Hell to Pay (16 page)

Hirsch smiled at Gaddis. “I mean, your investigators did check the IMEI number, right? Checked the IMEI of this phone against the one that was supposed to be in the evidence locker?”

Strangling his words, Gaddis said, “I would have thought the first aid box a strange place to keep a phone and two and a half thousand dollars.”

Hirsch shrugged. “Like I said, I have no idea what these items were doing in my car, if indeed they were there in the first place.”

Gaddis waved a folder at him. “My officers conducted a proper search, every stage photographed and witnessed, with no breaks in the chain of custody.”

“Oh,” Hirsch said. “Fair enough. So you’d have a record of all the serial number of each hundred-dollar note?”

Gaddis didn’t bite. He froze, then left the room, giving off a
someone’s fucked up
air. The grey man contemplated Hirsch. Fidgeting and murmurs. Then Gaddis came back. He said, “Are you pulling a swiftie on us, Constable? A dishonest man must expect dishonesty in others. You thought you’d embarrass the department by swapping the phone and the cash?”

“Well, you do investigate devious people, sir,” Hirsch said. He reached into the briefcase, took out his laptop. “Like the devious person on this bit of CCTV footage. It shows a woman opening my car and leaning in. Don’t know who she is. Your daughter, sir? Did you put her up to it? She’s got your thin nerviness.”

A
FTERWARDS ROSIE DELISLE GRABBED
him.

“You are such a smartarse. Gaddis is furious. He thinks you swapped the phone and the money, but knows he can’t prove it, yet also knows you were set up.” She gave him a twist of her mouth. “You come out ahead, don’t you? I assume the cash they found is yours? You’ll keep the original cash, change the hundreds each time you buy something? And you get the latest iPhone?”

“We’ll see,” Hirsch said.

Rosie shrugged. “You could be bent. You’ve got the gene. And the stink isn’t going away anytime soon.”

“Fuck them,” Hirsch said.

“Another day,” Rosie said. “Someone I want you to meet.”

She grabbed him by the forearm, dragged him to where the other woman hovered, glum and hostile. “Paul, this is Inspector Croome.”

Hirsch went very still. Here was some fresh hell, coming on top of being grilled by Gaddis for three days. “Of?” he said. All
things would flow from knowing which department Croome represented.

Croome’s eyes were like pebbles but less humane. “Sex crimes.”

Hirsch flinched. He’d had his share of confused and confusing sexual encounters, but didn’t think he’d broken any laws.

Rosie took pity. Her pretty hand rested on his forearm. “We’d like you to stick around for another twenty-four hours.”

“Is that a request?”

“Not entirely,” Croome said.

“So, an order,” Hirsch said.

“Something like that,” Croome said, handing him a slip of paper. “Be at that address noon tomorrow. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going, don’t let yourself be followed.”

THROUGH WITH HUMORING HIMSELF, Hirsch relinquished the original iPhone and $2500 to Rosie, together with his photographs of them
in situ
, obtained a written receipt, and returned to his motel.

The next day he took a succession of short taxi trips to the parking area of a strip of shops in Tea Tree Gully. Through a door marked
MAINTENANCE
and up a flight of stairs. Knocked on the only door at the top.

Rosie DeLisle answered, leading him into a sitting room decorated in 1970s motel. “Nice.”

“No it’s not.”

“Safe house?”

“Yes.”

Croome was standing by the window. “Sit, please, Constable.”

There were armchairs and a sofa free but Hirsch chose a stiff chair from the little corner dining table. With a glance at each other, the women joined him. “Inspector Croome has a request,” Rosie said.

“Why the cloak and dagger?”

“Things will move easier and quicker if you sit and listen and shut the fuck up,” Croome said.

She still thinks I’m bent, or a bit deviated
, Hirsch thought. He said, “Language,” and folded his arms. “Fire away.”

“You’re stationed at Tiverton.”

Hirsch said nothing. She hadn’t asked a question, merely stated the bleeding obvious, since that was probably his personnel file in her lap. Croome shot a look at Rosie DeLisle as if wanting her to run interference.

“Paul,” DeLisle said, leaning her slender elbows on the table.

“Yes?”

“The inspector would like you to tell us about Sergeant Kropp and his crew.”

The anger came on quickly, as it often did these days, but Hirsch expressed it coldly, a withdrawal. He didn’t move or speak or act. When he trusted himself he said, “I’m not a spy. I’m not a whistle-blower.”

