Death Delights (13 page)

I didn’t, and my face would have revealed it to the sharply observant fat man opposite me. ‘And so I can’t help wondering,’ he continued, ‘which House of Bondage your informant meant?’

•

As I drove to the morgue, all I could think about was the other brothel. Pigrooter had been happy to give me the street name and a clear description of the house which I’d written down on one of the Collins Club coasters. I felt elated, but reminded myself that I’d been here before. Many times before. And disappointed just as often.

I got to the morgue about fifty minutes after Bob’s phone call to find that Bradley Strachan, gloved and gowned, was about to clean up. Bob and one of the Crime Scene photographers had already bagged and labelled the late Frank Carmody’s bloody clothes and shoes. When I walked in, Bob looked up and wordlessly picked up an envelope with the tips of his gloved fingers and passed it to me. I pulled some gloves from the dispenser box on the counter and carefully took it from him.

‘Bradley found it tucked away in his inside pocket,’ Bob said as I examined the opened envelope. It had been slit along the top and dark blood glued it together along one edge. I tipped the folded letter it contained onto the bench, carefully opening it as Bob passed me a plastic sleeve and I housed it, studying the letter through the plastic. ‘This makes things much clearer,’ he said.

Dear Mr Carmody
, I read, noting that the letter was written in black ink in a strong, somewhat backhand copperplate:
Thanks so much for replying. It makes everything easier for me and also makes me feel that you are interested in my friendship. There was an expression in your face when I saw the photo of you in the newspapers that made me want to contact you. I know how dreadful it is to be locked up, year after year, at the mercy of your gaolers. And I’m lonely and I would so much like to be your friend
.

I looked up at Bob and Bradley. ‘This handwriting,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen it before somewhere.’

‘Where?’

I thought, but couldn’t bring it to mind.

I returned my attention to the letter, reading on:
I’m twenty six-years old, and work as a dancer in a nightclub. I have long blonde hair and blue eyes and I live with my brother in Potts Point. I’ve cut out your photograph and it sits on my bedside table. Please reply as soon as you can because I’m looking forward so much to hearing from you. One day soon, I hope I can dance for you
.

It was when I came to the signature that the writing seemed to waver as I blinked several times. My eyes locked onto the name at the bottom of the page.

‘Did you notice the signature?’ Bob asked. I blinked again. I hadn’t made a mistake, or seen something that wasn’t there:
Yours sincerely
, the letter was signed,
Rosie McCain
.

My sister’s name, signed in slightly bigger writing than that contained in the body of the letter. Beneath it, was a one line postscript:
Please destroy this. I don’t want any other men reading what I write for you alone
.

Neither Bob nor Bradley said anything for a moment, then they both went to speak together.

‘It’s not a unique name,’ I said, speaking over their mutual apologies. ‘There must be hundreds of people called that.’ I was rallying fast. ‘The important thing,’ I said, ‘is that I’ve seen this writing on an empty envelope when I was going through Nesbitt’s stuff.’

‘Was there a letter?’ Bob asked. I shook my head. ‘I didn’t find any letter. But this is the best explanation as to how he’—I paused—‘or she—does it. Writes to the victim while he’s still in gaol, and then presumably a meeting is arranged shortly after he’s released.’ But even as I was saying these words, some part of my mind was thinking,
it could be.
It just
might
be Rosie. Had Rosie, after twenty-five years’ silence, come forward as some sort of avenging angel? The idea was insane. If she was going to come forward, she’d come to us, to her family who had missed her for so long, and longed so desperately for her return. ‘Note that she thanks him for replying,’ I said, bringing my full attention back to the letter in my hands. ‘And yet it seems to be the first letter she’s written to him.’ Bob nodded, getting my point.

‘So we need to find out,’ he said after a thoughtful pause, ‘exactly what he replied to.’

The three of us looked at each other. Carefully, I picked up the envelope by a corner and turned it over, looking for any identifying marks. It was postmarked Potts Point and dated January, a year ago and, like the letter, it was addressed in the same strong, slightly left-leaning hand.

‘It’s the first physical thing we’ve had,’ said Bob, ‘that gives us somewhere to start. Someone writes to him in prison. Someone who says they want to meet him.’

