Harum Scarum (11 page)

‘Well, while I was waiting down here, I got the strangest feeling I was being watched, y’know?’ He gestured to the surrounding bush. ‘And I was wondering,’ he lowered his voice, ‘if this is the guy who dumped the kid’s body, then maybe the other guy is hanging around.’

‘The other guy, meaning the second guy the security guard saw in the vehicle?’

The young man nodded. His shiver spread to her like a yawn and she felt the hairs prickle on the back of her neck. She decided not to tell him about the strange noises she’d heard on her way down. There was no need to get him even more anxious than he was now.

He pointed to the star-shaped hole in the driver’s side window, the brown misting on the glass and what appeared to be flakes of dry tissue clinging to the jagged edges. Keeping his voice low as if someone might be trying to listen, he said, ‘Looks like a bullet hole. I reckon they had a fight in the Toyota, the other guy shot Kusak—if it is Kusak that is...’ He trailed off and looked nervously around with one hand resting on his Glock, the safety clip of his holster already unfastened. ‘And he’s still hanging around.’

Controlling her voice to hide her own concern, Stevie said, ‘I suppose it’s a possibility, Constable, but a long shot all the same. This might even be a simple suicide, he just couldn’t live with what he’d done—hardly surprising, really.’ She nodded to the body in the Toyota and pulled a face. ‘By the looks of him he’s been in there all day at least.’

Nagel cleared his throat as if to rid it of bile, and affected a smile. ‘Yeah, err, slowly cooking.’

In a few years he’d be a master of the black joke, Stevie thought, but he needed more practice on the delivery if he ever aspired to being the stereotypical, fat-bellied, the-job’s-fucked kind of sergeant.

‘Anyway, why would his murderer hang around that long unless he was hurt?’ she said. ‘And if he
was
badly hurt, he won’t be much of a threat to us, would he?’

Stevie scanned the ground as if they might be lucky enough to spot the bullet or shell casing twinkling in the sun. She saw no sign of it of course; this wasn’t a TV cop show. In her head she worked out the perimeter they would need to tape and search.

She circled the Toyota, taking in the damage. The impact from the tree didn’t seem as bad as it had first looked; and was probably not violent enough to have caused the death of the seat-belted man in the driver’s seat—if he hadn’t been shot dead already. She tried to look through the back windows, but could see little through the grime. Upon opening the back door, she noticed that the rear bench seats had been removed to make room for a mattress and boxes of supplies. She saw no sign of another occupant. A thorough search would be undertaken when the scene of crime officers arrived.

‘How did you find him all the way down here?’ Stevie asked.

‘I stopped at the lookout to take a leak, noticed the smashed barrier and fresh tyre tracks and thought I’d check it out.’

‘When was that?’

The constable looked at his watch, ‘No more than twenty minutes ago. You reckon this really is that Miro Kusak guy?’

‘Who knows, but it’s his vehicle all right. And there’s only one way to find out if it’s him for sure, isn’t there, Nagel?’

Beet red turned turnip white. ‘I was worried you were gonna say that.’

‘Have you got gloves?’

‘In the car.’ He looked helplessly back up the rocky track.

She rolled her eyes and reached into her jeans pocket for a pair of latex gloves. ‘These are too small for you, must be your lucky day,’ she said, snapping them on.

She wiped her brow with the back of her arm and moved over to the passenger side of the Toyota. ‘Stand back.’ She took a breath, knowing what to expect but still not prepared for the initial shock, the feeling of pebbles in the face as the blowies vacated the car in an angry cloud.

And the smell.

Holding her breath for as long as she could, she leaned across the empty passenger seat and patted the pockets of the dead man. She extracted his wallet and swiftly drew back to fill her lungs. The driver’s licence was visible through a plastic window inside the wallet and she steeled herself for a look at his face, comparing it with the picture. As bloated as the roo she’d passed on the road, he looked barely human, though the greying curly hair did resemble the man’s in the photo, as did the bulbous nose and broad forehead. ‘Miro Kusak, 41 Weir Road Mundaring, DOB 23/10/54,’ she read aloud for the constable’s benefit.

The left side of Kusak’s head was plastered with congealed blood, originating from a two-centimetre entrance hole above his ear. His left hand was empty and there was no sign of a gun on the floor or among the folds of the dirty blanket bunched upon the passenger seat—this was no simple suicide, this was murder.

