Only the Dead (17 page)

‘About what?’

‘I’m struggling to reconcile this on a moral level.’

‘Which part?’

He smiled weakly, shrugged. ‘The breaking and entering. The theft.’

‘McCarthy’s a shitbag.’

‘That’s subjective. Stealing stuff isn’t. There’s no crime in being an arsehole.’

‘Look. I went out on a job with him tonight. He used drugs uncovered in an illegal search to coerce information out of a witness. He physically assaulted a guy in the course of an interview.’

He shrugged again. ‘It’s happened before. It’s happened worse.’

‘I know it’s happened worse because he’s probably the one responsible.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You say he assaulted this guy during an interview. What did you do?’

‘Pulled a gun on him.’

‘On McCarthy?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Oh, Jesus.’ He pushed hair off his brow. ‘You’re not serious.’

Devereaux nodded. ‘You might be getting a new boss.’

Grayson was shaking his head, not listening. ‘I can’t deal with this. I can’t deal with this. What if they track the files you stole here? You’ll land me in a bunch of shit.’

‘Nothing will be tracked here.’

Grayson opened the door, took a step out into the corridor. ‘Look, I sympathise, I really do. If you say the guy’s bent, you’re probably right. But I just can’t get involved. Like, I can’t have anything to do with this.’

Devereaux didn’t answer.

‘I’ve got a family, man. I mean, far as I’m concerned, ignorance is bliss.’

He stood with his back to the door and pulled his tie up over his head. ‘I’m going to draw a line under it there. I don’t want to discuss it with you, I don’t want to run decoys while you burgle offices, I don’t want to do late-night printer runs.’ He gestured at the screen. ‘Do whatever you need, but that’s the end of it.’

He moved away from the door and called from the end of the hallway. ‘You can let yourself out.’

He did let himself out. The house was dark when he left. He drove home in the quiet, radio off, just thinking. The ghost
of a dead man right there in the car with him. When he got home he sat on the couch under a reading light and started in on the paperwork. It was after eleven p.m. He could feel the weight of the day, but he knew he wouldn’t sleep if he left the file for tomorrow.

He scanned photographs: street-perspective shots of a house off Swanson Road, close-in images of two men dead and bloodied by the entry. A crew cab truck abandoned in the yard, doors open, keys in. He read witness accounts and got a sense of chronology: six a.m., January thirtieth, two armed men had driven the truck onto the property. Shooting ensued, hence the bodies out front. The guys from the truck went inside the house. More shots were heard. They exited a minute or so later, whereupon a third man in a gold Nissan sedan collected them at the kerb and drove them away.

Police reports: the dead men out front were cops. Constable Ian Riley, Senior Sergeant Kyle Miller. A third murdered man found in the living room of the premises was identified as one William Rankin. Rankin had a criminal background: armed robbery, possession of stolen goods, assault. Scene examination notes: the attackers had used shotguns, and recovered all spent shells. A strange precaution, given they’d left a truck in the front yard.

He read until half past eleven that night. Then he turned the reading light off and sat there in the dark. He didn’t know what time he went to sleep, but he stayed awake a long time.

W
EDNESDAY
, 15 F
EBRUARY
, 6.58
A.M
.

W
itness work. Duvall rose early and donned the funeral suit, no tie. It struck him as a good look: sharp, not oppressively formal. He downed a canned peach breakfast, and packed a site-visit carry bag: business cards, the laptop, a cut-down version of his own case file. He left just after seven and drove south to town, turned west out towards Henderson, traffic still sluggish after waking up.

Newspaper coverage of the January thirtieth shooting had been scant, but he’d managed to glean the street name. Quarter to eight in the morning, he turned into the little cul-de-sac, just south of Swanson. It was nondescript housing. Only homicide could ever have found it fame. He slowed and checked frontages. The address hadn’t been published: he ran mental comparisons against his paltry file photos to try to get a fix. The car engine held a low murmur. It was an old Commodore, ’nineties vintage, a typical CIB pool car circa his retirement. If nothing else, it made him feel authentic.

