Prime Cut (9 page)

Who was she? How did she know him? What were the circumstances of the sighting? This was before their new publicity push because the photofit was based on what she had seen. So what led the SA Police to this woman in WA? What was Detective Tim Delaney holding back? Stuart Miller reached for his phone and the embossed business card of the young man in the suit.

Six down, twelve letters.
Fellow’s glee takes your breath away.
Cato nodded to himself, clicked his biro, and filled in the answer. ‘Manslaughter’. The coffees arrived. He furtively slipped the crossword pages out of the paper, folded them into his jacket pocket and put the newspaper back into the cafe’s complimentary pile along with the glossies. Jim Buckley clapped his hands at a spot just above and behind Cato’s head.

‘Moth, got it, must have escaped from your wallet. Poor bastard was blinded by the daylight.’

Cato ignored the jibe and sized up his partner. ‘Everything okay at home?’

He couldn’t help himself, he had to stick his nose into Jim Buckley’s business: curiosity rather than real concern. Since breakfast Buckley seemed to have spent every spare moment talking quietly but fiercely into his mobile. He had just done it again, pacing up and down outside, smoking and muttering into the phone while they waited for the coffees. They were sitting at a table at the top deck of the Taste of the Toun cafe. The view out over the Southern Ocean was magnificent. The day was fine and the wind was already up, it was an easterly but still cool as it came off the sea. In Perth an easterly came off the desert, hot and unforgiving. The top deck of the cafe was a bit claustrophobic with undersized tables and chairs and a roof that sloped down to below head height at its lowest point. Both Cato and Buckley had to stoop when standing in that space. If he’d been green, Buckley would have been a dead ringer for Shrek having unknowingly wandered into the seven dwarves’ cottage.

‘Fine,’ said Buckley.

Cato took the hint. ‘Great,’ he said.

Buckley’s call to the Donizetti case officer in Perth had drawn a blank. No sightings: Donizetti had disappeared without a trace, bank account untouched, no credit card transactions, nothing. Suspicion initially fell on a boyfriend who had previous for domestic violence but, while he remained a person of interest, it was hard to pursue without a body and without any forensics pointing the finger. There had also been a spate of gay bashings in the area in previous weeks. Take your pick.

Meanwhile Greg Fisher had been a busy little bee: he’d got back to the old man at Starvation Bay who had insisted he’d slept through and hadn’t seen or heard anything to do with lights on the boat ramp and was sorry he couldn’t be of any more help. Fisher had also left requests with the harbourmasters at Adelaide, Esperance, Albany and Fremantle to check shipping through their ports in the last few days with any notifications of missing personnel. He’d been in touch with fishing cooperatives at key points east and west to check if any fishers were reported lost overboard and he was now out on the groyne chatting with boaties at the town ramp.

Buckley slurped his coffee. ‘Think this Indonesian is your man then?’

‘Maybe,’ Cato shrugged, not wanting the other to think he was getting too excited by the possibility.

‘Long shot if you ask me.’

‘Probably right,’ Cato said, screwing up his face after a mouthful of the brew. ‘Maybe we should go and say hello to Justin; he may be a skanky drug-pusher but he knows how to do coffee.’

Buckley brightened. ‘Well we do have unfinished business with him. You reckon he looked pretty relieved to see us go yesterday.’

Cato could tell that Buckley would be more than happy to be back on the kind of police work he understood. Hassling drugpushers, retrieving stolen tractors, anything was better than trying to put a name to a piece of rotting flotsam that probably fell off a foreign fishing boat. Out on the street Greg Fisher had finished talking to the boaties on the groyne. He gestured up towards their window, thumbs down, no luck there. Cato decided to give Buckley what he wanted.

‘Okay, take young Greg with you and have another chat with Justin. See if you can find out who or what he’s hiding from. But Jim...’ Buckley had started to rise and was stooped under the low ceiling, cigarette packet in hand, ‘no rough stuff, we don’t want to give Greg any bad habits, eh?’

