Silent Fear (30 page)

Ella and Louise looked at each other. ‘Where’s your camera?’ Ella said.

‘Here.’

It was a big digital Canon with an extendable lens. He turned it on and scrolled back through the shots. ‘The sky was still light so you can see a fair bit,’ he said. ‘There’s the car there.’

Louise crowded close to see. Ella stared at the little screen, at the back of the black Audi, at the numberplate which she could see began with SG before the rest was lost behind the shrub, at the hatchback that was pulled up at an angle across its nose and the men that were getting out of the open doors.

‘Use that button to go forward,’ Finley said.

Ella pressed it and saw two men from the hatchback frozen in the process of getting in the back of the Audi. A chill ran up her spine as she recognised one as the man caught on CCTV talking to the female bystander, the man with the long face who’d been sketched so well by Phillipa Meddeman, who’d talked about the dog and was almost certainly the shooter from the park. She stared at the other man. Was it Trent Bligh? She’d only seen a headshot of Bligh on his record, and that was four years old now. He’d had a short goatee beard then and had worn his dark hair combed back flat. This man was clean-shaven with short hair, but something about his thin face made her think – or was that hope? – it was him.

The next shots showed another man with a rounder face getting back into the hatch. Luiz Paz, she thought, though the photo wasn’t clear enough to be certain. In the next shots the Audi was half off the kerb behind it, then both cars were halfway down the street.

She rubbed the goose bumps on her arms. ‘What time was this?’

Finley touched a button and a time and date appeared on the screen. ‘Seven twenty-one.’

‘Have you ever seen either of those cars there before?’

‘No, and I’ve been watching.’

‘For how long?’ Louise said.

‘A week or so.’ He put down the empty bottle and went to a bookcase and pulled out a thick manila folder. ‘I print these off each night.’

Ella opened it on the kitchen table and spread out the colour prints of cars and people coming and going from the house. The few women were young and dressed in tight jeans or short skirts. The more numerous men ranged in age from late teens to about sixty, and included tradesmen in work shirts and white-collar workers loosening their ties.

‘How long’s it all been going on?’

‘A couple of months.’ Finley adjusted the position of the now-sleeping Minette in his arms. ‘It took me a while to notice. I mean, the photos make it look busy but it’s not really a stream of men, just now and again through the day and evening. Once I started to wonder, I moseyed past and managed to speak to one of the girls who was about to go in, saying welcome to the neighbourhood, and she said without me asking that she’s a student and had some friends coming over later.’

Ella kept looking through the photos, searching for cars and people that she recognised. She passed a shot of a white Commodore wagon to Louise. ‘This is Carl Sutton’s.’

‘That car’s there a bit.’ Finley found a few more shots.

Ella could clearly see Sutton going into the house. She hunted through more of the photos, trying to recall Jared Kelly’s numberplate, and Henreid’s, and Sam Roberts-Brice’s. Then she found one of a parked motorbike and Paul Fowler taking off his helmet as he climbed the steps to the door. She handed it to Louise who studied it without a word.

‘Have you talked to their neighbours?’ Ella asked.

‘I went to the houses either side about three weeks ago,’ he said. ‘The people on one side don’t speak English, and the man on the other is really old and practically deaf and blind.’ He glanced past her out the window. ‘Look.’

Ella saw a car pull up at the front of the suspect house. A man got out of the driver’s seat, glanced around and went in the front door.

Finley picked up the camera. ‘You don’t mind if I . . . ?’

‘Go ahead,’ Ella said.

He shot one-handed, the other cradling Minette against him, while Polly talked to herself in the cubby.

‘Did you happen to notice if that hatchback last night was noisy?’ Ella said. ‘If it had one of those hotted-up exhausts?’

‘I couldn’t hear a thing, I’m afraid. The kids were going off, and when they wind up you can’t even hear the planes.’ He frowned into the viewfinder. ‘You think the council will pay attention with all this?’

‘I think we will too,’ Ella said. ‘Can I take these pictures and get the ones from last night too?’

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Take the baby for a sec? The computer’s in the bedroom.’

Minette was soft and heavy in Ella’s arms. Her closed eyelids were tinged with blue and her mouth was open. Ella could smell milk on her breath. She heard the beep of a computer booting up elsewhere in the house. Louise came close and touched Minette’s bare foot.

‘What do you think’s going on with these guys?’ she said.

‘Hard to say,’ Ella said. ‘Are they going there to get their rocks off? Is it just a brothel or is it something more? Why would Seth and Norris get carjacked from there specifically?’

