Vengeance List

by Gary Gregor

  On a wall at one end of the room, a large notice board displayed a variety of glossy photographs of both murder scenes. The photo layout was displayed this way since Foley received the report from the pathologist intimating the murder weapon could be the same in both cases. Prior to this, his team were treating the killings as separate, unrelated events. It was instinct based on the similarities in how both Richter and Costello died telling him the same person was responsible for both murders. It was instinct he was unable to shake, and Foley always trusted his instincts. It was a mantra he took every opportunity to instil into new members coming into the branch.

  He sat on the edge of a small conference table and stared at the photographs. Behind him, he heard the indiscriminate sounds of detectives talking among themselves.

  “Coffee, Boss?” someone asked.

  “Yes, please,” he answered automatically.

  The same someone thrust a mug of tasteless, tepid coffee into his hand. “Thanks,” Foley murmured. He sipped the terrible brew and looked at the lukewarm, brown liquid in the mug. “This is camel piss,” he said to no one in particular.

  “Sorry, Boss,” the offending coffee maker responded. “But, camel piss is all we can afford. There are too many tight-fisted pricks around here that haven’t paid into the coffee fund this week.”

  “That’d be bloody right,” Foley said absently, his attention still fixed on the photo display. He put down his coffee mug and pushed it aside. “I gotta get a real job,” he said as he walked from the room.

  3

  The police were playing their cards very close to their collective chests, releasing enough information to keep the daily gathering of media hounds at bay; at least for the time being.

  The mass media machine had very few fools, and strung along by the police was nothing new. Around the fringes, however, signs of frustration began to appear.

  Samuel Rose sympathised with them to a degree, and there was an irony in that emotion that did not escape him. He once enjoyed a love/hate relationship with most members of the media. Over the years, he learned how the media worked and became adept at manipulating them to his advantage. But, that was then, and this was now. The police media relations people were deliberately paying no more than lip service to the members of the press, and Sam knew this was, to put it mildly, pissing them off. Surprise, surprise! The police PR people were behaving just like them! He couldn’t blame the media for feeling affronted and deprived of the news keeping them in what he was sure they all considered to be honest employment. But then, Sam Rose had the advantage of knowing more about murder than the average person. He knew, for instance, in the majority of cases, it was imperative to the successful outcome of an investigation for the police not to disclose too much of what they had so far discovered.

  Be that as it may, Rose was more than a little curious. Despite having spent twenty years in the police force, the last ten of those as a Detective Sergeant attached to the Criminal Investigation Branch, he felt vaguely suspicious, given the sketchy, limited amount of information released to the public.

  Sam wasn’t a cop anymore and, as such, was no longer privy to the progress, or in this particular case the apparent lack of progress, of the official police investigations. He had tried, albeit in vain, to illicit any information about the recent murders merely to satisfy his curiosity; he still thought like a cop. He still had friends within the police department, but it soon became obvious the word had gone out. The shutters were down. Lips were sealed. Sufficient threat had obviously filtered down from on high to discourage casual chitchat in regards to the two murders that might pass between detectives over a cold beer at shift’s end. No one was talking. Not to the media, or to Sam Rose.

  Sam’s experience as a police officer taught him that most police colleagues considered private investigators as much value to the community as noxious weeds to a pristine garden. They were not welcomed with open arms around police headquarters, or any other police station. He had no right to assume he would be treated any differently by his former colleagues simply because he used to be one of them. Indeed, he once held private investigators in the same low regard.

  Rose had no vested interest in the current police investigations in his capacity as a private investigator, or in any other capacity. He was just curious. Once a cop, always a cop; he supposed it never left you. It was curiosity born of years engaged in the lawful pursuit of the bad guys. Everyone was curious. Such was the nature of criminals, the world in which they operated, the nefarious characters with whom they associated, and their crimes. Curiosity was a natural human instinct. These latest killings, however, were different from the everyday, run-of-the-mill murders. These had captured the imagination and curiosity of everyone; not to mention the outrage. The shallow snippets of information released by the police provided nothing more satisfying than morsels serving only to whet appetites constantly craving for more. Murder will do that; whet your appetite. Murder, regardless of its form, held a morbid fascination for most people. The very mention of the word “murder” was enough to arouse one’s curiosity. It turned everyone into armchair detectives. Everyday conversations in pubs, clubs, and around kitchen tables, hummed with scenarios, questions, speculation, and solutions.

  Murder grabbed the imagination and curiosity of everyone, prompting daily newspapers to run extra editions to satisfy a seemingly insatiable consumer demand for information. Television stations broke into regular programming, offering their viewers the same old footage accompanying the same old bulletins within moderately updated parameters. Still, their frustration remained. The community was being shut out, and there were rumblings of discontent driven by the media even the police could not pretend they did not feel.

  To Samuel Rose, it meant one of two things. First, it meant circumstances surrounding the murders had suddenly become so sensitive it was decided that releasing details at this time could well jeopardise the investigation. If that was the case, he fully supported that particular course of action. Or secondly, it meant the police were at a standstill, and were no closer to solving the case after the third murder than they were after the first. Sam knew every member of the homicide team. They were good investigators. In particular, he knew the man heading the investigations, Russell Foley, and his knowledge of Foley found him favouring the second scenario.

