Whispering Death (16 page)

Larrayne, her face appalled, swung around on the tall, sweet, skinny boy, who didn't look so sweet now. ‘How could you be so stupid.'

He shrugged, mopped at his torn ear. ‘Yeah, well.'

‘I want him arrested,' Larrayne said.

Challis glanced at one of the Rosebud officers, giving the nod, then he took Larrayne's arm and ushered her out of the house, to where the sun warmed the old decking furniture. She wrapped herself in the dressing gown and shivered. ‘Thanks for coming,' she said, her voice small.

‘Want me to call your dad?'

In fact, why hadn't Larrayne called him? Alan Destry was a policeman, after all.

‘
No
. No, please don't. You know him, he'll overreact.'

‘We can't keep it a secret.'

‘I'll tell him later, when it's over—otherwise he'll come barging in and start bashing people up.'

She was probably right. Alan Destry had a temper. ‘We need to tell your mum, though.'

Larrayne Destry was in the grip of doubts and frustrations. Her fists clenched. ‘No, please, you can't.'

‘Why not?'

‘She'll want to fly straight home. I'm okay.'

Then she slumped. ‘I feel such a fool.'

Challis touched a thick, white, rumpled sleeve. ‘You did nothing wrong. The boys stole the marijuana, not you.'

His words brought no comfort. ‘What happens now?'

‘Is there someone I can call, other than your father? A friend?'

‘They're all up in the city.' She thought about it. ‘Dad's girlfriend.'

Larrayne made the call. She was saying, ‘No, I'm okay to drive,' when Challis's mobile rang.

Jeannie Schiff, saying: ‘We have a crashed car, abandoned on Coolart Road, dead woman in the boot. Naked, beaten, bound, strangled, probably raped.'

24

Earlier that day, John Tankard's team had been breathalysing motorists at the Tuerong Junction end of Balnarring Road, then on a stretch of the Nepean between Mornington and Mount Martha. Finally, in the early afternoon, they set up on Coolart Road. Two pursuit cars—they went like the clappers of hell—two powerful BMW bikes, and four constables and a sergeant. The hotshots got to do anything remotely interesting, like on-the-spot roadworthy checks, running number plates through the on-board computers, processing the drunks, but Tank was given the crap jobs. Setting up a stopping lane and waving cars into it, standing in the middle of the road with his fancy gear on. Hot gear, too. Temperatures in the high twenties, low thirties all week.

Not much action today—a guy taking his kids to school had registered .059—but Tank knew the Peninsula would be full of thank-God-it's-Friday booze hounds as the afternoon deepened. He waved another anonymous car into the stopping lane, another anonymous male driver at the wheel. Maybe this loser was the shotgun bandit… Tank peered in as the guy slowed and stopped alongside the officer doing the breath test. Nah. Vague resemblance at best. Besides, there was a pregnant woman in the passenger seat, a toddler in the back, strapped into a capsule. Unless the bandit travelled with his family. God, Tank was bored.

‘Mind on the job, Constable.'

‘Yes Sarge.'

The sun was early-afternoon high, the air still, birds squabbling in the roadside trees. A magpie was getting on Tank's nerves. It looked fully grown, but hopped around squawking uselessly. Putting the pressure on mum and dad for another fucking worm.

A smell of horse shit wafting across from the adjacent paddock.

A chainsaw in the distance.

And up in the wide blue yonder, ibis wheeled silently and a few game, ragtag little birds were telling an eagle to shove off.

John Tankard sneezed explosively: there was a slasher working on the spring grasses along a nearby fence line. All in all, he felt that he'd pretty much exhausted his appreciation of nature this past week.

An hour or two later, the sergeant ordered them to shift location again, over near the freeway this time, the 80 km/h stretch near Humphries Road. It was Tank's job to stow the equipment and bring one of the cars so he was the last to leave, and was alone there on Coolart Road when a white Holden came barrelling over a rise, spotted him and snaked to a screaming halt. Tank read it. Drink driving; or drugs or stolen goods.

Thank the Lord, action at last.

Cranking the motor, Tank planted his foot, accelerating up the slope to intercept the Holden even as it reversed into a driveway, turned tail and shot back over the rise.

