Jill Jackson - 02 - Voodoo Doll (15 page)

'A
W FUCK
, M
OUSE
, now look what you've done!' Simon Esterhase threw his snooker cue into the rack in disgust. 'I sank the black, man. Why don't you stop bitching for a while? It's getting old.'

'Are you fucking serious?' Dang Huynh, known to most people as Mouse, chewed at his thumbnail. The skin around all of his fingernails was red-raw. 'I'm telling you I can't take anymore of this shit. He's a fucking psycho! What's to stop him from chopping one of us into pieces?'

Esterhase rubbed at his neck. He'd had diarrhoea every day since the Capitol Hill thing, and he just couldn't sleep right. But what was he going to do? Mouse and Tatts were losing it, and it was true that this could get them all killed. They'd all known Cutter was mental since they were kids, but he'd never done anything like this before. Now, though, Esterhase agreed with Mouse that it wouldn't take much for Cutter to turn his radar on them. He winced as images, sounds, flashed into his mind.

Esterhase sat down at his coffee table, chopped up some more pot. The ritual soothed him. He'd smoked twenty cones a day for the past fifteen years. Truth was, now when he had to be straight for some reason, he felt stoned.

Fuck, Mouse had paced the same circle fifty times.

'Man, can you sit down, Mouse? You're making my dick itch.'

'Why did he have to start with the killing? He's not going to stop,' said Mouse. 'How are we going to get out of this? He's going to get caught and we're all going up for fucking murder, man.'

Esterhase knew it. He packed a cone tightly and lit it, his lungs burning as he pulled the hit of marijuana, clean. They had always been scared of Cutter, but you just kind of ignored his sick shit back in the day. They'd all done so much time since then that none of them really knew how bad he'd become. Maybe Cutter didn't even know. The fucker was mad, that was for sure. Esterhase packed another cone.

'Here, Mouse, have this. You'll feel better,' he said, holding the bong out to his friend.

'I don't want it. I'm paranoid enough already!' Mouse wrung his hands. He had dark circles under his eyes and Esterhase noticed grey shot through his greasy dark hair. 'I keep thinking he's gonna break in my house and cut me up.' His voice cracked.

'Well, what do you want to do, Mouse? We go to the cops, we'll go down with him. They won't stop until they get the rest of us.' He lit the bong and had half the cone himself. He stared at Mouse through the smoke, red-eyed. 'We can kill him.'

Esterhase expected Mouse to freak at the suggestion. He, Tatts and Mouse had never done more than give a bloke a good flogging. The machetes were all for show. At least they had been.

Mouse said nothing.

'You wouldn't want to fuck a thing like that up though, now would ya, Mouse?'

'How would we do it?' Mouse's voice was tiny.

'You're fucking kidding me!' Esterhase gave a dead laugh. 'You've thought about it then?'

'What else are we gonna do?' Mouse pleaded. 'We've got to get out of this shit somehow.'

Esterhase looked around his rumpus room. He saw a luxurious, relaxing room to chill out in. In reality, the room was like the rest of the house, crammed with mismatched stolen property, half of it broken, all of it coated in a thin layer of grime. The walls were yellow with cigarette and marijuana smoke.

Esterhase was the pride of his family. The only child to have a job for more than six months straight, and to make it out of the housos. Shit, even his dad had only had a job once for about a year, back when Esterhase was a kid. Removalist too, just like him. But while his father had fucked his back up early, Esterhase had been smart. He'd always got others on the job to do the heavy lifting. The Maoris would work all day for smoko or some speed at knock-off time. And the job was perfect for finding places to do over.

Everything was pretty good in his life, he thought, finishing the rest of the cone.

Except for Cutter.

Lunch had been perfect, really, in every way. Well, except for the food.

Fortunately, Chloe Farrell and Andrew Montgomery had not been interested in the food. A newly retired couple sharing a muffin at the next table in the small café had wriggled closer on their bench seat while watching them. The man even moved his foot to touch his wife's shoe under the table. They'd been that way, once.

Andrew knew he was going to be late back, but he ordered a coffee anyway. Chloe had sparkling mineral water.

'Off the record,' Andrew said, watching her sip her drink through a straw.

'What is?' asked Chloe, ready for another joke, or flirtatious comment.

'A call came in late yesterday about the case.'

Chloe tucked her hair behind her ears. Sat forward.

'It could be nothing. Jane took it at the front desk. I was getting ready to knock off.'

