Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (2 page)

The blow to the head was possibly administered by the anchor that had taken him to the bottom, the pathologist reported, after comparing the shape of the indentation in the skull with the shaft of the anchor. The anchor had been intended to hold the body down until the fishes had picked the bones clean. Fortunately the fisherman had happened along about two or three days later. Or unfortunately, because identifying victim and culprit had become a headache for Challis.

At least the anchor told Challis a couple of things: the body had been dumped at sea, not pushed over a cliff, and he'd be saved the tedium of mapping body drift as determined by the tides and the shape of the coastline.

One other thing: the victim had been wearing a Rolex Oyster watch. Silver, with an expanding metal band. It wasn't the costliest Rolex available, but it was a genuine Rolex, not a ten-dollar Singapore or Bangkok fake. If the Rolex spelt a certain level of class or income, nothing else about the murdered man did. The clothes and Nike trainers didn't.

Challis walked on, allowing the Flinders Floater to rest there in his head like a shimmering wraith that would one day clarify, take on a corporeal being and tell him the story of his final days and minutes before he was thrown into the water to die.

He could see kangaroos grazing in the early evening light on the grassy slope above the walking track. He nodded at a young family, stepping off to let them through, and wondered what he was going to do when he got to the fork on the cliff-top above the little bay. Walk down to the beach and commune with the elements in the hope that he'd solve the case? Continue toward Cape Schank and hope to encounter Tessa?

Dusk was settling. He could see lights on the water and the lights of Phillip Island beyond the water. A cool autumn wind blew in from the sea. He zipped up his windproof jacket. He was hungry, sleepy, cold, depressed—and owed it all to one phone call.

An ordinary everyday sort of man might not have answered the phone at seven o'clock on Good Friday morning. But Challis was a homicide inspector and always answered the phone. And had heard his wife, using her phone card at the prison, announce that she intended to kill herself.

Her spirits always deteriorated at holiday time. Her spirits always
fell
.

He'd hung on to the phone for twenty minutes, letting her talk herself out of her depression. But the damage was done. He'd been making love with Tessa when the call came, and an hour later—the mood for love gone and just as he'd been about to set out for the two-day walk of the Peninsula beaches with her—Challis's parents-in-law had rung to say that their daughter had snapped her phone card in two and tried to saw through her wrists with it, and was in the prison infirmary. She wasn't in any danger, but Challis's presence would help stabilise her mood, and if he wasn't busy would he mind…

Challis had said yes.

Tessa had said, 'It's time you let go of her, Hal,' then had driven off, announcing that she intended to undertake the walk alone.

Challis had almost set out to find her when he returned from seeing his wife in the afternoon.

Perhaps he should have. He was no good at gauging these things, but suspected that it would have been better then than now, a day later, when she'd had time to stew and set her mind and heart against him.

Self-conscious suddenly, he turned around and walked back to his car.

Almost six pm… On the way home he tuned in to the news. Two asylum seekers had escaped from the new detention centre near Waterloo. Challis shook his head, imagining the fallout, the divisions, the extra work for Ellen Destry and her CIB detectives.

Ellen Destry would rather have been home tonight, Easter Saturday, but she was a detective sergeant at the Waterloo station and she could sense the hunger in Dwayne Venn.

What Venn liked to do was drive to three or four of the Peninsula's lovers' lanes and park deep in the maw of the roadside trees and attack couples in their cars. In the watery green light of the night-vision fieldglasses he resembled exactly a creeping psycho in a Hollywood slasher film, but on the two occasions that CIB had shadowed him in the past six weeks he'd never done more than watch. Not even taken his old boy out and tugged on it.

Ellen was almost beginning to doubt the veracity of Pam Murphy's information. 'Maybe your informant's given us a peeping tom instead of a rapist,' she'd said to the young uniformed constable last week after another three hours spent in the dark.

But Dwayne Venn was a nasty piece of work and there had been two rapes late that summer, both involving a knife and a hint of unhinged violence. Now Tessa Kane, Challis's editor girlfriend, was asking questions in her newspaper, and so Ellen would continue to watch Venn for as long as the budget could stand it. Senior Sergeant Kellock had taken a brief hard look at the figures that afternoon and told her, 'Two constables, Murphy and Tankard, that's all I can spare, what with those fanatics escaping from the detention centre.'

Fanatics? Next he'd be calling them 'ragheads' or 'sand niggers', like some redneck in a film. According to the detention centre management, the escapees were Iraqis, one an engineer and the other a taxi driver. They weren't her concern—or not yet anyway. Her concern was catching Venn.

And so now she was in the bushes where she could not be seen but where she could see the station's unmarked blue Falcon as a dense shape against the general blackness. In bushes on the other side was John Tankard, one of the uniformed constables. The other, Pam Murphy, was in the Falcon itself, huddled on the back seat with Detective Constable Scobie Sutton. They were playing lovers. Neither wore shirts. Pam's bra was black, which seemed to indicate passion and willingness for some reason, if you listened to the ads. All four officers were armed, and in radio contact via earpieces and small microphones. To the casual eye, the microphones worn by Sutton and Murphy could have been matching necklaces.

