Deadly Deeds (18 page)

Nothing.

The RACV would take too long to come, so I decided to catch a cab at the corner of Chapel Street and Dandenong Road instead.

My Indian taxi driver asked too many questions. I told him I had a headache and would appreciate if he kept to himself. He pursed his lips, as if I had just given him the finger. And in a way I had. Just because I hired his car, it didn’t mean I hired him as a psychologist.

I arrived at the VFSC at 11.37 a.m., three minutes later than anticipated.

Anxious, I cleared my name with Liaison, and flew straight to the Department of Biology. I entered the lab by pressing my ID card against a black plate next to the door. The door unlocked automatically.

John Darcy was adjusting his compound microscope. He looked exhausted. His hair looked unkempt as if he had been playing with a nail and a power point. He reminded me of a mad scientist with his white lab coat and surgical gloves.

He glanced up, and with a hand gesture told me to get closer. ‘Check this out,’ he said.

I crossed the laboratory and stood next to him, leaning on a galvanised work bench, lined with tens of yellow biological hazard containers.

‘How long have you been here?’ I asked.

‘
Seven a.m.’

He explained how he had a fight with his wife and needed to escape for a while.

God, relationships really began to scare me.

John shifted his swivel chair in front of a comparison microscope, a magnifying instrument with a relatively low range, 5 to 35x, making it possible to view two samples at once.

The comparison microscope worked by means of a double tube, whose separate images were combined together by a pair of mirrors and a pair of prisms into a comparison eyepiece. This instrument was mainly known to be used for comparison of bullet rifling and cartridge marks in ballistics. However, John had been using it to compare anything from hair, to fibres and tool marks.

‘
Look in there, and tell me what you see.’

I moved close to the eyepiece and viewed two dark samples of material  placed on the stage. The one on the right was rugged and fibres were pulled out from the edge. The one on the left was perfectly cut.

‘So?’ I asked, wondering what he was getting at.

‘
One of those two samples is from the suede jacket we found at Walter Dunn’s apartment.’ I remembered Frank finding the jacket. ‘The other is also from his jacket, but it’s the one Frank collected from the window frame at the Wilson’s apartment.’

‘
Which provided us with a point of exit,’ I commented.

‘
Or so someone wanted to make us believe it was,’ John corrected. ‘The material collected from the Wilson’s apartment is not the rugged sample, but the neatly cut one. If the killer had caught his jacket on the window frame, we would be looking at a tear, just like the sample on the right. But instead, the sample is perfectly straight, as if someone cut it with scissors.’

I looked at John and then back into the eyepiece.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘but we already knew Walter didn’t kill Jeremy Wilson from the autopsy report.’

‘
Sure, but this indicates something else.  Can’t you see?’

I racked my brain for a few seconds and said, ‘This was premeditated murder. Whoever killed Jeremy Wilson went through the whole trouble of cutting a piece from Walter’s jacket and placing it on the window frame of the Wilson’s apartment. And since we know that Walter was murdered and did not commit suicide, and he died a few days before Jeremy Wilson was killed, then whoever killed Jeremy planned this days ahead, maybe weeks, maybe months.’

He nodded with a smile.

I couldn’t see what the funny part was.

‘Jesus, John, we’ve got a real psychopath on our hands. The killer didn’t just try to cover up his trail, but created an entire scenario of false evidence to send us in the wrong direction.’

‘
And you know what that means?’

I looked at him puzzled.

He jabbed his forefinger in front of my face. ‘You’d better watch your arse. If the killer knows you’re getting too close to the truth, you could be in for a nasty surprise.’

I swallowed as I felt my stomach churning. John was right. The killer was still out there and would probably do anything to protect himself.

‘This could be someone clever,’ he added. ‘In fact, it could be someone who knows about police work. It could be someone we work with.’

I thought of Frank straight away, but he was too clever to make so many mistakes.