'What was it?'

'Some woman. Anonymous. Gave the name of someone we should be looking at for these home invasions.'

'What was the name?' she asked, palms flat on the table, eyes serious, face angled up to his.

Andrew gave a laugh. 'You're a real little newshound, aren't you?'

'Come on, Andrew. It's my job.'

'Yeah, well, it'd be my job if anyone knew I even told you that much.'

'But you said it could be nothing. If I knew the name, I could dig around. Maybe I could help.'

'You digging around would not help, Chloe. If the tip was straight up, you would not want to go poking a stick into this guy's nest.'

'Is there anything I could say that would get you to give me the name?'

'Baby, I could think of a million things you could say to me that would make me give you anything. But that's not playing fair.'

'Okay,' she said, standing. 'Well, we'd better get back then.'

Andrew's expression was surprised, then hurt.

'I'll pay for lunch if you'll get dinner.' She smiled over her shoulder, as she walked to the cashier.

J
ILL STOOD IN
the doorway after lunch, silently taking in the bank of audiovisual and computing equipment in Gabriel's second bedroom. It wrapped around three walls: PC monitors and TV screens, cameras and tripods, speakers and hard drives. Electrical cords and cables snaked across the floor, climbed walls, and trailed sinuously across most surfaces. A curtain was drawn across the single window, and the room was shadowy. Green and red LED lights blinked rhythmically in the gloom.

Gabriel cleared his throat behind her; she stepped aside. Smiling broadly, he wheeled a second chair into the room, bumping it four-wheel-drive-style over double-adaptors and a couple of magazines. Jill, flattening herself against the bookshelf next to the door, turned and read some of the titles.
Crime Scene Investigation
;
Criminal Profiling
;
Forensic Interviewing and Interrogation
;
Serial Killer Typology
.

'So what sort of cases were you on before this one?' she asked, pulling down a thick tome. She flicked through it before closing it on a page of corpses, a black and white photograph of a child's dead eyes the last image in her mind. She blinked it away.

'Oh, this and that. Same as you I suppose,' he answered, smashing the second chair into a space at one of the terminals. He couldn't quite get it to fit, so she walked over, and with her foot, nudged aside a book caught between the wheel and the desk. The chair bumped hard against the table with Gabriel's final shove, and some of the equipment atop it lurched. 'There!' he grinned delightedly and threw himself onto the seat.

Jill took the other chair as Gabriel pressed buttons and moved a mouse to wake some of the slumbering machines. She looked at the screen in front of Gabriel too late to identify the official-looking logo that preceded the program he had opened.

'Could you just access my email, Jill?' he said, pointing to the monitor in front of her. 'I sent myself the voice recording of the anonymous phone call. It should be in there somewhere.'

She opened his email program, surprised at his lack of concern for his privacy. Probably this isn't his only email account, she thought. She found the MPEG file near the top of his unopened mail and double-clicked. Under it were a couple of the pharmaceutical and penis-enlargement spam emails that also choked her mailbox every morning. It seemed not even all this technology could stop them getting through.

'So.' He pushed his chair back a little from his screen and looked at her. 'What did you think of Isobel Rymill?'

'She seemed even more nervous than her husband,' she said.

Gabriel pulled a USB flash device from his pocket and plugged it into his terminal, where it began downloading a large document. 'Anything else?' he asked, eyes back on his screen.

'Well, I noticed clusters of deception signals.' The words she'd learned from him yesterday seemed cumbersome.

'And they could mean . . .'

'She's hiding something. It could be guilty knowledge, something shameful, or the truth. She might be lying to us, or just holding something of importance back.' Jill felt half-curious and half-annoyed by this oral examination.

'Exactly.' He nodded and smiled slightly.

She waited for him to add something. He seemed delighted by their exchange, but as she had come to learn, he didn't always conclude his train of thoughts aloud.

She waited while he clicked on some icons on his screen, and a computerised drone started up from the terminal as it obeyed his commands. Suddenly he reached straight across her and used the mouse for her computer. His back touched her chest and her mouth was almost on his neck. She pushed her chair backwards, startled by his abrupt invasion of her space, but he continued what he was doing without heeding her movement.

'Just saved the audio MPEG to my machine,' he said, straightening up and turning to face her. 'Remember I told you that if I heard the anonymous caller again I was sure I would know her?'

