Whispering Death (20 page)

They were barely north of the town, stuck behind a Woodleigh school bus, when Schiff said, ‘We're not going to have a problem today, are we?'

Pam darted her a glance: she didn't want to plough into the rear of the bus. ‘Problem?'

‘You and me. Sulks, the silent treatment.'

Pam burned. Sure, she knew she was being a little guarded, but she wasn't sulking. ‘No, Sarge.'

‘There's no need to use my rank, not when we're alone. We have been intimate, after all.' Heavy quotation marks around ‘intimate'. Pam said nothing. She felt nothing, really. Her feelings weren't hurt, she wasn't in love, she didn't feel betrayed…

Felt a little used, though. Maybe. She had gone into this with her eyes open, after all.

And so what if Jeannie hadn't wanted to walk on the beach yesterday?

The school bus slowed, pulled onto the verge, where a couple of teenagers slouched, waiting, bags at their feet. They climbed onto the bus as if dazed, and Pam took the opportunity to spurt past. Now she was behind a line of cars. She glanced at the dash clock: 8 a.m. The autopsy was slated for 10.

Then she felt Jeannie Schiff's pretty right hand on her leg.

Challis drove Ellen Destry's Corolla to work and found Scobie Sutton waiting in his office, looking tense in a funereal suit coat and pants, the jacket flapping around him.

‘Scobie.'

‘Morning, boss.'

Challis waited. Sutton said, ‘I was wondering if you've seen this.'

A press release from police headquarters. Challis liked to kid that he had a special gift: he could tell if any printed or electronic document was worth reading merely by scanning the title, subtitle and first line. E-mails had a short life in his in-box. The contents of his pigeonhole had been transformed into a million egg cartons. ‘New crime scene unit,' he said. ‘What about it?'

‘You suggested I should shift sideways.'

Challis paused. He shrugged off his jacket, pegged it and sat behind his desk. ‘Sit,' he said, staring through the window as Sutton folded his bones again. ‘You'd need training.'

‘Yes.'

The role of the new unit was to collect crime scene information in the first instance—fingerprints, fibres, DNA, photographs and video recordings—and pass it on to the relevant division for analysis. The results would then be passed to CIU detectives, like Challis and his team, for action. Challis had mixed feelings about the new system. It would free CIU and uniformed police to concentrate on targeted operations, bringing increased speed and efficiency. But he
liked
standing in the middle of a crime scene, feeling his way into the who, what and why.

‘You'll work out of Frankston.'

‘I don't mind. It's only a twenty minute drive for me.'

Challis made a decision. The work—collecting evidence for someone else to analyse—would suit Scobie. Less need for intuitive leaps. Less call for speculating about the needs, moods, impulses and motives that drove other human beings.

‘I can put in a good word if you like.'

Sutton blinked as if to say, Whoa, not so fast, then ventured to say, ‘If you could, boss, that would be great.'

Challis stood, grabbed his jacket again. ‘No problem. Meanwhile we need another word with Delia Rice's parents. Something's not quite right about the timeline.'

Schiff squeezed Pam's leg in a way that was chummy yet undershot with desire. ‘It was good, you and me. But not…'

‘I know,' Pam said very distinctly, hands fixed on the steering wheel. ‘Not going anywhere. I know that. I wanted to have some fun, that's all, same as you.'

As if she'd not heard a word, Schiff said, ‘I could sense a kind of reserve in you, as if you liked it okay but it wasn't really your thing. I think, deep down, you prefer men.'

I prefer to do without the bullshit, Pam thought.

A final squeeze and Schiff removed her hand. ‘No regrets, okay? Put it down to experience.'

Fine. Pam could insist until the cows came home that she didn't have regrets, wouldn't have them, but Schiff had a kind of worldly, older-woman thing going. She wasn't listening.

Well, I do have one regret, Pam thought. I regret that Sergeant Jeannie Schiff is as big an arsehole as some of the men I've encountered. Live and learn.

‘Where was he going with Delia Rice's body?' she said. ‘He'd have known he couldn't dump her in the reserve, so he must have been looking for another location. Wonder how well he knows the Peninsula?'

‘What?' said Schiff, busy on the keypad of her phone. ‘Look, save it for a briefing.'