‘Finley said he thinks it started recently.’ Louise gently squeezed Minette’s toes. ‘What if they’re involved in running it and someone else has got the shi–’ She glanced at the cubby. ‘Become annoyed?’

Ella stared out the window at the house. She’d heard Sutton remind Kelly on the phone that after Roberts-Brice had been bashed they’d voted to keep the place open. Was this the place he was referring to?

‘We need to find out who runs the local places,’ she said, then Elijah Finley walked in with a sheaf of printed pictures and a USB drive.

‘In case you need to email them or whatever.’

He took the baby back and Ella took the pictures and the stick.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘So much.’

*

They got into the car and started the air conditioning. Ella phoned Dennis while Louise turned the rear-view to watch the house and empty car behind them.

‘It’s definitely the shooter, and I think it might be Trent Bligh and Luiz Paz as well,’ Ella finished. ‘Who runs the brothels in the Tempe area?’

‘I’ll call the local command and find out,’ Dennis said. ‘You said you saw Carl Sutton and Paul Fowler but not Kelly or Roberts-Brice in the photos?’

Louise nudged her and Ella turned in her seat to see another car pull up outside the house and a white-haired man get out.

‘Not yet,’ she told Dennis. ‘The witness says he’d never seen Garland’s car there before yesterday either. We have a heap of pics to go through on the way back though. Can you give me Roberts-Brice’s and Kelly’s car regos? And Henreid’s too while you’re at it?’

She heard the click of his keyboard, then wrote down what he said. ‘Any calls between our love-struck couple yet?’

‘Not a word,’ Dennis said. ‘Sutton phoned someone about their computer repairs, and Trina’s gone in a taxi to what looks like an outpatients’ clinic at RPA after dropping Darcy off with a neighbour. That’s it.’

‘You’d almost think they know they’re being watched,’ Ella said. ‘But now we have a shot of Sutton going into this place, we can slap it down in front of him – or her – and see exactly what they have to say.’

TWENTY-SEVEN

T
hey found Dennis in his office. Ella held up the sheaf of photos.

‘Roberts-Brice and Kelly are both in here. Roberts-Brice twice, Kelly just once. Henreid’s not though.’ She was wired, the thrill of the chase growing with every new piece of evidence they found. ‘How’d you go with the brothels?’

‘Interesting situation.’ Dennis pointed to the chairs. ‘There are a number of legal brothels in that area. The operators are all known to the local commands and to local council, and they keep their noses clean because they don’t want trouble. There’s also a string of illegal places that keep popping up all over the southern suburbs. They operate under the guise of massage parlours but once the clients are in there they’re offered further services. Their illegality is a licensing matter, strictly speaking, so it comes down to the local councils and what the premises are licensed for and so on.’

‘What does the council do when someone like our witness complains?’

‘First they have to be able to prove what’s going on, so some send in staff or private investigators to see what the women offer. This in itself is causing trouble because local citizens don’t like the thought of their rates paying for some civil servant to get a massage in order to test whether they get offered a “happy ending”.

‘Once the councils have proof,’ Dennis went on, ‘they have to send out notices, try to identify the operators and take them to the Land and Environment Court and get them officially closed down. This can take months or more, and even if they manage that, the operators generally just move locations – in some cases only across the road – and open for business again.’

‘No wonder Finley got the brush-off when he called to complain,’ Ella said.

‘I talked to a helpful woman at Marrickville Council and she said the last couple of places they’ve chased have simply disappeared before they could get anywhere in the investigation, then popped up somewhere else under a different name. She said they’ve managed to get a few into court, however, and gave me a couple of names and a list of their business names and addresses they’d operated from.’ He looked at a piece of paper on his desk. ‘Lara Yang and Ivy Kendall. I checked their records, but neither have anything else listed and from their file photos neither is the female bystander from the park. They’ve been fined and made to close their premises but soon enough they’re up and running again somewhere else.

‘The council’s investigation got no further than that,’ he went on, ‘but a detective at Newtown Local Area Command knew a little more. Six months ago a woman named Kaitlyn Edwards was found beaten and barely alive, and said that she and a girl she knew only by her working name of Susie were employed in a place called Rikki’s Relaxation, which is one of the names the council woman gave me. These girls had been taken into a room at the then location by two of the men who run the place and who said they wanted to film what they initially said was a simulated rape movie. It turned out to be not simulated at all, then, according to Kaitlyn, she and her friend were strangled into unconsciousness. She woke up alone in a backstreet in Waterloo. Her friend was gone. She refused to make a statement against these men, though she did give the names they used – “T” and “P” – and also gave as much information about her friend as she knew, but it seems she was using an alias.’

