Challis - 02 - Kittyhawk Down (18 page)

The old woman chuckled. 'Just don't call my number again. Well, dear, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that you get lucky sooner rather than later.'

Pam got lucky thirty minutes and nineteen calls later. Another quavering grandmotherly voice, confirmed that, yes, she had a granddaughter called Clare, and demanded to know what it was about.

Two uniforms had investigated the murder-suicide call, reported back breathlessly that there were two bodies, massive wounds, a lot of blood, and now Challis was standing in the sitting-room doorway of a small house that smelt metallically of that blood tinged with burnt cordite and something more ingrained, as though the place housed animals. Even now, after years on the job, a murder scene still had the power to distress him. He tucked in his tie—this wouldn't be the first time he'd vomited over it—and walked in.

Two bodies. The woman was jammed between a sofa and a coffee table, her face and shoulders sprawled over a magazine open on the table, her rump on the outer edge of the sofa, her knees on the carpet. She'd taken a blast to the back of the head. Blood, bone and brain matter had fanned out ahead of her across the coffee table and beyond that to the floor.

As for the man, he was in an armchair opposite the woman, the twin barrels of a shotgun propped under his chin. He'd apparently reached down with his right hand and used his thumb to trigger the shot. Most of his head was missing.

'You'd have to be dedicated to do that,' Sutton said.

Challis ignored him. A kind of secret, humming satisfaction had settled in him. This was a double murder and the only rules that applied now were: assume nothing, trust no one, check everything.

He guided Sutton wordlessly out of the house, pausing to tell the uniformed constable at the front gate, 'I want this place sealed off. Authorised personnel only, and they must be wearing crime-scene gear.'

He meant white sterile overalls, overshoes, gloves and hoods. There were spare sets in the CIB Falcon and he and Sutton dressed hurriedly before returning to the sitting room.

First Challis circled the bodies at a distance, occasionally crouching, occasionally gauging sightlines. Now that this was a crime scene, a perimeter would be established, especially in regard to the media and the ranges of their lenses and microphones, and the culprit's entry and exit routes would have to be determined, for they would be secondary crime scenes. Meanwhile the room would be sketched, videotaped and photographed by crime-scene technicians, and the pathologist would make a preliminary investigation into the apparent cause and time of death, and whether any of the observable injuries were ante- or post-mortem. And contaminants to the crime scene would have to be identified: suspects, the weather, relatives of the victims, animals (there was that smell again), and any person there officially—himself, other cops, ambulance officers, the pathologist. But now Challis was doing
his
job, mapping and absorbing the scene.

Then he crouched and felt the man's pockets. There was a set of keys in the left pocket. He compared the man's hands without touching them. The right hand bore fewer day-today cuts, grazes and calluses than the left, and was marginally smaller.

He stood and said, 'I want the room and bodies checked for prints and the hands bagged.'

'Boss?' Scobie frowned.

'Maybe they scratched the killer. Maybe the killer touched them.'

'But it's a murder-suicide. You heard the tape.'

'First,' Challis said, 'the husband is left-handed, not right-handed,' and he explained about the keys in the pocket, the comparable wear-and-tear on the hands themselves.

Scobie began to nod slowly, and then to focus on the room. Challis saw it happen, and waited.

Finally Scobie pointed. 'There's a bit of blood and grey matter on the guy's trouser cuffs. It's not his, the shot that killed him was fired upwards, so it must be from his wife. If he stood behind her and shot her in the back of the head before sitting down and shooting himself, how did his cuffs get sprayed by her blood? So someone else shot her while he was sitting there. He might even have been shot first. I doubt he'd just sit there and watch his wife get shot.'

You'd be surprised, thought Challis. Many a man facing death will happily let someone else get killed ahead of him.

But Challis didn't say any of this. 'We need a toxicology report,' he said, 'in case they were drugged first. But I'm betting they were bludgeoned first. With any luck the pathologist will find something, unless the shotgun blasts destroyed any evidence of that.'

He turned to gaze at the bodies. 'As for the shotgun, we need to know if it belonged here or was brought here.'

'How come no one heard anything?' Scobie asked pensively.

Challis shrugged. 'It's the end house, the neighbours are at work, there's that electronic gun thing going off in the vineyards every so often.'