Just then, he sneezed again. His window was open; grass dust and pollen swirled around his solid head. He gasped, his eyes watered, the sneezes were galloping away from him.

By the time he'd recovered, and could see dimly through his scratchy eyes, the Holden was far in the distance. He radioed it in, pressing hard on the accelerator, and sneezed again, his hand jerking the wheel, his body pitching about in his seat. He brought the car to a stop on the verge of the road, snuffled into a handkerchief, dragged a forearm sleeve across his eyes. He was still on the hilly part of Coolart Road and couldn't see the Holden.

When he'd recovered, Tank planted his foot again, swivelling his head left and right at the next couple of intersections: Waterloo far off in one direction, Merricks North the other, no white Holden.

He found it a minute later, buckled against a fancy stone gateway, as if the driver had intended to duck inside and hide, hoping the police would keep to Coolart Road and eventually assume he'd disappeared. Only he'd been going too fast, fucking moron, and he'd crashed.

Tank pulled in close behind, blocking the Holden against the stone pillar. He ran the rego number—the car had been reported stolen— called in his location, then got out, approaching the rear of the car with his baton in his left hand, his right hand ready to draw his service revolver.

No one in the rear seat, no one in the front.

He straightened his back, peering around at the lightly timbered paddocks on either side of the road. A man on foot could lose himself in open country pretty quickly—unless he'd decided to steal a farm vehicle or get himself a hostage. Tank glanced uneasily up the driveway to a farmhouse that was scarcely visible beyond a row of cypress and other trees. He pictured a man menacing a woman alone in her kitchen, a child playing outside, a teenage girl just home from school…

Just as he was about to step between the stone pillars and down the driveway, the other members of his team arrived, full of noise and testosterone. Tank, it soon transpired, was to stay with the wrecked car while the heroes searched the grounds and woodland.

‘Wait here for backup, let them know where we are.'

‘But it was me who chased him, Sarge.'

‘Whereupon he crashed into a stone wall,' the sergeant said, ‘endangering the lives of everyone around him. You know the drill on high-speed pursuits, don't you, Tank?'

‘So what's the point of having a pursuit car with all the fancy shit on it?'

‘Just stay with the car, all right? Check the registration. Search the glovebox. Make yourself useful.'

John Tankard made himself useful to the extent of finding a dead woman in the boot of the car.

25

Challis arrived to find Tankard directing a long line of traffic past the car and the crumpled gate post. Coolart Road on a Friday afternoon was always a nightmare of school buses, private cars, farm vehicles, delivery vans, 4WDs; of school kids, parents, tradespeople, city workers getting an early start on the weekend. Right now, they were content to be rubberneckers, in no hurry to arrive anywhere.

The first thing Challis did was order the traffic unit to set up a detour at Hodgins Road. Presently the flow of vehicles ebbed, then ceased. The departure of the unit's cars and motorbikes also eased congestion at the crash site, leaving only Challis's CIU car, an ambulance to convey the body, the pathologist's BMW, the sex crimes Holden and a vehicle belonging to the crime scene unit.

Then he joined Schiff and Murphy at the rear of the crashed Holden. Today the sex crimes sergeant looked like a cross between a slinky schoolteacher and a certain young criminal lawyer famous for her front-page cleavage, client list and corner-cutting. Schiff wore black leggings under a short red skirt, black top with a dramatic scooped neck, hair in a corkscrew at the back of her head. And different glasses, he noticed: rimless lenses, silvery titanium frames. Meanwhile Murph was dressed in thin cotton cargo pants, white running shoes, a fawn cardigan over a vivid white T-shirt. She shot him a grin, her body taut, almost quivering with energy, as if all she wanted to do was run, climb, swim or knock heads in. The old Murph back again, after weeks of the doldrums?

He stood with the women, looking over the bowed back of the pathologist, Freya Berg. First impressions: a bloodied face, bruising, the slackness of death. A closer look. The victim was aged in her early twenties, plump, all tension gone from her trunk and limbs. Bruised thighs and neck, a bitten nipple, stubbled pubic hair. Her nose, squashed to one side, was caked with blood.

He backed away.

‘Not getting any easier, Hal?' Dr Berg said.

The pathologist had registered his presence without looking at him. ‘Nope.'

‘I hear you've been ruffling feathers.'

‘Some other dude,' Challis said.