‘The initials?’ Ella said. ‘Could be “T” for Trent Bligh and “P” for his buddy Luiz Paz.’

‘Perhaps,’ Dennis said. ‘Kaitlyn said she’d seen these men before, along with two others, and that they’d all been in at one time or another and used the girls, sometimes in groups. She described them as average height or taller, all with short brown hair, all clean-shaven, all around the age of thirty. The detective said they pressed her but that was all she’d say. She just wanted to go home, and as soon as she was well enough she did, back to the north coast.’ He paused. ‘Her friend may still be missing. Since nobody knows her real name, we can’t be sure that she hasn’t turned up again, either dead or alive.’

Ella felt sick. ‘That’s awful.’

‘Who ran the place day to day?’ Louise said, a steely edge in her voice. ‘That Yang or Kendall?’

‘Kaitlyn said it was a woman who called herself Violet,’ Dennis said. ‘The only description she’d give was that she could seem nice but underneath was harder than any man. Said when the choking started she kicked the wall, and this Violet looked into the room, saw what was going on and went out again.’

Ella thought of the apparent concern in the eyes of the female bystander.

‘Kaitlyn said one other thing,’ Dennis went on. ‘Susie had joked once about going independent and Kaitlyn thought maybe she’d been overheard by this Violet. It was three days later that the so-called movie was made, and as Kaitlyn was passing out she saw the man called T holding Susie by the throat and saying, “Nobody sets up in business against us”.’

Ella looked at Louise. ‘Your theory fits. If Fowler, Sutton, Garland, Roberts-Brice and Kelly decided to set up a brothel together, the bunch already in business would do whatever they could to shut them down. First they bash Sam, and five days later, when they can see that hasn’t worked, they kill Fowler. They give them just thirty-six hours this time, and when the place is still operating they carjack Garland and kill him, and unfortunately Norris Sanderson happens to be there too.’

‘What a bunch of idiots,’ Louise said. ‘Why the hell would you keep on after even just the bashing?’

‘Money,’ Dennis said. ‘The council woman told me these places are raking it in. It’s why the operators don’t care about the fines and just set up in a new place.’

Ella thought back to the conversation between Sutton and Kelly. ‘Kelly wanted to shut it all down, but Sutton bullied him into agreeing to keep going. Sutton must be the driving force. What’s he doing now?’

‘He still hasn’t budged from his house,’ Dennis said.

‘Are they sure he’s still in there?’

He nodded. ‘Clients keep calling him to ask whether he’s finished with their computer yet.’

‘Too much like hard work when you can get some girls to make your money for you,’ Ella said. Anger bubbled up in her chest.
We have to nail every single one of these guys.
‘What a waste. All those lives for a bit of cash. Do you think Kaitlyn will talk if we can find her?’

‘The Newtown detective said she was adamant about not saying anything more, but I suppose anything’s worth a try.’

‘If we can get just a bit more information we might be able to pull it all together,’ Louise said.

‘I’ll call Newtown, get her details,’ Dennis said. ‘Oh – in other news, Brankovic’s clean. His car was having work done and he’d booked to play a round at, yes, you guessed it, Marrickville Golf Course, so he rented the car. Bit of a golf fanatic apparently. He had a bad one and got in an argument with another player on the final tee, then stormed off and hit the kerb on the way out. The search found nothing suspicious in his house or car, and the story’s been confirmed with the garage and golf club staff too.’

‘He couldn’t have said that upfront? Saved us all some time and hassle?’

‘The days when people freely gave us information are sadly long gone.’ Dennis reached for the phone but it rang before he could pick it up. ‘Orchard, Homicide.’ He listened, then held out the receiver to Ella. ‘It’s Reece Bennett.’

She took it. ‘Marconi.’

‘We’ve come to Seth Garland’s flat to find it broken into and his sister Holly and her friend inside,’ Reece said. ‘They drilled out the rivets in the security screen and climbed in.’

‘Put her on.’

There was a bit of mumbling, then Holly said, ‘I needed to do this. Norris did so much for me and I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing for him in return.’

Ella could hear the tears just under the surface of her voice. ‘Okay, but what exactly are you doing?’

‘Seth is the cause of Norris’s death, so I needed to get in here and see his things and how he lived. To try to work out what happened and why, and then find whoever killed them.’

In the background Ella heard Lacey arguing with Reece. She said, ‘You broke in though.’

‘I couldn’t wait for you guys,’ Holly said.

‘You didn’t even call me,’ Ella said. ‘What have you touched or moved?’

‘Nothing! We were just looking.’ She started to cry. ‘I had to do something. I had to.’

