. I need a drink.”

  “I just made you a coffee.”

  He shook his head as if I’d said something sadly ridiculous.

  * * * *

  The Brisbane Brewing Company was my local. It described itself as “industrial chic” but that just seemed to mean it had brick walls and exposed beams. We sat in the public bar with a view of the fermentation tanks behind a glass wall and I waited patiently until Ronnie had got most of the sneering out of his system.

  “Why can’t we go to the police?” I asked.

  “They’d want to know how you got Simon Anning’s name.”

  “So?”

  “So?”

  “I’d – I’d just tell them I remembered something, that she said she was meeting an old friend from uni. And I just put two and two together. What’s wrong with that?”

  He put down his burger and looked at me, brows creased. “If I was the lead investigator and I’d just started turning the screws on my prime suspect, what would I think if he lawyers up and comes in to see me saying he’s suddenly remembered the name of the killer?”

  “I suppose you’d think I was trying to throw you off the scent. Or, if Anning really is the killer, that I’m fitting up my accomplice to wriggle out of Reid’s grasp. But if Anning really was my accomplice, I’d have to be mad to turn him in. He’d turn on me, do a deal to reduce his time. That kind of thing. But he can’t do that because he wasn’t my accomplice, so what have I got to lose.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Let’s say I’m Reid and I’m obsessed with locking up some smart-arsed brainbox who thinks he’s going to get away with murder. Don’t you think I might put it to Anning that, if he stops giving me all this crap about being the only one involved and turns you in, he might get a much lighter sentence? And what would Anning do in that situation, if he has two neurons to rub together?”

  The burger felt heavy in my stomach. “Make something up. But that’s—”

  “Not fair?”

  I looked down at the table and the remains of my meal. “You knew we couldn’t take this to the cops all along, didn’t you?”

  “You don’t need a PhD in philosophy to work that out.”

  I ignored the taunt. “So what do we do with it?”

  “We do some more investigating.” I looked up at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “We know who did it. We know how. Now we need to find out why. If we can establish a good, solid motive – one that doesn’t involve you – even Reid will have to pull his head out of his arse.”

  I poked at my burger, picked up a chip and put it down. I was angry. Or maybe I was just frustrated. It should have been over. I should have been able to give the killer’s name to the police and get on with my life. And it all felt like it was Ronnie’s fault. He was the one who wouldn’t let it go. He was the one who kept pushing me to dig deeper into all this crap.

  “What’s your angle?” I snapped. He was in the middle of pushing the remains of his burger into his mouth. “What’s in it for you?”

  He chewed for a minute, looking back at me, obviously giving my questions a lot of thought.

  “I want to help,” he said, at last.

  “Why?”

  “Because I like you. You remind me of me when I was about six.”

  I was in no mood for jokes. “Six, eh? And what are you now? Seventy? Seventy-five? Isn’t that a bit old still to be playing cops and robbers?”

  His brows fell into a thunderous scowl. “Seventy-five, you little shit? I’m sixty-four! And I’m in bloody good shape for my age. I could go ten rounds with any bloke in this bar. Twenty with the likes of you.”

  I believed him. In fact, I don’t suppose I’d have made it through the first round. “Yeah, well, maybe, but you still haven’t answered my question.”

  He sat back, still scowling, and picked up his beer. “You still don’t know a single thing about me, do you? I’ve never met anyone with so little curiosity.”

  “I’m curious about why you’re helping me.”

  “Really? Yet you haven’t tried to find out who I am.”

  “I know all I need to know. You’re just avoiding my question.”

  “Yeah? Tell me something about me you think you know.”

  “You were in the navy, then the police.”

  “Yeah? What did I do in the navy? Whose navy? What was my rank? Which regiment?” I saw him smirk, knowing he’d scored a point. “And what about the police? Which State? What branch? What unit?”