Delia Rice's parents lived in a low, pale-brick 1970s house set on three hectares of muddy yard near the Moorooduc primary school. Bill Rice was an all-purpose landscaping and excavation contractor, so the yard was crammed with tip trucks, bobcats, backhoes, excavators and dozers. Challis and Sutton were shown into a dark, chilly sitting room and, moments later, learned that a crucial piece of their briefing information was incorrect.

‘Let's get this straight, Mr Rice,' Challis said. ‘You didn't drive her to the Frankston station?'

‘No. Like I said, I
was
going to take her there, but in the end I had a dentist's appointment.'

Challis kept his voice mild and even. ‘So she didn't catch a train, didn't go to the city?'

‘She did, but from
Somerville
,' Rice said, as if explaining to a dummy. ‘Where my dentist is.'

Challis nodded in understanding. Somerville was on a small branch line that served the south-eastern Peninsula towns: city-bound passengers changed at Frankston.

‘I had a 3.30 appointment,' Bill Rice explained, ‘and the plan was Delia would sit in the waiting room till I was finished, only the dentist was running late, so she said she'd catch the Somerville train.'

He was ravaged with grief, eyes raw, wispy hair limp and uncombed, grey stubble on his cheeks, jaw and neck. Erin Rice said nothing but sat beside her husband, holding one of his huge, sausage-fingered hands in her plump lap. She was combed and tidy, but more stunned than her husband.

Challis thought through the cock-up. Between the Rices' initial missing persons' statement and the homicide investigation, a key first impression had gone unchecked. Bill Rice had told someone what the
intended
plan was, and by the time it reached Challis's team it had become fact.

‘You don't know for certain that she caught any train?' he said gently.

In a small voice, Rice said, ‘I assumed she did. I mean, what else did she do?'

Dr Berg began the autopsy at ten o'clock, Murphy and Schiff watching from the raised viewing bay, Berg's voice crackling from the wall-mounted speakers as she worked. The autopsy suite was large, square and brightly lit by skylights and neon tubes. The floor and two walls were of small, gleaming tiles, with banks of refrigerated stainless steel drawers set into the other walls. The pathologist worked at one of the long, broad zinc tables, the surface cleansed by a constant stream of cold water that ran from the slightly elevated top end to a chrome drainage pipe at the bottom.

‘Rigor begins in the face and jaw,' she said, as if talking to students or thinking aloud, ‘followed by the upper limbs and finally the hips and legs.' She glanced up at the figures watching her. ‘Unfortunately rigor and lividity occur at unpredictable rates. This poor woman died violently, meaning adrenaline, which is an accelerating factor. She was kept in a sealed environment for some hours, the boot of a car. The temperature within would have been fairly stable but gradually increasing if the car was in direct sunlight for any length of time. Meanwhile, the body was protected from insect activity, weather extremes and other variables.'

She began to manipulate the body, first the feet, then each leg, lifting and bending, watching the knees. She proceeded to the abdomen, pressing down, and finally grasped and rotated the head a few centimetres left and right.

‘Rigor has come and gone. I have no reason to reconsider my opinion yesterday, that the victim had been dead for six to eight hours when found.'

Challis sipped his coffee. He hadn't asked for it but it had been delivered, white, watery and tepid. His knees were squashed between the sofa and a coffee table as solid as a brick wall.

‘How did she intend to get to the station from the dentist? Taxi?'

‘She walked. It's not far: five minutes?'

‘She had a specific train in mind? She had a timetable?'

Rice blinked. ‘Don't know. She doesn't usually take a local train.'

‘What would Delia do,' said Challis carefully, ‘if she were faced with a long wait?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘It's a limited service on that line, only a few trains each day.'

Erin Rice removed her husband's hand, placed it on his bulky knee, and they all eyed it briefly, a disembodied hand. ‘Delia was always impatient,' she murmured. ‘Impatient to marry that man, impatient to get to the city.'

Impatient.

Challis put his cup down and started the motions that would get himself and Sutton out of the house with the least disruption, pain and haste. ‘Thank you both for helping us clear that up. It will help us pinpoint Delia's movements.'