‘That's what I thought,' Berg said, continuing to palpate the flesh and work the limbs. ‘If you three fine police officers could just give me another five minutes…'

Schiff said, ‘Raped, punched and strangled?'

‘Five minutes,' repeated the pathologist, inserting a thermometer into the victim's rectum.

‘Leave the doc to do her job,' Challis said, motioning Murphy and Schiff away from the car.

In the meantime, they speculated: terse, muttered, a mix of observation and guesswork honed on similar cases over the years.

‘Same guy who snatched Chloe Holst?'

‘Could be. It's been a few days, time for him to feel the urge.'

‘And this time things went too far.'

‘Or he took them too far.'

‘See the lividity?'

‘She's been there for a while.'

The minutes passed. Challis and the women walked around to the front of the car, where Scobie Sutton was scrawling in a notebook.

‘Anything?'

Sutton pointed his pen in the direction of the house at the end of the driveway. ‘I spoke to the householder. She was in one of the front rooms, vacuuming curtains she said, and saw a man run a short distance towards the house then trip over that stone border and fall into the bushes. Then he got up again and ducked back through the trees towards the road.'

‘Police uniform?'

Scobie shook his head. ‘I really grilled her on that. He was too far away for her to get an impression of his face, but he was definitely wearing jeans and a T-shirt.'

Challis thought about it. The guy changed his clothing, or he had an accomplice, or he'd had nothing to do with the abduction and rape of Chloe Holst. Then he stopped thinking about it. Save it for the briefing. ‘Anything on the car?'

Sutton flipped back a page. ‘Reported stolen yesterday from the car park behind the TAFE College in Frankston. I spoke to the owner: Mary Mackenzie, college librarian, sixty years old.'

‘Husband? Son, nephew…'

‘Widow. One daughter, lives in Perth.'

‘Prints?'

‘Plenty. Probably not his,' Sutton said. He nodded in the direction of the pathologist. ‘The crime scene people haven't done inside the boot yet.'

‘You were first on scene apart from Tank and the RTB boys?'

‘Yes.'

‘She was dead when you arrived?'

A spasm crossed Sutton's face, and Challis was reminded again why Scobie had never been a good detective. Okay with a paper trail or CCTV footage, but bewildered by ambiguities, feelings, humankind's capacity for cruelty or indifference. ‘Yes,' he said, voice cracking a little.

‘It's okay, Scobe,' Pam Murphy said, shooting Challis a go-easy-on-him look, ‘we'll get the details from Dr Berg.'

But Sutton couldn't shake his distress. ‘Someone used her as a punching bag, sir.'

‘I know,' Challis said.

‘And there is bruising around her, you know, her…'

The words made pictures in Sutton's head, defiling and defeating him. Challis touched his forearm. ‘Thanks, Scobie, that's all I need for now.'

Leaving Sutton and the others, he wandered away along the gravel verge of Coolart Road, between the tarred surface and the fence line, where the roadside grass was thick and browning, no longer scrappily nourished by spring rains but growing combustible, waiting for one of summertime's discarded cigarettes. The paddock grass inside the fence had been shorn for hay and baled in the form of huge, blue polythene-wrapped cylinders that squatted on the broad hillside like futuristic dwellings. This effect was enhanced by the presence of uniformed constables walking through and around them, heading upslope to a distant stand of trees, where a police helicopter chopped at the air. Challis watched. There was no sudden urgency, so he returned to the others.

Freya Berg approached them with her vivid smile. ‘Preliminary findings. The neck is locked, the stomach on the way, but there's still some movement in the extremities. The blood is not fully clotted yet, so indications are she's been dead between six and eight hours. The boot of a car is a sealed environment, but I still think six to eight hours. If this were mid-summer or mid-winter, I'd probably revise the time.'

Schiff said, ‘The lividity…'

‘All down one side. She was placed in the boot soon after death.'

‘Anything else?'

Dr Berg gave the sex crimes detective a tight smile and went on with her briefing. ‘There are indications that she struggled with someone before death. Before her wrists and ankles were taped together, in fact. Petechial haemorrhaging indicates that she was strangled, but I'll know for sure when I get her to the lab. Blood and bruising around the genital area, broken nose, I'd say our hero was expressing a lot of rage.'