I knew I was dealing with someone intelligent, but not as intelligent as he thought himself to be. Someone cunning, cold-blooded, and capable of planning his killings well ahead of time. That person had a deep hatred of Jeremy Wilson and Walter Dunn. Especially Jeremy Wilson. The way he’d been butchered indicated revenge of the worst kind. Intruders killed fast and furious. Whoever had killed Jeremy Wilson took a hell of a lot of time to do it.

My mind did a juggling act, but came back to the same conclusion.

As much as I hated to admit it, I was almost certain I knew who that person was.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A
fter lunch, I cancelled my afternoon class at the Police Academy in Glen Waverley. Instead, I called the RACV to put a new battery in my car.

Straight after the RACV patrolman left, I changed into a pair of Levis and a white T-shirt.

With its new battery, the Lancer was roaring with pleasure.

And so was I.

I raced straight to St Patrick’s Hospital, making a nuisance of myself on the road, tailgating every car in sight, zigzagging between the traffic as if I was running in the Grand Prix. Cold wind blew in my hair, giving me the sensation of thousands of tiny fingers massaging my scalp.

No doubt, one day I would get pulled over.
             

I needed to talk to Dr Larousse, ask him if he had heard anything suspicious from his staff about Teresa Wilson. Since she’d been there for a few days, surely she must have spoken to someone. And if not, a nurse must have noticed something unusual, something which contradicted her version of the events of the 20th of February.

Dr Larousse wasn’t expecting me, and when I walked into his office, unannounced, he seemed taken aback. I glanced at his fluorescent green tie, hidden under his white lab coat.

‘
Dr Malina, did we have an appointment?’ he asked, pushing his rimless glasses up the bridge of his nose. He looked as tired as when I first met him. I wondered if there was anyone left in Melbourne who was getting enough sleep.

I stood in front of his desk and made eye contact. ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, but this couldn’t wait. It’s about Teresa Wilson.’

Dr Larousse stood up, circled the office, shut the door, and sat down again. ‘Actually, I was meaning to talk to you about her. I never got around to calling you.’ He almost whispered, as if he was about to reveal some great conspiracy. ‘You know what it’s like in a hospital. Always running around, shift after shift, and you keep on forgetting those really important phone calls you have to make.’ He presented a brown vinyl chair on the other side of his desk. ‘Please do take a seat.’

‘
Thank you,’ I said, partly excited, partly anxious about what he had to tell me. Him wanting to talk to me just when I needed to talk to him was a great coincidence, something I rarely came across in my line of work.

He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a cream-coloured manilla folder. A typed label with Teresa Wilson’s name was on it. He opened the folder and pulled out two A4-size colour photographs.

I tried to analyse the pictures across the desk, but nothing made sense. A composite of fleshy-like tones.

‘
Take a look at those,’ he finally said, handing over the photographs.

One picture showed Teresa Wilson’s badly bruised and cut face. The other, obviously more recent, showed a reduction in wounds.

‘The first photograph was taken at the preliminary examination. As you know, when Teresa Wilson first came to us, she was in dreadful condition. This is clearly evident in the photograph you’re holding. Our main concern at the time was to identify any life-threatening injuries, making sure the victim was breathing, stopping any major haemorrhage, looking for head and spinal cord damage, surface wounds, chest injuries and so on.

‘
Like I initially told you, it was obvious to anyone who attended Teresa Wilson’s wounds that she had been cruelly battered and raped. But now, take a look at the second photograph.’

I placed the first picture alongside the second one.

Dr Larousse tilted his body forward and pointed to various point on the pictures.

‘
You see all the bruising and swelling on the photograph taken when she first came to us?’

I nodded.

‘Okay,’ he went on, sounding just as excited as when he first began, ‘now look at this shot. The bruising has diminished dramatically in a small amount of time. This indicates the wounds were superficial in the first place.

‘
If you take a closer look at the lacerations on Teresa Wilson’s face, it’s much easier to identify them on the second photograph than on the first one.’

