Before It Breaks (5 page)

Dieter Schaffer, or at least the body they presumed to be him, lay facedown. Forensically Clement's method may not have been ideal but this wasn't the city and the longer the body stayed in the water the worse it would be for the techs. The body was of a man who looked early sixties, large build but not tall, wearing shorts, boots a t-shirt and dungaree style pants. Except for where the centre of his head had been cleaved like a mandarin with a couple of pieces missing, he boasted a good shock of grey hair. He wore a Citizen watch on his left wrist. Inconveniently, unlike in the movies, it hadn't stopped or been shattered at time of death and
was still ticking. After putting on plastic gloves and shoe covers and instructing the guys to do the same, Clement bent and examined the body as best he could.

‘Bullet holes?' asked Shepherd keeping his distance.

‘Doesn't appear to be.'

Clement was open to suggestions but couldn't resist looking for the kind of smaller holes a twenty-two might make. Taylor stated the obvious.

‘Someone caved his head in.'

‘Could have been an accident, couldn't it?' As usual Shepherd was trying to sound like he had some idea of what he was talking about.

Taylor shook his head. ‘Man, I seen plenty of these. I reckon it's an axe done that.'

Clement had to agree with his aide. Back in the days before gas and electric heaters, every house had a woodheap and the axe had been a common murder weapon but these days in the city it was rare. Up here, an axe was a cheap available weapon sometimes used when there was clan strife. The wound may have been caused by a heavy machete but that was, to use a grisly pun, splitting hairs. Unless it had been inflicted post-mortem, Clement was sure this was the cause of death. The blow had been severe, the skull shattered. Studying the victim's face in profile, Clement mentally matched it to the driver's licence photo on his police computer. Not the ideal conditions for a comparison but good enough to declare this was Schaffer. He took photos while the guys shooed flies.

‘Let's turn him.'

They rolled the body onto its back and Clement almost recoiled. Nasty. The right cheekbone and jaw had been smashed in. The t-shirt was caked in mud now but appeared to be one of those souvenir types of a sport team. There was a photo of the team, a trophy, the words HSV 1978–79 and some other words in, he presumed, German. It looked surprisingly new compared to the dungarees, probably a reprint. It only just made it over Schaffer's belly. Taylor had called an ambulance right after they'd found the body. Once it arrived they'd load the body and it would be taken to the morgue at Derby Hospital then flown to Perth for the coroner to do the official autopsy. Western Australia was a huge state, the logistics immense. It was like the police in London flying a body to Moscow for the once-over.

For now there wasn't much to do but cover the body as best
they could and tape off the whole area. The death would have to be treated as homicide. Lisa Keeble was the senior crime-scene tech who worked the region. Of all Clement's colleagues up here, she was the only one he thought could have held her own with any of the Perth crew. Smart, pretty and efficient, she preferred to live here than the city, quite likely because she had a boyfriend here. The boyfriend acted as no impediment to Shepherd. He invariably embarrassed all of them with his attempts to crack onto her. Despite her competence Clement suspected HQ might send in reinforcements for any homicide that was not a simple domestic. Whether they would also send detectives was another matter. He was pretty sure his boss, Scott Risely, would ask for his opinion and hold the fort if he wanted. Just into his sixties, Risely, Area Commander for the whole Kimberley, had a knack of serving his political masters without alienating the local community. Up here that was a tricky business. Risely wouldn't want to palm this off to southerners at the get-go, thought Clement as he swung back to the boys.

‘You called Lisa?'

Taylor said, ‘Same time as the ambulance.'

‘Something to look forward to.' Shepherd flexed as he spoke, as if preparing for his show of muscular strength that would knock Lisa Keeble off her feet. Not for the first time Clement wondered what went on in that brain and visualised some pinball contraption. He got Taylor to try the croc guys again. They hadn't left Derby yet.

‘Tell them to get a wriggle on.'

Taylor blasted them down the line. Clement was thinking they'd need to check the creek for evidence but nobody was going to dive in there if there might be a croc about.

‘These guys are good, right?'

‘The best,' Taylor was definite. ‘Any croc's in there, they'll trap him.'

‘Yeah well I'm not going in.' Shepherd folded his arms. Clement had a good mind to order him in now. His phone rang. Number withheld on the ID.

‘Clement.'

‘This is Gerd Osterlund. You left a message on my voicemail, Detective.'

German accent. Rudi perhaps?

‘Thank you for returning my call. Sir, are you a friend of Dieter Schaffer?'

A pause.

‘An acquaintance. Why?'

‘Mr Schaffer has been killed.'

‘That's terrible.' It sounded like genuine shock. ‘An accident?'

‘We don't know. I found your number on his phone. Under the name Rudi.'

‘His nickname for me. He called me yesterday morning to say he was going fishing. It's awful.'

‘Did he have any family here?'

‘Not that I know of. Like I say, we were acquaintances.'

Clement didn't see any value in hanging about here. He needed to know all he could about Dieter Schaffer as soon as possible. He asked if he could come and see Osterlund now. ‘Sure. I'm practically retired.'

Clement asked where Osterlund lived.

‘Broome. Number five Mars Place. You know it?'

‘I'll find it. I'll be a couple of hours.'

He ended the call asked the guys where Mars Place was.