Her mouth dried as she recalled the fear she’d felt when scrambling down the slope. She turned and peered into the back of the truck to have a closer look at the supplies she’d glimpsed before: a rolled up swag, camping equipment, boxes of food and bottled water. Miro Kusak had presumably been planning on lying low until the search for him had scaled down. The countryside around the weir was dense with forest, one park leading into another. With local knowledge and adequate resources a man could lose himself for months in a place like this.

She took a few short breaths. Even with the door open, the smell in the Toyota was overpowering and she was forced to vacate and gulp long drafts of fresh air. The search would have to be continued by police with breathing masks.

The constable handed her a fistful of tissues and she used them to wipe the body fluids from the outside of the wallet before riffling more thoroughly through the contents. As she searched she told the constable about the camping equipment she’d seen in the back of the van, shaking her head as she talked to clear the air of the hovering flies. Her fingers felt the outline of something solid in one of the wallet’s compartments and she found a newish key. ‘To the pump station you think?’ she said.

When the constable didn’t answer she looked up to find him nowhere in sight, she’d been talking to herself. Frowning, she turned slowly, shaded her eyes from the glare and scanned the surrounding bush.

‘Constable Nagel?’ Only the gentle waters of the weir lapping against the shore answered her call. Flies buzzed, a parrot squawked, but other than that, silence.

Then from the nearby scrub, the painful sound of retching.

Seconds later, the retching morphed into a scream of terror.

Stevie slapped her hip. No gun,
shit.
A stout stick lay across the track. She picked it up and charged through the bush to a burnt clearing where rubbish had been dumped. She found the constable on the ground beside a pile of empty bottles, one arm thrown protectively over his face and the paws of a giant dog resting on his chest.

‘Oh God, oh God, get it off me,’ he moaned.

Stevie approached cautiously. The dog turned from his busy licking of the constable’s arm, fixed her with spooky yellow eyes and wagged its tail.

Stevie swore, partly from relief and partly from amusement. She grabbed the dog by its collar and hefted it off the stricken man.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked him.

‘Oh, yeah, jeez ma’am, I’m sorry,’ Nagel gasped, ‘the dog came from nowhere, gave me one helluva a shock.’ He struggled to his feet and began to dust himself down.

She took off her belt and threaded it through the dog’s collar, holding him back a lot more successfully than she could her smile. Nagel smiled back sheepishly. ‘He seems quite friendly, but,’ he said.

Stevie ran her hand down the pinky-brown fur, feeling the prickling highway of hair scratching at her palm. ‘Looks like a Rhodesian Ridgeback,’ she said.

‘Must be a stray, lucky he’s not vicious. Wonder where he comes from?’

Stevie thought for a moment. ‘Try the front seat of the car. There was a dirty old blanket on it, covered with dog hair.’ She paused to pat the dog. ‘Constable Nagel, this just might be Miro Kusak’s mysterious passenger.’ She bent to examine the disc on the dog’s collar. ‘Meet Bonza. 41 Weir Rd Mundaring.’

The late afternoon sun weighed on the heads of the investigating officers, yet the mood remained buoyant as they combed the area around the crashed Toyota. This prick was no loss, Monty heard one of the SOCO officers say, the killer had saved them all a pile of bother. Another answered that he’d shake the killer’s hand, buy him a beer if he ever ran into him. Fine, he thought, but at this stage, despite the discovery of the dog, he wasn’t discounting the possibility that two men were involved, and who could say which was the nastier piece of work.

Monty was sitting under a tree, filling out an evidence label, when he heard the crunch of approaching footsteps.

‘“Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to Heaven.”’

He looked up. ‘What?’ he asked Angus Wong.

‘Henry Fielding,
Tom Jones.
’ With his Asian looks, his ocker accent and his propensity for producing a literary quote for most occasions, Angus was a maze of incongruities. Monty stared at him for a moment and wondered if he was also a mind reader.

Angus flopped onto the ground next to Monty, reached into one of the folds of his overalls and handed him a bottle of water. A television news chopper slashed through the air above their heads. Monty thanked him, took a long draught and returned to the task of labelling two small paper evidence bags.

