The Silent Inheritance (24 page)

He checked the time on his microwave. Five after eleven. He turned off the exhaust fan, the television, removed the flash drive, dropped it into his pocket and was out the door.

*

Midnight found him at his desk, attempting to fiddle two pairs of unrelated ankles to sit side by side on his screen. The kid constable interrupted his concentration.

‘I wouldn’t have picked you for a foot man, sir.’

Ross turned to the flyweight, who looked sixteen but may have been born knowing more about computers and mobile phones than Ross would ever know.

‘The pair on the right belong to a male,’ Ross said, daring the kid to disagree.

‘Or she’s on steroids,’ the kid replied. ‘Knowing some of the old girls today, it could be possible, sir.’

‘She’s a bloke in drag, and she’s got Danni Lane.’ Ross got rid of the ankles and clicked on the photograph of Granny Plaid Skirt at the Woolworths checkout, the cleaned-up, cropped shot of her head and shoulders they’d released to the media. ‘Do you know how to get rid of her wig?’

The kid knew. From a standing position, he gave Granny Plaid Skirt a bald head. With no flash of recognition, Ross asked for hair, and was confronted by Granny with a red Mohawk.

‘Get serious, kid,’ Ross growled, and the kid sat down and got serious, Ross’s breath on his neck, his eyes frozen to the screen as Granny became funeral serious, dark hair, dark suit, black tie.

He gave him grey hair later, then dark-rimmed glasses and a sweater, and he looked like a professor – and like no one. The kid gave him a goatee beard, a moustache, a partially bald head. He removed the goatee and moustache and gave him a full head of blond hair. Still failing to put a name to any of his faces, they printed six of their better enhancements, Ross promising each as it came hot from the printer that it would be a television star by nightfall.

With nothing more he could do before running his theory by Johnson, he considered his bed, but instead went in search of the security tapes collected from Chadstone the day Heidi was abducted. They were there, burned to disc and archived, and in the darkest hours before dawn, he found that bastard again, found him clad in that same plaid skirt and navy cardigan, pushing a loaded shopping trolley away from the Ladies’ toilets.

How many times had he played that tape, praying for one glimpse of Heidi? How many times had he fast-forwarded past that old dame and her loaded trolley? Enough for his neurons to remember seeing her.

The shot was grainy, and more so when he zoomed in on the trolley, but he hunted down his whiz-kid mate again who cleaned it up then printed it.

Too late to go to bed, and too early to wake Wall Johnson, Ross walked outside to Melbourne’s early light, and to its silence – or to as near as that city ever came to silent. Pigeons cooed, a lone tram trundled by, empty. A truck came then to pollute the pure morning air with its stink of diesel, so Ross lit his own pollution stick and leaned against a tree to watch his city come to life, feeling hopeful for the first time in years. They had him. Now all they had to do was find him.

They’d never worked out how Heidi had been spirited away from that shopping centre. That murdering bastard had wheeled her out in a supermarket trolley, zipped into a suitcase, and he would have been long gone before Heidi’s mother noticed her girl was missing and raised the alarm.

*

Inspector Walter Johnson wasn’t a fast mover and never had been. In his fifties now, he looked more kindly grandpa than cop. He’d had no family when he’d worked with Ross’s father thirty-odd years ago. He’d had six kids since, eleven grandkids and still counting.

He got things done, and by eleven that morning, Ross at his side, they faced a barrage of reporters. Johnson started proceedings with his classic cop-speak, then stepped to the side, and Ross, who’d never mastered cop-speak or microphones, wished he hadn’t been born with foot-in-mouth disease.

Done now, all said and done. Midday when he escaped, yawning. Bed not an option, he did the next best thing, made a beeline for his smoking place, where Les tracked him down.

Ross had given up attempting to dodge little Les years ago. Their life-time relationship had led to an unspoken understanding that what was said off the record didn’t end up on page one.

‘You’d remember Shane Lourie, Rosko,’ Les greeted him.

‘Lourie?’ Ross had known a few Louries, a few Shanes too.

