Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (19 page)

Pam Murphy stood in a house in Tyabb, numbly watching the pathologist. Inspector Challis and his crew had been and gone, Challis shaking his head and saying, 'Looks like our boy's been busy.' Apparently Challis, Scobie Sutton and Sergeant Destry had spent the morning at another shooting, a married couple shotgunned to death over near Upper Penzance, and now this one. The word was, Ian Munro was settling scores.

Challis had praised her for taking the time to check the old woman's story and finding the body. 'Good detective work,' he said.

She wasn't a detective, merely a uniformed constable, but she'd glowed to hear him say it. Now she was reminded of the everyday shit you see in police work. A shotgun shooting. Her first. Thank God the child hadn't seen it happen—and hadn't herself been shot.

John Tankard had collected Pam from outside the police station and driven her to the house. The real grandmother had arrived just as they were getting out of the car. Her name was Margaret Seigert and she'd tapped on the front door and the child, a very collected and precise little girl, had been clear about the fact that her daddy wouldn't wake up and there was a bit of blood on his pillow.

A bit of blood. While John Tankard, the child and the grandmother remained out in the corridor, Pam had gone in and seen the dead man, on his back in a queen-sized bed, doona up to his chin. Fortunately the child hadn't pulled back the doona and seen her father's chest: massive shotgun wound, the torso a pulpy mess, the mattress soaked in blood.

Then Tank had demanded a look, and she had taken his place in the corridor. When Tank came out again he appeared shocked, pale, sweaty, as though aware for the first time what a shotgun could do to you, aware that he'd been a very lucky man yesterday, outside Ian Munro's back door.

CIB were convinced that Munro had done this. According to a thick folder of correspondence found in a filing cabinet, the victim, David Seigert, had once represented Ian Munro in various legal and civil matters, including a court appearance on a charge of threatening behaviour in which Munro had been fined $875.

Seigert had a wife, but she taught at a university up in the city and often stayed away overnight. Pam had phoned her, the worst call she'd ever had to make, and the woman had returned immediately to this house in Tyabb and, with the grandmother in tow, had whisked the child away.

Shotgun killing. Only there was no shotgun at the scene.

According to Inspector Challis, the double shooting he'd just attended had also been a murder but staged to look like a murder-suicide and so the gun was there at the scene. The Seigert shooting was different, he told her. No gun and no shell casing.

Pam knew that even if he found the gun it wouldn't tell him much. Given that a shotgun fires pellets rather than a solid slug, and the inside of a shotgun barrel isn't rifled, it's more or less impossible to link the pellets from a victim to a particular gun—unless the shell casing is found at the scene, for it will bear characteristic imprints from the firing pin and the loading process. Sometimes a commercial wadding (paper or plastic) can help to trace a shell's manufacturer, but that kind of knowledge hardly puts you closer to the killer. Sometimes shotgun shooters make their own shells, but there was no way of knowing if that was the case with the Seigert shooting. There was no gun and no empty shell.

And now it was the pathologist's turn. Presumably she'd come straight from Challis's double murder. Freya Berg her name was, and she wore white coveralls, paper slip-ons over her shoes, a hairnet. She had a narrow, expressive face and long, quick fingers. Pam remembered her from an earlier case Challis had been involved in. A case in which Pam had also shown initiative and been praised by him.

It was interesting, watching the woman work. Tankard should be watching this, Pam thought. But Tankard was outside, ostensibly keeping nosy parkers away from the house but in reality trying to get his nerve back. 'What a way to die,' he'd said, more than once.

Dr Berg would be performing an autopsy later at the morgue, but right now she was examining the body, speaking into a micro-cassette recorder.

'The apparent cause of death is a massive wound to the chest, probably caused by a shotgun fired at close range. Materials found in the wound itself would suggest that the gun was pressed against the doona and fired through it.' She pushed the pause button and glanced at Pam. 'If that is the case, it might have been done to suppress the sound of the blast.'

Pam nodded. She watched as Dr Berg released the pause button, grabbed each foot and manipulated the ankles before lifting each leg and watching it bend at the knee. Laying each leg onto the sodden mattress again, she pressed down on the abdomen and appeared to watch the surface of the murdered man's skin.

'Room temperature is eighteen degrees Celsius, slightly cooler than the outside temperature of twenty-two degrees Celsius. There is still good movement in the extremities but the stomach is beginning to show signs of rigor mortis.'

Pam knew from her studies that the body cools at three degrees per hour at first. Later, the rate is one degree or less per hour. Rigor works from the head through the body to the extremities, so presumably Dr Berg would test the head last.

Sure enough, the pathologist hoisted herself onto the bed, manoeuvred herself until she was at the bedhead looking down the body, lifted the skull gently off the pillow and attempted to turn it. 'The head is pretty well locked,' she said.

Finally Dr Berg pressed the end of her ballpoint pen against the bottom side of the torso, repeating the action from near the armpit to the waist.