“No one’s saying you are.”

“Everyone’s saying it. And you’re about to ask me to blow the whistle.”

“Paul,” Croome said, not having earned the right to use his first name, “we have a situation and no means of monitoring it.”

“But sex crimes? Kropp and his boys?”

“I’ll explain in a minute,” Croome said. She was a little disordered, as if she’d expected plain sailing. “First, do you think you could paint us a picture, for want of a better term?” She glanced at Rosie. “Internal Investigations have received several complaints about the Redruth police but what we lack is context.”

Hirsch stared at her. “Before I say or do anything I need to know if either of you are acquainted in any way, shape or form with Kropp, Nicholson or Andrewartha, or the new woman, Jennifer Dee. No bullshit, okay?”

“No.”

“Never served with them?”

“No.”

“You’re not a second cousin or ex-girlfriend or ex-academy buddy with any of them?”

“No.”

He glanced at Rosie DeLisle. “You?”

“Never met them, Paul, never served with them, no relationship with them, however tenuous.”

Hirsch chewed on his bottom lip

Croome said, “Please, Constable, it’s very important.”

Hirsch liked her better now, marginally. “I can give you local gossip, that’s all.”

Croome’s face said she’d noted the fancy footwork. If he was merely repeating gossip, he wasn’t a spy or a whistle-blower. “Fair enough.”

Hirsch gathered himself. “Look, they’re not popular. Arrogant, heavy-handed, and this is a sleepy country town. It could be argued that Kropp has been there too long, has networked his way into it so thoroughly and has so much power, he tends to think of the place as his.”

“Like Quine?” Rosie said.

Hirsch nodded. “Like Quine.” He considered his words: “Kropp needs order,” he said, “but he and the others overdo it with unnecessary speed and drunk-driving traps, on-the-spot fines, screaming in people’s faces even if all they’d done was jaywalk.”

Then he recalled the way Nicholson and Andrewartha had talked about Melia Donovan and her brother, and their treatment of Jenny Dee. He cocked his head at Croome. “If you’re a female or black you’re probably a bit of a target.”

They fell silent.
Is Kropp another Quine?
Hirsch wondered. He pictured the full, frothing intensity of Quine, the stamp of his unimaginable expertise, but couldn’t quite match Kropp with that. By the same token, hard men like Quine and Kropp could be found in police stations all around the country.

“Care to elaborate?”

Hirsch’s instinct was to shut up. Impressions were dangerous
if there was no substance to them. But impressions were all he had. “I don’t have hard facts. I don’t know any teenage girls.”

“Yes you do,” Croome said, and Hirsch didn’t like the way she said it. He waited.

“Melia Donovan and Gemma Pitcher.”

Hirsch waited. Was the older man in Melia Donovan’s life a local copper?

“Paul,” Rosie said, “it’s been alleged the Redruth officers demand sexual favors of young girls in return for dropping charges they might be facing. Minor charges like shoplifting, drunkenness, possession …”

“So if you could get a bit closer to your colleagues,” Croome said, “you–”

Hirsch ignored her and flared at DeLisle. “The term ‘false pretenses’ comes to mind. I’ve helped you people enough. Consider this meeting over.”

“Paul,” said Rosie soothingly, “there’s someone we’d like you to meet.”

Croome got to her feet and entered a short corridor at the end of the room. She tapped on a door, cracked it open, stuck her head in. Hirsch heard murmurs and then she was standing back and making a
this way
gesture with one arm.

A teenage girl emerged.

“There’s nothing to fear,” Croome said, gently ushering the girl to the sofa and settling her into it. Rosie left the table and sat beside her, giving the girl a smile of warm brilliance, then Croome sat, and now Hirsch had the three of them staring at him from the sofa.

“Paul, I’d like you to meet Emily Hobba.”

Hobba looked barely fifteen but might have been older. She was pretty in an unformed, second-glance way, with a kid’s open round face, long brown hair falling from either side of a ragged center part. Her frame was thin, almost bony, inside a lilac T-shirt, a scrap of floral miniskirt and half a dozen clanking bangles. She caught him looking and immediately
gave him a lopsided smile. Startled, he struggled not to return it. It wasn’t quite neutral, that smile.