He found the place midway along the street. Single-storey, deep porch, twin grassed-over wheel ruts across the front lawn. He parked further up the street and walked back. It was full daylight, sun bright amid neat blue powder-coat surrounds. Cars passed, faces blanked by thoughts of yet another nine-to-five
obligation. No other foot traffic: murder makes for good pedestrian management.

He stood at the kerb and surveyed the house. A few doors up across the street, an old guy in a mid thigh-length dressing gown claimed his morning paper, eased away hunched and bow-legged. Duvall stepped up onto the porch. Dry boards squeaked at his weight. He saw bloodstain shadow: dark irregularities implied seepage. He stepped to one side and tried to take it all in, identified two overlapping patterns.

He ran his hand over the woodwork. Dimples in the grain: maybe sunken nail heads, maybe shotgun pellets, extracted and plastered over. He stepped back. Too random for a nail pattern: odds on a half-load of buckshot.

He stepped onto the lawn and crouched over the wheel ruts. They were deep and harsh, grass growth a little balder towards the house, like a front-wheel skid had ripped down through the topsoil. Impossible to tell whether they’d been inflicted the morning of January thirtieth, but they looked recent enough. He stayed on his haunches and theorised. Pellet damage in the front of the house implied gunfire from the direction of the yard. Maybe a sudden lurch in off the street from a heavy vehicle, a shotgun round out a side window.

He looped the house on foot and found no further exterior damage. He checked the street again. The guy with the paper had wandered back out to his letterbox, front page snapped open waist-high, remaining sections rolled beneath his upper arm. His presence made front door entry too risky. The ranch slider at the rear was bolted solidly from inside. Which left the side door as the only real option. Frosted glass with a neat butterfly imprint: he smashed an elbow through and reached in to free the lock.

He set himself three minutes once he was inside. If the
old guy called him in for burglary he didn’t want to hang about. He made a quick walk-through. Old indoor air with a faint chemical undercurrent. Stale, but sterile. The place was barren. No furniture. He checked the kitchen. Pale lino and empty shelves behind open cupboard doors; the whole room naked and slack-jawed.

He moved through to the entry. Polished timber floor: varnish would have repelled spilled fluids. The shotgun damage was visible in the wall, in perfect inverse to the exterior pattern. He moved through to what might have been a living room. The wallpaper had been torn back to the gypsum board. Light switches dangled from short lengths of electrical lead. Random stains of filler suggested gunshot damage repair. He leaned close and looked one-eyed along the plane of the wall. Hasty patch-up work had left subtle bullet-sized divots. He stepped through to the adjacent room. Rounds that missed framing timber had made it out the other side of the wall. He shuffled between rooms, gauging the line-up. A neat half-dozen row was stitched up high, near the ceiling architrave. Assuming living room discharge, the entry holes were smaller than the corresponding exit holes, meaning hollow point ammunition. The stitched line-up, maybe a police M4 on full automatic.

He stepped back to the living room. Massive bloodstain shadow on the carpet by one wall. Maybe one person’s hard farewell, maybe several people’s visit to an ICU. He struggled to make sense of it. Extensive bullet damage made trajectories seem non-coherent. He stood in the middle of the room. Pellet damage near the floor on one side, the neat stitch near the ceiling on the other. Maybe a shotgun round from the door, met by an assault rifle volley from the floor.

Carnage.

He went out the broken side door. The street was still quiet.
He hadn’t gained any undue attention. No watchers behind split curtains. Maybe the suit made him look halfway kosher. He walked back to the car and made a flip-through of his file. Recountals of the January thirtieth shooting were imprecise: ‘early morning’ was as specific as it got. Maybe the neighbours would shed some light.

He crossed the street and started door-knocking. The file came with him. Paperwork imbued legitimacy. He figured post-shooting police canvassing would have been extensive: visitations by big men in suits would have been common. This shouldn’t be too hard.