  Rose glanced again at the headlines blazoned across the front page of the Northern Territory News, the Territory’s main daily newspaper.

  SECOND JUDGE MURDERED

  He tossed the paper aside, annoyed with himself. He had no time for preoccupation with the case.

  The name on his office door read ROSE INVESTIGATIONS. Beneath the name, was a monogrammed red rose etched into the frosted glass that filled the top half of the door. When he was preparing his office for his new occupation, he thought the rose was a nice touch.

  Sam had enough investigations of his own to worry about without adding concern for what was, in effect, strictly a police matter. Murder was not his job anymore. He left all that nonsense behind when he snatched his time and walked out of the job in disgust twelve months ago. There were bonuses attached to his new job he never found in his old one. He was his own boss now, for instance. He could come to work when he felt like it, and go home when he had had enough. One of the major bonuses afforded by his new occupation was he never once had to carry a gun.

  The file he was currently working on lay open on the desk. He picked it up and looked at it. Insurance fraud; he did a lot of those. They were the bread and butter of his business. This one was complete all but for his final report. He glanced through the contents of the file; lingering for a moment over each of the photographs he had covertly taken providing ample evidence of the subject’s fraudulent claim. If one is going to claim fifty-thousand dollars from one’s former employer as fair, and adequate recompense for a severe back injury allegedly sustained at work, one should take precautions against being photographed doing the kind of things this moron indu
lged in; like water skiing in Darwin Harbour.

  “Bloody dip-stick,” Rose said aloud to the man in the photographs.

  He closed the file, dropped it in a tray marked “pending” and looked at his watch. Four thirty-five in the afternoon. Without thinking, he picked up the discarded newspaper and began to read once again the details, scarce as they were, of the latest murder.

  Roland Bertram Henderson, fifty-seven-year-old devoted husband and father of three, died where he sat. In the high-backed, leather chair behind his desk in his chambers adjacent courtroom Number 2 of the Northern Territory Supreme Court building.

  Henderson heard his killer enter through a door leading from his chambers to the clerk’s office behind where he sat. He was reading submissions from a case he was due to make a judgement on the following morning. It was late, and the court complex was quiet. He found it easier and less disruptive to work here at night rather than surrounded by his three adored but noisy, boisterous teenagers at home.

  He heard a soft click of the door behind him. He almost turned to see who it was, but the building was old, and there were always strange noises at night when the hum and buzz of the normal court workday had fallen silent. He should have turned around.

  In the few moments it took for him to die, his thoughts did not turn to his family. They did not turn to the security alarm button under the desk next to his left knee. Instead, he sat looking down at the file in front of him. He watched as his life’s blood gushed across the pages and wondered why he didn’t feel any pain. When he could no longer read the contents of the file through the rapidly expanding crimson pool, his eyes lost focus. He slumped forward, and his face slapped onto the file, splattering blood to every corner of his desk.

  A cleaner found the body three hours later. Like Justice Malcolm Costello before him, Henderson’s throat was cut from ear-to-ear.

  Speculation was rife. When the police were reluctant to disclose the gory details, the media, in their inimitable fashion, made up their own. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story, as they say. Pushing the limits of journalistic licence made already fascinating reading even more compelling by police persistence to neither confirm nor deny the media claims.

  The police still did not acknowledge they were looking for a serial killer. It would come, though, of that Sam Rose was certain. And, it would come soon. It had to, because serial killings were exactly what these murders were. He wanted to know more, and that frustrated him. It was no longer his business to know more. Why couldn’t he leave it alone? He had his work now. It had been a year, and he was happy not being a cop despite the circumstances that surrounded his leaving the job.

  It was not that he wasn’t grateful for the experience he gained from his years in the police force, he was. So far, the experience had proved invaluable to him in his current profession. Being an ex-cop offered certain credibility; it opened doors that might otherwise remain closed. Rose Investigations was a good, profitable, one-man business, and he enjoyed his work, most of the time. So, why was he feeling this way? He shook his head as though to dispel all thoughts of murder.

  Someone stood in the corridor outside his office. He could see the distorted silhouette through the frosted glass in the door. He rose, moved around the desk, and opened the door just as the knock sounded.

  Patrick O’Reily stood in the doorway smiling up at Sam. Briefly, the two men stood facing each other without speaking. O’Reily’s smile widened. Finally, Sam spoke.

  “Paddy, Paddy bloody O’Reily!” He offered his hand.

  O’Reily grasped the outstretched hand and pumped it vigorously. “To be sure, to be sure, Sam me lad,” he acknowledged in a guttural Irish brogue. “‘tis I, Paddy bloody O’Reily.”

  Sam had known O’Reily for more years than both of them cared to remember. In all that time, he could not remember the affable newshound ever going anywhere without an aged and battered trilby perched precariously on top of his head. It had become somewhat of an instantly recognisable fixture. With his free hand, O’Reily lifted the trilby an inch or two, and bowed his head slightly. Sam ushered him inside and closed the door behind him.