‘A year or two our junior, thought he looked like that bloke from
Star Wars
.’

Ross shook his head. His neurons had stopped firing since they’d turned the cameras on him. He’d come out here to suck smoke and forget those bloody cameras, and what he might see played back to him umpteen dozen times.

Les hadn’t become a newshound by giving up easy. ‘You remember the cocky little bastard. He lived in one of those hovels down near Willy Wilson’s place and got done for raping Willy’s twelve-year-old sister,’ Les said.

And a neuron fired. ‘The bantam rooster?’

‘That’s him. They gave him ten years but let him out after six. Willy and the rest of them have been stalking him since.’

‘Including you,’ Ross asked.

‘I keep track of him,’ Les admitted. ‘What I started out to say was, your photo could be him.’

‘He doesn’t fit the profile – unless they gave him a brain transplant while he was inside. As I recall, he was too smart to go to school.’

‘Get that suit off him and stick a dirty Nike cap on his bald head and it’s him, I tell you.’

‘Nike,’ Ross said. ‘Where?’

‘Living with a woman and her tribe of kids in a house we subsidise, within bloody walking distance of Forest Hill Chase.’

‘You’re having me on, mate.’

‘I’m bloody not, Rosko.’

‘Address?’

‘Dunno, but I know someone who will,’ Les said, reaching for his mobile. His contact not answering, he left a message and dropped the phone back into his pocket.

They stood side by side then, puffing smoke and watching the now unbroken stream of traffic crawl by, a big man, his dark hair beginning to grey at the temples, and a smaller, slimmer, sandy-headed man, both heavy smokers, a dying breed – literally dying, if you believed the hype. They’d been born during the same month, forty-two years ago, raised in the same Hawthorn street, attended the same schools, had troublesome sisters in common, one for Les, a Down syndrome girl who may have been easier to live with than Ross’s two. Les’s parents were still alive, and still caring for their girl, in her mid-forties now, but eternally a girl.

‘A man reaches a point in his life when he stops growing,’ Les said. ‘Cities don’t know when it’s time to stop. We’ll outgrow Sydney in a year or two.’

‘Could do,’ Ross said.

‘We had the best of it, Rosko.’

‘You’re right there, mate. She’s degenerating fast.’

‘Still planning on pitching your tent beside that creek?’

‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’

‘They were good times,’ Les said. ‘I remember your father …’ And his phone rang.

*

Ross was back at his desk, watching Nike walk towards the bus stop. He couldn’t see enough of his face to say if it resembled the killer or the bloke from
Star Wars
but that bus stop tape gave him an alibi, or the time on that tape did. An Olympic sprinter couldn’t have run back into the centre, decked himself out in his wig, plaid skirt and cardigan then got down to the bottom car park, not in three and a half minutes.

For a time Ross had believed. Outside, a smoke in his hand, he’d wanted to believe. He’d almost built an image of that Nike cap behind the wheel of an unregistered Kingswood. Gone now, like the smoke from some forgotten fag.

A lot of resources had been wasted on tracing the owners of that model vehicle, or those still registered. Most belonged to car enthusiasts. The killer had been flagged as a collector by that retired FBI profiler. Maybe he’d got it right.

They’d get him. His face would be on national television tonight. Someone knew him, lived next door to him, worked with him, slept with him – or not. The Yankee profiler had also suggested he was impotent – because he didn’t rape those girls. The bastard starved them, drugged and drowned them, but other than Nancy, he hadn’t marked them.

He’d kept little Nancy tied up, by her ankle. Forensic had suggested he’d used some type of collar. The skin above and below it had been rubbed raw. He hadn’t used that collar on the other girls.

Little Asian Nancy was the odd piece in the puzzle. Serial killers usually kill within their own ethnic group. Penny, Heidi, Monica and Danni were blonde, blue or brown eyed. Not Nancy. She’d had the dark hair and eyes of her race. Had she been his practice run, her abduction opportunistic?

Maybe.

