Disappear (20 page)

‘How’s the investigation going? Any further word from this special unit you spoke of?’

‘No. I’ve begun to doubt whether that will change. I know it’s still early days, but my feeling is they’re stumped, and they’re busy enough with dozens of other cases. So I’m taking matters into my own hands.’

‘That sounds dangerous.’

‘Not at all. I’ve hired a private investigator.’

‘Did you speak to Dad about this? I’m sure he could help.’

‘He’s got enough to worry about. You both have. This is something I have to do for myself.’

Roger nodded his understanding. ‘If you’re sure.’

‘Nothing may come of it,’ Jennifer added realistically, ‘but I have to try. And this guy comes highly recommended. The first thing he asked to see was Brian’s old business records. He wants to go right back to the source.’

‘You still have them?’ Roger sounded surprised.

She explained that she did.

Roger made the call, confirming the dinner reservations, then rose hurriedly from his chair. ‘We’d better get going if we’re to make the appointment on time. You know, it’ll be strange seeing Katrina after all these years.’

‘I expect it will.’

They headed across town in Roger’s car. As he drove, Roger confided, ‘There’s still times when I miss Brian, Jen. I’ve never had a close friend like him since.’

Jennifer knew exactly what he meant. A part of her had never stopped missing Brian. She smiled warmly at Roger and looked deep into his compassionate eyes. Minutes later they arrived at St. Vincent’s Hospital for their meeting with Doctor Katrina Wells.

The phone rang, shrieking across the quiet apartment in the mid afternoon. Rory turned away from his female companion, sat on the corner of the bed and reached for his cell phone. ‘Hello.’ He didn’t pull a sheet around himself as he spoke. He was unconcerned about his nakedness.

‘Rory, got somethin’ special, really special,’ Hughie Johnson’s thin voice cackled over the line, a multitude of street noises fighting for equal volume in the background. ‘Dug this up from the public prosecutor’s file at the Queensland courts. Back in the nineties, a dozen ex-Southern Star miners claimed medical damages against the mine.’

‘Medical damages?’

‘Asbestos poisoning,’ Johnson leapt in excitedly. ‘Case dragged on, no one particularly interested in the plight of these guys, y’know, the way things sometimes are. None of them could afford legal help, and Southern Star used a battery of lawyers to drag the thing out.’

‘This isn’t news, Hughie. There are industrial cases like that everywhere. Sob stories for the current affairs shows, not what I’m looking for.’

‘I know. There’s more.’

‘Then get on with it.’ Rory muttered an obscenity under his breath. He’d used Hughie Johnson from time to time for fieldwork in the northern state. The old timer was a stringer for a suburban newspaper group in Queensland, lowly paid, always chasing the big story, never getting it.

‘Henry Kaplan buys the mine mid-Nineties, right? Suddenly the cases are rushed before the courts, half the prosecution’s files containing key evidence go missing. The judge clears the mine of any negligence. Inconclusive evidence, right? Rumour mill says the judge was paid off by Kaplan Corp. and that the files were nicked by Kaplan’s thugs.’

‘Nasty story. But proof? Any proof?’

‘Nothin’ concrete. But I done some more diggin’. This judge is some turkey named Edsell. Checked with the credit register, the Corporate Affairs people and one of my mates in Tax. Seems that six months after all this, Judge Edsell buys a little holiday home in Vanuatu. Worth a cool million. No one knows ‘cause no one goes ‘round checkin’ on judges. Why should they?’

‘You’ve got documentation on all this?’

‘Yep.’

‘Email it to me. The details will fit in nicely with the first installment of my series on Kaplan. Have you a contact at the Corporate Affairs Commission up here?’

‘Sure.’

‘Tell him what you’ve got.’

‘No problem. He’ll be very interested. The whole thing stinks.’

‘I’ll visit the Industrial Court tomorrow. I’ll tell them the info has been given to the Corporate Affairs people. With any luck, a low-level inquiry will be underway within weeks. I’ll ask them if that’s the case and I expect they’ll say “no comment”.’

Johnson laughed. ‘And you’ll print that quote in this first installment. All of a sudden a low-level inquiry becomes a high-level one, and we’re riding the crest of a major, breaking story.’

