Mountain of Black Glass (95 page)

His smile was surprisingly kind. “Maybe we should go grab some lunch—this is our break, after all. Isn't there a coffee bar or something in here?”

 

Calliope was having a salad week, and even bravely avoided the feta cheese she could, with fairly clean conscience, have crumbled on top. She was determined to knock off a little weight. She still hadn't gone back to see the waitress at Bondi Baby, and was using the prospect as a dangling carrot: lose five kilos, get a new outfit, go see if the girl with the tattoo had really been giving her meaningful glances or had just forgot to put in her contact lenses.

Stan, who was one of those nauseating people who could eat like a pig and still remain thin, had loaded his tray with not just sandwich and crisps, but two desserts.

“I have a theory,” said Calliope, mournfully prodding a section of tomato. “Just listen to it and don't tell me I'm full of shit until I finish, okay?”

Stan Chan grinned around an excessive mouthful of sandwich. “O aheah—ire aray.”

“Ever since I realized this, it's been bothering me. Our boy Johnny's real name, or at least the name on the birth records, is John Wulgaru. But his father was almost certainly this Filipino guy . . .”

“Uh irate.”

“The pirate, yeah. And none of his mother's long-term boyfriends were Aboriginal. And Wulgaru wasn't a last name she used, nor did it turn up anywhere in the three generations of her background I tracked down.” Calliope gave up trying to spear the tomato and picked it up with her fingers. “So what does it mean? Why would she give him that name? If it was just a name that didn't mean anything, I'd say forget about it, but it's the name of a particularly creepy Aboriginal monster, a wooden doll that comes to life, and it's also the MO for how he killed Polly Merapanui, so it has to mean
something.
”

Stan had finally swallowed. “I'm with you so far, but everything up to ‘what does it mean' is the easy part.”

“I know.” She frowned. “Now we get to my theory. The woolagaroo was—what did Professor Jigalong say? ‘A metaphor for how the white man's attempts to control the native people may eventually backfire on him,' something like that. Maybe that's what his mother meant him to be from the very first. Maybe she meant him to be a monster—or at least an instrument of revenge.”

“Slow down, Skouros. You already said his mother was too busy hooking and hyping to join any political groups.”

“I'm not necessarily talking about something
political.
” She realized that her voice was getting loud; several tourists at other tables had turned to see what the argument was about. “I'm just talking about . . . I don't know, hatred. If you were an Aboriginal woman in the Cairns ghetto, maybe beaten and raped by your own father—there's suggestions of it in the social services files—and certainly beaten and raped by customers, isn't it possible you might want to strike back at the world somehow? Not everybody poor can be noble about it.” She leaned closer. “The few juvenile records we've got from Jonny Dark's childhood are horrible—you've seen them. Whipped and burned, locked in closets for days, thrown out to live in the streets once when he was three years old just because he pissed off one of his mother's so-called boyfriends. Who's to say some of it wasn't intentional? That she wasn't . . . molding him. Turning him into a weapon against the world that had hurt her.”

Stan was already on his first dessert, and for a moment, as he speared and chewed, she thought he had not been listening. “It's interesting, Skouros,” he said at last. “And there may be some truth to it, but I've got a couple of problems right up front. First, he
hated
his mother—you heard that Doctor Danney guy. If she'd lived, he would have killed her himself. Why should he take up some crusade on her part?”

“But that's what I think happened! I think his mother raised him to be this . . . woolagaroo, this killing monster, but what she mostly made him do was hate
her.
”

“So where does our victim come into this?”

“Maybe she tried to be his friend, and was just too close to something dangerously damaged. Worse, maybe in the way girls do sometimes, she tried to take care of him. Maybe . . . maybe she tried to be his mother.”

Stan slowed down as he started on his second dessert, as though taking the word “ruminate” literally, and did not speak for almost a minute. “Yeah, I see what you're saying,” he finally said. “I'm not sure about it, but it's interesting. I'm not certain it helps us forward any, though, and I sure as hell don't see what it has to do with grave posts.”

Calliope shrugged, then reached out her fork and pilfered a corner off Stan's piece of pie. He raised his eyebrows but said nothing—it was an old dance of theirs. “I can't tell you. I just have a feeling that this Aboriginal myth stuff isn't simply window-dressing. He didn't mutilate that girl just to make some mocking point about his cultural heritage. No, it's more like . . . like he was trying to liberate himself from it, somehow. Turn it back on his mother, tell her, ‘This is what I think of your plans.' But she was gone, already dead. He had to find someone else to act all that anger out on.”

Stan pushed back a little way from the table so he could cross his legs. The slanting sunlight through the high windows, the green of the trees in the Botanical Garden, the shrill voices of children as they skidded along the food-service aisle, all made Polly Merapanui's death seem almost fantastically remote.
But that's the point, isn't it?
Calliope thought.
We do what we do so that people can feel that the bad stuff is in boxes, kept separate—that when someone does something horrible, people like us are right behind them, ready to take them off the streets.

“I've been doing some thinking of my own,” Stan announced suddenly. “But first, I have a question. Tell me again why exactly they threw this case out of the “Sang” killer investigation—or the “Real” killer, or whatever the hell they're calling it this week . . . the “Sang-Real-Good” killer, maybe—why did they throw Merapanui back out again?”

“The only reason the task force picked it up in the first place was because the weapon was the same—their killer uses one of those big Zeissing meat-choppers too. Oh, and some of the woundpattern stuff was slightly similar, mostly because of the size and shape of the knife, probably. That and lack of forensic data. But everything else is different. The Real Killer—they only called him that because his first victim's name was Real, and because he never shows up on surveillance footage—goes after well-to-do white women, usually youngish, but certainly not girls like Polly. The mutilations on his victims are a lot less bizarre than with Merapanui, too. Why?”