‘I understand how you feel,’ Ella said.

‘No, you don’t.’

There was more mumbling and then Reece spoke in Ella’s ear. ‘You want us to bring them in?’

‘They haven’t trashed the joint?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they’d been here long. She was sitting on the bed in tears. Her friend tried to keep us out though.’

‘Send them home,’ Ella said.

‘Tell her I need to do something!’ Holly called in the background. ‘I need to help!’

‘Tell her I’ll keep it in mind,’ Ella said to Reece. ‘Thanks.’

‘No probs.’

She gave the phone back to Dennis and told him and Louise what had happened.

‘Poor girl,’ Louise said.

They were silent for a moment, then Ella stood up. ‘I need coffee. Anyone else?’

They shook their heads. Dennis picked up the phone and dialled Newtown, and Ella walked out of the room.

*

The coffee was strong and good. Ella sipped while looking out the window and thinking about Holly going home to an empty house. A paramedic’s job was like a cop’s in that they both got stuck in and got things done. Ella knew how absolutely powerless she’d feel in Holly’s situation.

‘More skiving off?’

She didn’t answer or look around. What was it with John Gerard and his skill at finding her? He came close enough that she could feel his breath on her shoulder and she remembered how Wayne had offered to have a word with him. Like she needed help.

‘What’s so funny?’ he said.

‘Private joke. You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Try me.’

She turned to look at him. ‘No, thanks.’

He stared at her. ‘Solved the case yet?’

‘I will when I finish my break,’ she said. ‘The leads are coming together nicely.’

‘Another one to be chalked up to the great Marconi.’ He raised his finger and marked an invisible line in the air. ‘We should all bow down before you.’

‘That’s right.’ She gestured to the floor.

He licked his lower lip. ‘You think you’re so smart.’

‘The word is
know
,’ she said. ‘I know I’m so smart. Next question?’

‘You think you’re so great but you’re not,’ he said. ‘One day people will see that and your career will be over.’

‘First you say I’m great, then you say I’m not,’ she said. ‘You seem confused, John. Are you feeling okay?’

‘You just wait,’ he sneered. ‘One day it’ll all fall apart.’

She put her finger to her chin in an attitude of thought. ‘I can’t see that happening. Not to me anyway. To someone else perhaps.’

Footsteps came down the corridor and Gerard turned and left the tearoom, shoving past Louise as she came in.

‘In a rush much?’ she said after him. ‘Rude git.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Ella was trembling but elated over having given better than she got. ‘Did Dennis find Kaitlyn?’

‘He did, and she gave us the name of a friend who still works for these bastards,’ she said. ‘He’s calling her now.’

*

Dennis was still on the phone when they hurried in. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I appreciate that completely.’

Ella sat down. It didn’t sound good.

‘We would very much appreciate your help,’ he said.

Ella could hear the faint voice of the woman on the other end.

‘You know what happened to Kaitlyn –’

The voice grew louder.

‘And that’s why we want to stop them,’ Dennis said. ‘Why we need your help.’ He listened. ‘Okay then, no court. No statements. But anything, any little detail, even about where they operate now.’

Ella crossed her fingers on the arms of the chair. Beside her Louise leaned forward.

Dennis picked up a pen but didn’t write anything. ‘I promise there’s no way this can get back to you.’ He listened again.

Ella held her breath.

‘Thank you.’ He wrote something down. ‘We truly do appreciate it.’

Ella heard the click as the woman hung up.

Dennis placed the receiver back into the cradle and the pen on the desk. ‘That is one frightened woman.’

‘But she gave you something anyway?’ Ella said.

He held up the notepad. ‘The address of one of their establishments: a place called Joylin’s Massage in Marrickville. She said Violet works there.’

Ella squeezed the chair’s arms.
We’re coming to get you.

‘She thinks they might be about to move though, so we don’t have much time.’

‘Will she wear a wire?’ Louise asked.

Dennis shook his head. ‘She quit ten days ago and never wants to think about it again, she said.’

‘But if we send in a male detective as a client, all he can say is that he was offered sex; he won’t be able to find out anything about who’s behind it or where they are.’ Louise sat back in her chair.

‘I’ll call undercover, see if they have a female officer who can pass herself off as a potential employee,’ Dennis said.

Ella watched him make the call with an idea forming in her head.

He put down the phone. ‘Nobody’s free for a week.’

And by then it might be too late.

‘I could do it,’ Louise said.

‘You look more like a cop than anyone I know,’ Ella said. ‘And I’m too old.’ She leaned forward. ‘But I have an idea.’