'There is no blanching, the blood appears to be fully clotted.'

She swung off the bed again and began to remove her latex gloves, saying, 'The deceased has been dead for between six and eight hours.'

Pam glanced at her watch. It was midday now. The child, and the victim, would have been sound asleep at four or six that morning, when Ian Munro came in blasting. She was nearly going to say
dead to the world
.

The pathologist was speaking to her.

'Constable?'

'Sorry, yes?'

'If you could tell Inspector Challis?'

'Sorry, what?'

A note of gentle patience. 'It's never easy; it never gets easier, Pam.' Berg paused. 'Just tell the inspector that I'll try to do the autopsy later this afternoon or first thing tomorrow morning. Tell him I put the time of death at between four and six this morning, okay?'

Pam nodded.

'Where is he, anyway? He usually sticks around.'

Pam tried to clear her throat. 'We think the person who did this also shot those people over near Five Furlong Road, so Inspector Challis has gone to have a word with the Special Operations commander.'

'Never rains but it pours,' the pathologist said, grabbing her bag and leaving Pam there to her thoughts and the odour of the blood.

Special Operations police and their tracker dogs were searching open ground near both crime scenes, uniforms from Waterloo were doorknocking the neighbours, and Scobie Sutton had returned to the Munro farm. That left Upper Penzance for Challis and Ellen. The residents would have to be advised. They might also have seen something or somebody. After all, the miserable estate where the Pearces had been shot lay less than two kilometres downhill from Upper Penzance.

Ellen drove. As they approached Upper Penzance she said, 'Larrayne's been going out with a boy who lives up here.'

Challis shifted in his seat. This was small talk and required a response. 'How's she been since…'

He meant to say since her experience at the hands of that abductor last year, but found his voice trailing away. Ellen knew what he meant. She said, 'Fine, thanks. A lot quieter, though: more serious about things.'

Challis heard doubt in Ellen's voice and chided himself for thinking that she was engaged in small talk. There were things she needed to air, and so he prompted her. 'Except… ?'

Ellen flashed him a glance, then returned her gaze to the twisting road. 'The boy she's been seeing is called Skip Lister, though his actual name is Simon. His father's name is Carl.'

Her tone was interrogative. Challis shook his head. 'The name doesn't ring a bell.'

'There's nothing on him,' Ellen said, meaning that she'd checked the national computer and asked around without result.

'But your antenna's up,' Challis said.

'My antenna is up.'

Challis watched her and waited. Gravel pinged against the underside of the car and Ellen braked once or twice for pigeons that flew into her path from the bracken at the sides of the road. She was a good driver, mindful of the possibility of oncoming vehicles beyond the blind corners, eyes flicking from the rear-view mirror to the road ahead and rarely glancing his way.

Eventually she said: 'For a start, Carl Lister is a bully. I don't mean physically, I mean in manner. He doesn't seem to care much what Skip gets up to. At Larrayne's party last weekend we discovered Skip passed out in the back yard. He could have choked to death on his own vomit if we hadn't found him. I rang his father, who implied that it wasn't his problem.' She went silent.

'Anything else?' Challis said, knowing there would be. Ahead of them was the first driveway, a stone outer wall with a locked gate and intercom grille on a brick pillar beside it. Ellen slowed the car and turned off the road, saying, 'He's the kind of man, you ask what he does for a living, he says "business". You ask what kind, he says "this and that" or "buying and selling". You never get a straight answer, so naturally you ask why not.'

'You think he's bent.'

'In a word.'

Ellen put the car into neutral and climbed out to announce herself through the intercom system. When there was no response she fished for a card, scribbled on the back of it and slotted it in the gate where it could be seen. She got behind the wheel again and buckled herself in, sighing, 'The joys of doorknocking. If it's not a weekender and therefore uninhabited, it's going to be empty because the owners are at work.'

Challis nodded. 'Maybe this Lister character will be home, so I can give him the once-over for you.'

'Your famous instincts at work.'

'Exactly.'

There was no answer at the next two houses, and then they came to a set of brick pillars and the name 'Costa del Sol' picked out on a board in chips of coloured glass and pottery, and Ellen said, 'The home of the Listers, father and son.'

'The mother?'

'Doesn't live with them anymore.'

Ellen got out and spoke into the intercom. Challis heard a crackling voice and a few minutes later a kid emerged from the distant house and came down the driveway toward them.

Ellen turned to Challis from her position near the gate and mouthed the word, 'Skip.'

Challis got out and stood to one side, intending to watch and listen. The afternoon sun had some autumn heat in it now, and as he stood there a sea breeze sprang up, stirring the leaves and chasing away some of the odours that subconsciously he'd been trying to identify: rotting vegetation, blood-and-bone mix from a nearby farm or garden, and something slighter and more fleeting, now gone even as he almost had it pinned down.