‘You got it. Great work, Hughie. Thanks.’ Rory rang off. He hadn’t expected something so substantial so soon. And not from Hughie Johnson. It just went to show you could never pick where the breakthroughs would come from, you had to keep all your options open.

He turned back to the woman on the bed. He’d been about to mount her for the second time when the phone had rung. Helen Shawcross wasn’t any more concerned about her nakedness than Rory. She was in a sitting position, her knees pulled up, revealing the dark patch between her legs. Her arms were folded across her knees, pulling them in tightly against her breasts. ‘Sounded interesting.’

She shook her head, tossing back the mane of blonde hair. There was a creamy texture to her olive skin, one that tempted Rory, siren-like, to taste its surface, as a child might lick cream from a bowl.

‘Interesting? Oh, yeah. One of my northern contacts has some heavy duty stuff on Southern Star.’ He crawled across the bed, head low, and when he reached her his tongue flicked out, trailing her arm, her shoulder, the side of her neck.

Helen watched the smooth shift of the muscles in his calves and thighs as he leaned across her. She ran the tips of her fingers in a straight line down his skin, from the matted hair on his chest to the solid flat belly. The nearness of him, the touch, the musky scent of his manliness, aroused her all over again. She had known at the luncheon the previous Sunday that she wanted to go to bed with Rory McConnell as soon as possible. There had been an immediate physical attraction to Rory; and an immediate contempt for his girlfriend, Carly Parkes. Spoilt little rich girl who fancied herself an urban revolutionary. Helen wanted Rory, and she wanted to spite his silly little piece of fluff.

And there was something else.

The danger of it.

Rory’s girlfriend was the daughter of one of Henry Kaplan’s friends. Helen knew it was no coincidence that her dalliances were always with someone she met through Henry - her rich, powerful, dynamic boyfriend and provider.

But she was her own woman, she made sure of that. Maybe one day she’d deliberately let him find out, just to prove it. Oh yes.

She loved the danger of it.

She tingled all over as Rory’s tongue slithered down her body, each touch of his flesh against hers erasing any last, hidden vestiges of innocence. ‘Northern contacts,’ she repeated. ‘You have been busy. Is that all I am? One of your contacts for information on Henry Kaplan?’ Another woman might have been offended, but Helen Shawcross found the idea appealing.

‘If you want to be,’ Rory said. Carrying on the conversation didn’t distract him in the slightest from giving her pleasure. His tongue was joined now by his fingers and he knew all the right places to tease and caress, making her gasp in delight. She stretched her long, lithe form over the bed and Rory moved eagerly into position over her.

‘You want to know about his previous wives?’ Helen said, a reference to an earlier conversation.

‘There were three,’ Rory commented, almost absent mindedly, his attention more focused on their lovemaking. ‘We never hear anything about them. What about the first? Roger’s mother. You’d think she’d be around somewhere.’

‘This northern contact of yours,’ Helen said, ‘male or female?’

‘Male.’

‘I suppose he gets paid for his efforts?’

‘The publisher looks after that.’

‘Who’s going to look after me for my investigative work?’

‘Me.’ Rory’s head tilted lower, his tongue pushing deeper and harder.

Helen sighed. ‘Oh yes. There. Right there.’

‘The second wife accused him of bashing her,’ Rory continued, ‘but dropped the allegation when a very large financial settlement was agreed to as part of the divorce.’

‘I know.’ Helen found her voice, in between the heavy breaths. ‘He told me. Henry told me all his wives were bitches who didn’t understand him. That I was the first woman who was a real soul mate to him.’

‘You believe him?’

‘I couldn’t care less one way or the other. I won’t be hanging around long enough after our marriage to find out.’

Rory was incredibly aroused by the fact that Helen Shawcross was a shameless gold-digger. ‘The third wife,’ he said, ‘appears to have been a diversion he tired of just as quickly. The first wife?’

‘He never mentions her,’ Helen said, ‘but I can change that. Get him talking.’ She smiled mischievously, like the cat that got the cream. ‘If the price is right.’

Rory’s tongue moved again, exploring secret places. ‘Oh yes, yes,’ she cried out.

‘Then you’ll be finding out lots of things for me, Mata Hari,’ Rory said. He shifted the weight of his body so that his limbs moulded with hers. ‘Because the payment has only just begun.’