Cato smiled; he’d meant it as a joke, male bonding and all that. Buckley produced half a smirk. ‘Reckon you’re the one to be giving advice about how to be a good cop?’

Cato stopped smiling.

The ranger put the outboard into reverse as he approached the cave. The ocean was fairly calm at this side of Quoin Head, a secluded bay about forty kilometres west of Hopetoun in the Fitzgerald River National Park. A jutting headland sheltered it from the strengthening easterly which was whipping up whitecaps further out to sea. His khaki park-ranger shirt was sodden from the sea spray he’d faced on the way out. The sea cave in the
western side of the headland was about eight metres high and the same wide. He knew it went back about fifteen metres, gradually narrowing down to no more than the height and width of a child. And it was dark back there.

The report had come in from a fisherman the previous afternoon: something bobbing around the mouth of the cave, maybe a seal or a dog? The angler hadn’t gone down to investigate because the waves were building into kingies. Maybe the creature was injured by a shark, or tangled in a net or fishing line. Seal, schmeal, the ranger thought, they come, they go, they live, they die. But if it turned out to be someone’s pet dog or, heaven forbid, a person, then that was a whole different matter. Anyway it was his job to check it out and it wasn’t like he had much else on at the moment.

He flicked on his Dolphin torch, scanning the surface of the water as it lapped against the sides of the cave. The outboard chugged – he didn’t want the tinny to be caught on the treacherous rocks around the cave mouth; it could be a real pain in the arse sourcing new prop parts down here. Another quick scan and he’d be out of there.

Something shimmered in the torchlight against the mossy cave wall further back. It was too small to be a seal, or a dog, although it could possibly be part of one. He turned the outboard off, allowing the boat to drift for a moment. He had a net attached to a two-metre pole but even at full stretch from the front of the dinghy he was still another two metres short of whatever it was. Outside the cave entrance the wind had moved south and conditions, even in the sheltered end of the bay, were chopping up. A wave surge sent the dinghy further into the darkness and clanging off a side wall. At full stretch out the front of the boat, he was bounced off a small jagged overhang. It scraped down the side of his face and hurt like hell.

‘Fuck.’

The curse rebounded all round the cave and out on to the blue waters of the bay. He was now much nearer to the object and he focused his flashlight on it.

‘Fuck,’ he said again. Quieter this time.

‘Where’s Quoin Head?’ Cato asked Tess as they bumped westwards along the gravel road. The rugged rock-strewn Mount Barren reared up ahead to their right like it was auditioning for a location role in
Lord of the Rings.
It was somehow smaller close up than it seemed in the distance.

‘About forty kilometres inside the national park. Nice camping spot, when it’s not closed by bushfire or dieback,’ said Tess. ‘But we’re meeting our bloke, his name’s Steve Bell, at the ranger’s house just up here.’

Jim Buckley was crunched up in the back seat looking thoughtful. Apparently the visit to Justin Woodward had been unproductive, the Snak-Attack was closed and the proprietor hadn’t been at home. To their left, the wide sweep of blue foamy Southern Ocean and the hazy hint of some islands out on the edge of the known world. There were clouds out there too, a dark smudge on the distant horizon, but they looked like they would pass along the bottom of Australia and into the bight without troubling this stretch of coastline.

Tess turned left up a rough rutted driveway to a green wood and fibro house with a couple of sheds, a rainwater tank and a weather station on site. The view from the front porch was a million dollars, or probably more these days, across unspoilt low scrub to the ocean. The occasional royal hakea stood head and shoulders above the rest of the vegetation, lurid orange and red diamond-shaped wounds blistering the dark crusty skin. Spring had well and truly sprung and the air fairly hummed with its vibrations.