Nobody answered at the first house. He tried next door. The peephole darkened for a long moment before the door opened, tethered by doubled security chains. A woman’s voice asked him if he was with the police. He told her he wasn’t, but his investigator’s licence was enough to make her open the door. She was young, dressed in hospital scrubs, looking exhausted. Probably fatigue from a regime of hyper-vigilance since the morning of January thirtieth.

Her recountal was from a principally aural perspective: gunshots woke her around six a.m. She’d grown up rural; she knew the difference between car backfire and a shotgun discharge. She guessed three or four shots in quick succession, another few several seconds later. It was maybe another minute before she risked a look out a front window. She saw some sort of pickup truck in the front yard of the house across the street, people lying hurt.

He pushed for details. She waved off the questions: he wasn’t probing fond memories. She licked her lips and swallowed. ‘Look, I only risked a glance, I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful.’

‘No, it’s okay. I understand.’

She said she was running short of time and started to close
the door on him: apologetic smile, knees bent. He managed to get a business card through the gap before she shut him out.

He lucked out on the next two houses: nobody home. A young guy at the next place he tried gave him a variation on the first woman’s story. Shots around six a.m., maybe four followed by a pause, then a volley of another ten or so a few seconds later. Duvall asked him if he knew who owned the house across the street. The guy said he didn’t. The previous owner had died six months back and the place had just come off the market. Best guess was that it had been sold.

‘You don’t know who the new owner is?’

‘Nuh-uh.’

Duvall said, ‘Do you know how many people were in the house when the shooting happened?’

‘No idea.’

‘You see anyone coming or going on January twenty-ninth?’

The guy thought about it. ‘That was the day before the shooting?’

Duvall nodded.

‘Don’t think so. Not that I recall.’

‘Did you see anything during the shooting?’

‘Not during. I hit the deck. All I saw was carpet.’

‘You take a look outside afterwards?’

‘I had a little look through the curtains.’

Duvall said nothing.

The guy made a shape with his mouth as he remembered. ‘Crew cab truck in the front yard,’ he said. ‘All shot up. Two guys in the yard, on their backs, blood in the yard, you can imagine. This big cloud of gun smoke just sort of drifting.’

‘You sure about the number of shots?’

‘Why?’

‘People sometimes overestimate things under stress.’

The guy shrugged. He made to close the door. ‘Can’t see that it matters,’ he said. ‘People still got killed.’

Duvall thanked him through the closed door and walked away. He got no answer with the next three places he visited. He jumped a couple of doors and tried the home of the guy in the dressing gown.

‘I saw you peepin’ round there across the road,’ the guy said when he answered. He had a glass mug of tea in one hand, tortoiseshell glasses anchored on a thick nose rife with capillaries. The dressing gown was knotted around a bulbous paunch.

‘I wasn’t peeping.’ Duvall showed his licence.

‘That print’s too small for me,’ the guy said. He frowned and took a cautious sip. Gentle, like he didn’t want to ripple the surface. ‘But it looks mighty official.’

‘Do you have a spare moment to answer a few questions?’

‘About that ruckus the other week?’

‘Yes. The ruckus.’

The guy nodded slowly. He stepped back and let his gaze circuit the doorframe. ‘Yeah. I reckon we can slot you in. Better come indoors and sit down. The old knees don’t much fancy doorstep chats these days.’

Duvall stepped in and closed the door. He followed the guy down a short corridor carpeted off-yellow, smell of tobacco smoke and buttered toast prevailing. They turned left into a small living room. Old furniture and packed bookshelves made for homely clutter. Faded novels stuffed floor to ceiling, thin yellowed ears of random papers peeping between. Everything warm and close and familiar. A wide armchair was set up in one corner beside a window. The open newspaper was draped on a footstool before it. A table adjacent held a magnifying glass and a pack of matches and a crinkled packet of tobacco
trapped beneath a wooden pipe. High shelves displayed ancient trinkets: a globe on a rusted pedestal, a hand-painted Lancaster bomber, a line-up of brass ammunition shells.