There’d been early theories of paedophile rings. The fact that no photographs of those girls had turned up on the internet didn’t mean that there wasn’t a coven of sick bastards out there with brains enough not to put their photographs online. A paedophile ring didn’t fit Ross’s personal profile of the killer. He saw him as a loner, as white, thirty-five to fifty, and intelligent enough not to give them a hair from his head.

He sent them notes he signed
The Wolf
. He was computer literate, which didn’t mean much these days. You couldn’t survive in this world if you weren’t computer literate.

Ross had memorised the note he’d sent with Heidi.

How she flapped her tattered wings on my display board. The tenacity of a child for life never fails to amaze me …

If he didn’t rape them, if he didn’t photograph them, what was his motivation? There was always a motive, which at times may have only been clear to the perpetrator, but there was a motive. If he was into photography, why starve them until they lost their allure? Or was that a part of his game, his proof of power, that he could reduce perfection to skin and bone … to tattered wings, pinned to his display board?

A power game, played out by a little man who had little power, who got his kicks by instilling fear into a city of millions. He was of average height and weight according to estimated measurements of Granny Plaid Skirt and her shopping trolley. The experts had placed him somewhere between five foot eight and nine and his weight around seventy kilograms.

They’d get him. They’d get Lisa Simms’s killer too.

Once the press meeting had been thrown open to questions, Ross had been hit with a barrage, most relating to Lisa – the media not yet prepared to give up on the fifth victim theory – and a resident of the street where she’d been found hadn’t helped. He claimed to have heard a hotted-up car roar by at around two that Sunday morning. An old Kingswood with a buggered exhaust pipe could roar.

Lisa wasn’t one of his. She’d done her block with her boyfriend, socked him in the eye and run – had run across a road and been hit by a vehicle that had been moving fast enough to kill her.

She hadn’t fought him. Her death would have been instantaneous, so how had she managed to bring back a sample of his blood?

Bumped his head? Cut his finger on broken glass?

On one of the FBI shows, they would have had DNA in twenty-four hours and the perp in twenty-five. Not the way it worked where Ross worked. They’d get DNA but it might take weeks, or months if they had to send it overseas, but they’d get it. With luck they’d find the accident site too, and the car.

Ross’s mind flitted to America, to the Latino and the three teenage girls. When that news had broken, it had sounded like a Stephen King scenario. But how many out in the suburbs knew what their neighbours got up to behind closed doors?

As a kid he’d known every kid on the block. As a kid he couldn’t recall his parents’ back door ever being locked. His dad was an overgrown copper. They hadn’t needed locked doors.

He could remember Gran taking him and little Les to a movie theatre once and in came a group of rowdy pre-teen boys to sit on the seats in front and block Les’s view. Twice Gran asked those louts to be quiet and to sit still. She hadn’t asked a third time. She’d taken the ear of the main offender and twisted it. Do that today and she’d be in court for child abuse – or the kid would turn around and knife her.

Commuters sat, eyes down when they rode on public transport, ignoring the gangs of drunken, drug-crazed youth. It wasn’t safe for a woman to walk the streets of Melbourne alone, not by night or by day. Humanity had advanced as far as it could go. It was regressing now, back to the animals’ random mating, back to the kill or be killed, to the hunting in packs. And a cop was expected to psychoanalyse them, to stand arms folded when an ice-crazed feral came at him swinging a machete.

Blame the system, the nanny-state, the bleeding-hearts and the taxpayer who provided. If Ross had his way, no man or woman would have been allowed to vote unless he’d paid his taxes for twenty years.

‘B
reak-through in the Danni Lane abduction.’

If there was an interview, documentary or news item about serial killers on the television, Marni found it and watched it. It wasn’t good for her, nor was her recent obsession with her dead father.

Two policemen on the screen at the moment, one of them the image of Robert De Niro, the other an older man.

Sarah sat down to watch when the one who looked like Robert De Niro took his place at the microphone. The subtitles couldn’t keep up with his mouth.

Psychopath
, she read.