Steve Bell was already outside waiting for them, blood on his ranger shirt and matting his blond sideburns, a big elastoplast barely covering the scrape down the right side of his face. Otherwise he had that perennially fit, rugged and healthy look of the outdoors
type. ‘It’s in there.’ He nodded towards an old rusty fridge up on the porch, the kind normally used to store beers and meat for the barbie.

Cato went up and opened the fridge door. There it was, the ‘Quoin Head head’. It was in the biggest freezer bag Bell’s wife had been able to find, he explained. She’d made herself scarce, it was nearly school’s-out time and she intended to keep the kids away until both the police and the head had gone. No offence.

‘None taken,’ Cato assured him.

The head lay sideways on the top shelf. The eyes were missing, hair black, or dark anyway. Nose, ears and lips had been fish-or crabnibbled and there was a strand of green mossy seaweed clinging to the chin. The head was male.

Jim Buckley peered over Cato’s shoulder. ‘Spitting image of you mate.’

Cato stared at the whiteboard in the Murder Room, at the name circled in the centre, Flipper. The head was on a flight to Perth to join the rest of the body. Both bits of Flipper had now moved a few steps up the priority ladder at the pathology lab and Cato had been told he could expect a preliminary report within forty-eight hours. That wasn’t quick enough for him but it would have to do. Buckley had been right, the head definitely looked of Chinese origin. It certainly didn’t look like Indonesian Navy Lieutenant Riri Yusala.

The only Chinese Cato had seen in the area had been the guy in the phone box on the main street on day one, and those working at the mine and getting into fights. Was that where he needed to look? Was that where he should have been looking all along? He reminded himself he’d only been in town for two days, although it felt longer. Nobody from the mine had reported anybody missing, but then again they hadn’t been asked. Or maybe they hadn’t even noticed. Apparently there were over two thousand people on site, most of them were fly-in fly-out, and that didn’t include the contractors and subcontractors.

Somebody coughed and he realised that they were all sitting
there waiting for him to say something – Greg Fisher, Tess Maguire, Jim Buckley. Patiently hanging out for some words of wisdom from Sherlock fucking Kwong.

‘What now, Maestro?’ asked Buckley, as if reading his mind.

Buckley’s dig in the Taste of the Toun still rankled with Cato but only because, like all home truths, it was on target. He’d been busted for being lazy, sloppy, incompetent, arrogant and corrupt. He was a disgrace. Fair cop as they say. But how had it come to this? That first day on the detective squad: the try-hard handshakes, the surly nods and knowing looks. It wasn’t unanimous but it was certainly widely believed, Cato Kwong was the new golden boy. He was a protected species, the modern face of WA policing, the one on the recruitment poster. He wanted them to know he was a good cop and he would show them all. Was that when the self-delusion started, on day one as a detective? Did he in his own heart of hearts also believe he was a protected species?

He certainly seemed bulletproof in those first few months out of uniform. DI Mick Hutchens taking him under his wing, showing him how it was done. An early result on a string of home invasions, Mick Hutchens puffing his chest out modestly for the news crew and Cato Kwong in the background putting the cuffed prisoner into the car, dark blue detective’s bib proudly on display. Then a big hydroponic drugs bust: Cato Kwong gets the tip-off from suspicious neighbours and the Western Power electricity readout backs him up. This time Detective Senior Constable Philip Kwong gets to front the cameras and they like what they see.

Then one chill winter’s morning, a Cockburn newsagent, Maria Lazzara, is found with her head smashed and the cash till empty. An opportunistic, tacky low-rent robbery accompanied by a savage bashing with a blunt instrument wielded by somebody who obviously had a taste for it. Fremantle Detectives caught the case, DI Mick Hutchens leading the investigation. Cato Kwong was put in charge of collating the handful of witness statements. The first was a nurse in a taxi on her way to the early shift at Freo Hospital. The cab stops at traffic lights and through the cold dawn drizzle she notices lights on in the shop and a man there: stocky, medium height and reddish
hair. Why did she notice him? Something a bit scruffy about him and not quite right; he didn’t seem like he belonged. Another witness, a student teacher on a moped, had to brake suddenly and nearly came off in the slippery conditions. A man had run out into the road in front of her: medium height, stocky build, reddish hair. It was just around the corner from the newsagent’s. The timing corresponded. By late morning they had their man: Peter Beaton – a tall, thin rangy alcoholic no-hoper with a spider web tattoo on his neck and a record for opportunistic, tacky low-rent robberies. He had been picked up by a patrol who’d noticed him acting suspiciously. Beaton was just four streets away from the murder scene. Mick Hutchens and another senior detective went to work on him. After two days they had a confession. Nine months later a jury put him away for life.