The old guy bent awkwardly and lifted the paper before sitting down. He set the mug on the table and crossed swollen ankles on the footrest and smoothed the paper over his lap.

‘I saw men shot,’ he said. ‘A long time ago.’ He looked out the window. ‘Never thought I’d see it again, in a suburban street, eating breakfast. Gordon Bennett.’

He grimaced and claimed a fibrous pinch of tobacco from the pouch, thumbed it into the pipe. He lit up with a match and eased the stem in one corner of a shivering lip. ‘You can shift them things off the chair there if you want somewhere to sit.’

‘I won’t keep you long.’

He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Your knees’re probably better behaved than mine anyway.’

‘You saw the shooting back on January thirtieth.’

‘Bits and pieces. It ain’t the shooting that’s important; it’s what’s going on afterwards. And I tell you, it ain’t easy looking. Shit.’

‘You recall what time it all happened?’

‘Well, I think so. Police came by a few times, and I’ve been telling them it all went down just after six a.m., and I don’t know whether that was the actual time, or whether saying it enough has convinced me that’s the truth.’ He laughed softly, leaked a skein of smoke.

‘Did the shots wake you, or were you up already?’

‘I was up already. Fixing some tea.’

‘How many shots did you hear?’

‘What did the folks down the street say?’

‘About what?’

‘How many shots did they think they heard?’

Duvall looked at him. Detective Training 101: don’t let witnesses compare notes. Fuck it. He’d never been a detective. ‘Maybe four or five.’

The guy was shaking his head. ‘People get stressed, things get overestimated.’

‘How many shots did you hear?’

‘No more than three to begin with.’

‘And then more later on?’

The guy nodded. ‘Handful of shots, a few seconds later I couldn’t count. A big one over the top that sounded like a shotgun. But don’t bet your kids on it. The old ears aren’t what they used to be.’

‘Did you take a look outside?’ Duvall said.

The guy crossed his legs, knees stacked neatly. He sipped at his tea. The steam misted his glasses. He used a dressing gown hem to de-fog the lenses.

‘Can’t say I rushed out,’ he said. ‘Gunfire in your street, it’s not quite the same as when you hear the ice-cream truck, is it?’ He chuckled to himself, rubbed a thumb over a tobacco burn on the armrest.

‘Did you see anything of the house while the shooting was happening?’

‘Not while it was happening. I got a look out the front window when it was all over.’

‘How soon after?’

‘Don’t know. ’Bout the time it takes an old fella to shuffle over to a window. Not too long.’

‘Can you describe what you saw?’ Duvall said.

He made a face. ‘Pass me one of them coasters there, would you?’

Duvall shifted a stack of auto magazines and passed the guy a cork beer mat. He set it beneath his mug. ‘Ta. No, I only had
a quick peek. Just enough to get the gist of it without getting something I could do without. If you know what I mean.’ He cleared his throat gently. ‘There was a light sort of truck parked up at a funny angle on the front lawn.’ He took a long hit off the pipe and looked out the window. ‘Guy dead on the front step, sort of half on the lawn. Guy dead in the doorway.’ He shrugged. ‘Looked sideways along the street and there’s this car pulling away.’

‘You ever seen the car before?’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t think so. Didn’t recognise the colour.’

‘What colour was it?’

‘Yellowish. Maybe gold or something. I dunno. Old eyes aren’t so good. Time was maybe I could have picked out some details. Nowadays I probably couldn’t even if it was parked in my lap.’

‘Was it moving fast?’

‘Not really. It’s wasn’t mucking about, but it didn’t look in too much of a hurry.’

Duvall thought a moment. ‘What did the truck on the front lawn look like?’

‘It was white. Sort of old.’

‘Was there anyone in it?’

‘Not when I looked.’ He mulled it over. ‘Can’t be dead certain on it, but I had a view straight through the back, and I’m pretty sure it was just seats and no heads, if that makes sense. Engine was still running, too. I told that to the police. And the doors were open.’