by Gary Gregor
“You move the body?” Foley asked the stockman who’d stumbled across the woman while out on a station bore run.
Giovanni Bianchi had waited in his vehicle until Foley and Rose arrived. “What …? Oh no … shit no, I never touched her.”
“You touch anything?”
“No, nothing.”
“What about that bag?” He indicated the travel bag several metres away.
“I touched nothing,” Bianchi insisted.
Foley gestured a short scuff mark in the dirt at the foot of the body, where an attempt had been made to drag the deceased woman away. “That’s a drag mark.”
“Dingoes,” the stockman said. “Bloody thousands of them out here. We’ve tried culling them, but the bastards keep breeding.”
“You know her, Giovanni?” Sam asked.
“Call me John,” Bianchi replied. “No, I don’t know her.”
“You Italian, John?”
“I’m an Aussie. Australian born of Italian heritage,” Bianchi explained.
“You ever see this woman before?”
“No, never.”
“Not at the roadhouse?”
“I don’t work out of the roadhouse,” Bianchi said. “I work out of the homestead, forty kilometres west of here. I was working out this way and called into the roadhouse for a feed. I have never seen her before.”
“You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure,” Bianchi affirmed. “Although … she could be my sister and I wouldn’t recognise her. Look at her face. It’s been chewed all to hell. How could anyone tell if they knew her or not?”
“You carry a gun in the vehicle?” Russell Foley asked.
“Yeah, I have a Remington .308 calibre. I use it for dispatching injured stock.”
“You mind if I take a look?”
Bianchi shrugged indifferently. “Sure. It’s in the vehicle. I’ll get it for you.”
“That’s okay, I will get it.” Foley moved to the passenger side of the vehicle and opened the door. “You mind if I take a look in your vehicle?”
“It’s right there, leaning against the passenger seat,” Bianchi motioned.
As Foley reached into the vehicle to retrieve the rifle, Sam turned to Bianchi. “Been working here long, John?”.
“Yeah, long time. Fifteen years this year.”
“You must be good at your job,” Sam said.
“They pay me well and they are good people to work for.”
“What time did you find the girl?”
Bianchi looked at his watch. “Maybe an hour ago. I rang Judy at the roadhouse and asked her to call you guys. I couldn’t ring you myself because telephone reception out here is hit-and-miss at the best of times.”
“You didn’t leave here at any time?”
“No, I called Judy and then sat in my ute until you arrived.”
With the rifle in his hand, Foley moved away from the utility and stepped across to where Bianchi stood with Sam. “You don’t carry this weapon in your vehicle unsecured like it was, do you?”
“No. I keep it locked in a rack behind the seats. Key is on my keyring.” He pointed to a spot west of their current location. “Bloody pack of three dingoes stood out there for ages. I didn’t want them having another go at the poor woman. I took the rifle down in case they started to move in.”
Foley lifted the weapon and sniffed at the breach and looked at Sam. “Hasn’t been fired, for a while,” he announced.
“Haven’t used it for about a month,” Bianchi advised. “I knocked over a decent size cow for station meat. I cleaned it afterwards.”
“Is this your weapon?” Foley asked.
“Belongs to the station,” Bianchi confirmed. “I have it because I do the rounds of the station property every month, checking bores and windmills. I use it for euthanising any injured stock I come across. And I have a license.”
Foley opened the breach and looked along the barrel. “It’s loaded.”
“I never keep it loaded until I need to use it,” Bianchi said. “I loaded it when I spotted the dingoes.”
Foley stepped back to the vehicle and replaced the rifle. “You can lock this back in the rack now. We will need to get a full statement from you as soon as we can. Can you make yourself available for that?”
“Yes, I can do that. Judy at the roadhouse will always know where I am and how to reach me. Do you need me anymore?”
“There’s nothing more you can do here, John,” Foley said. “We have a team of officers from our Task Force and our Forensics section on the way here. When they arrive, Sergeant Rose and myself will head back to the roadhouse. If you wait there, we will get a statement from you when we get back there.”
“Okay. I could use a strong coffee after seeing this.” He indicated the body.
“Thank you for standing by here until we arrived,” Foley said. “It’s unpleasant, I know, and we thank you.”
Bianchi moved away towards his vehicle. “You’re welcome … I think.” He took another quick glance at the body.
“What do you think?” Foley asked Sam.
“I think she might have been a pretty girl before the dingoes got at her,” Sam answered.
“I wasn’t asking if you think she might have been pretty,” Foley scoffed. “Do you think she is another victim of our perp?”
Sam remained silent and took a long look around the landscape. “How far are we from the roadhouse?” he asked finally.
“About five klicks. Why?”
“What was she doing way out here?” He indicated the travel bag several metres away. “I assume that’s her bag. What was she doing out here and how did she get here?”
“You think whoever did this brought her out here?”
“I think that’s a given,” Sam answered. “I can’t imagine her walking all the way out here on her own. We need to check with the staff at the roadhouse but I’m willing to bet our perp met her there and brought her out here to add to his ever-growing list of victims.”