Jill stared at him, the realisation raising the hairs on her arms. 'Isobel Rymill – she was the one who called and told us to investigate Henry Nguyen?'

He didn't answer, and she watched as he used the program he'd opened to compartmentalise parts of the recording they'd made of Rymill earlier that morning. He created a series of digitised sound bites and lined seven or eight of them up next to the file that held the recording of the anonymous tip-off. He then opened another program and opened two of the files with it. When he pressed 'Enter' the drone of the computer kicked up a notch. Almost immediately a coloured graph and readout appeared on the screen.

'Ninety per cent match,' he said, white teeth flashing. 'Not bad, considering the distortion from the phone call caused by her covering the receiver.'

'Wow,' said Jill, leaning close over Gabriel's shoulder. 'Where'd you get this voice recognition software? I don't think we've got anything that good at work.'

'I know. It's amateur hour in there. What are you gonna do?'

'So, we've got a clear new line of inquiry,' he continued, opening another program. 'We need to know everything about Joss Preston-Jones
and
Isobel Rymill, and we need to know why they so desperately want us to investigate Henry Nguyen.'

Joss had thought his day at work would never end, but he was surprised at how quickly he'd slipped into robot-mode and completed his chores for the day. He'd brushed aside the concerned comments about the fading bruises on his face, and left the office at 4.30 p.m. exactly. He called the house phone, knowing Isobel would not yet be there with Charlie – tonight Charlie had dancing lessons – and left a message indicating that he would not be home for dinner. Then he turned his mobile phone off and caught the lift down to the employees-only gym. He changed out of his work clothes and shoved them into his backpack. Imagining Isobel's face when she saw the clothes, he took the trousers out again and folded them neatly.

He went to the weight rack wearing a singlet and shorts and loaded fifteen kilos onto the hand weights. He moved rapidly through six sets of fifty bicep curls, dissociating through the pain, then hit the showers. He held his face under the water, eyes open, breathing in the steam.

He could see only Cutter.

He changed into jeans, a dark tee-shirt and runners. And for the second time in two days, Joss went back to his old world. He caught the train from Central to Cabramatta.

Isobel had grudgingly told Joss the things she'd learned about Henry Nguyen.

'I don't see why you need to know this stuff,' she'd protested. 'The police have it now.'

In Cabramatta two days before, he'd visited a medical centre. Isobel had found Cutter's medical records and they showed monthly visits to the centre, mostly on Thursday afternoons. The timing was about right, but Joss, waiting at a bus stop directly across from the front door, had seen no sign of Nguyen. He'd had no firm plan as to what he would do if he did. All he knew was that his life had changed completely since the home invasion, and he was not going to let it fall apart without doing everything he could to stop it.

He considered staking out Cutter's grandmother's house. When they were kids, he, Fuzzy and Esterhase had dropped Cutter there at around five one morning using a car they'd stolen the night before. Half asleep, they'd driven the car over a couple of streets and dumped it at a soccer field before walking home. Joss remembered that he'd helped his drunken mum from the lounge up to her bed before he'd gone to bed for the rest of the day. He shook his head. What a way to grow up.

He decided against the trip to Cutter's old home. He could think of no obvious information he could get from the family at this point. It was unlikely Cutter still lived there anyway. Joss needed to know more about his associates – who he hung out with now. Maybe he could find out the name of the arsehole that'd stood on his head at Andy Wu's house.

He got off the train at Cabramatta station and the smells of his past slapped him in the face. The area had been predominantly Italian when he was a kid, but since then Asian, and particularly Vietnamese, communities had been steadily migrating to the suburb. Now, most shop signs were in both English and Vietnamese. The rest were in Vietnamese only.

He made his way to the pub closest to the station. Back then, he and his friends had sold stolen watches and cameras, typewriters and aftershave to the patrons of this pub. It could be that some of the old crew still came here.

The ground felt gummy out the front of the hotel. Because of too many broken heads from the bashings and paralytic falls, the council had replaced the pavement with the rubber material used in children's playgrounds.

Joss left the last of the warm twilight behind him and stepped inside the pub. Like most hotels, it was always the same time once you entered those doors. Ten a.m. or midnight, it all felt the same, with the aim of aiding the punters to forget the troubles of the outside world, kick back for a while, lose some more money.