‘I’ve run a printout for you,’ Teddy Vanda said, lounging back in his seat at the computer console.

Lachlan scanned the sheet. Teddy’s cross-reference search had spewed forth the names of four others, missing for over eighteen years until recently found. They had been discovered at intervals of between three and four weeks apart, over a period of a few months. Always in the northern or north-western districts of Sydney, the same general area where Monique Brayson had been found. Each had been strangled with wire.

There was no other information. The individual files had been flagged as classified by the HQ Special Unit, access therefore being denied on the general police database. But Lachlan had no doubt that in each case, the victim would have appeared to be the same age now as when they had disappeared.

He felt his flesh crawl. He hadn’t experienced a sensation like this since his childhood. A film about zombies had made his skin tingle the same way. The film had been a TV rerun of one of those laughable B-grades from the 1950s but it had brought real horror and revulsion to his young, impressionable mind.

Together with Trish Van Helegen and Bill Dawson, this brought the number of garrotte murders to seven. Five of them, like Brian Parkes, had been long term missing persons. Two had not.

The sixth of the newly discovered missing people was Brian Parkes. There were two notable differences. He hadn’t been killed by garrotte. And he’d been found in the southern suburbs, not the northern. Otherwise, the similarities were consistent.

Whenever the long term missing people had turned up - deceased - John Rosen had been on the scene within twenty-four hours. He’d taken the cases under his wing, assigning them to his special team.

Lachlan guessed that Rosen’s team made enquiries, filed reports, followed the official line to the book - but with nothing to go on they ran up the same dead ends. The cases remained open. Relatives were kept in the dark as much as possible. Few details were released to the media. Various coroners had been called in to establish cause of death - quite likely, they hadn’t been aware of any age discrepancy - and the autopsy results were quickly removed by Rosen and absorbed by his unit, along with the investigative reports.

And Rosen had revealed none of this to Lachlan.

‘I have to admit,’ Teddy said, ‘I didn’t expect the search to come up with anything like this.’

‘I’m not sure I did either,’ Lachlan confided.

‘The details on all these cases is classified. But you knew exactly when and where to run the search,’ Teddy noted. ‘Without that input at the data entry stage, the computer wouldn’t have turned up these names.’

‘I saw a connection between Brian Parkes and Monique Brayson, but not enough. Needed more.’

‘Now you have it. So what’s the story, Neil?’

It was the first time since he’d known Teddy that Lachlan detected a serious tone to his voice.

‘Every one of these cases disappeared into the special unit at HQ.’

There was no question that John Rosen, aware of a connection between these disappearances and killings, had moved swiftly and covertly to ensure the connection didn’t become general police or public knowledge.

‘Keep it under your hat for the time being,’ Lachlan said, ‘until I’ve had a chance to look into it further.’

‘You know I will.’

Lachlan studied the printout again, not wanting to believe his eyes. With many homicides being documented monthly, it was unlikely anyone else on the force had discovered the similarities in these murders. And, no one had reason to question John Rosen’s orders.

Lachlan was reminded of the 1980’s Yorkshire Ripper case in England. There had been investigations into the Ripper murders by different detectives in different areas over a period of a few years. Peter Sutcliffe had been interviewed by various officers - on eight separate occasions - but this obvious link throughout the paperwork had gone unnoticed. Sutcliffe had eventually been arrested after he’d been seen acting suspiciously, not because the link had come to light.

Centralising information on computer had come a long way toward ensuring that couldn’t happen. But in this case John Rosen had manipulated the computer system for the opposite effect.

Lachlan had known Rosen for twenty years. In his younger days he’d regarded Rosen as a father figure. To Lachlan, Rosen represented all that was honest and dependable about the police force. Now, in a single moment, Lachlan felt a storm of doubt unlike anything he’d known before. He felt as though he were being torn apart inside. Confronted by these details, he simply couldn’t ignore the implication: John Rosen didn’t want these crimes investigated.

Tall and huskily voiced, Doctor Katrina Wells had a warm presence that put Jennifer at ease immediately. Appraising her, Jennifer found it hard to picture the much younger Doctor Wells with a younger Roger. They didn’t seem at all suited.