How early did Cato Kwong know it was all bullshit? When the coalition of pushy journos and do-gooders secured an appeal for Peter Beaton after eight years of incarceration? Or was it when DI Hutchens pulled him to one side half an hour after the confession was signed and mentioned a couple of anomalies that needed straightening out? Like what? Like our man is tall, skinny, with darkish hair and a big fucking spider’s web tattoo on his neck that nobody seems to have noticed, not medium height with reddish hair like the witnesses are saying. No worries. Cato Kwong was Mr Can-Do. The nurse in the taxi was contacted. She knew the score, been out with a few cops in her time. Yes, maybe the man she saw at a distance of thirty metres through the dawn drizzle was actually stooped over, that may account for the height thing. Pretty sure the hair was reddish though but yes it did all happen a bit quickly. Maybe darkish-reddish? The student teacher was pretty adamant that he was medium height, stocky build and reddish hair. She was up close and personal and he nearly made her come off her bike. She wasn’t changing her statement.

Hutchens and Cato considered the matter. Maybe it was someone else who just happened to be in the area. Maybe best not to call her as a witness, bury the statement and just use the nurse and the confession instead. Maybe Detective Senior Constable Philip Kwong began to think right then that it was bullshit. If so he did nothing
about it. Peter Beaton had put his hand up and now he was locked up. Case closed. Cato Kwong’s star continued to rise and before long he was a detective sergeant with his eye on Mick Hutchens’ job.

Over the years the ‘Free Beaton’ campaign intensified. They found an independent pathology expert who showed that the wounds inflicted on Maria Lazzara could not have been left by the weapon described in the confession. The shape and indentations were wrong. Hutchens had fumed. ‘Wounds? Indentations? What the fuck would they know? Strawberry jam is fucking strawberry jam.’

An independent cold-case team is brought in to review the evidence. They concur with the expert on the murder weapon. They raise an eyebrow at the witness statements, particularly the one from the student teacher filed at the back and never produced in court. Then they run the scene fingerprints through the new whizbang computer. Bingo, a match on a known thug serving time in Bunbury Regional Prison for another opportunistic and tacky lowrent robbery, with violence. Medium height. Stocky build. Reddish hair. Peter Beaton, the very first murderer Cato Kwong helped put away, was the wrong man. Shit meets fan. Heads must roll but the only clear concrete breach of protocol, the paper trail, the smoking gun, could be traced to Detective Sergeant Philip Kwong. Golden Boy. Protected Species. Those at the top of the food chain get a disapproving shake of the head and the dreaded tsk-tsk but they get to stay on the path to greatness. DI Mick Hutchens is invited to consider early retirement but digs his heels in and tells them to get fucked. He’s moved to Albany instead. Cato Kwong, no longer on the protected species list, gets demoted and sent to Stock Squad in the sincere hope that he’ll get the hint and quietly slip away into oblivion, career effectively over. He’d known for a long time now: it was a career founded on self-delusion and bullshit. Stock Squad was exactly the right place for him.

‘Maestro?’ Jim Buckley repeated.

Cato shook himself back through the time warp. ‘The mine, the contractors, the subcontractors – we want a list of all Chinese nationals or Chinese-Australians on their books. Then we do a
rollcall. Second thoughts, just get the full list of all employees from them. We’re not just looking for a victim here, we’ll also be looking for a perpetrator.’