  4

  Patrick O’Reily was a freelance journalist who perhaps should have been on the payroll of the newspaper Rose had just been reading; given it was the publication where most of his stories wound up. Affectionately known as Paddy to those in the circles where he moved, O’Reily was a unique individual. Many said he could smell a story long before it became one, and Sam knew him well enough to know it was a pretty good assessment of the Irishman’s ability. Where Paddy saw an inkling of a story, he pursued it with bulldog tenacity, and a determination and aggression leaving lesser scribes bewildered and empty-handed in his wake.

  Sam liked Paddy, liked him a lot. A long time ago, in the days Paddy liked to reflect upon as “the good old days”, he was known as a Police Roundsman. Nowadays they labelled him an Investigative Journalist, a politically correct, new age title, Paddy supposed, though he found very little in politics these days that would amount to correctness under any definition. Where Paddy was concerned, politicians of all denominations were a bunch of stuffed shirts and skirts, thinking up useless shit in an attempt to justify their obscene salary packages. Then, to exacerbate the problem, they lied about the same useless shit in an attempt to have the public adore them.

  He had yet to embrace computer technology, considering computers an invention of the devil, promoted by politicians. He preferred pounding out his stories on an old Adler manual typewriter.

  Sam remembered how O’Reily’s diminutive presence was a daily occurrence around the corridors of Police Headquarters, rarely raising more than a cursory glance from anyone in the building. It was still that way, Sam believed. Paddy O’Reily had become part of the furnishings, and was sure to be catalogued on a station inventory somewhere.

  Sam returned to his chair and indicated for Paddy to sit opposite him. Paddy removed his battered hat, dropped it haphazardly on the desk, and ran his hand over his balding pate. As he made himself comfortable, Sam took the opportunity to observe him closely.

  O’Reily had one of those faces that made estimating his age difficult. His looks were deceiving, but Sam guessed he was on the northern side of sixty, and accepted that he could easily be wrong by as much as ten years. Paddy reminded him of a smiling garden gnome, or perhaps a real, live, Irish leprechaun. He stood no taller than five seven or eight, and had he chosen any profession other than journalism, he might well have become a pretty fair jockey. Years of working outdoors chasing stories in fair weather and foul left his features wizened and leathery. Very little hair adorned his head these days, and that which remained had matured to a strangely flattering salt and pepper shade. He carried with him, perhaps a burden, a reputation of shrewdness and toughness, and looking at him now, Sam doubted the passage of time had dulled any of that reputation. Sam found Paddy’s air of urgency and straightforwardness refreshing. And, the ever-present smile, seeming such an inherent part of his being, might well have been painted on at birth. That, and the ever- present, mysterious twinkle in his eye, were his two most endearing character qualities. Sam tried to recall the last time he saw Paddy, certain it was in a bar somewhere. In any event, he knew it had been too long.

  “Well, old friend,” he said finally. “It’s been a long time. How have you been keeping?”

  Paddy shifted in his chair, crossed his legs, and chuckled quietly, the roguish, villainous glint in his eyes enhancing his craggy features.

  “Sam, me lad,” he smiled, “I’ve been keeping well, true enough. How about your good self then? How goes the gumshoe business?” He had lost very little of the accent from his homeland, despite his years in his adopted country. The broad Irish brogue was as strong as Sam remembered. His voice sounded like marbles in a cement mixer, a legacy of too many years of smoking cigarettes and consuming whiskey at a rate that would surely have killed a lesser man. Paddy held a philosophy of life he w
as never reluctant to pass on to anyone who cared to listen. “All things in moderation – except substance abuse,” he would declare with unbridled sincerity.

  “Business is good,” Rose replied. “And what’s more, I’m answerable to no one these days but myself. I should have made the move years ago. But,” he paused, “let’s get back to you. I get the feeling this is not a social visit. I haven’t seen you for ages, and here you are, out of the blue, sitting in my office asking about my health and the state of my business affairs. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to see you, but what the hell are you doing here?” He shrugged and indicated the surrounding office. “I’m afraid my line of work these days won’t offer you any block-busting news stories.”

  “Ah, Sam lad,” Paddy smiled. “You’re wrong. You’re wrong to be sure. When you’ve been treading the streets as long as I have in search of worthy tidbits to satisfy the curiosity of the masses, not to mention the gluttonous appetites of hard-to-please editors, you quickly learn there are worthwhile stories to be found everywhere. It just takes an experienced eye to spot them.”

  “Don’t forget the nose of a bloodhound,” Sam interrupted. “You could smell a story under six feet of concrete. Now, tell me, what brings you to my place of employment, humble that it is?”

  “Well,” Paddy answered, “before I enlighten you with the purpose of my visit, you and I ought to have a drop of mother’s milk, don’t you think?” From somewhere inside his jacket, a small hip flask appeared.

  “Still travelling with all the necessary survival equipment I see,” Sam joked. He rose from his chair and retrieved two chipped, well-worn mugs from a small table in one corner of the room where there stood an electric jug and the makings for coffee.