Challis - 05 - Blood Moon (15 page)

When she looked again, he was gone.

Then Carmen arrived to take her to
lunch, Carmens glossy black hair, red skirt and green top brightening the drab
grey world of the planning office. For you, madam, she said with a curtsy,
presenting Ludmilla with a small parcel wrapped in royal blue paper decorated
with gold stars and moons, a parcel almost too beautiful to tear open.

A tennis racquet?

Carmens big, clever, expressive
face fell. Aww, you guessed.

It was an MP3 player, sleek and
black. Ive loaded it with some albums I think youll like, Carmen said. Plus
it plays FM radio, video clips and voice recordingsI thought you could use it
to record your field notes. She snatched it from Ludmilla. Here, let me show
you.

Ludmilla was intrigued. I need
never leave home.

A little cloud passed over Carmens
face. Oh, youd better leave home, Mill.

They went out, Mr Groot coming to
his office door and looking pointedly at his watch.

* * * *

Josh
Brownlee rose at lunchtime that Wednesday, feeling wrecked. He wanted some kind
of release. He wanted to hurt someone. He stumbled from his motel room opposite
the yacht club and made for High Street, passing the Chillout Zone at the
Uniting Church, the Zone pretty quiet, no schoolies, only a handful of
volunteers wearing the hallowed look of people who work uncomplainingly,
sunnily, with Young People.

He wandered up to McDonalds, where
he ate a hamburger, followed by an ecstasy tab washed down with a can of Red
Bull, and overheard a slag from Grover Hall say she was taking the ferry across
to Phillip Island. So he hung back and followed her, nothing particular in
mind, except that she really filled out her T-shirt. But when he reached the
dock a dozen other schoolies greeted her, all with that healthy glow, wearing
shorts, hats and daypacks, many of them wheeling bicycles. God he despised
them, even as he felt a tiny, nasty, carnal bite to see all those bare legs.

* * * *

20

Challis
bought a ham and salad roll for lunch and ate it in his office. Hed spent all
morning driving from house to house, office to office, trying to get a fix on
Lachlan Roe and the First Ascensionists. He heard the same story, over and over
again: Lachlan is a lovely, lovely man.. .Cant think who would want to hurt
him like thatI hope you find the monster who did it...

Dirk? No one had much time for Dirk.
But Dirk was young and foolish rather than evil. Looked up to his brother.

No one could back up the aunts
claim that the boys were twisted.

It was a relief to hear the phone
ring and have Superintendent McQuarrie summon him to regional headquarters in
Frankston. As soon as you can, inspector.

Sir.

The old, peremptory McQuarrie.
Challis finished eating and clattered down the stairs and out to the carpark.
Maybe its going to be Outer Woop-Woop for Ellen or me after all, he thought,
as he steered onto Frankston-Flinders Road.

Twenty minutes later he was
threading around a series of shopping-centre carparks, looking for somewhere to
leave his car. Frankston, a suburb on the outermost southeastern edge of the
sprawl that was Melbourne, was the kind of place that says there is no such
thing as too much commerce. He found a slot in the baking sun, trotted across a
busy street to the complex that housed the police and the magistrates courts
and took the lift to the top floor.

Superintendent McQuarrie answered, Come,
to Challiss knock. Challis found him sitting behind a vast desk, looking small
and tidyin full dress uniform today, for some reason, loads of braid, chrome
and brass hanging from his chest and shoulders, as if to diminish the size of
the desk and inflate his own. An open laptop sat before him; beside him was a
portable screen, the Victoria Police logo shimmering there in hazy focus.

Inspector.

Sir, countered Challis.

I know youre a busy man. I wont
waste more of your time than is necessary.

So not the sack; a demotion or a
transfer? wondered Challis.

In order to achieve benchmark aims
and improve forward efficiency, Im proposing three new initiatives for the
Peninsula.