Shepherd jumped in. ‘Private little cul-de-sac above Cable Beach, a half-dozen houses, three mill plus. I went to a pool party there for Kirsty Liriano.'

‘Who is…?'

Shepherd was waiting for a chance to trump Clement's ignorance. ‘American singer. Hot.'

While Clement had faith in Taylor's competence he knew that he could feel insecure with responsibility. Shepherd would have to stay with Taylor and be ranking officer. Poor Lisa Keeble.

He pulled the card from Schaffer's phone and put it into his wallet. The phone he sealed in an evidence bag which he handed to Shepherd.

‘Give this to Lisa. I want you to ring around all the banks, find out who Dieter Schaffer banked with. I want you to check any withdrawals. If he had a credit or debit card, find out. They're to call me direct if it has been used anywhere since last night, or if it is used again.'

‘Got it.'

‘Call me if there's anything important at all.'

Foot to the floor, Clement hammered down the highway, illegally calling Risely with just one hand on the wheel. He caught the boss
mid-scone at a church forum where indigenous and town leaders were brainstorming how to keep local youths on the straight and narrow. What flashed through Clement's mind was a room with a couple of brand new ping-pong tables that would be trashed within a month. Best of intentions guaranteed no results. The kids needed fathers but half of them were banged up in jail or on the run. He ran through the basics as Risely munched.

‘Homicide?'

‘Quite likely.'

Clement explained he was trying to find out more about the victim. Risely was relaxed.

‘How are we going to search the creek?'

‘Jared's got a couple of croc trappers onto it.'

‘Good. Hagan and Lalor are back. I'll send them to secure the site and watch it overnight. Call me if you know anything.'

That's what you wanted in a boss, though Clement wasn't getting carried away. He hadn't worked with Risely in a pressure situation yet. His years in the city had shown him that was when monsters revealed themselves. He searched about for his Cruel Sea CD, realised it must have been at his apartment and settled on Dr John because he only owned five CDs and this was one of two in the car. Just after the good Doctor had finished and the Black Crowes were being given their chance to shine along the relentlessly flat road, he passed the ambulance on its way to the crime scene. About ten minutes later Lisa Keeble followed in her old Fairlane. It had been her grandfather's but she'd retained its pristine condition. Clement figured it must guzzle half her wages in fuel but she'd told him she was sentimental and it was worth every cent. She looked like a jockey in that beast, her head just visible over the dash. She gave him the nor-west wave, a barely perceptible raise of the fingers off the wheel.

It took Clement a good hundred minutes to make Broome. On the road he toyed with the idea of hitting the Anglers Club first but decided to wait for the post-work ‘rush'. It amused Clement the way so many people talked of Broome like it was some Valhalla. No doubt it was exotic, desert on one side, green-blue ocean on the other, a Japanese cemetery testifying to the presence of a community that began with their pearl divers over a century before and was bombed by Japanese planes in World War Two. Flicking through
glossy airline magazine photos of the pristine white sand of Cable Beach, occupied only by camels and swimwear models, Europeans read of this isolated land of pearls and giant sea turtles and made it a must-see along with Tangiers, Buenos Aires and an ice-hotel in the Arctic Circle. But for all that, the town was flat with more than its share of box-like brick buildings, chain-link fences and litter. You could have been blindfolded, drugged and dumped in parts of town and woken assuming you were in one of those Perth industrial suburbs like Welshpool. What was unique was the mix of people, indigenous groups — some the original coastal clans, others whose forebears had drifted in from the desert—jumbled with money-chasing miners and old hippies, both the genuine pot-smoking Kombi van breed and affluent boomers who yearned to have been the real thing, grown tired of their well-paid government jobs to the south, on a pilgrimage to an idea. Except for the hippies and musicians travelling up from Perth for the annual Shinju Festival, nobody had paid much attention to this oasis on the tip of a desert until the 1980s when it was marketed as a kind of real people's Club Med. To Clement, the attraction of Broome had always been simple, it actually was an oasis, and when you travelled to it from whatever direction through hundreds of ks of boring, scrubby desert, all its positives were maximised. Broome was to travellers what the sight of a woman must have been to whalers returning from a long expedition. Even with teeth missing, a port whore was desirable, but a pleasantly attractive woman was glorious. Growing up here, Clement had loved the open space, the smell of the bush, the Robinson Crusoe beach; but there was a lot he was glad to turn his back on. Months out of every year you couldn't swim in the tantalising sea for box jellyfish even though the heat and humidity was smoking you through. And he hated the deadbeats that drifted here. Broome was like family: you might love it but if you stuck around long enough it grated. He felt confined and defined by it. Given a real choice, he wouldn't have chosen to return. His phone rang. It was Shepherd.

‘Dieter was a Savings Bank client of Bankwest. No cards; cash transactions, a little in, a little out; a balance of nearly eight thousand. Last withdrawal was three hundred bucks over two weeks ago.'

The guy was frugal. ‘He might have had one with another bank.'

‘I checked them all. None of the locals have him as a customer except Bankwest.'

Clement had been hoping that if this was indeed a robbery-homicide
somebody would stuff up and use Dieter's card, but that wasn't going to be an option. ‘What about the croc blokes?'

‘They're onto it. Say it could be tomorrow before it's safe to go in.'

It wasn't the kind of thing you could rush apparently.