He didn't say
final
movements. He couldn't say it would bring her back. He couldn't promise it would identify her killer. Bill and Erin Rice were crying again anyway. They weren't thinking about blame or justice just yet.

The pathologist lifted her head and called, ‘Lights.'

The room darkened. She ran a UV light over the body slowly, quartering the pale, slack flesh. ‘Lights,' she called again.

The room brightened. ‘No semen present on the surface of the body.'

‘Get on with it,' Schiff muttered. ‘Vagina, mouth, anus.'

‘No fibres,' Berg said presently, ‘nothing under the nails, nothing caught in the hair—apart from trace elements from the car itself.'

Schiff muttered, shook her glossy head and restlessly checked her phone for messages.

More time passed. ‘No semen present in the mouth, vagina or anus,' Berg said.

And later: ‘It is entirely possible that we'll find trace elements of a different order in the victim's eyes, nasal passages and ear canals, telling us where she'd been before being forced into the car. Needless to say, analysis will take time.'

‘Needless to say,' said Schiff.

She was standing very close to Pam. Pam moved away.

Before starting the car, Challis made a phone call. He asked a question, said thanks, pocketed the phone.

‘There was a train through Somerville at eleven past three,' he said, ‘but Delia Rice was still in her father's car then, on the way to the dentist. The next was at ten to five.'

Sutton said nothing. It was as if he hadn't listened or didn't know what to do with the information, so Challis started the car and pulled away from the kerb. There was silence as they passed a stretch of sodden grassland, a Christmas tree farm and one of the Coolart Road roundabouts. Injecting some sharpness into his voice, Challis said, ‘You heard the mother: Delia was impatient by nature.'

Scobie Sutton came out of his fog. ‘Right…'

‘Think about it. When she realised she'd have to wait for an hour and a half, she decided to hitchhike. Got herself rescued by a nice policeman.'

‘And her father so close,' said Sutton tragically.

Challis tuned him out, checked his watch. Too soon to call Murph at the morgue.

Quietness settled as Berg began to cut into the body. Pam watched with a clammy dread. The only sounds were the faint hum of the ceiling lights, murmured voices in distant corridors, fabric scraping against fabric as Jeannie Schiff grew increasingly restless. Finally the pathologist said, ‘Major petechial haemorrhaging…Bloody froth caked around the mouth…Damage to the hyoid…'

She looked up at the detectives. ‘Death was due to manual asphyxia.'

‘Well, we all knew that,' Schiff said, striding for the door.

32

At two o'clock that Monday afternoon, Steve Finch was absorbed in slotting more RAM into an old desktop PC when the air cooled and shifted. Or he'd imagined it. What he wasn't imagining was the man standing on the other side of the workbench that doubled as his counter and desk. He jumped, trying to hide the response. ‘Didn't hear you come in.'

The man said nothing and Finch thought
cop
. He read him quickly: slight build, well dressed, aquiline nose, eyes twinkling with cold intelligence. The kind of cop, Finch thought, who catches criminals because he thinks like one.

‘What can I do for you?'

‘The name is Towne,' the man said, flashing ID.

Finch glimpsed the name, a logo and some of the words before it was folded into a pocket again. ‘Federal? What would the federal police want with me?'

‘I'm told you're the go-to guy if someone wants to fence a stolen painting,' the man said.

Finch screwed his face into a scoffing dismissal. ‘I don't know who you've been talking to, pal, but—'

Towne dug into another pocket and now held a small pistol. He wasn't listening to Finch but gazing as if amused up and down the nearby shelves. With a grunt of satisfaction, he shoved the barrel into a rack of army greatcoats and fired. The coats were excellent sound suppressors. Finch gaped and bent to protect his groin. Then he straightened, trying to present a smaller target to the mad policeman.

‘You can't do that.'

‘I just did.'

‘I'll never sell them now.'

‘Oh, I don't know, genuine army wear, complete with bullet hole,' said Towne.

Finch's commercial instincts clicked into gear. ‘But still…'

Towne pocketed the pistol and leaned over the counter in a matey fashion. ‘Let's start again: I have it on good authority, namely the art and antiques squad, that you are the only show in town when it comes to fencing high-end paintings and other collectibles, like coins and stamps.'