And as if she’d promptly forgotten him, Hobba took out a mobile phone and in seconds was working it, texting crazily with a faint grin. Hirsch glanced at Croome, then Rosie, raising an eyebrow. They shrugged minutely as if to say,
It’s the way it is, nothing we can do about it
.

Rosie placed a hand on Emily’s forearm. Long, tanned, slender fingers. Hirsch looked away from them, concentrated as she said, “Late last year, Emily got involved in a …” she hesitated “… scene involving some other young girls and a number of men.”

Emily lifted her head and said clearly, eyes bright and clear, “Sex scene.”

“Indeed,” Rosie said.

“The men wore masks, we wore nothing.”

Hirsch thought he should chip in. “Where was this?”

Emily shrugged. “Here and there. People’s houses. I mean, I was totally wasted, you know? Out of it.”

“She means Adelaide,” Croome said. “Inner suburbs, outer suburbs.”

“Sometimes the country,” Hobba said, anxious to put her right. “We’d be picked up in this big car and stay away a couple of days. Everything laid on, party, party, party. I’d be that sore.”

The country. Hirsch said, “Where in the country, Emily?”

“How would I know?”

Hirsch frowned at DeLisle and Croome. Croome said, “Tell Paul what you saw in the newspaper.”

Hobba brightened. “Oh yeah. Okay. Well, you know that girl what got run over, I reckernized her.”

“Melia Donovan.”

“I reckernized her.”

“She was at one of the parties in the country?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Who else was there?”

Bored, Hobba said, “There was this one other chick.”

“Was her name Gemma?”

“Dunno. Maybe.”

Croome interrupted. “Emily nearly died of an overdose after one of these weekend parties. Someone dumped her outside a hospital in the Barossa Valley. It threw a little scare into you, didn’t it, Em? She told a counselor and the counselor contacted us.”

Hirsch looked to the girl for confirmation. She shrugged and gave him a whisper of a bat of the eyelids.

“What was Gemma’s role?”

“I dunno … Anal? Golden showers? She did what we did.”

“I mean, was there any sense that she recruited Melia?”

“Nup.”

“How many times did you attend the same party as Melia Donovan?”

“I dunno, it’s a bit of a blur, maybe only once.”

“When was this?”

“What’s with all the questions? Don’t you believe me? He doesn’t believe me.”

“Em, it’s all right, he’s come into this new, he needs to fill in the gaps.”

“Well he can stop with the questions.”

Croome said, “Emily, I know it’s a long shot, a lot’s happened, but if you saw photographs of the men who might have been involved, would you recognize body shape, bearing, body language, do you think?”

Emily gave a teenage shrug. “I was like totally out of it. I just have this feeling of like black masks over their eyes and this one guy wearing a uniform.”

Croome and DeLisle stared at Hirsch as if to say,
Now can you see why we want your help?

Hirsch said, “He arrived in a uniform? You caught only a glimpse of it?”

Emily snorted. “He wore it like the whole time, like rubbing our faces in it. I need the loo.”

She leapt from the sofa and disappeared into a room off the hallway. Hirsch watched her go. “How did Emily get involved? Did someone recruit her?”

“A girl called Lily Humphreys, they were in a youth training programme together,” Croome said. “Humphreys got out first, took Emily under her wing when she was released. What that boiled down to was, ‘Would you like to party with these cool guys I know?’ Emily said yes. They did this a few times over several months, city and rural locations. Sex, booze, cocaine, probably GHB. Then one day Emily wakes up in a hospital in the Barossa Valley, sore and torn and bruised. She mends slowly, but starts to have flashbacks. They scare her. She puts them together with the state of her body and confesses things to a counselor who then gets in touch with us.”

“Flashbacks.”

“Men wearing masks, someone getting rough with her and another telling him to go easy, things like that.”

“So speak to Lily Humphreys.”

“Disappeared.”

“Disappeared as in she’s probably lying dead somewhere, or disappeared as in address unknown?”

“The latter. Packed all her things and hopped on a plane to the Gold Coast, according to Emily.”

“When?”

“While Em was in hospital.”

“She got spooked.”

“Yes.”

“It would be worth checking to see if Gemma Pitcher was in youth training with either of them.”

Croome smiled. “One step ahead of you. Humphreys and Pitcher were there at the same time, but before Emily’s time.”

Hirsch glanced at Rosie DeLisle. “Gemma’s disappeared. I’ve done all I can to find her, you’ve got better resources than I have.”