I thought of the corpse lying in the next room, the long medial opening now neatly zipped back together, there because someone with my lost sister’s name had wanted to meet him last night.

•

Driving over to Phillip Street we found the house empty—Miss Carmody was away staying with a friend—and it didn’t take us long to locate another three letters, carefully wrapped up in brown paper among her brother’s scant possessions. Only the one that Bradley had found on the victim’s body had an envelope, the rest were folded together in the order of their arrival, all written in the same distinctive backhand in black ink. We took just about everything we found in his room back to the Police Centre. Bob and I read the letters carefully, handling them only at the very edges, gloved up and replacing them in order in plastic sleeves. As I read them, I started to realise the nature of the trap used by this killer to lure his—or her—victims. For over a year, this person had planned. The letters were sent at monthly intervals, starting with the first one dated June the previous year. Each letter grew steadily more provocative, more openly suggestive. ‘
Tonight,
’ Bob read aloud, ‘
I undressed in front of your photo. Then I touched myself, calling your name. I am aching for you. I can’t wait to meet you. But my brother is so jealous and suspicious of me. He never lets me go anywhere alone. I’ll let you know a good place we could meet.
’ Bob’s grey eyes looked over the top of the paper. ‘It’s signed the same way as all the others,’ he said. ‘
Until then, I am yours only on paper. Rosie
.’ It was hot and heavy gear for a sex-starved sex offender, locked up for years.

I started thinking about the scenario the letter-writer was creating and Bob stood up, hands in his pockets, and walked over to look through the partition at the rest of the office. ‘Maybe there is a brother,’ I said, ‘and maybe they work in a team. “Rosie” arranges the time and place of the meeting, then she goes, seemingly alone, to the pre-selected meeting place and while she distracts the victim, out jumps the brother with his knife.’ Bob nodded slightly, still standing with his back to me, gazing out through the glass. But I knew he wasn’t seeing anything out there. He turned round to me again, shaking his head.

‘I can’t really see why the killer would mention the existence of a brother, if there was such a person and that person was part of the killing. It’s giving too much of the game away. That’s why I don’t think there is a brother at all. This brother business is part of the character that “Rosie” is creating for the victim to believe, that she’s a naïve, lonely, beautiful, highly sexed, over-protected young girl—’

‘—who dances in a nightclub?’ I said, incredulous. I knew the sorts of kids who ended up dancing in nightclubs, and although they might be young, they were hardly naïfs. ‘Bob,’ I said, ‘what does the picture that Rosie is painting of her situation really suggest to you?’ The reason Bob and I have been close associates for so long is that his way of thinking is very similar to mine.

‘Actually,’ he said, a slight frown lowering his bushy eyebrows, ‘it reminds me of the kind of letter that you might read in
Playboy
.’

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘The whole set-up smells like one of those porno movies that attempt to weave a plot and some other characters around Miss Fanny and the Ramjet. It’s bullshit, Bob. It’s fantasy.’ I thought a bit more and refined my conclusion. ‘Male fantasy,’ I added. I looked through the letters again, frowning. ‘That’s definitely the last one?’ I asked Bob.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘Because there’s still no mention of where and when they’re going to meet. There’s the mention of a meeting, but nothing’s planned.’

‘Maybe she contacted him in another way?’ said Bob. ‘Maybe a visit?’

I shook my head. ‘I’ll check that with Corrective Services,’ I said, making a note to myself. ‘I think there’s a missing letter.’

Bob smiled one of his rare smiles. ‘Let’s say there
is
another letter somewhere, naming the time and the place.’ He tapped the letters. ‘At least now we know how the killer does it. The poor bastards showed up all right. Who could resist these?’

‘I think I could,’ I said. ‘Especially if I’d known what happened to two other sex offenders. I’d be very wary of meeting anyone unknown.’

‘But Rosie isn’t unknown,’ Bob pointed out, speaking from the victims’ point of view. ‘She’s probably the closest friend the poor miserable bastards had in the world. As far as they’re concerned, she’s a twenty-six-year-old blonde nightclub dancer who’s hot for them. It’s a different set-up to what’s happened to those other men who, after all, are only names in a newspaper.’