“Because something's been bothering me about the information in this case, and . . . well, it's just strange the way the records have been erased.”

“People hack into systems all the time, Stan, even our system. Don't you remember that multiple-murder on Bronte Beach, where the guy's girlfriend . . .”

“That's not what I'm talking about,” her partner said impatiently. “I'm not surprised someone hacked into the system and jiggered this guy's records, what's suprising is the way they did it. I know about this stuff, Skouros—I did an academy refresher in it just a couple of years ago. It usually goes two ways. Either they work and work at it until they manage to get into one system, but don't realize how many parallel systems there are, and leave all the cross-referencing, or they do a sensible, professional job once they're in and drop a dataphage.”

“Some of that data-eating gear.”

“Yeah. Which will systematically follow the name or whatever from system to system until everything's gone—everything, including stuff about people with the same name! You can buy the service from any black market hackshop. But what our boy's done—if it was him—is somewhere in between. He's left little bits of information lying around all over the place. Kind of sloppy, in fact. It's like he managed to do stuff no normal gear-jockey can do, in terms of getting into lots of different systems without being detected, but didn't know enough basic stuff to get a dataeater and do the job right.”

Calliope wasn't sure where this was going. “So?”

“So it just made me wonder about the Real Killer and his weird luck at staying off surveillance systems, camera drones, you name it. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it.”

“That seems like a real stretch, Stan. Besides, if the task force didn't find any hard connection between our murder and all of theirs, we'd probably be spinning our wheels worrying about it. Let's face it—we've got a small-time case and we should just get used to it.”

Stan nodded. “Maybe, but you haven't heard the rest of what I'm thinking about, and some of what you've said today, your theory, just makes me wonder about it more. Let's assume that what you've said is true, right? This kid was raised in a brutal environment, with a mother and a succession of boyfriends we
know
abused him—that much isn't speculation. But let's go with your idea, that his mother systematically tortured him, trying to turn him into some kind of human terrorist weapon. Filled him full of monster stories, religious mania, all but put the knife into his hands and told him ‘kill, kill, kill!' Okay. The profile fits—he's been in trouble since he was little, there are suspicious deaths all through the record, as well as what we know are a few actual murders, whether or not you buy into the polite fiction of temporary insanity. Then he goes into Feverbrook Hospital and scares the bejesus out of everyone with how smart and quick and evil he is—old Doctor Danney comes up about a fingernail short of calling him the Antichrist—where he meets Polly Merapanui. Then, a short time later, our Jonny Dark aka John Dread, he suddenly dies. But we don't believe that now, do we? In any case, all his records are buggered, so it's hard to know what's really going on. A few months after our boy's so-called death, Polly Merapanui dies, brutally mutilated, a real psycho number. All this sound more or less right?”

Calliope had been hungry, but she did not feel like finishing her salad now. “Yes. More or less right.”

“You see where this is going, don't you?” Stan put his feet on the floor and leaned in, his eyes intent. “Little Johnny Dread has been shaped from birth to inflict pain and suffering. He's gotten away with everything so far. He's an intelligent, cruel, sociopathic bastard—maybe he is the Antichrist, for all we know.” His grin was without humor. “So . . . why would he stop killing? He's like an adult in a world of children, as far as he's concerned. He can get away with anything.
Why would he stop killing?
”

Calliope sat back and closed her eyes for a moment. “He wouldn't, of course.”

Stan nodded. “That's what I think. So he's either gone—way gone, America, maybe Europe—or he's here. Could even still be in Sydney. Right under our noses. And he's still murdering people.”

As the sun went behind a cloud, a shadow passed across the tall windows of the museum restaurant. It might have been Calliope's imagination, but for that single moment everyone in the wide, echoing room seemed to fall silent.

 

T
HEY stopped to get out and stretch their legs along the motorway. The Drakensberg stretched above them, sharp and forbidding. The dim late afternoon sun had already begun to drop behind the peaks; shadows blanketed the mountainside and the patches of high snow seemed weirdly luminous.

“This . . . I haven't been here before.” A puff of Del Ray's vaporous breath swirled in the crisp, cold air as he squinted up at the line of jagged peaks. “It's impressive, I guess. I can't say it looks like a very nice place to spend a lot of time.”

“You are just ignorant, man,” Long Joseph said cheerfully. He had been here before, only a few weeks earlier, and felt a certain expansive possessiveness about the place. Besides, it was always good to one-up a young know-all like Renie's ex-boyfriend. “This is your heritage. It is . . . it is part of history, you see? Those little people, those Bushmen, they used to live all up around here. Before the white man came and shot them all.”

“Some heritage.” Del Ray clapped his hands together. “Come on. I don't want to be looking for this base in the dark, and God knows how far we'd have to go to find a place to stay for the night.”

“No, you don't want to be running 'round here in the dark,” Long Joseph said. “Very tricky.”

The ride up had been long and tedious, but once Joseph had established his right to play the radio and occasionally sing along—a right granted in return for a promise that he would keep his feet off the dashboard, whether he thought the leg space was too cramped or not—he and Del Ray had worked out a reasonably practical arrangement. The tenor of the day had further improved when Joseph found a handful of coins wedged in the crack of the seat, and made Del Ray pull over at a combination store-and-she-been along the motorway, a place too small to have a hologram, or even a neon sign, but whose painted advertising carried the only words that mattered—“COLD DRINKS.” Despite a few desultory protests from Del Ray that the money by rights belonged to his brother Gilbert, since it was his car, Joseph spent his windfall on four bottles of Mountain Rose. He drank half of one before they were out of the muddy parking lot, but then, remembering that there would be no alcohol at the Wasp's Nest base, put the cap back on, and congratulated himself on his restraint.