  “All right, so I don’t know all the details. What’s that got to do—”

  “You don’t care. That’s all. Why don’t you just admit it? You think I’m some annoying git who’s in your life for a few days and then I’ll be gone. You don’t care who I am or what motivates me because to you I’m just a temporary annoyance you can forget all about soon. The only reason you want to know why I’m helping you is because you’d rather I wasn’t. It bugs you that I won’t leave you alone to screw things up. It’s all over your face. You just want to crawl back into your shell and feel sorry for yourself. You don’t give a fuck about finding Chelsea’s killer, not really. You’re just going through the motions out of some half-arsed sense of obligation.”

  It was all too accurate for comfort and I felt my defences rising. Either I thumped him or I got up and stormed out. But he kept me pinned to my seat with his hard, cold stare while he chewed over his next words.

  “You want to know why I’m helping you? All right, let me tell you. Murder pisses me off.”

  I waited for more but it didn’t come. “Murder pisses you off? That’s it?”

  He looked away for a moment, sucked on his teeth and looked back. “I’ve worked on a couple of dozen murders in my time and they all have one thing in common; for one screwed up reason or another, someone believes that they are so much more important than someone else that they can kill that other person to solve whatever problems they have. Take Simon Anning, for example. Without knowing a thing about him, I can tell you that he thinks a great deal of himself, that he killed Chelsea to fix some problem in his life – probably to do with money, or status, or comfort – and that he probably regrets it but still thinks it was justified. Me? I think life is all we have. Taking it from someone is not just the worst thing you can do, it’s an unforgivable sin. People who do it should be caught and punished.”

  He seemed sincere. He seemed crazy fanatical, in fact. Yet I sensed there was more than he was telling me. “So you’re saying—” But he cut me off with a sour expression.

  “Look, I’ve got a problem with it. I know I have. When I was in the police, it became an obsession. It took over my life. That’s what ended it for me.”

  “I thought they sacked you.”

  “They did because I was too keen to solve cases, so keen I wouldn’t put up with their management bullshit, or the lazy, nine-to-five time-servers I had to work with.”

  “Like Reid.”

  “He wasn’t the worst by a long way.” He took a pull at his beer, brooding.
“Anyway, it became a kind of sickness. I knew I was practically certifiable but I just couldn’t help myself. I lost my friends, my wife—”

  “You had a wife?” It seemed incredible.

  “Yes, I had a fucking wife, you ignorant little shit.”

  “Sorry. That was… Sorry.”

  He shook his head, irritated but still lost in his memories. “If they hadn’t sacked me, I’d have been chewing the padding off my cell walls by now I reckon. Getting out was the best thing for me.”

  “So why…?”

  “Because I could fight the temptation the first night we met. But then you came back again and I could see what a useless bell end you are and what a crap job the cops were doing and if there was ever going to be justice for Chelsea, I was going to have to get back on the fucking horse.”

  “And now you don’t want to get off.”

  “And now I still can’t because, if I don’t bring Anning down, no-one will. You’ll just get yourself locked up for it while Anning sits back and thanks the gods that protect bastards like him.”

  His strange confession had taken the wind right out of my sails. Oddly enough, I could actually understand the kind of obsession that might grip someone wanting to get to the very bottom of things. My own experience of it had led to nothing more than late nights in the library and a few missed meals but it gave me a perspective from which I could glimpse the darker, more destructive force that must have driven Ronnie’s fall from grace. I thought, vaguely about trying to suggest he stop and leave me to it but it seemed like a dumb idea.

  “All right,” I said, subdued. “Let’s catch him. What’s our next move?”

  He pursed his lips, thinking. “You’re going to see the cops tomorrow, right? Well, don’t mention Anning. They’ll find him in the end, but they haven’t got there yet. That gives us a window of opportunity. We need to start digging into his finances, his business, his associates...” He grimaced in frustration, perhaps regretting the loss of all the resources he once had as a police officer.

  “I could maybe ask Karen to take a—”

  “No.” It was a sharp rebuke. “Nothing illegal. Besides, Anning is some kind of propeller-head himself, remember. He might notice if we set your little bloodhound sniffing around in his business. Do you want her to end up dead as well?”