Cigarette smoke already impregnating his tee-shirt and whispering its way down his lungs, he took a seat at the end of the main bar, facing the door. Determined to ask for a light beer and sit back to sip it slowly, he found himself instead ordering a schooner of full-strength VB. Ten minutes later he asked for the same again and for two packets of chips. He hoped the grease would counteract some of the alcohol.

Tragedy performed a series of vignettes around the hotel. A woman sat with two men, her features sliding off her face with her lipstick, gazing with naked desperation from one man to the other as they spoke the inscrutable language of the drunk. Her expression altered to one of begging appeasement when she had their attention. He twice watched her flinch when one of the men moved his arm suddenly to sneeze, to make a point.

A bloke in the fluorescent shirt that was the uniform of unskilled labourers kicked his workboot in disgust against the base of the poker machine he was feeding. When he stood up from his stool, Joss was surprised to see he looked no older than twenty or so. He made his way to the front of the room, but instead of leaving, he withdrew two fifties from the ATM near the door. He returned to his stool, slid in a note, his jaw slack, his eyes on fire, as though he was watching pornography.

A wizened man laughed into his glass on a stool next to Joss. A section of greasy hair that had long abandoned its comb-over position slipped in and out of his beer as he drank. The bald spot on his head was beaded with sweat, despite the refrigerated air. A dark area at his groin signalled that he'd found the trip to the toilet a waste of good drinking time. He's probably a digger, thought Joss, draining the last of his beer. The thought made him want to order another, but he figured he'd use the toilet instead. He swayed a little when he got off the stool.

He splashed his face with cold water before leaving the bathroom.

Eyes always on the door, he saw a face from his past walk into the pub.

Fuck, what was his name?

The man walked towards the bar, not looking in Joss's direction. Joss ordered another beer and took it back to a small table; he angled his chair towards the bar. The man looked around the room after he'd ordered his drink. His eyes moved past Joss, then whipped back again, his obvious movement almost comical to someone trained in surveillance.

Joss sipped.

'Hey, man,' the bloke had his drink and was making his way over. What was his frigging name? 'Aren't you Joss?'

'Yeah. Rodney Harris?' said Joss, remembering at the very last moment.

'Yeah, man! How the fuck have you been? What are you doing back in Cabra, dog?'

Rodney Harris was a wannabe back in the day. He would try to hang around whenever he saw Joss and his friends, and sometimes they'd let him. Other times they'd tell him to piss off, or make him steal them some food before he could stay. Today, his features were blurred, his once-blond hair thin, translucent. He spoke in the nasal gaol-whine of the streets. The heels of his shoes were rounded with wear.

'Oh, you know, nothin,' Joss tried to dumb down. 'Thought I'd come see if there's any action around here, you know.'

Harris looked at him sidelong, and took a sip of his dark-coloured drink.

Joss pushed out the chair opposite with his foot. 'You're not still drinking Jackies are ya?' he said.

Harris laughed. 'Yeah, man, always.' He took the seat.

'So what have you been doing?' Joss asked before the other man could. 'I haven't seen you for years.'

'Since we were kids, dog. Not since Fuzzy died. How fucked up was that, man?'

'Yeah.'

'I've been doing shit. You know, this and that. I got a coupla kids.' He put his hand-rolled cigarette on the edge of an ashtray on the table, pulled out a flat, shredding wallet and showed Joss a green-tinged laminated photo of a young girl and boy. 'Course they'd be older than this now,' he said, looking at the photo. 'Their slut mum took off with them to Queensland when I was inside.'

'Yeah?' said Joss. 'Bitch. They're all the fuckin' same.'

'Too right, dog.' They drank together. 'So what about you? Where'd you piss off to? We heard your mum killed herself. Sorry, man.'

'Nah. Crazy bitch. She just threw herself in front of a car, but she survived. Probably dead now though, for all I know. Who cares? I got locked up for being uncontrollable.'

'No waaay.' Harris laughed. 'Unlucky. So what brings you back to the 'hood?'

Joss inwardly cringed at the American gangster-speak. Didn't these idiots ever grow up? Harris drained his drink, crunched the ice.

'Let me get you another one, man.' Joss stood and made his way over to the bar. He shouldn't have another, but this was a critical point. He had to ask about Cutter. He ordered another beer, and, overly careful, carried the drinks back to the table. The rigid walk of the almost drunk.

'It's a spinout to see you, Rod,' he said when he got back to the table. 'Do any of the old boys still hang around here?'

'Yeah, man.' Harris listed off a few names, all of them familiar, none of them the right one.