‘What’ve you got there?’ Angus asked.

‘A bullet and a shell case; the slug was embedded in a tree at the lookout, the shell case near the rubbish bin.’

‘Beauty, can you tell what they’re from?’

‘Looks like a point 40 S&W cartridge.’

Angus met Monty’s eyes. ‘Semi-automatic pistol? Interesting.’

‘Could be.’

‘Anything else?’

‘They found several of what appear to be Bianca’s short bleached blonde hairs in the Toyota, subject to confirmation of course. Plus a long dark brown hair on the dashboard.’

‘Another victim?’

‘Who knows? The results will be sent to missing persons, there’s always a chance it might match someone in their database.’

They fell silent. Monty put the bags into the top pocket of his overalls.

He spotted the mortuary van bumping along a rough weir-side track. They’d sensibly decided not to come down the steep path. Upon vacating their van, the assistants grappled with the Stokes stretcher while Henry Grebe buzzed around them like a blowfly. At the Toyota, Grebe raised a hand to signify a halt and beckoned his team around him for a briefing.

‘Found anything else of interest?’ Angus asked Monty.

Monty switched his gaze from Grebe and pointed to the red-brick structure at the water’s edge. ‘That’s the old pump station, long since abandoned but with a new padlock. Stevie found the key in Kusak’s wallet.’

‘You think that’s where he kept the girl?’

‘More than likely. Forensics have swept it clean—already sent their samples back to Perth for analysis. There was bedding in there.’

‘His own private hideaway,’ Angus looked sickened. ‘Anything else I should know about?’

‘No sign of Bianca’s laptop, but we found a PC in the back of the van. It’s had the sun glaring down on it like a laser beam for most of the day so I’m not sure what kind of nick it’ll be in. It’s on its way to Central. Also found camping stuff and enough food supplies for about a month in the wilderness.’

Angus gazed at the enormousness of the vista. ‘Looking at this place, I’d say he might have got away with it too. How are the others going?’

‘Stevie’s visiting Mrs Kusak, breaking the news about Miro’s death and returning the dog, and Barry’s conferring with the Mundaring police. Wayne wasn’t doing much except whinging about jock itch, so I sent him with some uniforms to start questioning Kusak’s neighbours.’ He paused, gave Angus a faint smile. ‘And I’m supervising the crime scene.’

‘The press are gathering at the lookout. Want me to give them a statement?’

Monty nodded gratefully, took another pull on his water bottle and watched as Angus made his way back up the track. He felt like shit, his toothache had become a headache and his stomach churned. The last time he’d felt this lousy was when he was a kid when he’d been out all day on the mustering at Stevie’s family station and got heat stroke. He poured some water from the bottle over his head, rubbed it into his scalp and attempted to lose himself in the activities of the crime scene investigation.

The photos had been taken, the pathologist long gone.

But the body snatchers seemed to be taking their time. It should have been a routine job, but for some reason they seemed to be discussing the body’s removal at length.

From where he still sat under the tree, Monty saw Henry Grebe beckon to the probationer, Constable Nagel. After a few moments, Nagel nodded and walked with hesitant steps to the Toyota. Monty hauled himself to his knees and squinted through his aviation sunglasses. As far as he knew SOCO guys wearing breathing apparatus had thoroughly searched the back of the van, photographed and removed the camping gear. It was hard to believe the body snatchers had noticed something in the Toyota the experienced searchers had missed.

The SOCO team had worked their way in a radius away from the Toyota and were now out of sight in the bush. The police divers had not yet arrived to search the surrounding waters. A group of local police were positioned at the lookout, holding the media and the curious at bay. As far as Grebe and his assistants were concerned, there was no one in their immediate vicinity. They don’t know I’m sitting here under the tree, Monty thought.

Nagel opened up the back door and stepped inside. Right behind him, Grebe closed and latched the back door, then skipped over to rejoin his men who were laughing themselves stupid a few metres away.

Monty had seen enough. Heat exhaustion forgotten he leapt to his feet and strode towards the Toyota. He could hear the blows hammering upon the doors from within, and the anguished cries from the constable trapped inside. He turned the handle and wrenched the door open. Through the sickening miasma of methane gas the hapless constable all but fell into his arms.