“As soon as Forensics gets here, we will go to the roadhouse. We will get a statement from Bianchi and question staff members.” He looked at the body. “Someone brought her out here and killed her. If he met her at the roadhouse, we might find out who that someone was.”
Foley reached into his pocket and removed a pair of rubber gloves. As he snapped them on, he stepped close to the body and focused his attention on the severely damaged face. “Too hard to tell if she was shot with the mess the dingoes have made to her face.”
“There doesn’t appear to be any blood anywhere else on her body apart from the face,” Sam pointed out.
“If there’s a bullet hole under all this mess, it may indicate that our perp is responsible.”
“If there’s a bullet hole under all that, Forensics will find it,” Sam stated.
Foley stepped across to the discarded travel bag and dropped to one knee. With gloved hands, he opened the bag and rummaged through the contents. Near the top of the bag, underneath a couple of items of clothing, was a small money purse. He removed it, opened it, and removed a driver’s license. “Samantha Love,” he announced, reading from the license. “Age forty. From Adelaide.” He counted through a wad of notes in the money section of the purse. “She is cashed up. Got just over five-hundred dollars here.”
“That would eliminate robbery as a motive.”
Foley put the purse back in the travel bag and continued searching through the contents. Finally, he extracted a folded pamphlet he discovered in a small external side pocket. He read it silently. “Looks like she might have been heading for Yulara.” He handed the pamphlet to Sam. “That’s a brochure on an upcoming three-day archaeological and cultural conference being held in Yulara. Starts in a couple of days. Application fee to attend is four-hundred dollars.”
“That might explain the cash in her purse.”
“A job for Sarah,” Foley suggested. “She could check with the organisers of the conference and see if this girl is on their atte
ndance list.”
“Good idea, mate,” Sam nodded. “I’ll ring her when we get back to the roadhouse.”
Foley put the pamphlet back and zipped closed the bag. With a grunt, he got to his feet. As he rose, something caught his eye several metres away. He stepped across to where the item lay glittering in the sun, in the dirt at the verge of the road. “She was definitely shot.” He removed his biro from his shirt pocket and carefully picked up the expended shell.
“What have you got?” Sam asked, hurrying across to join Foley.
“Empty shell.” Foley held up the cartridge on the end of his pen. “A .45 calibre. Had to be from a semi-automatic, judging by the distance from the body.” He stood, fished in his pocket for a small plastic zip-lock evidence bag, dropped the cartridge inside, and sealed it. Removing his gloves, he looked towards the distant Stuarts Highway and Stuarts Well Roadhouse. “Could be Forensics and the Task Force coming now.” He indicated a thin cloud of dust on the horizon.
Sam looked at it and then at the prone body of Samantha Love. “Hang in there, kiddo,” he said softly. “We’ll have you out of here soon.”
29
Adalhard Jaeger was heading south, towards the South Australian border. He needed to leave the Northern Territory. He did not know where the track he was on would terminate, but it had to cross the border at some point, he assumed. At least, as long as he continued on his current heading, he hoped it would cross the border. The going was slow, much slower than he would have preferred, but the track was rough and, in places, indistinct. As he bumped and rocked across the uneven ground, his thoughts turned to the woman he’d left lying behind in the dirt.
Killing the woman had never part of his plan, not at first. She should never have hit him; it changed everything. Gently, he felt his tender and obviously broken nose, feeling the crusty dried blood beneath his fingers. He had never been hit by a woman before. None of the women he had known up to now were the hitting type. It would be bad enough he supposed to be hit by a man, but to be hit by a woman, not once but twice, was something he was never going to let slide. And, then, she had had the nerve to jump from the vehicle while it was moving, albeit slowly. Jumping from the vehicle was the catalyst for what happened next.
He could have finished it there and then with a merciful shot to the head, taking her quickly from the horror of knowing she was dying. But she had hit him, not once but twice, and for that she had to suffer for as long as it took for her to die.
Now, more than ever, he knew he had to get out of the Territory. He had originally planned to head north, beyond Alice Springs, but the manager at Stuarts Well roadhouse had seen him. She knew he had agreed to give the woman a lift as far as Erldunda, even thanked him for doing so. He remembered there was a CCTV camera behind the counter and his image would be all over it. If, and when, someone found the woman’s body, the police would be thicker than desert flies in the area. It mattered not where he went, but the South Australian border was closer than any other. All he had to do was get there, but at the speed he was forced to travel over the rough track, it was going to take forever.
If he were to take anything positive from his situation, it was that the body of the woman might not be found for weeks, even months. The track he was on at the time was much like the one he was on now: rough, isolated, and rarely used. He made no attempt to dispose of the body; the ground was as dry and hard as concrete and digging a grave, even a shallow one, would have proven difficult. There were also no patches of scrub or bush nearby where he could dump the body and hide it from view in the unlikely event that someone should pass by. No matter, he thought. The body could lay where it fell. His focus now had to be getting out of the Northern Territory. If he stayed, he accepted it would only be a matter of time before the police caught up with him.