Challis gazed at the super, wanting
to say: You summoned me all the way up here to listen to some gobbledegook?
Besides, he was pretty certain that the initiatives had come from Force
Command, not McQuarrie.

McQuarrie began to peck at the keys
of his laptop as if it might bite him. First, a specialist sex crimes unit.

Well, Challis would welcome that,
they all would, but the image that swam into view on the screen showed a crime
scene, detectives with clipboards and shirtsleeves standing around watching
forensic experts in disposable oversuits and overshoes searching on and around
a body on a stretch of waste ground.

Wrong slide, said McQuarrie
crossly. All right, lets leave the sex crimes unit for now. Another proposal
is for a self-contained IRU, or initial response unit, which will attend crime
scenes and carry out all the tasks currently undertaken by several disparate
individuals. It will consist of thirteen officers: a sergeant, eleven senior
constables and one constable. It will be solely responsible for securing the
scene, recording it via photos and video, and collecting evidence such as
fingerprints, DNA and fibres. This evidence will then be passed on to the relevant
divisions for analysisthe fingerprint division and the Forensic Science
Centre, for example. Once the information has been recorded and analysed, it
will be handed on to CIU for further investigation.

Challis had mixed feelings. What if
the evidence got lost? What could be done about the inevitable delays when
there were three stages in the process? Would an officer in such a unit feel loyal
to the evidence he or she had collected, and want to follow through? Then
again, it would free a CIU head like himself to manage targeted operations more
simply, and also free up uniformed police, who often got bogged down at crime
scenes and spent hours standing around.

But he didnt say any of this. He
wanted to see what else McQuarrie had in mind.

Any questions?

The idea has merit, sir.

McQuarrie narrowed his gaze at
Challis, expecting a trap. When it didnt come, he said, Right, lets see the
next slide.

It was a breakdown of the proposed
unit, with boxes and arrows. McQuarrie skipped over it. Another image appeared:
a roomful of desks, computers and analysts.

Right, Project Nimbus. As you know,
this has been trialled successfully in other regions. Briefly, tactical
intelligence officers will be employed to target particular crimes, monitor the
movements of known criminals and their associates, including those recently
released from prison, and identify geographical hotspots on the Peninsula.

Challis said, An extension of the
work currently done by the collators, sir?

McQuarrie frowned. If you like. But
the collators are still only useful
after
the event. Our aim is to
become increasingly strategic and proactive.

He began to count on his fingers. Imagine
being able to identify crime and traffic hotspots and place officers there
before
theres trouble. Or being able to anticipate the intentions of a loose
confederacy of individuals. Or knowing
when
certain types of offences
are likely to occur.

This would have helped Ellen and
Murph with Schoolies Week, Challis thought.

We need to make informed decisions
based on evidence, McQuarrie said. What we have now is a culture in which
information is
not
shared between stations and districts, where a vital
piece of intelligence is locked inside a computer somewhere, and young or lazy
officers fail to complete or write reports, or do follow-ups.

Challis quite liked the idea. What
kinds of data would he log into such a system? Environmental factors,
certainly. For example, drought. With drought came the theft of water and
livestock, and increased social distress leading to domestic violence, suicide
and threats to public officials. He went into a kind of musing daydream,
staring past McQuarries head at the sky outside the window, the wispy cloud
and scrappy birds flying past. Economic factors like recession, he thought;
theres always an associated increase in property crimes. And ethnic
clustering. One of the Frankston inspectors had told him what a headache it
was, educating young Sudanese men: they reacted aggressively to being arrested
or questioned by female officers, for example, and believed that a learners
permit was a full driving licence and one car registration payment covered them
forever.

And Challis thought about the recent
spate of car break-ins around the little three-screen Waterloo cinema: was he
correct in thinking they occurred mostly on Tuesday nights, when the cinema
offered half-price tickets and the adjacent carparks and streets were full?