Greg Fisher put up his hand like he was at school, then realised what he was doing and put it down again.

‘It’s not just the mine...’ All faces turned towards Fisher and he blushed, bless him. ‘There’s a general labour shortage around here. The mine is sucking up any spare skilled labour so they’re bringing in guest workers for construction, for plumbing, electrics, earthmoving, you name it.’

Cato nodded in agreement. ‘Fair enough. Widen it, the building firm and contractors on the new housing estate, et cetera. You and Tess know the scene and the people better than we do. Can you do that Greg, Tess?’ More nods. Cato looked over at Buckley. ‘And we’ll take that tour of the mine.’

Tess scanned the list provided to her by one of the bigger mine contractors, Dunstan Construction Industries in Ravensthorpe. There were about twenty Chinese-looking names on the list, all accounted for at this stage. They’d all been paid yesterday and signed receipts to that effect. Tess and Greg were on their way back to Hopetoun to call on a smaller contractor supplying labour to the surrounding housing developments. The sun was dropping over to the west, the Barren Ranges lying on the horizon like a huge black sleeping dog. Friday afternoon. The pub would be starting to fill up. Her normal job would occupy her fully tonight: drunks in the pub, same as it ever was.

Tess felt her chest tighten, her stomach knot. On the list in front of her, a third of the way down, sandwiched between Kyle Dixon and Frank Duncan. John Djukic. Employed driving a water-truck at the mine. There he was, the man who’d tried to kick her to death and got away with it. According to the roster Johnno Djukic was commuting from Esperance, five days on four days off, and living part-time in a donga at the mine site village. Djukic: ginger mullet and coal-black eyes, bastard offspring of an alcoholic Scottish
mother and a foul-tempered Serbian father. Ending up with the worst of all their genes. Djukic winking, grinning and blowing her kisses across the courtroom while his lawyer weaved a tale of chaos and confusion surrounding the events in the Karratha Hotel. Creating enough reasonable doubt to let Djukic walk free.

By the time the verdict came in she’d had her own doubts. Was it really him in the centre of the melee stomping and kicking her like it was personal? She knew there were others but she hadn’t been able to identify them and that was part of the problem. ‘Did she have something against gingers?’ his lawyer had joked. Her young colleague Pete Latham had been invalided out of the force with half an ear bitten off, a fractured eye socket and partial loss of sight in the left eye. His career over before it really began. Johnno Djukic. Had he really tried to kill her? As far as Tess was concerned the answer was still yes.

‘What’s the matter?’ It was Greg Fisher, in the driving seat, looking scared.

‘What?’

‘You’re ... are you crying?’

She hadn’t even realised she was. ‘It’s nothing. Focus on the driving.’

‘Sure, boss. Sorry.’

Tess wiped her face, and kept on scanning the list. John Djukic was on a four-day break. He was due back on Monday. Three days’ time.

‘Bloody big,’ Buckley agreed.

‘State of the art,’ Bruce Yelland informed them with a proud sweep of the arm.

‘Hole in the ground,’ Cato was thinking to himself.

The sun clipped the summit of Mount Barren. The dark clouds that he earlier thought would pass safely to the south had crept up behind the ranges and now boiled with the storm they carried within. Inky-purple cumulonimbus bubbled with pinks, oranges, greys and blues. The wind occasionally swelled into gusts that
slapped the ute side-on. It was late in the day and extremely short notice, big boss Marnus van der Kuyp had pointed out through a fixed smile, but he was sure he could rustle something up. Yelland had been pulled out of a mine crisis-planning meeting to do the honours. No, he informed Cato tersely, holding on to his civil tongue like the true pro he was, they weren’t actually planning to have a crisis. Cato was none the wiser. The tour would be the severely abridged version. Cato and Buckley let Bruce Yelland know they were duly appreciative.