I noticed the scratches on Teresa’s face were unusually well-scattered.

Dr Larousse stopped for a few seconds, giving me time to absorb his comments. He pushed his glasses back on his nose again and continued, ‘When someone gets assaulted, the scratches are random. But on Teresa’s face, most of them seem to concentrate on the left side of her face, something which I had never picked initially in the original photos we took, no thanks to the amount of bruising and blood smear. Also notice how the scratches have somehow missed every sensitive area on her face, including the eyes, the nostrils, the lips and the ears. Do you see what I’m getting at?’

I opened my mouth to respond, but he went on, ‘But wait, take a look at those.’

Dr Larousse removed another two A4-size colour photographs from the manilla folder, this time showing scratches on Teresa’s arms.

‘
Look at the left arm,’ he said, his voice filled with excitement, as if he had just discovered a vaccine for AIDS.

I looked at the pictures and noticed Teresa’s left arm had ten times more scratches than her right one. All this had never been obvious at the crime scene since there was so much blood and chaos. I also never had the chance to examine Teresa Wilson because she had been whisked straight to the hospital.

‘Okay,’ he went on, ‘when a person scratches herself deliberately, she tends to do it more on the side away from the leading hand. Since Teresa Wilson is right handed, the left arm is more scratched than the right one. Let me put it another way: left-handed people injure themselves more on the right side, and vice versa.’

I nodded as I stared at the pictures, not really surprised about what I was seeing.
              When I spoke to John Darcy that morning and concluded whoever killed Jeremy Wilson had
staged
his death, something triggered my mind. I suddenly recalled Teresa Wilson was a set designer. Her job was to make visual impressions. Only she never counted on the forensic evidence she would leave behind.

I looked at the pictures in front of me and wanted to throw-up, not because of the injuries on her body, but because I had felt so close to this woman for a little while. I’d been naive enough to believe only a man would do something so horrific. I’d never come across someone who had self-inflicted so many injuries just to make it look like she was beaten.

‘What about the squash ball in her anus?’ I asked, not because I needed more convincing, but because Dr Larousse seemed to be taking so much pride in his discovery. And also because I appreciated his extra research and good eye for observation.

‘
Ah, ha,’ he said, ‘now that’s something you’d have to hear.’ He pulled a typed page from the manilla folder. ‘When surgery was performed on her anus, the surgeon who did the operation noticed that, and let me quote this, “the anus has slightly keratinised edges, and on close inspection, appeared to be chronically abraded”. This woman was used to having things inserted in her anus. I’d say she was involved in passive anal intercourse.’

I knew keratin was a fibrous protein found in hard skin from my biology study at university. Unless Teresa Wilson had a serious constipation problem, Dr Larousse had to be right about her fetish for anal intercourse.

‘So,’ I said, ‘you’re convinced Teresa Wilson has inflicted all those injuries on herself?’

He looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Well, I’m not a medico-legal expert, and I certainly wouldn’t want any of my comments to be used in a court of law, so officially, I’d have to get a second opinion for you from a forensic pathologist. A clinical pathologist just wouldn’t serve the purpose. Problems in criminal investigation differ from problems in clinical work. You know as well as I do that writing up a report to be presented in court is not the same as writing a report for a medical colleague. The last thing you’d want is my testimony thrown out of court on the basis that I’m not qualified to comment. But between you and me, those injuries have got her signature all over it.’

‘Do you think you could arrange a forensic pathologist’s report  for me?’

‘
Not a problem. You can nominate your own pathologist if you want, and I’ll do the leg work. I can have a report for you within a week.’

‘
There’s no way to speed up the process?’

He raised both eyebrows as if to say it’s out of my hands. ‘I’m doing the best I can. In fact, I’ve spent more time on this patient than can be justified. But after I heard you came back to visit Teresa Wilson a few times after our initial discussion, her case kept nagging me. Something didn’t ring true. I knew I had to see you and talk this over.’