Ellen said softly, 'Destry in position.'

Scobie murmured in her ear, 'Sutton in position.'

'Murphy in position.'

'Tankard ditto.'

Trust John Tankard to be different.

And they settled back to wait. They were a hundred metres away from the tourist road that gave access to the lookout. There was little local traffic—everyone was down on the coastal flatlands, heading herdlike to or from parties, pubs, restaurants and the cinema on this Easter Saturday evening.

Just then a Kombi van drove in. It stopped for thirty minutes, there was soft music, and then it clattered away again, leaving behind a trace of marijuana smoke. There were lights upon Port Phillip Bay, and the distant horizon glow of the Melbourne suburbs beyond the black water. Cloud wisps obscured the stars and the moon.

Ellen's mind drifted. Back at home in Penzance Beach her daughter was having a party. Ellen fretted a little. It was Larrayne's seventeenth birthday and Ellen wanted to celebrate the fact that her daughter was better now. Just over a year ago Larrayne had been abducted by a man who'd already abducted and murdered three other women. She'd been full of adolescent moody rattiness before the abduction, but since then had become quieter, more studious, inclined to stay at home. The party was also meant to mark her jettisoning of the ratbags she'd once hung around with at school and cementing new friendships. They were decent kids, these new friends, but— along with all the other shit that happened at night on the Peninsula lately—there had been instances of gatecrashing that had ended in violence.

'We could register the party with the police,' Ellen had suggested.

'Sweetheart,' her husband said, 'we
are
the police.'

Alan Destry was a uniformed senior constable in Traffic. He was sour about his prospects. He'd failed the sergeants' exam and was married to a detective sergeant on the fast track. Beating her at something, however trivial, made him feel a little better about himself.

And he was earning brownie points tonight, staying home, watching over a bunch of partying teenagers. Ellen imagined his scowling presence at the door as they arrived, his visual scrutiny, his quick search of jacket pockets, handbags and daypacks for booze and dope.

There was
some
booze allowed. Not enough to cause Larrayne's friends to waste themselves and turn nasty, though.

Drugs were another matter. There was evidence that a major network had taken over on the Peninsula: increased arrests for possession and pushing, more overdoses, reports of ecstasy and amphetamines being sold at rave parties. The rave party scene scared Ellen. Admission was cheap, about $15 to cover the hire of a DJ and portaloos, and the parties were often held in out-of-the way factories that lacked basic safety measures like fire sprinklers. Kids heard about them by word of mouth and liked the sense of community encouraged by the music, the drugs, the secrecy, the air of being outside the mainstream. The drugs were also cheap and readily available, with ecstasy selling for $50 a pop and the effect lasting for hours. The kids believed that ecstasy was harmless and loved the boost it gave them, the ability to dance all night and feel invincible. They had a touching faith in the purity of the ecstasy, unaware that it had probably been made by a bikie gang in some backyard garage and contained heroin, speed and the horse-drug ketamine, bound together with glucose or caffeine. They risked poisoning themselves or fusing their brains in the long term, and at the parties they forgot to drink lots of water, got dehydrated, risked death.

Larrayne had been to one rave party. It had been well managed and publicly advertised, but the pushers were there, she said.

Ellen looked at her watch. Ten forty-five. Where was Venn? Assuming their rapist
was
Venn, he liked to take a knife from his boot and burst in upon a pair of lovers, demanding money. Then he'd threaten to start slicing pieces of flesh from the woman unless she undressed fully and handcuffed her boyfriend's hands behind his back and performed oral sex on him. Finally he'd insert the handle of the knife inside the woman's vagina and leave after cutting clumps of pubic hair from her and pocketing any cash the couple had on them.

Ellen badly wanted to catch him.

Then she saw him. 'He's here,' she murmured.

She had heard the engine and at first thought it was a passing motorist, but then a lowered black Longreach ute with a roll bar appeared in her glasses, slowing for the entrance, then U-turning to make another pass, and giving her a clear view of both its numberplates. She saw the ute enter finally, then coast past the police Falcon and stop some distance away, pointed toward the exit. The Longreach looked fast and hard, like the driver.

They were going to make an arrest no matter what. If Venn simply spied on Sutton and Murphy, then they'd have him on a public nuisance charge and would work on him to confess to the rapes. But what Ellen wanted was to arrest him as far along the stages of assault, unlawful imprisonment and rape as possible, so that she could make a firm arrest yet not imperil her officers.

Venn opened his door. Ellen took the fieldglasses from her eyes and saw nothing: he'd removed the interior light bulb. She put the glasses to her eyes again and saw that he wore darkjeans, a dark T-shirt and lightweight army surplus boots. The balaclava sat like a pelt of short black hair on his scalp. He was big, but light on his feet. The fear he inspired, one person going up against couples, made sense to her finally.