Then the crime scene technicians arrived and went to work. Challis retreated to the doorway and watched for a while. They dusted the main surfaces for prints, occasionally shooting first with a Polaroid CU-5 fixed-focus camera before trying to retrieve prints that risked being destroyed when lifted. Challis didn't think they'd find prints from the killer. He—or she—surely wore gloves. And he doubted they'd find prints on the bodies, even if the killer hadn't worn gloves when he killed them. Latent prints on living flesh maintain their integrity for no more than ninety minutes. Prints on a corpse were determined by atmospheric conditions, the state of the skin and other prevailing factors.

Sutton murmured in his ear, 'So who made the emergency call? Was the husband forced to, maybe?'

Challis had played the tape before leaving the station. He tried to recall it now. Had the man's voice sounded fearful, as if he'd been forced to act against his will? Not really. Agitated.
Faked
agitation.

'The killer,' he said.

He eyed the telephone, and when it had been dusted for prints he walked across to it, picked up the receiver and pressed the redial key. He heard eight beeps and then a woman's voice: 'Waterloo Police Station, Constable—'

He hung up. There was a card Blu-tacked to the wall near the phone. Local emergency numbers. The killer had read the number from the card.

Anyone else in an agitated state would simply have dialled triple zero. He sighed and returned to the hallway. Where was the pathologist? He heard Scobie Sutton clattering about in the kitchen. Just then Ellen Destry appeared from a room further along the hall.

'I've been searching the study,' she said.

'And?'

'His name's Mostyn Pearce. Wife's name is Karen. They have a kid of school age called Jessica—who could be at school, she's not here.'

Sutton heard that. He joined them, saying, 'My daughter goes to school with a Jessie Pearce.'

Ellen showed him a photograph in a pewter frame. 'Are these the parents?'

Scobie nodded. 'God, who's going to tell the kid?' 'There's a Rolodex in the study. Maybe the grandparents are listed.'

Challis was peering over her shoulder. 'Is that a ferret?' 'Yep. It's tied up in the back yard at the moment.' He saw a family portrait, against a hedge, a ferret in the grass at their feet. Challis concentrated on the man's face. No sunglasses. The man he'd seen walking a ferret in Rosebud had been wearing shades. It was probably the same man, though. Then Sutton was saying, 'Pearce worked at the detention centre. He gave everyone the creeps. Whenever he took his kid to school he'd bring the ferret with him. Walk it on a lead like it was a dog.'

Challis thought of Tessa Kane and her article and the laughter they'd shared. Pearce had been a figure of fun but hadn't deserved to die like this.

'So what do we know about the Pearces?' The common features of a crime like this were: victim, culprit, motive, evidence, weapon. They had the victims and the weapon—unless there was also a blunt instrument lying around somewhere. They had some limited evidence, but possibly no evidence at all that would help them identify the culprit. And they didn't have a motive.

'A very interesting scrapbook in the study,' Ellen said. They followed her. 'Study' was a convenient word for a room that contained one tiny, heavily lacquered bookcase, a desk with a computer and printer, a sewing machine in one corner, an exercise bike in another.

The scrapbook lay on its side in the bookcase. Ellen spread it open on the desk, and Challis found himself reading clippings of the Meddler's letters to the
Progress
, together with handwritten drafts of irate letters to shire councillors, the police, Vic Roads, the mayor, the Federal and State Members of Parliament, all meticulously dated and annotated. 'Pearce is the Meddler?'

'Looks like it.'

Challis groaned. 'A man who's offended dozens of people in the past two years.'

Ellen flipped forward through the scrapbook. 'Here's a letter he drafted yesterday.'

Challis read a line or so: 'On Easter Sunday I phoned in a report of poorly treated sheep on the property of Ian Munro—' He didn't read on, but gazed quizzically at Ellen.

She said, 'Munro's property is only a kilometre or so from here. I even saw Pearce walking past it the other day. Given that he likes to dob people in to the authorities, maybe he'd had a run-in with Munro in the past, and maybe Munro decided to get even with him.'

'Bit drastic,' Sutton said.

'Well, he
is
unhinged.'

'True.'

Challis stared past them, staring into space, thinking it through. Coincidences did happen in murder inquiries, and so did things that were hard to credit, but he knew enough always to search for the simple answer, the most likely answer, first.

Pearce had offended someone. Munro? Would Munro stage something as elaborate as this—or simply walk through the door, blasting away with his shotgun? That's if he would do something so over the top to begin with.

'Check it out,' he said. 'Meanwhile Munro crossed swords with bank managers, lawyers and shire officials. We'd better make a list and start warning them. I also need to know whether or not the Pearces owned a shotgun. It could be Munro's, of course—according to his wife, two shotguns and a rifle are missing.'

Then Pam Murphy was calling him on his mobile, saying that she had another murder for him.