I thanked him for his time.

Just when I was about to leave his office, he said, ‘Oh, and another thing. I got the opinion of a gynaecologist regarding the abrasions in Teresa Wilson’s anus, and he didn’t think it was the kind of marks a squash ball would leave. He said they were marks left by women’s fingernails.’

I turned around, surprised. ‘How could he know it was woman’s fingernails?’

‘
The cuts were short and steeply arched, just like the tips of a small manicured hand.’

When I got home, I took a long, hot shower to compose myself and remain level-headed.

I had suspected on and off that Teresa Wilson had killed her husband. But now, there was strong evidence to believe she did.

Or that she had deliberately dramatised the rape by inflicting excessive injuries on herself.

If Walter did rape Teresa, she obviously wanted the end result to look worse than what he did to her. Come to think of it, her actions were not as uncommon as I initially thought. When a rape victim felt the rapist hadn’t left enough evidence on her body, she often highlighted the rape with creative evidence, such as self-inflicted scratches and wounds. This was common since so many rape cases never ended up in court because of lack of physical evidence. Rape victims failed to realise that wounds can also tell a story.

As I shampooed my hair, I realised I had to overcome two major problems. The first was to explain to Trevor Mitchell why I continued investigating the Wilson homicide when I’d been barred from it.

The second, a problem of a much graver nature, was telling Frank the full story. The thought of it made me sick. There he was, lodging a probable psychopath under his roof for the last two weeks or so and becoming infatuated by her when she was probably planning her next victim.

And more likely than not, it would be him.

I shivered at the realisation that I might find Frank in the same state as I had found the other bodies, all, I presumed, the artwork of Teresa Wilson.

I stepped out of the shower and dried myself with a white bath towel. The bathroom was filled with steam, so I opened the small window above the bathtub. The air was cool, but it cleared the moisture. I could see the sky outside, covered in white clouds.

As I slicked my hair back, my thoughts drifted to Claire Kendall, Jeremy’s secret lover.

Surely if Walter Dunn was a good friend of Jeremy Wilson and the lover of Teresa, he must have told Teresa about Claire. By jealousy, Teresa killed Claire.

But why would she have killed Jeremy when she, herself, was cheating on her husband by having an affair with Walter? And why did she kill Walter?

The only consistency I had established so far was that Teresa killed the two men she slept with. And if that was anything to go by, I began to feel an all-consuming fear regarding the safety of Frank Moore.

I could have gone straight to the police and had her arrested. But to do so I needed a warrant. That would have taken a lot of explaining. In addition, the evidence I obtained to date might be inadmissible in a court of law because I had followed improper procedures. The defence would argue that since I was unauthorised to investigate the Wilson’s case, then my findings would be worthless. This would earn a big cross over my name at the VFSC and the CIB. I would seriously have to consider a life as a private investigator instead.

But my main reason for refusing to get police participation was that I felt it might have been better to accumulate more evidence before Teresa got herself a lawyer. The amount of evidence was mounting up as I went along. This gave me faith to push a bit further. I knew if I persisted a bit longer, I would dig up many more secrets, enough to give her three life sentences. After all, in spite of how personally involved I felt to this case, my focus was to get her to court, not help her slip through the legal system. Once I’d found enough evidence, I’d pass it on to the detective in charge of the investigation, anonymously of course, and let him follow up my leads legally.

I knew I was pushing my luck by not getting police involvement immediately, but lawyers could be really cunning. We needed more than just suspicion. Someone out there would go over all the evidence we had accumulated since the beginning of this case with a fine tooth comb, and question the validity of every single test we’d done. Our legal system was increasingly becoming Americanised. You had to be involved in the system to realise what a bunch of losers some lawyers were. They were not interested in their clients guilt or innocence, but just how much money they could extract from them. A pretty lame way to provide justice in a country where seriously dangerous offenders, such as rapists and killers, were given lighter sentences than white collar criminals.