There was no other traffic out in this country and Adalhard doubted that anyone had been across the track he followed in a very long time. The isolation was both a good thing and a bad thing—good because he was highly unlikely to meet any traffic coming or going, and bad because, as the only vehicle on the track, he was vividly obvious, should the police search for him from the air. He would love to increase his speed as he made for the distant border, but the road conditions would simply not allow anything above thirty or forty kilometres per hour.
For perhaps the hundredth time, he glanced into the rear-vision mirror and saw that, at the slow speed he was traveling, he left no dust cloud behind him.
The Task Force was allotted the job of searching the countryside for as far as the fuel supply in their huge Bear Cat armoured vehicle would allow. Three members from Forensics were also engaged in processing the scene, so Foley and Sam drove back to the roadhouse. When they arrived, Giovanni Bianchi was sitting alone in a corner of the dining area, drinking coffee.
“I’ll get a statement from Bianchi,” Sam told Foley.
“Okay. I’ll have a chat with the manager.”
Armed with a spiral-bound writing pad, Sam moved across to where Bianchi sat. He stood in front of Bianchi’s table and smiled at the station hand. “Hello again.”
“I was going to finish this coffee and leave,” Bianchi said to Sam.
“Why would you do that?”
“I’ve got work to do.”
“What is it you do, exactly?” Sam asked.
“Right now, I am supposed to be on a station bore run. I check that all the bores are running and there is water for the stock. It takes two or three days to get around every bore on the station.”
“You sleep out every night?”
“Been doin’ it for years,” Bianchi answered casually. ‘I’ve got supplies and warm bedding in my vehicle.”
“Well, I won’t keep you long. We need a detailed statement from you and then you can be on your way.”
Bianchi picked up a large sheet of paper from the table and handed it to Sam. “Will this do?”
Surprised, Sam accepted the page and took a few minutes to read it. When he was done, he looked at Bianchi and waved the page. “This is excellent. Looks like you might have done this before.”
“I have,” Bianchi nodded. “Several months ago. I was the first vehicle on the scene of a bad traffic accident back up the highway a little way. Toyota Landcruiser utility and a road train hit head on. Bloody mess that was. Couple of your blokes from Kulgera arrived about forty-five minutes later and took a detailed statement from me.”
“You’ve done well,” Sam smiled. He glanced at the statement and handed it back to Bianchi. “Just needs today’s date, your printed name, and your signature.”
Bianchi complied, handed the statement back, and rose from his table. “I really need to get on the road. Am I done here?”
“Yes, thank you,” Sam replied. “We appreciate your help. If we need to speak to you again, we will be in touch.”
The two shook hands and Sam watched as the station hand left the roadhouse.
Russell Foley was talking to the roadhouse manager, Judy Brown, when Sam joined him in front of the customer service counter. Sam handed the statement to Foley, who glanced through it.
“That was quick,” Foley said.
“He had it all but done when we arrived,” Sam explained with a wry smile. “It’s not the first time he has written a statement.”
“Where has he gone?”
“He’s back on the job. Said he had a lot of ground to cover before nightfall.” He looked at the manager. “He said we could reach him through you if we need to speak to him again?”
“Either through me, or through the station homestead,” Judy Brown replied. “He is based at the homestead, but we see him here every now and then. Comes in for a feed whenever he is working down this way.”
Foley looked at Sam. “There is a CCTV tape with images of the suspect.” He turned back at Judy Brown. “Can we look at the tape?”
“Of course,” Brown said. “There is a small television in the corner of the kitchen area. You can go back there a
nd watch. I’ll set it up for you.”
“Thank you,” Foley smiled.
Following the manager, Foley and Sam joined her in the compact kitchen area behind the shop-front service area. The heat emanating from the large gas-fired stove, complete with hotplate and chip fryer, was uncomfortable and, although there was nothing cooking at the moment, the strong aroma of recently cooked “junk-food” hung heavily in the air.
Brown indicated a bench above a table at the end of the kitchen. A small television set beamed black-and-white images from the front customer service area and the vehicle refuelling apron in front of the roadhouse. Brown crossed to the table, reached up and pressed a button on a small video recorder next to the television. “I’ll rewind the tape,” she said. “Hard to tell where to stop, so I might have to rewind a couple of times until we find the image you want.”
“We have plenty of time,” Foley said.
“Stop the tape there!” Sam ordered loudly.
The manager hit the stop button and Sam leaned in close to the television image. “That’s him!”
Foley also leaned in close, his head almost touching Sam’s. “Are you sure?”
“I’m bloody positive, mate,” Sam confirmed.
“How can you tell? He’s got his hat pulled low over his face.”
“Look at him, Russ,” Sam insisted. “You saw him at Curtain Springs. That’s him!”
Foley turned to the manager. “Did you speak to this bloke?”
“Yes,” Brown answered. “He had a strong accent. Said he was from Germany.”
For a moment, there was complete silence. Sam looked at Foley and Foley gave a slight shrug of his shoulders.
“He was German?” Sam asked the manager.
“That’s what he said,” Brown answered.