Long blonde hair. And a red jacket.

‘Those notes,’ I said, ‘on the envelope with Nesbitt’s gear.’

Bob waited, not following me, but hearing the excitement in my voice.

‘He’d written, “Long blonde hair, red jacket,’’ and I’d assumed it was some poor kid he was targeting, like they do. But it wasn’t. It was a description of someone he was going to meet.’ Bob nodded and I realised I was doing the same. We were starting to build up the picture. ‘Do you think it could be a woman?’ Merrilyn Heywood had asked me and I’d said no.

For the next little while I dictated and Bob typed up a transcript of each letter. That way, we could go over and over them without harming any delicate traces of physical evidence on the originals. The transcript I’d give to Charlie as well as our forensic linguist. The originals we’d send over to Document Examination. The State Government lab, just like the one in Canberra, would give us the type of paper, the type of pen used, the name and possibly even the batch number of the ink and just about everything you could think of about those letters except for the one thing we really wanted—the name and address of the writer.

‘I’ll run them over to the lab myself,’ Bob said, ‘then Fingerprints can have a go at them. See if there’s anything interesting.’ Police had learned the hard way not to send questioned documents to Fingerprints first. Some of the processes used in that department render the document useless for further examination.

We went over the events of the night before one more time, with Bob questioning me about my statement, trying to get me to identify what sort of motor cycle I might have heard leaving the crime scene. But all I could really say was that it sounded high-powered and that it was going like the clappers.

‘We need Staro,’ said Bob. ‘We’ve got to find him. He might have seen what happened.’

‘If he did, and the killer knows that he did, I can understand why he’d just want to disappear for a while,’ I said. ‘Staro values his equipment as much as the next man.’

‘Staro hasn’t got the form this killer targets,’ said Bob. ‘And we have no reason to assume the killer saw him.’

‘We don’t know what sort of form Staro might have,’ I reminded him as I picked up the bagged clothes of the lately dead Frank Carmody and wondered how Staro was handling his new sobriety in the face of last night’s incident. ‘Staro has the sort of past that could easily involve sexual abuse. Of him, and by him,’ I said. ‘Poor old Staro’s been for sale for a long time.’ Thinking of the selling of sex reminded me about the second House of Bondage. And,’ I continued, ‘you should know that there are two establishments that go by the name “House of Bondage”.’

Bob raised one of his wild eyebrows. ‘Is that so?’ he said. ‘I wonder why we haven’t heard about it.’

‘Maybe it’s new,’ I said. ‘I plan a visit and I may need to organise a warrant later.’

More words on paper. Words on paper were starting to feature too much in my life lately. And I couldn’t entirely shake the feeling that maybe the anonymous ill-wisher was somehow connected with the letters that now lay on Bob’s desk, awaiting examination. According to my unknown correspondent I was going to be ‘made to’ care. And soon. Were the ‘Rosie’ letters related to that threat in some way? They had been printed, not handwritten, but I knew I had to come clean with my erstwhile partner about this business, much as I hated doing so.

‘Bob,’ I said, as he moved to leave, ‘I’ve had an anonymous letter.’

I told him the gist of it. Better than that, I quoted it because I knew it off by heart. Bob frowned. ‘You’d better bring it in and show me,’ he said.

‘Sarah’s looking at it,’ I said. Before I left, I asked him for the address of Peter Carter, father of the girl Frank Carmody had murdered.

•

At Long Bay, I went through the records with a helpful young officer. Apart from his sister, the only other visitor Carmody had was a Father Dumaresque of St Kilian’s, Padstow.

I wrote the name and address in my notebook and went back to my car. Then I drove to the Schofields address Bob had given me and found Peter Carter’s house, a small timber cottage set on a large block. I walked up to the front door, passing a derelict henhouse on my right and a neglected garden. I knocked at the door and waited. After a while, I knocked again. I waited a little longer, then walked round the back. On a long open veranda, a man was sitting smoking.

‘Hullo,’ I said, ‘I knocked but maybe you didn’t hear me.’

‘I heard you all right,’ said the man. I thought it was Carter but needed to be sure. I pulled out my ID card and waved it at him.

‘Peter Carter?’ I asked.