But would Ellen want to head such a
task?assuming thats where McQuarrie was going with this meeting. Challis
couldnt see it. Shed want to be more hands-on in any new prospect being
mooted for her.

Finally, McQuarrie said, irritably
searching for the correct slide, we come to sex crimes.

* * * *

21

At
4 oclock that afternoon, John Tankard arrived at the Waterloo cop shop,
feeling pretty rested. After leaving Cree in the Fiddlers Creek yesterday hed
driven out to Berwick, where his parents and little sister lived. Hed downed a
couple of coldies with the old manwhod been a copper in London before
bringing his young family out to Australia, and was now groundskeeper of a golf
courseand helped Natalie with her Bog People homework project, Nat grabbing
the mouse and keyboard from him because he was so slow and clumsy, and so
fascinated. Then he got stuck into his mothers shepherds pieshe hadnt
wanted to migrate, and still clung to the things that brought comfort and
reminders of homeand was tucked up in his own bed by eleven oclock. Hed
slept in this morning, knowing he wasnt on duty until this afternoon.

He was nursing a coffee in the
canteen when Pam Murphy looking good in jeans and a close-fitting white
T-shirtwas in his face, saying, Wheres Andy?

Dunno.

Well, has he come in yet? Tonight
could get messy and I need to brief you guys.

Tank wanted to say, Dont take it
out on me, Im not the one whos late. He drank his coffee.

Could you find him for me?

Feeling maligned, Tank went looking.
Seen Andy Cree? he said, in the canteen, the carpark, the sergeants common
room, the front desk, the gym. No sign of Cree. All he found was some guys
watching porn in a forgotten storeroom in a back corner of the police complex.

You fucking morons, he said.

A guy from the Traffic Management
unit, three probationers, and the guy who washed dishes in the canteen. They
were huddled around a DVD/VCR combo, watching five guys jacking off onto a
kneeling woman. They all turned half lidded eyes on him, sleepily aroused.

Turn that crap off. Get back to
work, Tank said, feeling like someones father or teacher.

Come on, Tank, drawled the guy
from Traffic, pull up a pew and pull on your pecker.

They all sniggered, arranged around
the screen on milk crates. The air was thick with cigarette smoke and something
thick and undefinable, as if some ugliness were exuding from their pores. John
Tankard, who for years had been the bad boy of Waterloo, found himself snarling
like one of his old sergeants. All of you, back to work.

The kitchen guy and the probationers
scuttled away, edging around Tank, who filled the doorway and watched
expressionlessly as the guy from Traffic made slow work of turning off the
machine and boxing up the DVD. Tank guessed theyd been watching stuff that had
been seized on a raid. Seen Andy Cree around?

Not me.

Tank, feeling even more like the
wise old man of policing, sighed and went back upstairs to report to Murph. He
tracked her down to the CIU briefing room, where photographs of Lachlan Roe,
Dirk Roe, the Landseer School, a teenage girl and a man he realised was Ollie
Hindmarsh, the local member of parliament, were arranged on whiteboards. And
there was Cree, standing with her at the far end of the briefing table, near a
stack of folders and leaflets. Before he could stop himself, Tank retorted, Jesus,
Andy, Ive been looking everywhere for you.

Cree gave him a mild look of
inquiry. Well, here I am, John.

Tank managed to keep his trap shut.
But what really pissed him off then was Murph saying briskly, Gentlemen, as
she got down to business. The word and its delivery didnt feel right. The old
Pam, who until a few months ago had been his patrol partner, would never have
sounded like this, as if shed had a senior-officer transplant. Plus she was
barely noticing him, and in his dim way he realised that her body was taut,
humming, and it certainly wasnt him doing that to her. Fucking Cree. Tank
jerked out a chair and plonked himself down and folded his arms, making it
clear he didnt have all day.

No one noticed. This is Lachlan
Roe, our assault victim, Murph said, handing them each a photograph. Tonight,
as we keep an eye on the schoolies, Id like you to show it to everyone you
meet.